The second edition of the book is in press!  Should be out this October or November.

I can’t wait! I have wanted to update my advice for many years.

This spring and summer, I’ll be blogging some excerpts of the new edition. Let me know your thoughts!

Karen

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Excerpt from the New Preface:

A lot has changed since 2015. And a lot hasn’t. Competitive productivity remains the gold standard of academic career success. For that reason, the particulars of my advice on the job search, building a competitive record, and grant and postdoc applications, for example, remain mostly unchanged from the first edition. What has changed in the intervening decade is the toxicity of this competitive productivity, and the ever-growing harm that it causes to practitioners at all levels, including the tenure track and tenured. In the first edition, I alluded to systems of abuse and experiences of suffering in the academic world, and indeed these have always been central to my career advice since I began blogging in 2011. But like most others at the time, I located these exclusively in the ranks of the precarious, the scandal of adjunctification. In the decade since; however, conditions of labor in academia have deteriorated so drastically across all ranks that they can no longer be ignored by any but the most insular (of whom, granted, there are still many). For most, there is no more avoiding the dreadful embodied harm caused by a constellation of forces that have changed academia beyond all recognition. Now there is a chorus of complaint, a miasma of despair, and an exodus of people.

And mind you, this predated the existential threats confronting the entire American higher education and federal research sectors spearheaded by the current administration, unfolding as I write in early 2025.

When I speak of harm, I am not speaking hyperbolically. As early as 2009, Rosalind Gill noted that university faculty were subjected to, “a punishing intensification of work… a profession overloaded to breaking point,” resulting from underfunding as well as hyperinflation of productivity expectations, and “an audit culture that, if it was once treated with scepticism, has now been almost perfectly internalised.” In the years since, these conditions have only escalated, producing among tenure line and precarious faculty both what Peter Fleming, author of the 2021 call to arms, Dark Academia: How Universities Die, calls a “surfeit of duress,” deriving from “conditions in which it would be irrational not to despair.” These conditions, as the authors of the 2023 Gig Academy note, are a perfect storm of escalating work demands in a context of ever declining resources (“do more with less”) under structures of managerial control rooted in neoliberalism.  Academic neoliberalism has replaced collaboration with competition and relative equality (within the ranks of the tenure track) to intense status hierarchy (tenure-track vs contingent), transforming academics into “human capital” to be manipulated by obscenely bloated and corporatized administration. With the accelerating closures of whole programs, departments and institutions, coinciding with widespread right wing attacks on tenure, more and more institutions turn to what Bryan Alexander calls the “Queen Sacrifice” of tenured faculty layoffs. The litany of closures and layoffs reinforce that “as human capital, academic faculty members can now be overworked, constantly surveilled, and cast off without support once they have been used up.”

Unsurprisingly, the commodification of academia has been linked to high levels of psychological distress and anxiety.  And indeed, study after study show faculty suffering. A 2023 survey found that 64% of faculty feel chronically burned out, with 58% reporting academic work had taken a toll on their mental or emotional health. In 2024, more than half of faculty surveyed reported that stress had made them consider leaving their jobs. Faculty departing academia showed symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder at higher rates than frontline healthcare workers. That this all occurs in academic settings resolutely hostile to all forms of mental, emotional or bodily vulnerability creates a kind of Schroedinger’s Mental Illness — visible and hidden in equal measures, simultaneously.

This dis-ease is not confined to the mind. Physical illness and death are so central to the academic narratives I consulted preparing for this update that one of my new chapters is devoted to the particular forms of harm (embodied and otherwise) experienced in particular by minoritized scholars in academic settings; another, why leaving academia is now not just a necessary option, but likely the optimal one for any who wish to prioritize their mental and physical health. As Fleming argues, academic capitalism has created conditions so contrary to thriving that they see  “the physical organism simply give in.”

And so if the immiseration of one group – adjuncts – was the story when I first published this book, it is the suffering of every group –  faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and staff – that animates the present moment. Even the “successful” tenured academic career has moved from being “the best job in the world” (as we never used to stop hearing) to something very bad indeed.

But it goes without saying that across all ranks, the harms of academia fall most heavily on its most marginalized members by reason of gender, race, disability, and queer, non-binary, or trans identity. In this update I also want to call into question the normative presumptions of my first edition, and rework what I’ve come to think of as its “white lady Karen” aspects. I am a queer able-bodied cisgender white Jewish femme, with autism, ADHD, and OCD, and have been treated for depression and emotionally unstable – formerly borderline – personality disorder for many years. I was unaware of many of these identities during my years as a practicing academic, well into my time as The Professor Is In, and this lack of awareness was, I think, evident in my career advice.

I have therefore undertaken to update my advice in this edition with an eye to better flagging the many obstacles and abuses of the academic career that may arise for (multiply) marginalized scholars. I have added a few words about strategies for disclosures, requests for accommodations, and so on. But I do so with awareness that all advice of this kind, as Garcia Peña writes, is by its very nature individualized, and individualism being one of the core tenets of white supremacy, the advice will always “work” best to the degree that the job seeker occupies a normative identity as white, male, cisgender, and able-bodied.  Second, advice from someone outside the marginalized community, who is also not a practitioner in any fields that could lend expertise, can reproduce harm. Professionalization is, after all, as Mark Broomfield writes, “white racial performance” in service to the comfort of white institutions. As Victoria Reyes explains “Individual advice on navigating racist and sexist systems may allow more people to pass through the faculty doors. But it also means that more people are traumatized, socialized into an exclusionary academic system, and taught to think that treating people in harmful ways is ok.” While I have sought the insights of BIPOC, queer, non-binary, trans and disabled scholars writing on their experiences of academic professional practices, members of marginalized communities know far better than I ever could the affordances and risks of both academic conventions and the choice to disrupt them. Therefore at many junctures I merely signal where –  as far as I can see it – peril is most likely to lie and where mentors from within the community/ies may provide better advice on how to navigate it.  For this reason my third new chapter contains a section of career advice drawn from a range of scholars of widely divergent identities and backgrounds.

Finally, I am also at pains to show where harm can potentially follow from the advice that I give, repeating as it does (without endorsing) the competitive hyperindividualistic productivity values that continue to dominate hiring and tenure decisions. Make no mistake: I do want you to thoroughly understand these values, because only by understanding them can you make informed decisions about how to navigate them. Ultimately, however, I have no interest in telling job seekers to “mask,” or “pass,” or overmedicate, or tolerate abuse, or accept harm, or even shoulder the burden of educating, in the interests of getting an academic job. This only continues the pattern of requiring those who have suffered most in the system to shoulder the burden of trying to fix it, when that task belongs to the “over-represented.” And so, in a new Coda, I make recommendations to departments and search committees on systemic change that might prevent some of the harms in the first place.

In 2015 my goal was to help job seekers avert both crushing debt and the psychic misery of misinterpreting a failed tenure track job search as a personal and private failure without recognition of its wider systemic context and causes. Now in 2025 I still want readers to avoid the crushing debt and psychic misery, of course, but I also want you to recognize and avoid the mental, emotional, financial and physical harms of the hyper-corporatized, neoliberal “gig academy” – even when you have “succeeded.” While it is still entirely possible to complete a PhD, take a postdoc, apply for tenure track positions, get one, and proceed through tenure and promotion with body and spirit intact, this can no longer be assumed. Not by the individual, and not by their advisor or department, not by disciplinary organizations. The harms of academia are too great and must be spoken aloud.

The single greatest difference the previous edition and this one is this: my recommendation that you, my reader-practitioner, always put your wellbeing first. My goal is to remind you that academia is just a job, that you are not your job, and that your health is worth more than any job. Instead of working yourself to the bone or martyring yourself at the altar of academic advancement, I will urge you at regular junctures to step back, pause, and consider what might be a more life-sustaining choice for body, mind, and spirit. And being as always a steadfast foe of the elitist “vocational awe” school of gaslighting that even now insists that we not mention money in discussions of academic labor, I remind you that this choice must take into account things like health insurance and your bank account.

This has never been more urgent now that even such rickety academic foundations as remained are being systematically dismantled by a fascist government hell-bent on destroying all of our institutions of education, critical thought, and political opposition.

….to be continued…