I have fantasized often over the past three months about being able to make this announcement publicly: I’ve accepted a job as an assistant professor of English at Tulane (my second tenure track position; I’ve been at Missouri State University for three years). In addition to having fewer teaching duties and more support for my research, I’m getting an $18,000 raise (only possible because my salary has been criminally low, and it’s not even the worst of the worst!). I’m elated. But of course this is not an uncomplicated elation. This is also the time of year when a lot of brilliant people realize they can no longer sustain all the costs associated with looking for a good academic job (one with a salary that is at least not insulting and with benefits).
[I can’t co-sign this terminological change hard enough.]
This is a piece of stay lit, not quit lit. I’m in no position to tackle the complicated morass of emotion from which quit lit emerges (though I was in 2015, when my mentors convinced me to give it one more year). But I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost of a tenure track job, both literal and emotional. I’m offering what it has cost me because I think it’s good for everyone in academia—especially those who have been removed from the pain of job searching in this decade—to be reminded of what it takes to stay. I also want to think seriously about real (read: difficult and costly) solutions to a genuine crisis. (I’m not here for any of the “it’s always been bad” takes.) I don’t want to turn into the type of professor whose politics are performative. Nothing changes if the ones who stay don’t think seriously about the structures we’re staying in and propping up. (It’s also worth noting that not all tenure-track positions are created equal. I’ve been privileged to have the job I had at Missouri State. But I also worked my ass off, teaching between 60 and 90 students a semester, which, please never forget, includes a lot of time serving as a de facto counselor to students in crisis, a job for which I am most definitely not trained and which I find completely and utterly exhausting. Between all of that mental and emotional labor, service work, and trying to keep publishing things, most days I didn’t have the energy to follow the plot of a Top Chef episode, let alone organize for contingent faculty on my campus or anywhere else. And pre-tenure faculty are not exactly in the most secure positions when it comes to rocking the institutional boat.)
The cost of staying
Many people warned me before I started graduate school that I was “mortgaging my earning potential in my twenties.” I sort of understood this, but also I was twenty-three years old and had no real sense of what that meant. Eventually I’d have a stable job, so what did that really matter?
Well, for me now, at thirty-six, I see how it mattered. I’m not starving, but I have no savings (aside from $9,000 in a retirement account that I was only able to start at age thirty-three), no assets, and about $18,000 in debt (some low-interest student loans and some high-interest credit cards). Here’s how the credit card debt happened.
Income through grad school and first years on the job market:
2006–2007 (Grad School Year 1): $12,000 stipend plus $5,000 fellowship
2007–2008 (Year 2): $16,000 stipend plus $5,000 fellowship
2008–2009 (Year 3): $16,000 stipend
2009–2010 (Year 4): $18,000 stipend (raised because a TT faculty member went to bat for us—I think this was the year it was raised, though it may have been the following year)
2010–2011 (Year 5): $18,000 stipend
2011–2012 (Year 6): $18,000 humanities center fellowship at my home institution
2012–2013 (Year 7): $25,000 external fellowship
2013–2014: $19,000 salary at a one-year “VAP”
2014–2015: $38,000 one-year research fellowship
2015–2016: $26,000-ish adjuncting (4–6 courses per semester)
2016–2019: $52,000 salary in a TT position (3/3 teaching load)
2019–?: $70,000 salary in a TT position (2/2 teaching load)
Prior to the MSU job, 2014-2015 was the only year I made enough money to cover my expenses. My family is not in a position to help me out (my parents have had their own job struggles that have coincided with my college and grad school years). Each year there were things I had to have that I couldn’t pay for. They went on my credit card, which had a $20,000 limit, even though my annual salary was almost never above $18,000, because Bank of America is a predatory institution. I’ve never been able to successfully negotiate for more money or resources in a job offer because I’ve never had any leverage, because getting one job offer is a goddamned miracle.
In addition to the financial costs, there are also of course the mental and emotional costs of knowing you’re only going to stay in a place for a year (nine months, really), not to mention moving costs that may or may not be reimbursed, and the isolation that, for me at least, has come with the jobs I’ve had in very small, insular towns. Others have written about this more eloquently than I feel capable of. I just want to note that financial stress and emotional distress work together to amplify each other, as you know if you’ve ever had a depressive crying jag interrupted by a phone call from a bill collector.
I love this profession with my whole heart. It is a complete and total joy, even when it’s difficult, to think, write, and teach. It’s everything I’ve ever hoped for in a professional life. This shouldn’t be a privilege for the few. And that means the few need to fight harder for everyone else playing the good life lottery.