Six years out of a PhD in English literature, I’m in the third and final year of a teaching contract at a prestigious UK university. The contract, I’m assured, won’t be extended, but at any rate I’m running out of willpower to go on in academia.
I currently manage my family life around a weekly 400-mile round trip in my car. The goal was always to find work closer to home, but that work never materialised. Since starting my current job, I’ve only seen three permanent posts in my field advertised; I applied for all three but was shortlisted for none. Some of these positions, I later discovered, attracted well over 100 applicants. I’ve only made it to three interviews in total since finishing my PhD, including the one for my current role.
The job market in English literature has been miserable for as long as most can remember, but it seems to be hitting rock bottom as a result of a drop in overseas students and other knock-on effects of Brexit and the pandemic, as well as frozen tuition fees and a declining uptake of GCSE and A-level literature courses. In addition, subjects like English are increasingly frowned upon by a government waging war on “low-earning” degrees, and whole departments are currently threatened with closure or are quietly renewing pandemic-era freezes on hiring.
Academia doesn’t owe anyone a living, but I do feel short-changed. When I began my doctorate, I was told that I’d need at least two articles published if I wanted to land a job. By the time I submitted, that had been revised to needing to have made moves towards publishing my thesis as a book. But the repeated insistences that this would boost my luck in the job hunt have not been borne out. When you apply for an “entry level” job, you are increasingly up against mid-career ship-jumpers; in that scenario, there’s no conceivable number of publications, hours of teaching or anything else that will definitively boost your fortunes. You might well move up the queue, but you’re still two-thirds of the way back.
Senior colleagues recall their own “wilderness years”, bouncing between teaching posts and institutions to make ends meet, with something approaching fondness. Such tales are told to reassure us newbies that established academics know only too well what it was like waiting for that permanent post, but that our time, too, will come if we only persevere a little longer. I’m sure that no one wishes us anything but kindness when they give us such advice, but those with secure contracts really don’t seem to realise how bad things have become unless they’ve recently been on hiring committees themselves.
I’m not suggesting that senior colleagues should be telling us all to look for work outside academia, but it would certainly help if that idea weren’t treated as dishonourable, if not downright unthinkable. When I tell colleagues I’m thinking about quitting, responses tend to suggest I’m being melodramatic, running along the lines of “come on now, it’s not that bad”. At the more extreme end, you’re looked at as if you’ve just said something deeply offensive or you were dying.
An insecurely employed colleague of mine recently told her mentor she was considering non-university employment. He grinned at her and told her to keep at the job hunt for now – after all, he said, all his previous mentees had landed academic jobs. The mentor meant well, but such advice is plain toxic. It tells the candidate that if they don’t land a job, they’re an abnormality and a failure.
This widespread reluctance to think outside the profession is a symptom not so much of academics’ supposed lack of transferable skills as of how academics narrate their trade to themselves and to one another. We learn to treat academia as a calling rather than a job, and we justify our chosen paths by denigrating roads not taken. But while no early-career academic would make the concessions we do if we didn’t think academia were a great career, we should not regard work outside academia as worth less than work within it.
No one at the level of teaching staff and researchers is in a position, individually, to change the state of employment overnight. But everyone must realise that, these days, even a term’s worth of teaching can’t readily be found (and won’t be properly paid). It is simply unrealistic to tell everyone in the job market today that it’s all just a matter of time and tenacity. The kindest thing, now, would be for the advice to catch up with that reality.
Chris Townsend is a fellow in English at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.
