My Standing in the Academy -- Or: Should I Walk?

by Lucy S.

Some confessions. Almost every day, I think about walking away from academia. I don't know if I could support myself if I left, but then, I don't know if I can support myself if I stay, either.  

I try to understand what I find so painful about being in it.

Part of my pain is rooted in my pay.  I make $4,000 a semester to teach a class. That's higher than what most other colleges pay around here. Last semester, that meant about $8.70 per hour before taxes (and gas and books...), based on my estimations ($4000 divided by 460 hours). Classes were 15 weeks, and I averaged at least 25 hours a week of work - 375 hours, not counting driving time of an hour a day there and back. (The truth is, I worked far more than 25 hours a week many weeks because I kept reading about how to teach writing and how to teach literature, and I often over-prepared for the content I thought I’d share with students during class meetings.) The week after classes ended, I needed another 25 (or more) hours to meet with students and email more feedback. Papers were due December 20, so I spent another 30 hours (or more) reading, answering more student questions, grading, adding up total course grade points, and submitting grades. Before the semester began, I spent at least 30 hours preparing (more, really, but some was connected to getting the job in the first place).  I will get faster, of course. But how much faster? Can I live on this pay when my separated spouse finally moves out soon?

At the same time, I don't like to think about my hourly wage. When I talk with students, I don't know which part of that is "work" and which is "fun.” That's part of what is confusing about this work. But there are only so many hours in a day and week and year. As much as I love the work, I need time for other things. Even if I get a lot faster, I can't imagine teaching more than three classes a semester – two might even be the limit – if they’re at different colleges and if I’m going to try my best to provide students with the kind of relationship-based education that I believe in. We're limited in how many classes adjuncts can teach at my university (two in fall; one in spring for a total of $12,000 maximum). If I manage to later line up and handle teaching one class at a community college in fall and two in spring for $3000 a class, I’ll make a total of $21,000 a year with no benefits, working a ton of hours and driving between my home and two colleges.

Why did this develop? We, the non-tenured, now teach the majority of classes in the U.S. Apparently, this, too, is not a job for real grownups, at least grownups whose earned income must support them. Why does anyone think that this is acceptable? 

Yet if I decide pay must be my first concern, I unravel the purpose in what I've done anyway, because if I were going to make a high income my main goal, I’d never have gotten a B.A. in English or gone to graduate school in English literature. I wanted to do work I believe in and love. The work means too much to me to dull my feeling for it all by going into factory or business mode.

So I continue to see what I do as a resistance to the status quo. (My honors thesis was called "Relational Education as a Resistance to an Immoral Status-Quo" - not a poetic title, but it says something about my stance.)  But I wonder at times if I'm deluding myself by seeing it that way. If I ever come to fully believe that, I will leave the work if at all possible. Will "ever" come too soon? Here I am only one semester into teaching, soon to start the second, and I hover between intense idealism and crushing disillusionment.

It was like that for me in grad school, too, and during part of my time finishing my B.A. Then, though, I was on the way to something. Graduation, I guess, but the degree itself wasn't the aim. I believed I was on the way to heightened consciousness, deepened sensitivity, and an unfolding panorama of language finally available to me to express what had felt dammed up inside me for so long. I would finally understand what had bewildered me throughout much of my life. And I hoped I was on the way to some kind of community, a place I’d finally be accepted into, where we would talk about all these things that matter so much, and our talk would infuse our actions, and we would help change the world for the better. I still hold onto all of that – still believe it – or at least believe IN that ideal – and hope that the rest is true. But what if none of it is or will ever be? What if I'm just another exploited adjunct helping to prop up the status quo?

I try not to think about the last questions too much, because doing so can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I fear what it would do to me to believe that. So I try to encourage myself. I try to care for the connections I have with a small number of friends who seem to have similar feelings for this work.  

I don't like cynicism about what we put so much of our life into, and I don't like selfishness, but I don't like the naive, uncritical "positive thinking" rampant in U.S. society, either (connected to its own kind of selfishness). Nor do I believe in saintly martyrdom that so often lets others become increasingly selfish.  I get mad and hurt at times when someone who does make a living wage says that I can do all this as a “labor of love” without material concern. I want to ask if they on the other hand do not center their lives, including their work, around love, but instead live and work just for money.  I've done so much unpaid labor for love in my life that at this point, I'm sickened and angered by the expectation that for some, love for the work and the people we care for is enough, and any compensation is icing on the cake (a cake we can’t eat).  I start to wonder, do any of these people "love" me? Where is the mutuality? Do they care if we don't make a living wage? Or do they just assume that we have "other" income? Trust funds? Our own businesses on the side? Are we "dependents" to be supported by the "primary income" of partners with "real" jobs?  Are our jobs hobbies? Or are we all to be their idea of other Mother Teresa's living out a vow of poverty for our vocation? 

And here I don’t just mean others in academia, but many in our society who blithely pursue their own concerns, embracing their privilege, guarding it, not willing to do anything to enact solidarity.

 And so my pain is rooted in my pay, but it is also rooted in the deep ways in which I am forever fused to my class and not to the class of people I teach or work with at this university. I teach undergraduates at a university where my kids would not be able to go to school for their undergraduate degrees. I teach students fresh out of high school who will probably earn far more than I do four or five years from now. The alternative – in which they graduate and don’t find work after paying $180,000 for their four years in school and in the dorms – does not bring me any comfort. But if all goes as planned, I’m helping to produce the professional-managerial class who often get to manage the working-class workers – the people like my own kids, my extended family, and many of my life-long friends. I produced the workers first – gave birth to them, taught them myself for years, thought that I would somehow give them a way out of the system’s demands.  And now, I produce the class who manage the workers, if my students are lucky enough to get the lives for which they study and pay. I, on the other hand, will not ascend into their class, nor do I want to.

It is hard now to know what to hope for and try for. My son – one of the twins – the one I, his brothers, and other people thought of as especially intellectual, who was reading adult history books at age 9 and studying labor history at 14 and the French Revolution at 17 – he had to get to his job stocking in the back at Target at 6 am this particular Saturday. He only got 18 hours this week, but will get 28 next week. He didn’t finish college – became disillusioned with many aspects of academia after a couple years – so many will blame him for the job he has. His twin brother has to be at Starbucks by 2 pm today; he has a B.A. with a dual major in English and Theater Arts. He too can be blamed for picking the wrong majors. My oldest son also has a B.A. in English and has applied for many jobs, but gotten none so far. He does freelance editing for $300-$400 a month. He worked at college writing centers for five years as a tutor; the other two also worked as writing center tutors at the nearby community college. Maybe I knew, even as a homeschooling mother, how to teach kids to write well: read with them and have them read a lot; discuss the readings and other important issues with them; let them write. I don’t know if the other two will ever go to college, though. One has learning difficulties; we will probably have to help him apply for disability income through Social Security.  The youngest might go, but I don’t want him to major in English – my discipline – if he does. I won’t tell him that, but I hope he doesn’t. He’d have a better chance of making a living if he learned tile-setting from his dad than he would from anything I could teach him. I still believe that learning, even in college, is for so much more than making money. But those who run and fund our institutions do not seem to see it that way. And also, I know what low-paying, boring, meaningless, tiring, unreliable jobs do to people over time. Even the better-paying, more reliable, but still boring and tiring jobs take such a toll. I want meaningful work and lives for my kids, for other people’s kids, and for myself. I am so sick of this society. I want better for us all. So I guess I do know what to hope for, but I am trying to know what I can do to create that.

I feel sandwiched between generations who are trapped. I grew up hearing my dad joke about suicide because he hated his job -- and I finally realized as I moved into adulthood that he hadn’t been just joking. When my uncle, an insurance agent, wanted to change his life-insurance policy every few years, my dad would say that the policy had just passed the two-year incontestable mark (after which it will pay, even if the policyholder commits suicide). He’d say that he couldn’t guarantee that he could last another two years for a new policy. He’d make us laugh in the way he said it, just as he made us laugh talking about dogs chasing him, supervisors interrogating why he couldn’t sort three-foot stacks of thin cards as fast as he’d sorted three-foot stacks of National Geographic magazines the other day, and so many anxieties and absurdities bound up with that job. But he hated spending the best part of his days and years in that work. He knew it could be far worse, but that only made him feel more trapped. And at times, the joking thinned and disappeared, revealing raw anguish underneath it. The viciousness and meaninglessness of so much, not only in his life, but in the larger society ate at him. But he kept living, enduring the bad parts of his days and his depression about this society while mostly savoring the better hours and days. And he’s always made us laugh at how stupid and lousy some aspects of the system are. I see my kids do so many of these same things now, but with even worse job prospects.

And so I think about walking away from my work, even though I love it. If that work doesn’t help make a better world – if it only churns out more professionals and managers for my kids and other people I love to labor under and serve rather than make community with as equals – then why should I put so much of my time and care into that work? 

On the other hand, where do I go and what do I do to work to make the world we need?

I know that I, my kids, my parents, and others I love are not simply among the exploited; we live as exploiters, too, of course. What is to be done with that knowledge? More affluent academic acquaintances have used that at times to repeat for the umpeenth time that "we're all implicated."  Okay… We're all implicated - the end?  Is that meant to pretend that we’re all in the same position? Is it supposed to be their absolution, even as they say it is not – a way to not worry about the horrific contradictions we live with and the lives and planet this system decimates? In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau says we're not obligated to right every wrong on earth, that we may choose to pursue our own life, but we need to get off another person's back first so that person can also freely create a life. How? How can we stop standing on other people's backs and get them off of ours?  That makes me think of Joan Baez, in the intro to one of her songs, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King's call to stand tall - if you stand tall, a man can't ride your back. But if we can't throw others off our backs and stand up very straight, and can't find anywhere to stand that isn't on other people's backs, can we start by at least not pretending that we're all standing up straight and walking our paths freely?  And if we do that, might we finally find a way to stand up side by side and MOVE toward better?  

For now, I stay in academia because it's where I learned to more thoroughly identify painful sources of what can deceptively come across as “just life.” I stay because it's where I met some of the people I know who also want better and who try to create it there, amidst all that perpetuation of the status quo. I stay because I love enough of what I learn and teach there. I stay because I hope that through my work and relationships there, maybe I can help us see where we all stand and where we might stand if we all change the world. But what we are doing now is not enough. I am standing in an academy that excludes many more people than it includes, and I don’t know how long I can keep standing in this particular spot.

***

Postscript: Already I feel the backlash within myself after posting the above.  This is a lack of gratitude, I think, and it is self-pity, I think, and I am one of the luckier people on this planet. Then I feel the defensiveness that arises in response to my backlash. Competing for levels of oppression is no way to stand up for ourselves, I think, and “being thankful for what we have” when it means perpetuating this devastating status quo does nothing for those most harmed. And then the idealistic impulse returns, that thought that maybe I am doing some good, that maybe we just have to try harder to take over these excluding, oppressive systems, and make them serve ALL OF US. After all, there is nowhere to go to escape capitalism and the many ways it hurts so many lives. 


I finish this just as I am finding out that a chemical spill into the Elk River in Kanawha County, West Virginia, is affecting over 300,000 people.  I remember this county, because it is the place in the U.S. where another chemical, the deadly methyl isocyanate, is produced – the gas that poured out into the city of Bhopal, India, for the worst industrial disaster ever known. I had my students read a book connected to Bhopal this last semester. The chemical released this time is called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, and it is used to wash coal. Now we all wait to learn more about this chemical and what it will do to the ecosystems and inhabitants of the places it has poisoned. How long will we all stand this? 

***

A second postscipt.  When I wrote this post, it felt true. Then afterward, something felt wrong, so I added the postscript.  Now I'm home from going to see two friends play their music at a coffee shop -- two friends who are tenured professors where I teach, one of whom hired me and gave me the chance to teach, a good friend who is unceasingly kind to me -- and I feel something somehow untrue in the post I wrote. I don't know how to ever get to the truth, it seems. I cannot reconcile these pieces of reality that seem to sit completely apart from each other. 

What the university pays me or what the American academy as a whole has normalized in their pay and treatment of adjuncts seems completely disconnected from that friend. There is nothing he can do to pay me more. The university sets our pay. I know he is on my side. I know he would feel terribly hurt if he felt that I somehow imply a lack of concern for me and others on his part. He has done all he can to support my learning and teaching. And he calls me his friend. Tonight I got there after they'd started, and on the break between sets, he came over to talk and said he'd planned to start with one of his solo songs, but had held off to wait till I got there so I could hear it. 

Another truth is that despite my pain, I would never choose to have not done what I've done in these recent years since I returned to school.  My life is far better for having met the people I've come to know, and from what I've learned, written, and now taught. 

These truths that I can't fully fuse - the truths I tried to write in the original post and these later truths - these are what together hurt. At the same time, that too feels untrue. I don't move through my days in a state of anguish or morose despair. I laugh. I enjoy people. So far I love teaching. And most days, I'm glad to wake up. But these conflicting feelings aren't just "ups and downs" -- "moods"; they're the inevitably fractured responses to a broken contradictory system. 

That's all for tonight. It's not enough, but these are my truths on this late night in January.