Dunkirk NY – This blog post has gotten a lot of attention in academia in the past week. Dr. Erin Bartram, an underemployed PhD in history, wrote about her unsuccessful attempt to land a tenure track teaching/research position at a four-year college and her intent to quit looking for one. She received some media attention for it (Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Long Reads), got some pushback, and consequently wrote a defense of her piece in a subsequent post. I bought her the requested cup of coffee at the end of her first post; two, in fact. But there is a well-known saying among those who take meals at soup kitchens: if you want to drink the coffee, you have to listen to the sermon.
I began to think about the issues presented, not because these issues are new to me, but because I noticed in the pieces what I believe is a significant change of attitude in how younger people approach the issue of work. Dr. Bartram is 35, two years younger than my own daughter, who also exhibits many of the same sorts of attitudes towards work that Dr. Bartram does. It significantly differs from mine, and perhaps that is what I find hardest to reconcile in my mind. If I had to sum up the difference in one sentence, it’s the one Dr. Bartram used in her follow-up post: “I don’t have to.” To quote:
As soon as I told people what had happened to me, lots of people said I should look into teaching high school. But when my friend Alex asked about it, and I responded “I don’t really want to, but…,” she said “If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.” And that’s actually enough. It’s not an issue of certification or ideology or anything else, when it comes down to it. I don’t want to do it because I don’t think it’s for me.
This is the struggle that I have when I talk to my own children about their careers. I get this response or a variant of it almost every time. My daughter majored in the equivalent of marine biology (she went to Evergreen State in Washington, which has no defined majors nor grades), and at the moment is unemployed. She has had a series of jobs, but for one reason or another does not appear motivated to improve her credentials or résumé to advance her career. She does not wish to go to grad school, and yet she laments that she can’t get a job in her field, a field where graduate education is a requisite for minimal entry. She fears the debt of any further education, even to the point where attending school for technical jobs such as respiratory therapist or lab assistant don’t interest her.
My middle son leads a very quiet life as a full-time companion for an autistic adult. He is happy where he is and does not express any desire to move to a different situation. He puts in exactly 40 hours a week and is paid hourly. The rate sustains him, but again, he shows no interest in advancing a career. When I mention he might like someday to go into a supervisory position, he balks, saying he’s probably not good enough for such responsibility. He is happy, which for me is the most important thing.
As for my youngest son, he went to undergraduate school for acting, and consequently moved to Chicago to begin his career. At 30, he is wondering what his next step might be. In the meantime, he went from being chef concierge at the hotel he works for to a middle management position – Guest Relations Coordinator – and did not like middle management. But as he thinks about his future, he is beginning to realize that every advancement he may want to make in some other field requires additional credentials, more schooling in probably a different field. This is more of an “I don’t want to” than “I don’t have to” position. I sense the hesitation to make any decision, because it requires a good deal of change. Even the thought of moving to Los Angeles and pursuing his acting career there seems to be fraught with obstacles for him.
Dr. Bartram’s struggle stands in contrast to my own. I did a lot of things I did not want to or felt I had to. I did them anyway. I viewed doing those things as a necessary, if unpleasant, means to an end. I had a pretty bad experience the first time I went to graduate school (NYU), and was not very eager to attend a second time. I went, however, because I needed the MFA credential. I taught for six years at the community college level, not because I wanted to, but because I felt I had to in order to establish a track record of teaching. At the community college level, you are more often than not the entire theatre department, and you are doing everything – directing, building sets, lighting, getting costumes, publicity – to put on a show, or you are begging friends and colleagues to help. I took a job for lower pay in New York state just to get out of rural Nebraska because I felt I had to. Perhaps I may have had extra motivation in the form of three young children for whom I had to provide (I assume Dr. Bartram has no obligations other than to herself; she does not indicate one way or the other).
And yet, with all the “had tos” I went through, I still believe that I was simply lucky eventually to land a tenure track position. The three people who held my position before me each lasted one year: one left because he realized he did not want to teach; one left because he was a skirt-chaser; and one left because he was dealing and doing drugs with students. All three were “professional actors” with MFAs and Actors’ Equity cards, hired to give the department some professional credibility. When I came along as the fourth candidate in four years, I think the rest of the faculty took a look at me – a man with a wife and three children – and decided I might actually be someone who would stay for awhile and not get into trouble. That’s it. I had no Actors’ Equity card at the time, my professional credits consisted of summer theatre work, and I had only taught at the community college level. I got the position, and “awhile” turned into 29 years. Even now in retirement, I still believe that it was not so much my work, effort, and persistence, but sheer luck and fortunate circumstances, that landed me the position.
One of the great things about professional sports is that your ability and success is easy to measure and is demonstrably evident. In major league baseball, you cannot have a career if you can only hit .200. You might have a middling career hitting .250 if you can do something else particularly well (defense or speed). You will definitely have a career if you can hit .280 consistently, and you’re a superstar if you can hit .300 consistently. Professional athletes, when faced with the reality that they will not be the professional athletes they dreamed of being, never blame “the system” as being at fault. They can’t, because the evidence is too clear and too objective. To me, a significant weakness in Dr. Bartram’s defense is simply that she cannot and does not admit the possibility that she is the academic equivalent of a .220 hitter in baseball. She seems unable to admit that she might, just might, be not quite good enough yet. That’s a harsh judgement, and it may be unfounded, but just like a professional athlete, she is competing for work in a very tight marketplace (there are exactly 750 MLB active roster spots: 25 men on a team times 30 teams). No matter what you may think of the institution or of your own capabilities, there will always be winners and losers in any competitive marketplace. What is terribly hard for any person to accept is the very idea that you might be one of those who cannot make the grade.
There’s a famous speech in the movie Bull Durham that talks about the difference between hitting .250 and .300 over a 500 at-bat season: it’s 25 hits. In a 25-week season that means an average of one extra hit a week – just one extra hit in about 20 at-bats per week. Those hits can be anything: flairs, bloopers, ground balls that just barely sneak through a hole in the infield. Hit .250 and you’re probably in the minors; hit .300 and you’re a multimillionaire. Luck: and maybe, just maybe, a little extra skill.
I don’t buy the “I don’t have to” argument. Yes, you have to. Yes, you have to take that job you think you don’t have to. Yes, you have to publish regardless of the cost. Yes, you have to put in more than three years of effort. Yes, you have to be the one to take the extra 500 swings after batting practice. Yes, you have to re-adjust your swing to learn to hit the curveball. Yes, you have to develop that third pitch and consistently hit corners. The minute you say “I don’t have to,” you’ve implicitly admitted you’re entitled to something, and your penchant becomes to find fault elsewhere. In the yin/yang of life, nothing is ever one-sided. An institution might have its problems, its issues, and its faults, but the failure to recognize your own potential faults and limitations creates a blindness that can become a detriment to eventual success.
I happen to think that young people have it much, much harder these days in terms of finding successful careers than I ever did. They are right when they observe that institutions built in the 20th century are in the midst of upheavals that put them at a disadvantage. In academia, there are fewer tenure track jobs, more adjuncts and temps, funding for higher education is rapidly declining, and the current atmosphere is one of entrenched survival. Young people today face the need to work far more hours, patch together all sorts of different “gigs” to make a living, and endure far less security about everything. Someone like me is ill-equipped to offer concrete advice, even to my own children (or Dr. Bartram). It all feels much more desperate to me, and I wonder how long this economic model of entrepreneurship and self-created careers can sustain itself.
Of one thing, however, I am fairly certain: “I don’t have to” won’t cut it. It never has in any generation. It’s an attitude destined to fail. Yes, you have to. And you need a little luck. I hope, Dr. Bartram, you enjoyed the coffee. -twl