The Boom-Bust Generation of Academics
I graduated from college in 1998, during the high point of an honest-to-goodness economic boom. Instead of grabbing one of the many new opportunities for making money, I decided instead for a life of penury in grad school. While that decision looks like financial suicide today, higher education was undergoing its own boom.
College enrollments were shooting up, as were the number of tenure-track jobs available in history departments. During the time I was earning my PhD in the first half of the 2000s, the number of new jobs actually exceeded the number of new history PhDs for the first time in over a decade. (see chart above) Other students in my department seemed to be able to get jobs and I was optimistic.
Once I defended my dissertation, I got a low-paid, temporary “visiting” assistant professor gig, but considered that a springboard into the tenure track instead of a dead end. As luck would have it, I did indeed manage to secure a tenure-track job in the spring of 2008. I was lucky because if I had waited another year, my chances would have been pretty slim. As the above chart shows, the Great Recession marked a permanent decline in the number of tenure-track jobs in history.
The news seems to be getting worse with each passing year. In the aftermath of the recession many were forced into the contingent labor market, but now the knives are coming for tenure-track and even tenured faculty. I have friends at universities whose departments are getting slashed, including high-profile cases like West Virgina University and Manhattan College. Red states are revoking tenure and villainizing humanities professors. When I decided to become a professor 25 years ago I had no clue I was joining a group later to be marked as enemies of society.
For a variety of reasons, I left my tenure-track job thirteen years ago. I used to feel a certain longing for academia after my career change, but now I mostly feel survivor’s guilt. Even though I am a member of the boom-bust generation of academics, I managed to avoid the worst and have set up a happier life as an independent school teacher. I got a chance to walk before they made me run.
Academics my age are all too painfully aware of the bust these days, but we should also spend some time thinking about the boom. Back in the 90s, the red states whose politicians try to find new ways to humiliate professors saw their state’s colleges as necessary to the growth of their economies. For example, Georgia established the HOPE scholarship to get more of its poor students into universities.
With the neoliberal shift in the economy education mattered more than ever. Millions of students took out trillions in loans while hardly anyone questioned it. This was the price to pay to be able to have a middle-class life. Buy now, pay later.
Meanwhile, tuition kept rising. This was partly due to the fact that states kept slashing money to their university systems without negatively impacting enrollment. Schools kept jacking up tuition to make up the difference, and nobody batted an eye as they signed the loan paperwork. This all fit well with how universities were run like businesses after the 1980s. If you don’t build a rock-climbing wall, lazy river, and luxury dorms, how will you get the customers, er, students in the door?
At the time, there were signs this could not last. In my “visitor” job, I worked at a regional state university whose enrollment had tripled over the past three decades. At least half of my students were first-generation and from Michigan, well aware that the kind of industrial jobs that their parents worked would not be open to them. To be able to teach this influx of students, the university turned to contingent workers like my friends and I. We were paid little, had no security, and had zero voice in our department despite doing most of its labor. (When I got journal articles published they weren’t even posted on the board in the department where tenure-track faculty had their work touted.) Inspired by our environment, my friends and I jokingly created a fictional institution called Huge University. We would go out at happy hour and make up outlandish slogans for it and laugh about the apparent absurdity of the situation we found ourselves in.1 We felt less like professors and more like educational shock workers.
That was over fifteen years ago, right before the Great Recession. It turns out that tuition could indeed get so high that people would think twice about going to college. It turns out that a university system dominated by neoliberal values would aim to slash and burn any academic department not seen as lucrative enough. It turns out that with tuition rising students would be less likely to roll the dice on a humanities major. It turns out that conservative state politicians would in fact not tolerate a situation where college-educated young people voted against them in massive numbers. By attacking universities, they could both appeal to their base in the culture wars and reduce the number of opposition voters.
I don’t see any signs of any of the things I’ve mentioned changing anytime soon. Humanities degrees will become another status object of the well-to-do while the peasants will be molded into obedient workers with enough technical skill to keep things running but without the capacity to question the basis of the society they live in. Our overlords are salivating over AI and its potential to turn written expression and human inquiry into machine barf, which will dethrone those pesky professors forever.
Looking back on the higher education boom I participated in as a student and professor, I am kind of amazed that such a thing was ever allowed to happen in the first place. That gives me little comfort as I watch my friends suffer and regional state universities deny their less privileged students a window into a broader world. I don’t have any solutions to offer, only a feeble prayer that so many people who have based their life’s work around seeking knowledge and teaching others be protected and treated with respect instead of being vilified and immiserated. God save and preserve this boom and bust generation of academics, because nobody else seems to want to.
One of my friends came up with “Think big. Think bigger. Now that’s Huge!” We joked that the mascot would be the Anacondas.