Today, members of the PMC face a choice. Will they cling to an elitist conception of their own superiority and attempt to defend their own increasingly tenuous privileges, or will they act in solidarity with other working people and help craft a politics capable of creating a better world for all?

—Stefanie Ehmsen & Albert Scharenberg, preface to “Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class”

In 2019, as I was nearing the end of a three-year creative writing MFA program in the Midwest, I poked my head out into the job market and, like a groggy groundhog emerging from hibernation, surveyed the economic landscape.

“Fuck that,” I said to myself before retreating back into the basement bullpen. “Let’s just do five more years of grad school.”

So, off to the Sonoran Desert I went.

I didn’t really care about getting another graduate degree. Graduate degrees are, I think, generally overrated.

Don’t get me wrong: sustained, intensive study is certainly worthwhile, and is not nearly as freely available to everyone as it should be. I just mean that there’s no necessary or meaningful connection between intelligence, capabilities, and formal credentials. The process is what’s meaningful, not the piece of paper you get when the process is over. Real learning is never really “over,” anyway. Plus, what people actually learned during grad school is often very different from what employers assume they learned.

Noam Chomsky once argued that excelling in ruthlessly competitive school settings usually requires “some combination of greed, cynicism, obsequiousness and subordination, lack of curiosity and independence of mind, self-serving disregard for others, and who knows what else.” And that this is often the main thing a credential demonstrates to employers. As one of my CW teachers once put it: as long as you have a moderate aptitude for ass-kissing, hoop-jumping, and self-important monologue-ing, graduate degrees are things “they practically hand out on street corners.” 

In any case, what I really cared about, as I burrowed back into grad school, was taking refuge from the raging dumpster fire that is the 21st-century academic labor market.

And take refuge I did. For a while.

As a rhetoric and composition PhD student, I had a 2:1 teaching load, health insurance, a tuition waiver, and a $20,000 yearly living stipend, not to mention access to a high-speed printer (no small thing). My studio apartment cost $525 per month. It was close enough to bike to campus and included a small, fenced yard for my dog. (You could say he’s my emotional support animal, but I like to think the arrangement is mutual.) The fact that the apartment’s window A/C unit was pathetically outmatched by southern Arizona’s 110-degree-plus summers was ultimately a trivial downside.

Not to minimize the plight of grad workers, but I would have gladly stayed a grad student for the rest of my life. Teaching writing and rhetoric to college students is consistently rewarding — socially and intellectually, if not materially. The GTA life felt like it’d be a relatively comfortable, sustainable way to keep doing it.

Eventually, however, the funding ran out (as it tends to do). At that point, I realized that a doctoral degree is something university bureaucrats mainly give out to get rid of people. 

I skipped commencement.

I’m now a contingent faculty member at Montana State University, where I just finished my second year, for a grand total of 10 years teaching college writing and rhetoric.

And now, at thirty-five years old, for the first time in my life, I have nothing to look forward to (besides the usual things I enjoy: reading, writing, eating, camping, class discussions, summer breaks).

No big next steps, no major milestones on the horizon.

It’s all downhill from here.

At least, it has been so far.

My first gig out of grad school was a Visiting Assistant Professor appointment with a 3:2 teaching load and a $57,000 salary ($11,400 per course). I was grateful, but the gig lasted exactly a year — the funding, once more, ran out. To stay at the same university, I had to shift into the more standard “NTT” (non-tenure-track) role and take a 60% pay cut. 

At MSU, NTTs with terminal degrees start out at $4,252 per course. Since an inhumane 5:5 teaching load is considered “full-time,” many NTTs report working at least 55 hours per week, which translates to at least 240 hours of unpaid overtime each semester. Because of exploding class sizes and other forms of job creep, NTTs still struggle to give students the levels of individualized attention they need.

For a single adult with no children, an NTT’s annual base pay is about $20,000 less than what’s needed to afford basic necessities in Gallatin County, Montana, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator. To support two adults and two children, it’s about $100,000 less than what’s needed.

Since this region of Montana is one of my favorite places on the planet — moose, bears, wolves, bison, glacial lakes, volcanic hot springs, etc. — I didn’t initially mind the pay cut, though I did have to move to a cheaper apartment.

It didn’t take long, however, for the daily indignities to start piling up.

In my current teaching position (which doesn’t require a terminal degree), I now get paid less, per course, than I did as a graduate student. I’m no longer allowed to teach many of the courses that I taught (and designed) last year as a VAP. Instead of spending 32% of my income on rent, I now spend 75%. Instead of the series of annual GTA contracts, I’m now on 5-month, semester-long contracts. Instead of having paid writing and research time, I now have — well, none. Instead of one job, I now have three: part-time college teaching, part-time construction work, and part-time union organizing. I’d consider teaching full-time, but I simply can’t give meaningful feedback to that many student essays.

I tried hard to avoid this outcome.

But, after two desperate, demoralizing years of carpet-bombing the academic job market with CVs, cover letters, and rec letters, I finally decided that I don’t even really want a tenure-track job — which, as I explain below, isn’t the same as not wanting job security.

Why?

Reason #1: Market scarcity.

There simply aren’t enough TT jobs to go around. I’d have more luck hitting a hole-in-one at the local golf course. And I don’t even golf.

This reason certainly bruised my ego. Contingent faculty are often perceived to be less qualified and committed than they actually are, simply because they’re contingent faculty — a job situation that by itself proves, ipso facto, in the eyes of some TT faculty and administrators (though certainly not all), that contingent faculty are deficient or inferior. “No one who’s actually really smart, capable, and hard-working,” the reasoning goes, “would ever tolerate such a shitty job for more than a couple of years . . . ”

The reality, though, is that many of us simply have nowhere else we can go (or want to go).

Reason #2: Publish in pay-walled, Elsevier-owned venues or perish.

As much as I value careful scholarly analysis, I’m also drawn to public, non-specialized writing genres, yet blog posts like this one are generally not taken very seriously by tenure and promotion committees — as if a text’s value is somehow inversely proportional to the number of people who might actually read it.

No writer is truly free until they’ve written something without thinking once about how it will look on their personal website or resume.

On a related note, a tenured professor once recommended that I not write what I really think about anything until I won the protections of tenure. Is it possible that the chronic lack of job security for the “new faculty majority” might, in fact, be an intentional means of political and intellectual discipline? Rhetorical question.

Reason #3: Being a boss sucks.

A depressingly high percentage of the jobs available to people in my field are for “Writing Program Administrators” or “Writing Program Directors.” In this context, words like “administrator” and “director” are just euphemisms for “boss” or “manager.” Low-level, front-line managers, to be sure, but managers nonetheless — people with direct power and control over an army of exploited adjuncts, contingents, and grad students.

Most of the people who do those jobs have good intentions. Still, I have a strong desire to avoid supervising the exploitation of others. Former WPA Susan Miller-Cochran has an article called “Innovation through Intentional Administration: Or, How to Lead a Writing Program Without Losing Your Soul,” but I’m not sure that’s entirely possible.

Even if it was, I know I wouldn’t have the mental fortitude needed to engage in the job-jeopardizing forms of managerial refusal that WPAs have to engage in, on a near-constant basis, if they want to insulate the people they supervise from upper admin’s relentlessly exploitative pressures and demands.

Reason #4: Shit won’t change unless we change it. 

This final reason took the longest to gestate. 

Even though I’d written an eco-Marxist dissertation, I realized that parts of my psyche still needed to unmoor themselves from an individualistic, careerist worldview (not unlike the worldview that motivates people to apply for managerial positions).

As Jack Metzgar writes in Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society, even though the “sense of possibility and even necessity of becoming something different and better than what you are is at the core of middle-class professionalism and [is] its most positive attribute by my lights,” it’s simultaneously true that, in working-class culture, there is often (though not always) “a kind of reverse status to being common, to not standing out, a positive value to not putting yourself above and lording it over everybody.”

In this alternative to middle-class professional culture, the real thing to strive for, the real success story, is doing such a good job “pull[ing] your own weight” that “nobody notices.”

Lack of distinction becomes the real distinction — even if, at the same time, simply surviving under conditions and constraints not of our own making always involves “enormous drive, creativity, imagination, and resolve,” as Vivek Chibber emphasizes in The Class Matrix. “There is nothing automatic or passive” about it.

Only by failing spectacularly, over and over again, to distinguish myself — only by failing to “make it” according to the dominant, achievement-oriented metrics of capitalist society — could I finally admit that C. Wright Mills’ critique of self-serving careerism was spot-on: “[it’s unfortunate that] the white-collar employee [often] remains psychologically the little individual scrambling to get to the top,” Mills wrote, “instead of a dependent employee experiencing unions and accepting union affiliation as a collective means of collective ascent.”

The choice, at that point, was clear: either I could continue clambering for my own personal slice of a shrinking pie, or I could abandon the shrinking pie and join the people already struggling mightily to cook something a lot more nutritious and a lot less perishable. Since time and energy are scarce resources, the more time and energy I invested in the first option, the less viable the second option would become.

There are, in other words, two basic ways to think about how to get a good job:

(1) Resign myself to what’s available and die competing with other, equally desperate people for scraps. (see: “There Is No Alternative”)

(2) Reject what’s available, and work with others to create new, better options — partly by redefining what “tenure-track” even means in the first place. (see: “Another World Is Possible”)

In “Building Labor Solidarity Across Tenure Lines,” Jiyoon Park and Naomi Williams argue that “tenure should be understood as the privileges granted in a timely fashion to all competent teachers, providing ‘job security, a living wage, training, respect in the workplace, and a voice in curriculum issues,’ not to just a select few.”

Of course, such protections should — and could — be extended to all workers, not just teachers, as Montana’s unique, statewide prohibition of at-will employment suggests. (After a six-month probationary period, the Montana University System’s classified staff are, unlike its contract faculty, considered “permanent employees” who can’t be fired without just cause.)

Given the two options above, the choice was easy. Not because I have more integrity than anyone else. I was simply forced, by external conditions, to admit that the rules of the academic game are a recipe for self-annilation, and to realize, as Charlie Post argues, that only “the conscious organizing of ordinary working people . . . combats precarity and puts stability in people’s lives.”

Re-Writing the Rules

I should emphasize, here, that there’s nothing at all unique about my current job situation. It’s just higher ed’s version of the gig economy, where “the new faculty majority” are treated like ultra-cheap, disposable independent contractors: rescued from the “applicant pool” when they’re needed, dumped in the gutter when they’re not.

And there are, as always, plenty of much worse situations to be in: Congolese cobalt miner, Foxconn factory worker, migrant farm worker, textile furnace-feeder . . . None of which offers unlimited access to library databases and the Adobe Creative Cloud, the way my current job does.

Honestly, it’s kind of obscene for me to even be complaining, isn’t it? It’s not like I live in a fucking refugee camp!

On the other hand, bosses love to try to pacify people by telling them: “Be grateful for what you have. Things could be a lot worse, you know.” (The implied threat is hard to miss.)

Regardless, white-collar workers now “have more in common with precarious blue-collar workers than ever,” as Alex Press observes in “White-Collar Unionization Is Good for All Workers.”

The fact that the “Uberification” of higher ed has become the “new normal” does not, of course, make it any less of a moral outrage. Indeed, it’s a profound insult to students, to faculty, and to the whole idea of education as a democratic public good — a “betrayal,” as Herb Childress calls it in The Adjunct Underclass.

This betrayal hasn’t been easy to metabolize. “The college-educated are trained to expect that the world will make room for them, and when it doesn’t . . . the blow isn’t just economic; it’s psychological,” writes George Packer in “The College-Educated Working Class.”

Indeed: my therapist told me that my mental state is unlikely to improve until my economic state does.

What this means is that my mental state is unlikely to improve anytime soon. Especially since I can no longer afford therapy. (That’s okay, though. I realized that a therapist is basically somebody you pay to be your friend, and that I was using those weekly sessions as an excuse to avoid the harder, scarier task of cultivating non-transactional friendships with new people in a new city.)

Cynicism Is a Luxury Workers Literally Can’t Afford

The only real source of hope, for me, has been my involvement in union activities and labor organizing through the Montana Federation of Public Employees (MFPE), the Gallatin-Park Central Labor Council, the Montana DSA Labor Working Group, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the English NTT Labor Group.

That last group is what Stan Weir would call an “informal work group,” one premised on the ideas that (1) collective bargaining organizations like MFPE must not operate as “exclusive clubs” that care only about dues-paying members, and that (2), as Marianne Garneau writes in “Big Strikes and the Sabotage of the Labor Movement”:

The calls today to reinvigorate union militancy through bold and inspired leadership generally set aside [the] tradition of settling issues on the floor. Bringing militancy back is not just a question of putting someone else at the helm of the existing grievance and bargaining processes, and well-mobilized ranks building towards the all-out strike.

It has to be a question of organized and unruly work groups politicizing work and pushing back on the job, building the power to call the shots to management — workers once again exercising that kind of control over their daily lives. (emphasis added)

Like any community, these various labor groups have plenty of internal conflicts and contradictions. But they’re also full of people who are committed to what Karl Marx, Marc Bousquet, and many others would call a bottom-up “labor theory of change” (collective, multiracial self-liberation by the rank-and-file), in contrast to the top-down “management theory of change” (individualistic saviorism) that is far too common among well-intentioned academics, politicians, celebrities, CEOs, and even some union officials.

(Here’s a one-pager I made about these two theories of change.)

These groups affirm David Bacon’s claim, in “Labor Needs a Radical Vision,” that “government and corporations may treat a job as a privilege, and a vanishing one at that, but unions must defend a job as a right.”

Without the inspiration and camaraderie these groups provide — not to mention the ongoing, experiential (and refreshingly credential-free) education — I would be in a very dark place. Participating in these groups allows me to access the mental and emotional resources necessary to begin “changing the things I cannot accept,” as Angela Davis once put it.

Or, in the words of Max Horkheimer: “A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison, and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.”

It’s still not clear how long I’ll last in higher ed, or if the path to an honest living lies elsewhere.

Either way, within or beyond academia, all any of us can do is sail into the unknown.

I thank Genie Giaimo, Christie Hodgen, and Ben Cilwick for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 

Further Reading

Higher Ed

Erik Baker: “What Are You Going to Do with That? The Future of College in the Asset Economy”

Herb Childress: “This Is How You Kill a Profession” & “The Academic Career Calibration Protocol”

Mary Ellen Flannery: “‘We Deserve to Be Paid’: Contingent and Part-Time Faculty Want Equal Pay for Equal Work. Why Not Now?”

Matt Seybold: “Against Technofeudal Education”

Work & Unions

Elizabeth Anderson: “The Struggle for Meaningful Work”

Josh Dzieza: “The Laid-off Scientists and Lawyers Training AI to Steal Their Careers: Experienced White-Collar Workers Are Now Part of a Miserable Gig Economy”

Barbara Ehrenreich & John Ehrenreich: “Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class”

Rasmus Hästbacka: “What Is Syndicalism and What Is It Good For?”

Mie Inouye: “Labor’s Militant Minority”

United Electrical, Radio, & Machine Workers of America: Them and Us Unionism

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