Last week a woman I went to graduate school with killed herself. After graduation she’d gotten a tenure-track job as an assistant professor at a large university, and it was there that she threw herself off one of the buildings on campus. In a majorly bad move, the university where she worked neglected to cancel classes the next day, and students had to attend class in the building she’d jumped from. Not cool, guys, not cool.
My former classmate and I hadn’t spoken in nearly four years, though there was a time when we were very close and confided in each other about a lot of things. We talked about the difficulties that we were going through as grad students, our fears for the future, our frustrations with how the system was run, and the difficulties we faced teaching first-year composition to undergrads in Nebraska. She was one of a small handful of people I could be open with about my insecurities, and she in turn was open with me.
Our falling out wasn’t a dramatic one, but it was a falling out nonetheless. After I graduated and stayed in the city to work an editing/greenhouse assistant job in the university’s agronomy department, my skepticism about the viability of a future in academia became more pronounced, while at the same time her own work and recognition in her field was starting to take off. Though we never talked about it directly, I got the impression that she didn’t want to be around someone who was questioning academia’s shortcomings, even if I fully supported her and the people around me who were pursuing academic careers.
I remember seeing the news that she’d been accepted for a professor job and thinking how good it was that she’d gotten what she wanted, and I knew that she’d certainly earned it. I also remember thinking that she was set now and had a great life laid out ahead of her, and that this was a good thing too.
I won’t mention her name here to prevent this post from showing up in Google searches, and because that’s not really my point. Rather, her death has reminded me of how shitty life can be for graduate students, lower-level instructors, and, even, it turns out, those who get the coveted professor jobs that everyone wants. That’s why I’d like to share a few thoughts.
What’s Grad School Life Really Like?
From 2013 to 2015, in the days before I started this blog, I finished a two-year master’s in English/Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I’d been accepted for a graduate student assistantship there, which meant that in addition to getting free tuition I could work and earn a living stipend. My first year I was paid $11,600 ($1,160 a month for ten months, before taxes) as a research assistant, and my second year I was paid $16,000 ($1,600 a month for ten months, also before taxes) to teach two sections of undergraduate writing.
I devoted a separate post to the finances of grad school life, but the basics were that especially for the first year, I lived pretty tightly with few frills. I rented the cheapest apartment I could find ($330 a month for three rooms) in a building that had seen better days; ran my aging computer, printer, and cell phone into the ground; and went two years without buying new clothes. I also walked everywhere instead of driving (campus was just under a mile from my apartment) to save money, which meant dealing with scorching midwestern heat in the summer and hand-chappingly dry windy days in winter.
Not having money to spend on things I needed was stressful. Despite my lack of tools, when my car ran into mechanical troubles I often tried doing the work myself rather than taking it to the shop, and I once carried my dead car battery a half hour to Autozone for a free test because I wasn’t allowed to bring it on the city bus. When my trusty six-year-old laptop was on its last legs, I spent hours transferring my files on to CDs and DVDs after I ran out of free cloud storage and because I didn’t own an external drive, and walked to the campus library at odd hours just to use the internet because I also didn’t have a smart phone.
I had other stresses too. The biggest of them involved how well I could hold my own as a writer around members of the department, both the professors and the other grad students, who all seemed to be better than me because they had more publications, had presented at big academic conferences, and had read a lot of books I hadn’t. I often felt embarrassed to be around my peers and had an ever-present awareness of my own inferiority.
In my writing workshops I had to deal directly with how bad my writing was, because three times a semester everyone would read a section of my novel and talk (mostly) about the parts of it that weren’t working. Everyone in the creative writing program was trying to get novels published, and we knew that if we wanted to attract the attention of literary agents and publishers, our writing had to be the best.
The competition wasn’t just in the writing classes, though—it was everywhere. There were awards that grad students could win for the best research paper, best short story, best collection, or best teaching: some of us won, but most of us didn’t. There were travel grants available for those attending academic conferences, but there was never enough money to go around. A lot of grad students wanted to teach advanced classes after their second year, and not being chosen for them meant you’d be stuck teaching freshman writing again.
And that was just within the department: the real competition came when you sent your work off to a journal to be published, and if it didn’t meet the journal’s standards or stand out above everyone else, you’d be rejected. Acceptance by the big-time journals meant a chance to brag about your achievements in the department newsletter, but more importantly, a line to add to your CV—and the longer your CV, the stronger a candidate you’d be for one of the dwindling number of tenure-track professor jobs that everyone would be applying for after graduation.
A quick history of university employment in America reveals that while obtaining a stable professor job with a decent salary and a path to tenure was a relatively straightforward process for grad students after World War II, in subsequent decades it became harder and harder, especially in the humanities (e.g., English), where funding was cut, enrollment was down, and an increasing number of classes were being taught by adjuncts. These adjunct teachers worked part-time, were paid per class, could abruptly have their classes cancelled at the last minute, enjoyed no job security, and weren’t given health insurance. At some universities adjuncts don’t have offices, and many have to work multiple jobs to keep the bills paid.
I once shared an alcohol-fueled conversation with a professor in the Nebraska English department (whom I also won’t name here) where I asked him/her the biggest reason most people in academia want tenure. In contrast to earlier times when tenure served as protection against faculty members with unpopular ideas being fired by mercurial administrators, the professor bluntly answered that in an uncertain job market, having tenure meant having job security.
Everyone worried about finding jobs after graduation. All. The. Fucking. Time.
We were also really, really busy—the busiest I’ve ever been for an extended period. Most people in the department taught two sections of freshman English, which meant they had to read and grade essays written by 40+ students several times a term, which in my case totaled around 800 pages total, not counting multiple drafts. We also had to prep for lessons, be available during office hours, and answer student emails, in addition to taking classes, working on our writing/research, holding down extracurricular positions (again, for the CV boosts) and going to events around the department. There were also a lot of social functions on weekends, and at the bars after classes.
The locale left something to be desired: Lincoln, Nebraska is a grid city surrounded by corn and soybean farms, with no mountains, no ocean, no forests, and only a few manmade lakes. There are a few museums, lots of restaurants and bars, and a small music venue, but otherwise very little to do around the city outside of attending college football games. The weather is dry in winter and sweltering hot in summer, and most of the buildings are colored in drab shades of brown. People in Nebraska also tend to be more conservative, more superficial, and less friendly to outsiders than I was used to growing up in the Northeast.
It was a recipe for things to get bad.
How Did People React to Being in Such a Stressful Environment?
I ask myself this question often. Most of the time I felt worthless for one reason or another: I had barely any publication credits, my writing wasn’t good enough, I constantly worried about my future, I had no money, and living in Nebraska sucked. Some days it was hard to get out of bed, and other days I reacted more strongly to setbacks than I have during other, more positive periods of my life. It was a very hard time.
The other people around me complained about many of the topics I mentioned above, though most of their complaints were centered around teaching, being too busy, and Lincoln not being interesting enough. These things were relatively superficial, but they were acceptable to talk about.
The more I got to know people, though, the more I discovered that they were dealing with a lot of the same stresses I was. They had student loans to pay, and a lot of them were taking out extra loans as grad students (which, thankfully, I managed to avoid). A lot of them worried about the job market and whether they could be hired after graduating. They constantly worried about whether they were writing enough, and dealt with the sting of having their writing rejected when they sent it out. And, if their writing was accepted and published, they doubted that anyone would actually read it or find it interesting.
Many of the people I talked to expressed doubts that they wanted to continue with academia at all, but a lot of them felt that they were too old to change career paths, or that they’d already come so far that it would be a waste to leave and start over in a different field. A few even worried that they could never learn new skills because teaching college courses was the only thing they knew how to do. That was scary to hear.
Other people took the opposite path and doubled down on academia as a track to success. They told themselves that if they worked hard enough and kept teaching, publishing, and researching, that they’d become accomplished and hirable enough to beat out the rest of the playing field for the high-paying tenure-track jobs that everyone wanted and rise above the dregs of the grad student life. I knew one person who, as a motivator, told themselves every day that they were absolutely good enough and that they would get that tenure-track job after graduation. That was scary too.
The reality, though, was that even for people who were hired for the coveted tenure-track jobs, things weren’t so rosy: these jobs often came with large teaching loads, with more pressure to be involved around the department and even more pressure to publish—all in hope of once again amassing a strong enough CV so that you could be awarded tenure when your time came. Those who were declared valuable enough for tenure were given permanent job security and a big raise, while those who didn’t make the cut were given the boot.
Older professors would often take pity on us, telling us how much more difficult it was to make an academic career now than when they were starting out, but there was little else they could do. When it came down to it, they were established, and we had to face the overwhelming odds.
I found out later that most of the grad students in my department were taking advantage of the mental health services covered by the university health insurance. People knew this not because they talked about it openly, but because they would awkwardly run into each other in the waiting room. I wonder often whether I should have been going to counseling back then too, though rightly or wrongly I guess I thought I could handle things myself.
These were the things that people only talked about in private. Though there was an open acknowledgement that things were difficult in academia, no one seemed able or willing to enact real change for themselves or others.
I decided not to continue on to another grad school program because of the way being in this environment made me feel. I also didn’t trust myself to climb the CV-building ladder in hope of claiming the fabulous tenure-track prize the way everyone around me wanted to, but most importantly, I’d become depressingly aware that in academia, the writing I cared about so deeply and that made me feel so vigorous and alive came second to the material rewards and success one could get by being published and accepted. That did, and still does, feel wrong.
It took a lot of reflection, but in the end I found it better to work a Day Job while writing on evenings and weekends. I left Nebraska, started this blog, and started work on a satirical novel about the grad school life, and I’ve never looked back.
What Can Be Done?
I don’t know why my former classmate and friend threw herself off that building, and there are a lot of things I don’t know about what her life was like after we parted ways. I feel pretty confident, though, that working in the academic environment I just described made things a lot worse for her.
It’s clear that things in academia are broken, but what can we do to fix them?
Helping people in academia be more open with the people around them about their fears, insecurities, and doubts would be a really good start. Not only would this prevent people from feeling like they’re the only ones struggling, it helps them form closer relationships, and over the long run, if people feel strongly about changing the system, they can band together and take steps to enact real change, little by little.
On a more practical level, more money would also help. Even an extra two hundred dollars a month would have gone a long way for me as a grad student, making it easier to buy things to make my life easier, which, in turn, would have reduced stress. Being able to take an Uber to Autozone when my car battery died, or being able to buy a cheap external hard drive so I could back up the files on my dying laptop aren’t exactly luxuries, but they would have made a big difference to me. Being poor is hard, and stressful, and having a little extra money every month helps take a lot of that stress away.
Lower teaching loads would also help a lot: giving fewer classes to grad students (say, one class per semester instead of two) allows them more time to focus on their own classes and writing while still gaining valuable teaching experience. The same goes for full-time non-tenured instructors, who teach a disproportionate amount of classes at many universities while trying to do their own writing and research. It’s not cool for universities to save money by assigning more classes to the overworked people at the bottom when they could be hiring more teachers to share the work.
Finally—and this is the really, really, big one—a lot of the stress shared by the people in the department arose from the fear that they wouldn’t be able to get the coveted, high-paying tenure-track professor jobs after graduation, and would instead be relegated to the role of poorly paid adjuncts with no job security and a non-existent professional status. This created a system of Haves and Have Nots: the Haves got all the money from the handful of professor jobs, while the Have Nots had to suck it up and take the crumbs.
Creating more employment equality throughout the entire system would solve this problem by eliminating many feelings of fear and worthlessness shared by those who work in academia. Instead of creating tenure-track jobs that pay upwards of $100,000 a year and adjunct jobs that pay $3,000 per class, universities should create more, stable jobs that offer living wages and health insurance in the middle of the spectrum, thus offering up more viable opportunities for more people. Financially this will be good for the wallets of those at the bottom, but more importantly, it’ll erase the feeling of failure that people get when they can’t win the fabulous prizes.
There are those out there who will protest that times are tough, and universities lack the funding to get rid of their adjuncts and hire more regular faculty. To this I answer, does your university really need that rock climbing wall, those new pillars in the building foyer, the make-your-own-omelet bar in the student dining hall, that brand-new football stadium, and for your presidents, administrators, and coaches to be making high six-figure salaries while the people who actually teach the classes save money by going an extra month between haircuts?
Inequality has real consequences. Don’t pretend these problems aren’t there.
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