Someone (probably on Twitter) once said that academia is like a bad relationship where the aspiring academic gives and gives and never gets anything in return. Countless PhD holders sacrifice everything to “succeed” in academia, with success defined as attaining a tenure-track job, a position that guarantees you at least seven years of job security, good benefits, and institutional support to conduct research. (No matter that you might be a wonderful teacher or have published a whole book — if you don’t have a TT job, you’re a failure.)

Then, of course, there’s the question of securing tenure, a rigorous process conducted around the sixth year of employment for which you have to submit a record of your publications, letters of support by colleagues, and evidence of being a good teacher (as determined largely by highly subjective student evaluations that often display not only gender bias, but may even constitute legal discrimination!) and of providing service to your department, institution, and professional society. Institutions vary widely in their rates of tenure, with the University of California system known for supporting their faculty so that the majority of them gain tenure, and the Ivy Leagues notorious for not tenuring junior faculty. If you don’t get tenure, your academic career is all but over, as any other institution at which you might apply for a job will know you’ve been denied tenure and likely view you as damaged goods.

I’m providing ample detail about the career trajectory of an academic because the process is so very opaque to outsiders, and because academia is so exclusive and insular: if you become an insider by getting a tenure-track job, you must do everything to maintain your insider status, which includes an extraordinary amount of gate-keeping and politicking. You also must never openly critique the status quo by, for example, speaking up for the huge and ever-increasing army of adjunct faculty.

The issue of adjunct/contingent labor in higher education has been discussed extensively, but here’s a snapshot of an adjunct’s miserable existence: you’re hired for one semester or quarter to teach one or more classes for a flat rate of anywhere between $2000 and $6000 per course, depending on the institution and location. As a concrete example, I taught a summer session course at UC Berkeley in 2013 for $5000 for a six-week class that met two hours a day, four days a week. That rate was on the high end of the spectrum. In addition to lecture hours, instructors have to factor in several hours of prep time for each lecture they give, hold regular office hours, and put in time grading assignments and papers.

Obviously, one course per semester or quarter is not going to work out to a living wage, so many adjuncts have to drive around to two or three different campuses to patch together enough work to be able to pay their bills. They often are given no office space, have no benefits, and absolutely no guarantee of job security beyond the three- or four-month course they’re teaching. I’ve often thought that adjunct faculty who hold PhDs are one of the most exploited categories of worker that exist in contemporary American society given their educational level: who else can you think of with so many years of training and education, so much prestige on paper, who makes an average of $20,000–30,000 a year? Many adjuncts rely on public assistance and some are even homeless.

And if that wasn’t insulting enough, we have proposals like this recent one from Southern Illinois University recruiting “alumni adjuncts” with advanced degrees (PhDs) to volunteer for duties including teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses, lecturing, serving on committees, and/or advising students, all for no pay. (I’ve already shared my thoughts on this outrageous proposal.)

Now, a question: did you know that non-tenure-track faculty with no job security are responsible for teaching about 70% of undergraduate courses in American higher education? This means that academia is an incredibly exploitative system that relies on the poorly compensated labor of adjunct faculty and graduate students in order to allow the dwindling number of tenure-track and tenured faculty the time and space to publish and remain within the inner circle of academia.

And why, you ask, would anyone as smart and educated as a PhD holder engage in this horribly exploitative system? Usually because they’re hoping it’ll lead to a tenure-track job. They are biding their time and gaining teaching experience while they apply for tenure-track positions. The incredibly sad part of all of this is that most of the time, working as an adjunct faculty member doesn’t result in an offer of a tenure-track position. And this is one of the primary pieces of evidence that debunks the myth of meritocracy in academia: a lot of teaching experience does not mean you will be offered a job where your primary responsibility is to teach.

As researcher Maren Wood found in her 2016 study of who gets tenure-track jobs in the humanities and social sciences, the largest cohort of successful applicants are ABDs, doctoral students in the last stage of their degree who are “All But Dissertation”; in other words, they have finished all the requirements for their degree except their dissertation. PhD holders are routinely passed up for tenure-track positions in favor of ABDs. This is a risk for a tenure-track search committee to take, because there’s always a chance the ABD will not finish their dissertation in time to start teaching the following fall (and yes, this happens all the time).

So why do search committees take the risk to hire ABDs? There is no one answer to this question. But in my experience, in academia newer = better. There is a common assumption that ABDs are on the cutting edge of academia, theoretically, methodologically, or otherwise, that they offer fresh perspectives. This is not a wholly satisfactory explanation for the widespread hiring of ABD’s, because there’s no major difference between someone who is two to three years beyond their PhD versus an ABD in terms of “freshness.” And yet, there’s a common notion among academics that, like a loaf of bread, your PhD can go stale. Once you’re roughly four to five years beyond your PhD and you’re not on the tenure track, you’re considered to be stale, washed up, your “sell-by” date expired.

This is what I believe happened to me. I earned my PhD in 2010. And not from a second-tier institution, but from a top PhD program at UC Berkeley. I state this not to show off, but because research shows that where you get your degree matters for getting a job; Sarah Kendzior refers to this trend as “academia’s 1 percent.” However, as my experience shows, a top degree isn’t a guarantee for getting a tenure-track job. Upon graduating, I was lucky enough to be awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Hamilton College, in upstate New York. So, my husband and I made the sacrifice of moving from one of the most livable (and, I’ll say it, the best) cities in the country (Oakland, CA) to a tiny, remote town in central New York.

This is what you do if you want to succeed in academia: you suck it up and move to a place you don’t want to be in order to pledge your loyalty to the cult of academia, to prove that any sacrifice is worth securing a tenure-track job. I’m lucky my partner was willing and able to move across the country with me, because I was supposed to be the main bread-winner in our family; I was the highly trained and educated professional, while he was the blue-collar immigrant with no college education. (Little did I know back then that his skills would be more marketable than my PhD!) However, I have grad school colleagues for which moving wasn’t an option: their partners were the main bread-winners, and it didn’t make economic sense.

As my two-year position at Hamilton came to a close, I applied for any and all positions in my field and related fields. I got an on-campus interview and, as was later told to me by a member of the search committee, was very close to being offered the position. Did the fact that I was 7.5 months pregnant when I went to the interview affect my chances of getting the job? I will never know. It’s not supposed to be a factor for the search committee when deciding on a candidate — it’s illegal, of course, to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy. But these decisions, like all hiring decisions, are highly subjective.

This was really the turning point in my academic career, as it was the first time in a decade that I wasn’t going to be affiliated with an institution. This point matters, a great deal. The lack of institutional affiliation can function like a big red scarlet letter for a scholar. It signals that you’re on the outs, unwanted by any academic institution. Taking on the title of “independent scholar” is fraught with assumptions, questions like: is she not committed enough to academia to work as an adjunct faculty member, if only to have a temporary affiliation? The answer was, yes, I was very committed to academia (efforts I’ll relate below), but no, I was not willing to exploit myself working as an adjunct in a futile effort to get a permanent position. This is absolutely not to knock or shame the adjuncts who are doing the thankless work of educating the majority of this country’s college students, whether because they’re hoping for a permanent position or they just love teaching. We all make choices based on our unique circumstances.

Principles aside, my family’s economic situation made the possibility of working as an adjunct impossible: my partner didn’t have the type of job that could support our family on one salary, and we had a child now. It wasn’t an economically sustainable decision for me. More feasible was to work outside of academia. And believe me, it still wasn’t/isn’t that sustainable, because transitioning out of academia is a long, hellish, soul-searching process that I’m still navigating.

While I wasn’t teaching at or affiliated with an institution, I continued to be active as a scholar by publishing and presenting my research, and this required taking on a new label: independent scholar. Attending academic conferences as an independent scholar is quite an isolating experience, as I detailed here. So why attend these conferences at all if I’m not employed in academia? Well, as crazy as it may seem, I wanted to keep disseminating my research, which meant presenting at conferences. By the time my postdoc ended, I was already working on converting my dissertation into a book, and I thought, based on what my advisors told me, that publishing my book might help me get a tenure-track job. Even if I wasn’t teaching, continuing to publish would show I was committed to a career in academia, right?

So, I wrote and published the book, in large part while I was an unaffiliated, independent scholar with no funding or access to libraries and article databases. I was lucky to have had access to research funds while at Hamilton, and was able to conduct post-dissertation fieldwork in Cuba to expand my book beyond what I had written in my dissertation. About half of my book was completely new material. But the writing, editing, and proofing was completed with no funding. I also decided to index my own book because I didn’t want to pay the press $700 to have someone else index it; this entailed a huge amount of labor.

Between the time my postdoc ended (2012) and my book was published (2015), I continued going on the academic job market every year, hoping the imminent publication of my book would help my chances. However, each year I saw diminishing returns: I got some bites each year, meaning phone or Skype interviews, but I wasn’t making it to the final round (on-campus interview). There was little to explain my failure, save the fact that I was not affiliated with an institution and that I was getting farther away from my PhD date. And boy, did I internalize that failure. I wasn’t used to failing at things I set my mind to do — few people who attain PhDs are — and the extended phase of failure defined by not getting an academic job was the most demoralizing thing I’ve ever experienced.

The idea that I wasn’t going to be practicing the profession for which I had trained for over a decade provoked a massive crisis of identity. Academics’ sense of self-worth tends to be very entangled with their profession. This may not be unique to academia, but it is certainly one of its defining elements. We pursue a particular field of research because we’re passionate about it, and we tend to define ourselves largely by what we study. My sense of self had become very tied up in the label “ethnomusicologist,” and it has taken years to begin to redefine my professional identity and figure out what other careers might be viable for me other than “academic.”

The cult of academia requires that you believe you could only be happy as an academic. I bought into this notion fully. Some graduate students never intend to be academics, and there are PhDs who leave the academy early on because it’s not for them. Not me. I wanted to be part of the inner circle, badly. I come from a family of academics and intellectuals who were able to follow their passion and study and write about what they love. I wanted to be recognized as an expert in a particular field of knowledge, praised for my incredible ideas and insight (to be honest, I still do). And I really couldn’t see an alternative to academia that lined up with who I thought I was. So, I clung tightly to the dream longer than I should have and delayed the process of figuring out who I am aside from an academic.

Throughout the process of failing to obtain a tenure-track job, the class politics of academia haven’t been lost on me. I now view it as a fundamentally bourgeois profession: because there’s so little opportunity for stable employment, you have to have a reserve of family or marriage-related wealth accessible to you in order to wait it out to try and get a job. I doubt anyone without an additional source of wealth could adjunct for a sustained amount of time.

Although I wasn’t adjuncting, I too bided my time working as a freelancer, hoping my situation was temporary. And I was able to keep trying, to put off leaving academia, precisely because we had financial support from my parents. Getting a tenure-track job is a privilege afforded to less than half of the people who have all of the required skills. I wanted to pursue a “life of the mind,” but it wasn’t until I failed at this pursuit that I realized how much academia is tied to class privilege. Not every successful academic grew up with money, but unless they get a tenure-track job within a year or two of finishing their degree, they’re unlikely to stay in academia.

By the time my book was published I was already starting to come to the realization that I wasn’t going to be able to get a tenure-track job: I was five years beyond my PhD and knew that it was getting “stale.” Academic colleagues encouraged me to apply for one more job market cycle following the publication of my book, as they thought it might make a difference. It didn’t. The fact is, ABDs who hadn’t even finished their dissertations were being called for interviews and offered tenure-track jobs, while an accomplished scholar who had published a book and numerous other publications was being passed over. Generally, it’s understood that academics have to publish a book (or have one well on its way) within the six years before they go up for tenure, but I had already published a book and couldn’t even get on the tenure track.

And this is when I began to truly internalize the fact that academia is not a meritocracy — it’s a crapshoot. There are hundreds of applications for every tenure-track position, and surely dozens of applicants like me whose list of publications or teaching experience and evaluations far exceed the minimum requirements. Some tenured professors claim the current jobs crisis is the “same as it ever was” going back to 1973 (despite an almost 50-year time gap!), but they conveniently ignore the fact that publishing expectations have changed radically. Back in the 70s and 80s, you might get a tenure-track job without having published even one peer-reviewed article, and now scholars with whole books published are passed up in favor of ABDs! And it’s not that we’re just bad at academia and can’t accept this — you don’t publish a book with a university press (a process involving rigorous peer review), or have it endorsed by senior scholars, if you don’t do good work.

Perhaps even more than luck, it matters who you know. It matters how much your dissertation advisor is willing to go to bat and actively seek out opportunities for you. Many temporary (one- or two-year positions) are filled not through full searches, but through professors contacting their colleagues at other institutions and asking if they have students (current or former) who they can recommend.

There is simply no opportunity in academia. The glut of PhDs grows every year, with newly minted doctors joining the ranks of those who finished their degree in previous years. At the same time, the number of tenure-track positions is declining as the corporatization of the university is growing: institutions are spending less of their budgets on faculty and more on administrators and extracurricular campus services that attract students, such as gyms, cafeterias, and student centers.

I wish I had realized sooner that my failure to succeed in academia was/is not a personal failure, but a structural failure. I wish I hadn’t internalized the feelings of failure, which were, although I hate to admit it, accompanied by large doses of jealousy and spite towards my colleagues who were succeeding. I kept asking, “why not me?” and “what do they have that I don’t?” These are impossible questions to answer. Most successful academics do good work, but that’s just not enough to make it; you have to also have luck or be a good networker and even social climber who ingratiates yourself with academic VIPs.

I would hazard a guess that one of the reasons I failed to secure a tenure-track job is my lack of political expediency. I have a big mouth and a tendency to say what’s on my mind. I don’t engage in baseless flattery, although I will eagerly express my admiration for someone’s work if I feel it sincerely. Maybe I wasn’t fully able or willing to play the political game of academia, and perhaps I would have found myself in trouble when I came up for tenure review because of this.

All of this leads back to my realization that academia is not a meritocracy, as I assumed for so long. I thought I could succeed on the strength of my scholarship. But academia doesn’t necessarily reward good scholarship…and conversely, it sometimes rewards shoddy or unoriginal work. Academia rewards one’s willingness to worship at its altar, to believe that this is the only fulfilling profession a PhD could engage in, and to reinforce its extreme structural inequality by not speaking up for adjuncts or other precarious academic laborers. To keep your mouth shut and nod “yes, of course” when you are a female academic and are asked to take on more service duties than your male counterparts. But that’s a whole other can of worms…

It has taken me a long time to get to a place where I could so openly write about my experience as a scholar abandoned by academia. I couldn’t do it while I was still holding out hope of securing a tenure-track position. I’m now mostly at peace with my fate, although I still sometimes rage about it. I doubt those feelings will ever go away completely. But shedding the myth of meritocracy, exposing it to myself for the lie that it is, has helped me externalize my failure and view it a systemic problem rife in academia rather than as a personal failing. I no longer feel ashamed about not succeeding in academia because I know it’s not my fault. I got the short end of the stick, and I know now that my situation is the rule, not the exception.

Academia is broken, crumbling under the weight of its own inequality, exclusivity, and insularity.