I'm A Loser, Baby
The Perils of Living Life in Academia
Note: I am on the schedule to be at the 2023 Organization of American Historians (OAH) Annual Meeting in Los Angeles next month as part of the panel “The Past, Present, and Future of the American University: Putting the Perpetual and Worsening Crisis in Perspective.” I honestly feel a bit like Frederick Douglass did at that invitation to speak at the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852 in celebration of the Fourth of July. Especially given the way most historians and other academicians have treated me over the years. This will be my third time at OAH, my second OAH in Los Angeles, and my third time in LA. I hate LA, have been followed and harassed by cops both times while in LA. While the words will likely come out differently when I speak in a month, the sentiment of “What, to the loser in the academy, is presenting at an elitist and hypocritically capitalist conference like OAH?,” is embedded in my essay.
By all conventional measures, I am a loser, baby. By the measures of the academy, my career has been long dead, so there is no need to kill me. I earned my doctorate in history more than a quarter-century ago. In that time, I have never held a tenure-stream or tenured position. I have published two books, but neither was with a traditional university publisher. I have written dozens of articles, but only published three full-length scholarly articles (with Radical Society, Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, and Teachers College Record) and four book reviews for peer-reviewed journals. I have taught over 100 courses with 10 different universities, written more than 100 letters of recommendation on behalf of my students, received commendations for my work, but have never made more than $50,000 in a year for such work.
Yes, I am a loser, alright! I was a loser the moment my dissertation advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. decided to “run interference” to keep me from applying for jobs when I was churning out a new chapter every other month because I supposedly wasn’t “ready.” I lost when my committee member Daniel Resnick approved of my thesis but said my writing was “too journalistic.” I definitely became a loser once my other committee member Bruce Anthony Jones saw fit to have me write his letters of recommendation for me, only to ditch my emails and telephone calls once he left the University of Pittsburgh for the University of Missouri.
There was my former professor and one-time editor of the History of Education Quarterly rejecting an article submission without sending it off for peer review, telling me at 28 that “even a senior scholar with fifteen years in the field would have trouble pulling this off.” There was also one-time NYU professor (now UPenn professor with the Graduate School of Education) Jonathan Zimmerman who bumped into me at conferences and served on search committees asking me about my doctoral thesis, all while mining it for a book without crediting me or hiring me for a job. Public Enemy has an album titled It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. It only took a half-dozen people familiar with my work to do the same.
Maybe Joe Trotter was correct, though. I wasn’t ready, not in November 1995, maybe not even in 2023. I was not ready to accept that higher education was a place of nepotism, narcissism, and the use of the moving goalposts of credentials as a proxy for racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and petty jealousies. It has only been since I turned 50 that I have understood how much others' jealousies have shaped the contours of my careers. It was only at 44 that I allowed myself to acknowledge that the meritocracy was not just bullshit, but that it was a bullshit idea for me to use to advance in my own careers, too. By then, I had become fully enmeshed in academia again, this time as an adjunct professor with University of Maryland University College, where I could not even choose my own textbooks.
But if I am truly a loser, then so is academia. The system in which all faculty work is a sorting system, one which elevates “winners” and marginalizes “losers,” to the point where even the alleged winners are losers, too. It is a system that is inflexible, unforgiving, and modeled much more on racist capitalism than those who claim higher education as a “medieval” place would care to analyze. It is a system that rewards the look of uniformity, the thick veneer of conventional writing and thinking, the thin veil of so-called tradition. Academia is yet another world of mediocrity looking for the mediocre, especially white male mediocrity. It is no accident that in nearly every field of higher education, white males make up the majority of tenure-stream faculty members. Even in history, even among African American historians, white men and the light, bright, and almost white set are in the majority at most major US universities. In a country built on racist capitalism, this cannot be an accident.
This unyielding world of Pollyanna sits against the backdrop of institutions who have shifted the vast majority of the education work unto academia’s losers. Contingent faculty are the army of losers — especially adjunct faculty stringing together work without benefits and minimum wage pay — mostly with doctorates but without even a place to secure their book bags without the threat of theft. And of course, the graduate students and research assistants of higher education are losers, too. They are in the on-deck circle of Loserville, hoping against hope to win academia’s lottery. They are very much like the white and Black sharecroppers from a century ago, hoping that their bumper crops will exceed the taxes, fees, and fine print of their contract and pull them out of the literal and figurative debt of this predestined life. Only to end up becoming contingent faculty also.
To quote myself in an article I wrote about contingent faculty as second-class citizens in academia, I am “a tragic figure” in academia’s circles, among all of my colleagues, among many of my former students (some of whom are now tenured faculty themselves). Seldom have they ever said a word about my journey in academia or my fate, and their silence is as deafening as being within a mile of a thermonuclear explosion. But the real tragedy is watching my colleagues, students, and more senior faculty over the years watch and say in their heads “Well, at least it’s not me,” over and over again. It’s actually worse that driving on I-95 snarled for three miles because for five minutes a thousand cars slowed down to see three smashed-up vehicles and their drivers on the median strip. It’s worse because there are things that can be done to disrupt this parade of self-blame and useless shame (unionization and strikes for better working conditions come to mind), but hardly anyone watching does. Academia from a professional standpoint is, “it’s all about me, it’s all about me,” and screw everyone else.
For those who would say, “Well, you should have published more scholarly articles.” I say, “Go season some food.” Publishing in scholarly journals never earned me a job when I was committed to doing so. It is unpaid work, a process that on average takes two years, and all too few people actually read your material. Who benefits from a system set up this way? Mediocre writers, especially white men. They run most of the scholarly journals. They are the peer reviewers, the jury-of-my-peers, so to speak. This is a crock, a sham of a shame of pitifully poor writers who do not understand other ways and methods for looking at or even sensing the human condition. As such, they will reject new methods, interdisciplinary approaches, really, anything that challenges their status in any given field. “Laying siege to the citadel” as I did for nearly 20 years, with only a handful of scholarly articles, book chapters and entries, and book reviews to show for it was a ridiculous waste of time, talent, and youth.
I have known since 1993 writing for audiences outside of academia as a historian might cause me trouble. I knew for years attempting to take my research and converting it into language accessible to the reading public, and not just to my alleged peers, would lead to some consternation. I did not know making the choice to try to write as a scholar and to try to write as a writer would lead to my version of Moses in the Sinai for the better part of 20 years, including 10 years in the nonprofit world.
I did learn something about myself, though, in those years of herding grant projects from conception to completion, working with social justice fellows, and working with nonprofit organizations all over the US. Research without real-world application might as well be toilet paper. Writing without accessibility might as well be walled up in a monastery in Malaysia or at an abbey in Andalusia. So I spent years stripping out the inaccessible in my writing, finding my voice, experimenting with and experiencing different writing styles and genres. In that, I learned what I cared about, what I didn’t care about, and what I no longer needed to invest care in. The history profession’s stamp of approval on my writing was one idea that easily fell into that last category.
This was my last experience with scholarly publishing. After embarking on my research on the connections between racism in the US and narcissism in the US in 2015, I decided to not let this particular project get slowed down by the gears of the scholarly publishing process. And after sending a piece on American racism and American narcissism to the Journal of American History in 2015, I waited nine months to receive a rejection from them. The draft never made it past the editors.
For those who would say, “Isn’t it you who is jealous?,” my response is, “You can shove that and the rest of your accusations where the sun don’t shine.” My other answer is a question. Jealous of what, exactly? More money and better working conditions, both of which I have found in my other work between freelance writing and the nonprofit world? Jealous of having more motivated students and the ability to create your own courses? Maybe, if I had never experienced either of these in my time teaching undergraduates, graduate students, doctoral students, and high school students. No, while I can be occasionally envious, I am not jealous. Yes, I have sour grapes. If academia was an orchard that constantly delivered you nothing but spoiled, rotten crates of grapes, no matter how well one sorted them, you would end up with sour grapes, too.
And it is doubly so because I have barely raised the most obvious thing about my time in academia. I am Black. I am a Black man. I started as a young Black man in my late-20s in a world full 0f mediocre middle-aged white men. I left for a decade and came back a decade older, did my time in nontraditional academia, and moved my way into full-time contingent teaching, but now I am a middle-aged Black man approaching my mid-50s. Being Black in academia then and now makes me a target of the quiet racism and ostracism of my colleagues. Being Black in academia then and now means I catch hell from a cross-section of my students, white, Black, and of color, straight and queer. Being Black as an educator has always meant that whatever grade I assign for anything, even a multiple-choice exam, is constantly questioned by one out every seven of my students (I’ve taught more than 2,600 over the years). That one in seven think their presence in my classroom is their right, that I should bow down and thank God every day for them being there.
There are also the white apologist students who believe themselves to be “not racist” because they are in an African American history class with me as their professor. There are also the Black students who either expect me to make up for the years of racism they’ve experienced at a predominantly white institution or expect me to have Cirque du Soleil-level flexibility for them when they plagiarize, refuse to do the work assigned, or otherwise miss deadlines and extensions on projects. There are the students who try to play “Stump The Professor” with me, as if my doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University would not have prepared me for their Jeopardy Challenge.
It is maddening to the point of complete burnout and the need for a bed at a psychiatric facility. This is not a joke. I know more than a few people who have found themselves in desperate need for help because of a mental break or collapse from this deliberately destructive system. For those who have read or listened this far, why would it take bearing my soul, sharing my years of experiences with such a monstrous system for you to go, “Yeah, academia is terrible and all, but it’s the system we’ve got, so…”? To that, I say, “No! No! No!” The system is in lockstep with our nation-state, with Western ways of thinking. It needs not your defense, nor your deference.
And the pitiful thing is, you will not listen, you will not learn, because like most Americans, you are too stiff-necked and hardheaded to do so. Yet you expect your students to learn from you, your colleagues to read you, and academia to award you. Being an American in academia means never saying you are sorry, because all the evidence points to a system supported by the powerful. Academia is evidence of sorry, mediocre, jealous-hearted narcissists in control. Screw you all!