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i get asked sometimes why i went from academia to labor organizing & there are a few answers. maybe they are useful so i will share them!
the tl;dr version is:
-followed my own interests/energy
-saw only doom ahead in academic career
-felt complicit in vampiric higher ed system
-followed my own interests/energy
-saw only doom ahead in academic career
-felt complicit in vampiric higher ed system
on following my own interests/energy:
i was lucky enough to have a labor union as a grad student (s/o @uaw2865!). i got very involved in union organizing and leadership in my last 2-3 years of grad school.
i was lucky enough to have a labor union as a grad student (s/o @uaw2865!). i got very involved in union organizing and leadership in my last 2-3 years of grad school.
pretty soon i was spending at least as much time organizing as i was on anything academic, and found the work more engaging and energizing than my work as a scholar & teacher (which i liked!).
i consider myself lucky to have found organizing when i was toward the end of my dissertation, so i didn't have to grapple too much with the sunk cost conundrum (i finished the phd *and* changed careers).
organizing offered a lot of what i had been missing in academic work: a sense of *urgency*. i also liked how social it was, and how task-based. it felt extremely concrete compared to my academic humanities work (which was about climate change, but still).
but more than any abstract principle, the real giveaway was how i found myself wanting to spend my time. i always wanted to be organizing! i basically spent two years working full time (or close to it) for my union, while feeling increasingly distant from my academic work.
this was happening right when i was starting to get a little more successful as an academic: scheduling skype interviews for the handful of jobs i did apply to before deciding to stop, publishing a couple of pieces, appearing on panels with senior scholars i really admired.
so for me, it was really important to hone in on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivators. it really did come down to what made me feel most useful, and what tasks i wanted to prioritize. the answer was always organizing.
okay, number 2: the looming specter of infinite grind in academic labor
everyone knows the job market is horrible. that deterred me some, but i actually sort of *liked* being on the job market. it's fun to create a profile for yourself and imagine different futures.
everyone knows the job market is horrible. that deterred me some, but i actually sort of *liked* being on the job market. it's fun to create a profile for yourself and imagine different futures.
(this perverse take on the job market brought to you by not having been on it for very long, or very seriously.)
what really got me was looking around at mid-level and senior faculty in my department.
(note: i loved my department! i cannot overstress this. i was a rare thing: a happy graduate student! in a functional department that supported me! but i still decided to leave.)
(note: i loved my department! i cannot overstress this. i was a rare thing: a happy graduate student! in a functional department that supported me! but i still decided to leave.)
i spent a lot of time listening to faculty talk about their jobs, both at my own institution and others. and even in the best places, the kinds of jobs i could never dream of getting out of the gate, people just seemed so frustrated and worn out.
increasing admin loads. frustration over never having enough time to write and teach. constantly weighed down by limited budgets controlled by a managerial class that didn't seem to understand education or scholarship. a feeling of powerlessness to change things.
the last one was what got me in the end. i saw so many faculty who felt trapped in the exploitative system of contemporary u.s. academia. they wanted better pay & working conditions for grad students, adjuncts, university staff, themselves, but couldn't imagine getting there.
finally, there was a strike of service workers on campus. as i watched only a minority of faculty cancel classes in solidarity, with most expressing either reservations about the tactics or a sense of helplessness in their own position, i realized i never wanted that to be me.
i didn't want to be afraid to take a real, material stand for workers' rights. i didn't want my politics to become abstract. and i never wanted to feel that powerless.
which brings me to point 3: complicity in the higher ed system.
i was in academia for a long time not because i necessarily felt like it was the only option for me, but because it was the least bad one i had found. maybe i wasn't changing the world, but i wasn't doing harm.
i was in academia for a long time not because i necessarily felt like it was the only option for me, but because it was the least bad one i had found. maybe i wasn't changing the world, but i wasn't doing harm.
(note: some scholars do change the world! i truly believe this. i just never felt like i would be one of them, and not in a self-hating way. it just wasn't where my ambitions lay.)
but as i came closer and closer to the idea of being faculty, i grew increasingly uneasy with the idea of participating in a system that asks young people to mortgage their futures for an education i wasn't sure was worth it.
(education is absolutely worth time & energy, it's vital, and i feel very lucky to have walked away with so much of it debt-free. but the way we are doing it isn't working for most people.)
the idea of someone paying a ton of money to take a class with me when i didn't even understand my own work as particularly urgent was more than i could really stomach.
and so i decided: rather than stay within institutions i increasingly saw as straight-up harmful, and try to change them from there, i would walk, then turn around and fight them from outside.
(this was personal! and based partly on an assessment of my own skills and comfort. i am better at agitating and confronting than inside strategy. i'm a little allergic to not saying what i think, even when it's the better idea to keep quiet.)
anyway! this is all a long story that most people probably won't read, but if you do, i hope it's useful. this was how it worked for me, and if any part of it resonates, i'm always happy to talk more. career change can be hard!
but it can also be easy; it was for me, surprisingly so. i got the first job i applied for and i've never looked back. and luckily i have no regrets about any of it: i'm glad i did a phd! and equally grateful that i stopped at the right time.
(side note: i think it would be cool if we could normalize getting a phd as something you do not because it leads to an academic career, but because you want to spend a few years researching something esoteric and writing a lot of words on it for its own sake)
(part of "normalize" here includes hugely expanding the accessibility of higher ed for most people, & the social safety net necessary to support that kind of track)
(i see this as part of a much larger problem with how we as a society have come to treat education exclusively as "training for the jobs of tomorrow")
