Higher Education Screwed Me Over. Twice. Here’s What I Learned.

Here’s the story of how higher education, aka Academia, aka the Degree Mill, screwed me over twice. The lessons I took away are simple. The predictions I’ll be making are obvious. The insights I’ve gained, I could have told you before this all happened. So am I a better, wiser person after all of this? Hell no. Just tireder, and poorer, and ready to vent about it for your reading pleasure.

Eudaemonia

Like many weary souls eeking their way through a post-undergraduate Epicurean lifestyle, I found myself, at the age of 24, feeling bored.

I got my Bachelor’s at a certain school. Let’s call it Water-Treader University. WTU. WTU sits in a beautiful if not cheap town of about 70,000 or so, nestled in some mountains. Winters are drab, springs are windy, summers are gorgeous. About a two hour drive from a major city, but otherwise surrounded by America at its most beautiful. A geologist’s playground, a hiker’s paradise, a high-altitude athlete’s home-away-from-home. So when I graduated with a BA in International Affairs in 2013, I decided I what I would do would be to… stay put for a while.

I clocked in wherever I could and tried my best to make rent. I was a wood-chopper, dishwasher, stage-hand, barista (for a single day), and, finally, a retail worker in a used bookstore. All my undergrad buddies (except the ones we all agreed were overachievers) took similar routes. I call this the Scholar’s Honeymoon Phase. A lot of recent graduates experience something like it. We’re too infatuated with our friends, with our simple lifestyles, getting to know the town we never really ventured far enough off campus to see, to want to move away from it just yet.

So I stayed, and had probably three of the happiest years of my life living on a shoestring, not using my degree, clocking in 40 hours a week.

I loved this time because I had all of the things that Epicurus, that wise Greek guy, said we should have: a close-knit group of intelligent friends, a simple and unindulgent lifestyle, and freedom from fear and pain.

I was eudaemonic, you might say. Which is Greek for “I’ve got a happy little daemon inside me.”

Somewhere inside this eudaemonia, however, was the conviction that you shouldn’t get too comfy in life. I started to feel like something needed to happen. I’d heard that a couple friends of mine had gotten into WTU’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. I thought this sounded cool. I applied too, and got accepted. Grad school’s pricey, though. I also applied to be a Graduate Teaching Assistant, which would waive my tuition and provide me a stipend which would be about enough to cover rent and, like, most brands of rice.

I was accepted.

That’s how I started teaching for WTU.

Two years later, I’d graduated with an MFA. I’d learned some useful things about how to write clearly. I also learned that I really loved teaching. As a GTA, you’re pretty much left alone apart from biweekly meetings with a mentor, and you’re free to be in the classroom and have fun with your students. As long as you don’t majorly fuck up, you’re okay. And I didn’t majorly fuck up. In fact, I did a good job.

So when I graduated, I thought, what the heck? I’ll apply for the full time version of this job. I could use a few more years in this pretty town, and there was a handful of instructorship slots available. The first call I was given was negative. I didn’t get it. I was to learn the first lesson of being on the lowest rung of the higher education ladder: when at first you don’t get the job, expect a phone call in a few months.

Fucked Up Thing #1:

Funding comes and goes. It’s as volatile as cryptocurrency. Hey, that’s a pretty good name for it: crypto-currency. What did this mean for me? It meant that I get to prolong, as long as possible, the stress of not knowing if I’ll have a job.

You're Hired! (...for now)

So I got a call a short time later from an elated boss, saying: “Hey! We can hire you now. We got the funding we all secretly knew we’d eventually get but on which I wasn’t allowed to base any decisions. What do you say?”

I said, “heck yes!”

So I started my first year of teaching full time as an instructor in the University Writing Program.

The University Writing Program is a fancy name for “the group of unfortunate souls in charge of ENG100.” Basically, it looks like this: a 40-something white woman with PhD and an 80-90k salary is in charge of thirty or so GTAs who live on a tiny stipend and a handful of full-time instructors living on 36k. For help, she has these instructors, plus like two other faculty members whose official status nobody is quite sure about. One of these runs some kind of undergrad tutoring program. The other is like the Vice-Boss. She’s the one who’s really nice. I don't think it's consciously a good cop/bad cop thing. I think Vice-Boss probably tries to compensate for Boss's terseness by being extra-available.

The UWP sits inside the Department of English like an appendix. Not really taking part in the general run of things, but mess it up and the whole system collapses.

ENG100 is often called “Freshman Composition.” It’s the English class you had to take. In the hands of a bad or even mediocre teacher, it’s a chore all around. In the hands of a good teacher, it’s actually a pretty good class. It’s supposed to train all the new students how their other classes are going to expect them to write. Citing sources, using semicolons, double spacing, all that stuff. But also, in the syllabus there is some token phraseology about critical thinking and rhetorical knowledge, and if you’re an ambitious teacher you can use it as justification for a lot of fun lessons.

My first two years went relatively smoothly. I only had one dark premonition. It was during “orientation.”

Orientation

GTA Orientation is practically an institution across campuses in the US. It looks a bit different depending on where you go. Our thing was that it lasted several weeks, whereas with most schools it’s a weekend at most.

Most of these GTAs have never taught before. In three weeks, they’re going to be unleashed on unsuspecting 18 year olds. Basically, we’ve got a lot of work to do in Orientation to help the GTAs feel like they think that they know what they’re doing.

It’s stressful. Everyone feels it. Back from a leisurely summer, we’re all getting up early, planning lectures, breakout sessions, lessons. The Boss is trying to organize lunches, timetables, seating arrangements. It seems really hard. But then again, she gets paid more than double anyone else, so I never minded seeing her work hard for three weeks. I mean, she teaches one class in fall, none in spring.

But disregarding my personal opinion about her salary, she has a lot on her plate during Orientation. So do we all.

Anyways, it’s my turn to give a mini-talk. I’m standing at the front of the classroom. Thirty confused, stressed GTA faces are staring up at me. I’m trying to tell them how the school’s library website works. I’m on no sleep, because I spent all the last night trying to figure out how the school’s library website works.

Wildcard: the Boss is whispering more than audibly to the Vice-Boss beside her while I’m trying to talk. They’re sitting at a table in the middle of the room. I can’t very well be like, “Hey Boss, shut up will ya?” So I have to press on through.

Some guy asks me a question. I don’t know the answer. I’ve often heard the rhetoric coming from Boss which goes, “If you don’t know something, just pass the question to me.” Unfortunately, from same Boss comes the alternate rhetoric, “If you don’t know the answer, ask Vice Boss, or ask colleague, because I’m too busy.” You kind of just have to catch her on an “ask me” day.

Unfortunately, I didn’t. Flustered, hearing her name called, Boss turns away from her whisper-buddy and looks at me. “What?” she says (more or less). “I don’t know. That’s a weird question. Ask ___.” Then she turns back to whispering. I’m left looking like a wet blanket up there. Everyone is weirded out.

Rude and unprofessional, right? To make your underling look like an idiot at the front of the room, because they asked you a question? I was very confused because up til now, I’d considered Boss to be quite a professional Boss. But I realized Fucked Up Thing #2 of higher education.

Fucked Up Thing #2:

Toxicity is contagious. Working in a stressful environment makes a lot of people behave unprofessionally and combatively. Most people, when they are afraid and stressed, will lash out. This makes the people around them more stressed out and liable to lash out.

So I had this little black cloud hanging over my head starting from that moment, and a small suspicion: I don’t think we're having a very fun time here.

Then 2020 Happens

So I, like the rest of America, am plugging along, and then 2020 happens. I’m in the middle of a typical semester. Try to buckle down, focus on only what’s going on in the classroom. Go to meetings, chime in, try to play the “professional development” game by volunteering for stuff, try to pretend like I get paid enough to volunteer for stuff.

Long story short, students go home for spring break and don’t come back. The semester finishes online, which involves me posting videos and students pretending to watch them. Most of the instructors’ days are spent rumor-mongering about Fall Semester enrollment, Shock Doctrine, hiring freezes, pay reductions, downsizing, what have you, along with a fair share of complaining about the school’s president, who is a ridiculously overpaid and even more-than-averagely incompetent goon.

The more I complained about the president, the more I realized that she was probably the right goon for the job: adept at the short-sighted tunnel-vision capitalist game that produced, you know, the housing crisis and stuff. Maximize profits now, worry about later later. Except it’s even more sad than that, because “maximize profits” in higher education becomes synonymous with “try desperately to balance the books.”

Relatively small-scale weekend research involving Wikipedia articles accessible to all led me to Fucked Up Lesson #3.

Fucked Up Lesson #3:

Funding is wack. 99% of the reasons why Higher Ed is fucked up can be traced back to decisions made by state legislators. In recent decades and particularly since 2008, states have given less and less funding to public universities. These universities have been forced to make students and their families pick up the slack by skyrocketing tuition.

Looks like this:

States have less money > they give less money to public universities > public universities increase tuition > middle class gets saddled with lifetime debt > degrees become poor investments > bad for economy > nothing ever changes.

Probably this belt-tightening was inevitable to a certain degree, back during the Great Recession. But one of the universal laws of governmental belt-tightening is that once the belt tightens, it never loosens again.

Your parents and their parents paid wayyyyy less tuition than you or your kids. Because back then, states funded public universities much more. The only conceivable way for this to change would be to vote in a bunch of state legislators on the promise to restore funding to universities. But that’s very unlikely to happen because who would campaign on something as prosaic as that when there are far more titillating politics to run on these days? Leave sweeping change to the federal government. Far easier to normalize sky-high tuition by an amped-up barrage of pro-university rhetoric and marketing. “Follow your dreams!” “Pursue your goals!” “Don’t let anyone stop you!” “You have the right to do this!” “I was a poor degree-less loser, but look at me now!” Et cetera.

(Sometimes it even gets good, like this ad from University of Phoenix, a for-profit school)

(How much freaking money did they spend on this??? Oh wait; they probably made a student in the Film and Media department do it for free, and let the faculty help for "professional development.")

Hmm, I thought. I think that the toxicity of this environment might have a lot to do with money. I think this money problem might have a lot to do with legislation, which I think has a lot to do with our state’s priorities, which has a lot to do with our country’s priorities, which have never encompassed education, higher or not.

–

No matter. Just focus on the classroom. Do my little lessons on critical thinking. That murder-mystery one is always lots of fun. Better yet: start these conversations, but make the students lead them. See what they have to say.

Turns out, not much. Because they have no clue. After all why should a bunch of 18 year olds know anything about state funding of higher education institutions? All they care about is the cafeteria food being bad. And not getting Fs. And not feeling left out. And hanging out with their friends, having fun. Dare I say it: their Epicurean lifestyle. “I don’t want to know,” they seem to be saying. “Let me have these years.”

So the end of the semester is here. We go through the whole rigamarole of applying for next year.

Hold up, you ask. Why are you applying for a job you already have?

Whoops, almost forgot! Fucked up lesson #4.

Fucked Up Lesson #4:

Applying for your own job. Most instructors across the country are on one-year contracts. What this means is, we are hired for specifically one school year. We have to apply for next year along with everyone else who wants to apply for our jobs.

Seem messed up? It is. Talk about a toxic work environment. Talk about being afraid every step of the way. I could spin some pseudo-conspiratorial stuff about the university wanting to keep underlings afraid and over-productive and skittishly non-combative, but that would be giving the institution credit as capable of orchestrating a subtextual plan. No, no. They have things set up this way for simpler reasons.

Firstly, and most obviously, because they want the ability to downsize as easily possible at a moment’s notice. Secondly, because they don’t want long term instructors. Keep us here for a while and we’ll want… shocking! … upward mobility! To apply for lectureships! Maybe even assistant professorships should something (astronomically unlikely as it might be) open up in our disciplines! In other words, giving us a three-year contract, we’ll start getting ideas.

But keep us on a short leash and we’ll gladly work like dogs teaching classes no one else wants to teach without complaint, for pittance.

A program full of people competing for an increasingly smaller pool of one-year contracts. Sound like a positive working environment? Still, I tried my best to finish the semester on a note of positivity and hope.

The First Time It Happened

I was even nice to my Boss when she called me in tears, saying that not only was I not “rehired” (read: fired), but most of the UWP was not rehired. Everyone except for one of us, let’s call her Belinda. Belinda is a 30-something white woman with no PhD but with kids. Did I mention that the Vice-Boss is a 40-something white woman with kids? And the extra Vice-Boss that somehow they were able to promote during all of this is a 30-something white woman who, very wisely, had a kid last year?

Fucked Up Thing #5:

Hiring practices. Hiring practices in higher education are straight outta the 20th century. In the last five years there was one lone instructor of color in the UWP. She was “not rehired” after just a year by the Boss for some very transparently bogus official reasons. Basically the Boss just really didn’t like her. So after her, the program went back to being white as the driven snow. Every one of us. The entire English Department, by the way, (not counting GTAs), has, I think maybe three people of color out of a few dozen?

Not being a moderate liberal with a nuclear family, the cards are stacked against you.

Anyways, as I was saying, the Boss called me in tears, explaining what had happened. How could I take this personally? Times were “unprecedented,” after all, so I couldn’t really blame the school for taking advantage of their one-year contract system to downsize. Literal pandemic, and whatnot. And it’s not as if I was the only one they fired. So I was the one consoling the Boss, telling her to cheer up, that everything would be okay, that our health was the most important thing after all, that it wasn’t her fault.

Sound a little backward?

–

I went on unemployment, like a lot of us. I watched other more pissed off faculty start Facebook groups, group chats, petitions. I thought it was a little sad. “I’m young,” I thought. “I have skills. I’ll forge a new path. Worst case scenario, I’ll go back to my old lifestyle.”

But of course, I couldn’t. By now half of my friends had moved away. The ones that were left were self-quarantining like me. And go back to a 40 hour a week, stay-inside job? Definitely, definitely not. Now that I’d had a taste of teaching at a university for a living, how could I go back to retail or service?

I slogged through the rest of 2020, and I found, in December, that the general budgetary laws had held true. I got a call from the Boss, asking me if I wanted to come back for Spring Semester.

“Heck ya!” I said. Hooray! I’m back! They like me again! They’ll expand the program back to its original size! They’ll loosen the belt after tightening it!

Lol.

It’s January, 2021. Through a combination of emails between the Boss, the Vice-Boss, the Dean of the English Department, the Associate Dean, and the Chair of Literature, I gather a fuzzy notion of what I’d be doing this semester.

Now the one year contracts are for a 4/4 course load. What that means is that I’m hired to teach four classes in the fall and four in the spring, or the equivalent thereof. In practice, we instructors teach three classes in fall and spring each, with the difference made up by mentoring GTAs and running Orientation. This is pretty standard in higher ed.

“We already have mentors for the GTAs. Since you’re coming in for spring, you’ll have to teach 4 classes.”

Hmm, four’s a lot. No one teaches four classes. But alright, makes sense. No one to mentor? I’ve got to teach four then. Maybe it’s even nice of them. Maybe it was the only way they could get me into the contract, by scrounging up some other class for me to teach.

Three sections of ENG100, and one of ENG230, which was Intro to Literature. I was stoked to finally be teaching something other than composition. So coming into the semester, I was excited.

“Let me tell you about WTUFlex,” said no one. But they should have, because that was important.

One bonus fucked up thing about WTU, which I won’t include in my official list since it’s kind of common to most workplaces, is that no one ever explains shit to you. And asking is like pulling teeth.

So, what is WTUFlex? It’s the stupid name for WTU’s stupid system of hybrid in-person/online classes. You have eight students in your classroom at a time, and the rest Zoom in from their dorms. The roster will cycle through and everyone will be in class about once every three days. By doing this, WTU gets to maintain the illusion that students are getting what their tuition dollars paid for: in-person classes.

Fucked Up Thing #6:

Lives are expendable. Universities across the country during the 2020-21 school year knowingly let COVID-19 burn through their student bodies. Rather than reduce tuition and offer a fully-online year, they came up with this system which made it so that students had to go to class despite ineffectual social distance measures. Meanwhile, the Bosses still pull in closer to 80-90k. The school presidents make +400k. The instructors they begged to come back for spring make 17k for that semester.

I had at least four students with COVID-19 they got because of WTUFlex. One of them had to leave class to go to the emergency room when her blood oxygen level fell dangerously low. The students who weren’t struggling with physical illness suffered mental distress and illness almost as bad. I had one student email me suicide threats, and many others drop off the radar because of illness.

Very directly, decisions made by higher-up figures at the school are to blame for this. Many of these students, instead of taking a gap year, had university foisted on them by family members who bought into the pro-higher ed rhetoric created to convince them to take on a financial burden no one in their right mind would ever volunteer for… without significant brainwashing.

And here I am, in the eye of this shit-storm, trying to teach my 18 year olds what semicolons are. Treading lightly around the theme of school. Many of these students are first-generation immigrants, children of parents who struggled hard for the chance to send their kids to an American university. This rhetoric ain’t bogus for them; it’s extremely meaningful. And these are precisely the people that the university tries to rope in. A lot of first generation students from less financially privileged families will be going to school on a federal grant or scholarship, giving WTU some of that precious, precious federal money which is more reliable than family bank accounts. The rich on the other hand don’t have to bother with scholarships or loans (or mid-tier schools for that matter).

And then there’s the middle class, the ones whose families just barely can send their kids to school. Who can take out loans, or spend their working lives saving up. And it all goes—where? Overpaid administration? Tenured faculty? Numerous staff? Yes, yes, yes. But also the vast and ever-growing infrastructure which serves just as much to grace the covers of recruitment brochures as to be functional buildings. Schools must increase drastically in size, so that they can host more and more students, so the school can get that precious tuition money in order to fund these very building projects—projects they overextended their budgets on, based on optimistic enrollment projections. Projections the ones who made them never thought they’d stick around long enough to see proven embarrassingly wrong. Cycle? Call it a ferris wheel on fire.

The Re-reapplication

So, the time came to reapply yet again. Word on the street was that there would be four instructorships open. Four. About half of the current numbers. I was puzzled. Why would they expand back to near-previous numbers for this spring, only to downsize once again for next fall? No way enrollment could justify that. Must be the typical rise and fall of the budget. More would open up closer to the end of the semester, as usual.

I reapplied. Did a phone interview.

Have I mentioned that the Boss doesn’t sit in on classes? She has no idea how people teach. She only finds out when things go wrong, or when people specifically ask her to observe a class. Out of the four people on the hiring committee, two of them have seen me teach, both a single time.

At the end of the interview, which went, I dunno, fine, the Boss said something about how the next stage of interviewing would happen next week. A virtual campus visit, for the benefit of those applying from outside of the school (it was a nation-wide search, which they have to do by law I think). I said something non-committal, and hung up.

The Second Time

The next Monday, I saw a series of department emails mentioning the second round of interviews.

Hmm, I thought.

Clicking on the emails, I saw a link to a series of Zoom meetings for virtual lessons the candidates were to give. We were all encouraged to Zoom in and “show our support!” I scanned the list. My name wasn’t on it.

Uh-oh. I emailed Vice-Boss. Then Boss. Expressing my sincere hope that this was not how I would find out that I didn’t make it to the second round of interviews.

Later that day, I received a few sentences from the Boss’s personal email, apologizing for “how this went down.” Apparently she wasn’t allowed to contact me through her work email regarding the hiring process.

Yes, indeed! I found out that I was “not-rehired” in a department-wide email.

Fucked Up Thing #7:

No one’s ever straight with you. When I tried to figure out why this happened, I got no more emails from the Boss. Vice-Boss (you’ll remember that she’s the “nice one,” the one who’ll make you feel like a child as opposed to an idiot) sent me a long (but not that long) email explaining that, although of course I had every right to be upset, that really it had to be this way. By “law” they weren’t allowed to give anyone a reply until all stages of the hiring process were complete. So, you know, how regrettable! but they just couldn’t tell me I didn’t get it. And that email that went to the whole department? Well, what were they supposed to do. The law, after all…

I’ll make an executive decision here and stop myself from expostulating any further. I’ll close with the observation that, on top of all the other fucked up shit that goes on in higher education, a thick cloud of the following fact shrouds everything: no one is ever straight with you.

What I Learned

So, it happened again. I was fired twice. First time in a phone call in which I was put in the roll of consoler, second, de facto, in an email to other people.

In other words, I gave up unemployment benefits to work my ass off for a program that more than once unceremoniously left me in the dust.

Probably my pride was hurt the worst. I mean, I was naive for not seeing this coming. I think. Does anyone expect to find out they lost their job in a group email? Am I entitled for expecting a phone call? Or at least a personalized email? Or that the stock rejection email that came late that day should have come earlier in the day? And that, excuse me, it would not have been breaking the “law” for me to have got an email from an individual first before a group email. Because the group email constitutes letting me know. So it’s the same thing, just thoughtless and unprofessional.

Sigh. I guess, in summation, I have this to say: a toxic job is bound to end toxically. Prediction? Tuition will follow the same rule that Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations says applies to rent: it stays as high as people can afford. Never lower.

The belt that tightens never loosens. States don’t restore funding. Sky-high tuition is here to stay.

I think back to those interim years, 2013 to 2016. When after work, I would bike to someone’s house to watch a movie, or to a patio for a late afternoon beer with a group of buddies. When my friends all lived in one place and I didn’t constantly have one foot in a quagmire of badness. I want to get back to that.

All of the experiences I have had as an adult lead me back to this final, simple conclusion: community is everything. If you spend your working life in a toxic community, it will turn you into a fearful and angry person. If you have a great community, you'll feel like you have a happy little daemon who lives inside you, like an anti-ghost who haunts your heart and makes it happier. You'll be eudaemonic.

Communities are like houses. It takes work to keep them clean, healthy and livable. Some have a little asbestos in them, or lead, from decades gone by. Sometimes you can work really hard and get rid of that asbestos or lead. Sometimes the house just needs to be torn down. And if you can’t tear it down, guess what: you can move. Moving is scary, but sometimes it’s the best thing to do.

And when the shitty house kicked you out to the curb not once but twice, then hey, it’s not like you even had a choice!

–

“A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.”

- Epicurus