BY ZOE SHERMAN
I tried not to be a professional academic. But I loved being a student so much, and I felt such a strong pull toward scholarship that eventually I overcame my qualms about getting my livelihood tangled up with my intellectual passions. In the fall of 2009, at the age of thirty, with a toddler in tow, I became a full-time doctoral student. I started a full-time faculty career in the fall of 2014. I lasted a decade.
As I began my new job, even before the shock of the pandemic, the career prospects and working conditions for teacher-scholars were in decline. I soon hit upon a metaphor for the timing of my academic career. It’s like getting to a club around 2 a.m., I told people. Peering in from outside, it seems like everyone is having a good time. So, I put on my cute outfit and head over . . . and I get there just in time for last call. Then, the music turns off and the lights turn on, and instead of joining revelers dancing at a glamorous party, I find myself among haggard stragglers milling around in a dingy firetrap, the floor sticky with spilled drinks. Yeah, my colleagues nearing retirement said, I can’t believe how lucky my timing was; I managed to have a lifelong career, but I sure don’t envy the scholars coming up behind me. Yeah, colleagues of my generation said, we’re too late and that club-at-2-a.m. image captures it. Okay, friends outside of academia said, I get what that feels like, but why?
By the time I started my career, the growth of college enrollment—kickstarted by the first wave of GI bill beneficiaries, sustained by their baby boom offspring, and persisting through my own period as a student—was slowing or reversing. (For many disciplines, the enrollment in doctoral programs was already out of line with the number of stable faculty positions PhD graduates could hope to land even before the end of the twentieth century; my cohort was not the first to worry about being late to the party.) Colleges in the 2010s had built capacity for the growth trajectory of earlier cohorts but then found themselves unsure of being able to fill their seats. And the students we had in the 2010s were stressed. In the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, economic strains on students’ families, alongside rising costs of attendance, made college more financially burdensome than it had been a generation or two before. (There was a time when a hundred days of minimum-wage work could pay a whole year of sticker-price public university tuition. By the 2010s, it was more like fifteen months. The pay-as-you-go model was no longer an option.) Stagnant or declining employment prospects for college-age young adults, especially those without degrees, made college feel like a desperate defense against the risk of downward mobility, a bribe to be paid in the hope of escaping the most degrading corners of the labor market.
A love of inquiry and a sense that the pursuit of the tools of citizenship was a worthy pursuit drew many faculty to their fields, but those values leeched out of the institutional commitments of colleges that (understandably enough) wanted to keep their doors open and their lights on by capturing enough tuition dollars to pay the bills, and whose strategy for capturing those tuition dollars was to promise to position students for employment. Meanwhile, colleges’ staffing strategies revealed the lie that being an educated worker will magically make your job a good job. By the time I lucked into a full-time faculty job, a majority of the classes offered by institutions of higher education were being taught by highly educated contingent faculty, many of whom string together multiple gigs that do not add up to a living wage. Even the one-job-is-enough faculty like me found ourselves expected to do a little more each year with, each year, fewer institutional resources. Then, heading into the 2020s, the shock of the pandemic exacerbated everything that was already happening in the 2010s. I gave it up.
I had already committed to my exit from academia before the 2024 election. Now, suddenly, the concerns that led me to leave seem almost quaint. Less than a full semester into the new regime in Washington, my metaphor has become more specific. Academia isn’t just a club. It’s the Kit Kat Club. Willkomen! Bienvenue! And it isn’t 2 a.m. on just any day. Spring semester of 2025—with foreign-born students being arrested and sent to far-off detention facilities for thinking the First Amendment applied to them, with public data sources at the foundation of urgent research agendas being demolished, with entire vocabularies disappearing from college websites and published scholarship almost as fast as they are disappearing from government websites, with scholars who study fascism deciding that now is the time for them to leave the United States—we are in the second act of Cabaret hurtling toward the closing curtain. Auf wiedersehen, à bientôt . . .
Zoe Sherman was, until recently, associate professor of economics at Merrimack College. She continues to research and write on her own time and on her own terms. She now works part time in public history and part time in childcare and enjoys the company of her teenager during what is likely to be the last year they live in the same house full time.
A sad story, at multiple levels, and that final paragraph is really chilling.
It’s called civilizational collapse. Robert Nisbet wrote all about it back in 1975. A decade later I quit academe when I refused to give a pass to a wealthy student who hadn’t attended any of my lectures for the entire year. It was a matter of money, apparently and my naivete. My explanation that it required me to betray the conditions of my contract concerning probity, integrity and academic leadership. All that counted for nothing. Pragmatism, they said, was the answer. The wrong people were getting the power to run things. Academe isn’t the only area polluted in this way. Everywhere else I turned to was going through the same process that affects everything that has human hands on it. But it’s not all doom and gloom. I came to realise I was in an even bigger school, and the curriculum was adversity; a test of whoever and whatever I was. I went looking for what my gut told me was truth, and saw that what’s needed is faith, the right sort of faith. Not belief, but genuine faith. But what is that?
Gerald Heard defined faith as “the right knowledge. For faith is not believing something our intelligence denies. It is the choice of the nobler hypothesis. Faith is the resolve to place the highest meaning on the facts we observe.” Where the Church insists the intelligence plays no part, Heard and I say that it is the most vital element in the whole process. It’s do or die.
Jiddu Krishnamurti said of belief: ‘Belief is corruptive, because behind belief and idealistic morality lurks the ‘me’, the self – the self which is constantly growing bigger, more powerful. We think that belief in God is religion.’ American religion today is about the ‘me’, nothing else.
But the best description of authentic faith came from Carlo Suares in his book “The Cipher of Genesis”: “Faith is direct perception of the immortality of consciousness. It is the living mind’s realisation that it has projected itself into a mortal state, although knowing itself to be immortal. The mortal state is unconsciousness, imaginary. It roams the face of the Earth enclosed within the mini-consciousness called ‘the human condition’.”
Finally, we might heed the advice of Max Ehrmann: “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”