Sublimating the Grief of the Left Behind

If you’ve been watching the rolling thunderstorm of executive orders affecting higher education and thinking, simultaneously, “what a loss to the world” and “what a loss for those scholars” … you are right.

It is a massive and increasingly uncorrectable loss to the world that life-enriching and life-saving research is being stopped in its tracks. We will now not know things that we might have otherwise learned, and we will not think thoughts that might have otherwise given us joy or revelation. These consequences are now unavoidable.

But societal impacts are not the only consequences to consider. The loss of knowledge that is being widely grieved right now goes hand in hand with immediate or forthcoming loss of livelihood for individual scholars. And even though academics have become adept at mourning these individual losses—we write mike-drop essays, lobby our professional associations and contribute to GoFundMe accounts—we have generally limited ourselves to catharsis and critique.

Our current moment calls for more. What we are now experiencing in American higher education and what we will continue to experience for the foreseeable future is a generational loss. We need to understand why it is this kind of loss. We need to be able to explain this to others in ways that do not trigger fresh complaints about ivory tower academics. And we need to grasp the nature of the obligation on those of us left behind.

Put simply, we need to acknowledge, contextualize and equip. With apologies to Erin Bartram for repurposing her excellent title—without any of the irony—we have to sublimate the grief of the left behind.

Academic Job Loss Is Different

Industries change, businesses close and employers lay off existing employees or fail to hire new ones. While this is never easy, people find new jobs all the time. Why can’t a tenured professor or a recent hire or an eager postdoc do likewise? Why isn’t this just another instance of scholars being snowflakes?

Here are just three reasons why job loss is especially fraught for academics. There are more than three reasons, of course—and I discuss many in my forthcoming book, The War on Tenure. But these three are a good place to start.

Institutionalized Employment

To begin with, academia is a highly institutionalized industry.

What does that mean? It means that if you want to be a professor, you need to find one specific type of employer—a university—that will hire you to be that. Sure, without a university employer, you can still be a scholar, a public intellectual, a researcher, a writer or a teacher. Often you can be two or more of these simultaneously. But you cannot be a professor if you are not employed by a university.

Many of academia’s peer professions are not institutionalized to the same degree. You can be a lawyer, an accountant, an architect or a psychologist—you can even practice many types of medicine—all without being hired by specific types of employers. You can, for example, practice the very specific type of law that I teach, employment law, as a solo practitioner, or in a law firm that’s small, medium or large, or as part of a company’s in-house counsel, or for the government (in which case you are exceptionally busy right now). You are not limited to one type of employer if you want to practice employment law. In other fields—like human resources, information technology, sales or communications—you not only can work for different types of employers, you probably should do so to become a well-rounded practitioner.

But there is only one way to be a professor: get hired (and stay employed) by a university.

Because of this institutionalization, when universities stop hiring, as they are increasingly doing in response to federally induced chaos, it isn’t simply that a difficult job market has become harder: It’s that a difficult job market is ceasing to exist altogether. That’s the first reason why academic job loss—and specifically academic opportunity loss—really is different.

Quasi Monopsony

The institutionalized nature of academic employment makes the academic labor market difficult. But that bad situation is made worse by the fact that the academic market consists of a few geographically dispersed employers seeking highly specialized employees. This makes academia a quasi monopsony.

As of 2020, according to U.S. News, there were around 1,400 accredited nonprofit institutions offering four-year degrees and serving at least 200 students each. That may sound like a wealth of job opportunities for aspiring professors. But having just half a dozen potential employers within driving distance of one another is considered an exceptionally dense job market in academia. In other industries—again, say, law—the same market would be considered exceptionally shallow. (Try comparing the number of law schools in Atlanta, where I currently live, with the number of law firms and companies that maintain in-house counsel.)

Thanks to this shallow, thin and quasi-monopsonistic job market, aspiring professors know that whenever a job does arise, you go where it takes you and whether or not it suits you and your family. Or, particularly if you’re a heterosexual woman, maybe you just forgo having family at all.

(The same job market picture gets worse still when you remember that universities don’t just hire professors or even law professors: They hire, for instance, labor and employment law professors or intellectual property law professors … and they usually only need one or two of each. And that job market keeps getting worse when you factor in the adjunctification that has characterized academia for decades, and that I’m largely bypassing in this essay. Forget driving distance: In many subfields, job candidates are lucky if there are half a dozen jobs available nationwide in a given year.)

Given all these difficult market dynamics, what happens when a job that you already have disappears? What happens when four years into a tenure-track position—or 20 years after tenure—your lab or your department is forced to close?

Well, if you’ve committed to a labor market characterized by “a few geographically dispersed employers seeking highly specialized employees,” either you find a comparable employer within your existing geographic market, or you relocate to a new geographic market, or—if neither of these options is available to you—you exit the industry altogether.

This is a second reason why academic job loss is different. Although I can’t offer statistical evidence of this given the lack of prior data collection (and the unlikelihood of future data collection), the scholarship strongly suggests that institutional exits are likely to coincide with industry exits because academic workers often have no other choice.

Autodepreciation

In the influential essay whose title I’ve borrowed, Erin Bertram notes that we avoid grappling with the loss of colleagues who have been forced out of academia by “reminding the departing scholar about all the amazing skills they have.” We tell the departing scholar, “You can use those skills in finance! Insurance! Nonprofits! All sorts of regular jobs that your concerned parents will recognize!” But as Bartram and other commentators observe, you could probably have won those jobs just as easily without the Ph.D. at all.

What even these critics often overlook is that you could actually have won many of those jobs more easily without the Ph.D.

I’m not talking about the mountain of debt and the lost decade or so of earning capacity that come with many Ph.D.s. I’m not even talking about the way in which academic training leaves you with valuable but fairly generic skills (“critical reading”) as well as specific skills that won’t help you in the general labor market (e.g., assembling a syllabus that students find interesting, that strikes the right balance between challenging and feasible assignments, and that accounts for institutional resources, for different learning styles and for applicable accommodations, all without relying on an overly pricey set of books). These things matter, but they are still only some of the ways in which competing to enter and succeed in academia harms the people who do it.

Instead, what I’m referring to here is a phenomenon that many commentators implicitly understand but few explicitly articulate: Academic training, expectations and norms force you to unlearn or forgo skills you might have otherwise had that could have served you well in the general labor market. Put differently, academic training forces you to engage in a kind of autodepreciation.

In my book, I use the example of Judith Butler’s famously critiqued and parodied writing to illustrate this. Butler’s writing is notoriously difficult—characterizing it as such is probably one of the few things their supporters and critics can agree on—but it’s just an extreme example of how scholars are often required to write and speak in ways that won’t serve them well outside academia. Phrases like “Althusserian theory” and “homologous ways,” both taken from Butler’s award-winning “bad sentence,” can be efficient shorthand for people who must contribute to complex debates that have evolved over decades or centuries. It’s not always possible to communicate complicated ideas via relatively short sentences written in the standard American English that I’m using right now. I certainly don’t write this way when I’m discussing worker classification doctrine or theories of democratic sovereignty.

To stand a chance of succeeding in academia, you need to regularly use that type of expert vocabulary and complex sentence structure. You need to write in it to publish scholarship, you need to speak in it to present research and teach students, and this means you must also learn to think in it. But once you’ve had to think, speak and write using expert shorthand for decades—for up to nine years of graduate school, a year or three of postdoctoral fellowships, not to mention any time spent as a full-fledged professor—you will understandably struggle to sound … not like Judith Butler.

What happens, then, if an acute financial shock prompts most universities to stop hiring new professors just as you’re finishing your degree? Or, supposing you’ve already scrambled into a full-time job, what if the same shock forces your department or program to be eliminated? Where does that leave you?

Where it leaves you, in many fields, is holding a too-fancy degree, a handful of irrelevant publications, skills that are either widely possessed (critical reading) or overly specialized (syllabus writing), and a tendency to speak and write in ways that nonacademics find unappealing or confusing, or unappealing because they’re confusing. Where it leaves you, in other words, is having depreciated your own generally valuable skills in order to become competitive for the highly specialized job you tried to get—or actually got—but that no longer exists. This is a third reason why academic job loss really is different.

Whither Now?

What I’ve just said is not uplifting. There is no uplifting way to spin the individual effects of the current assault on higher education. My goal in discussing dynamics like institutionalized employment, quasi monopsony and auto-depreciation was not to set the stage for a happy ending: It was to provide an explanation and a language for the trauma of job loss in academia. It’s not just you. It really is different.

But it’s not enough for us to understand and name these dynamics. If we believe that knowledge is power (and I’m assuming that if you are reading this article, you subscribe to that view on some level), then there must be some way to derive power from this knowledge. Here are a few possibilities.

First, having understood the nature of this loss and some reasons why it is so profound, acknowledge both publicly. Explain the dynamics that make academic job loss different. Explain them to your uncle, your cousin, your neighbor, your college friend. Learn to say them partially, and therefore inadequately, instead of either keeping silent or holding forth in the grocery aisle. It’s true that many nonacademics do not understand why our industry is so difficult and so seemingly distinct from the industries that are familiar to them. But that’s at least partly because we do not explain things to nonacademics nearly as often as we explain—and decry—them to each other. Hand-wringing illuminates nothing and helps no one.

Second, don’t be afraid to encourage early-career researchers to develop Plan B’s and Plan C’s (which they should already have, but that’s a different and well-trodden path). In fact, don’t be afraid to encourage them to pursue those alternative plans right now and even if it comes at some expense to their academic progress. Obviously, the A.B.D. who is one chapter away from finishing should probably finish that chapter given her sunk costs. But discuss with her whether she should postpone graduating until she can develop an alternative income stream.

Third, when academic hiring thaws—whether that is six months from now or several years into the future—give serious consideration to candidates with CV gaps dating to this period, the person who worked in a retail job or in an industry research position for which she was grossly overqualified needed to buy food and pay rent. If she is still qualified for the position you are later lucky enough to offer, do plan to consider her for it—and do plan on indicating that you will do so in the job advertisement so that she knows to apply.

And, fourth, don’t be afraid to ask colleagues who are forced out of academia whether they would like to stay involved somehow. Maybe they would like to work in journal operations (and maybe they would appreciate the small income this kind of work occasionally generates). Maybe they would like to participate in free virtual reading groups or brown-bag lunches. Maybe they would even like to join a mentorship circle, whether as mentor or mentee. Regardless of the nature of the opportunity, don’t be afraid to ask—and don’t take it personally if they decline. Bearing the discomfort of a curt no (or even a verbose one) is something those of us who are left behind can and should do.

Job loss is difficult in all industries, but it is not equally difficult. For the most part, we can’t avoid or undo the job loss that is now unfolding in academia. But we can understand it, name it and explain it to our nonacademic friends and family so that they better understand our grief. And we can work to mitigate the effects of job loss and opportunity loss for our colleagues in whatever small ways are open to us. It is time for academics to hunker down and try to keep each other warm, because winter, as they say, is coming.