Out of the frying pan and into the fire...
In this post: The real story of what happened after I left academia, on the loss of my academic career and feeling adrift.
Next week: Author and activist Jessie Daniels joins us to talk about dismantling white supremacy, leaving academia, and more.
Last week: Dr. Caitlin Faas and I go over wtf it means to be both "embodied" and "reduce stress," and how to know your limits while staying productive.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire: the real story of what happened after I left academia, part I
With the loss of an academic career, that is, my singular and obsessive focus for eight years of my twenties, I was adrift. In job interview after job interview, I was told that I had too much experience, or that they were worried I’d get bored in the position. It boggled my mind. Why would a company not want a PhD, who had been drilled to take orders without questioning them, to work extraordinarily hard for very little, who could think quickly on their feet to problem solve? I was a bargain, I’d figured.
The grand majority of my friends from academia were also struggling. Of my original PhD-track cohort of graduate students who were all first years together, only one of us had a job. He was also one of two men in the entire department of Art History (and white). When we reconnected, he remarked to me,
“Allison-- of all of us, if someone had told me our first year that you weren’t the one with the tenure-track position, and moreover, that that person was me, I wouldn’t have believed them.”
To be fair, the first person in my graduate cohort to get a tenure track position (before she defended to boot) was an Afro-Latina scholar. It’s just that the tenure track wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. A 4-4 teaching load with an endlessly growing list of extracurricular committees and affairs and the pressure to finish her first book took its toll. But, because PhDs are forged in the bowels of hell, of course it wasn’t the workload and low pay that broke her. It was something far worse, but just as ubiquitous in higher education.
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