Gratitude, 2021

I do not consider myself naive about higher education. But what’s happening this month has me at a loss. I really thought I knew better than this. This week marks ten years since I started a career in higher education. In that time I have experienced institutional failures; racial, gender…

Last year, back when living in a pandemic was a new and terrifying reality, I wrote a piece about the process of applying for academic (faculty) jobs in the United States. I had just made the painful decision to leave the academic job market for a different kind of career. …

This is not a crisis essay. It’s the end of the most difficult semester that many of us can remember, and I’ve been thinking about the future of higher education. Back before the pandemic started, I was writing a lot about crisis thinking. Crisis thinking is what happens when you…

The Visionary Futures Collective brings together humanists across the United States to tackle challenges relating to the present and future of higher education. This group is made up of scholars of the humanities. Many, but not all of us have or are currently pursuing graduate degrees. Many, but not all…

Dear friend, you say you want to start a PhD in literature and who am I to stop you, who I love, who I want the world for. Dear friend, you are one of the people that academia would benefit so much from. You did the work of investing in…

[EDIT: View the 2021 version here!] — “You need to lower your expectations,” the director of a graduate program says. “You might not get a tenure track job right away. Be prepared to settle for a VAP or a postdoc.” It’s the spring of 2020. We are in the midst of a pandemic. …

As the job market for higher ed breathes its final gasps, grad programs around the country are looking for ways to connect their students with people who have successfully transitioned out of academia. This is the right thing to do. Most of your students are not going to get tenure…

I had a meltdown on twitter the other day. I wrote a thread, and then I deleted it, and then I wrote another thread. The gist was this: I cannot save academia. I am, by many measures, an academic failure. I do not have the title of professor, the privileges…

Your humanities are not my humanities. I work for a national humanities organization, and part of my job is reading about why the humanities matter. It’s an old and tired debate. Is it valuable to live a life of the mind? …