One of my primary goals in the revised edition of The Professor Is In was to make its advice responsive to diverse identities around race, sexuality, class, and above all, disability. To that end, I read deeply in disability studies literature, and sought writing that explicitly related questions of disability to the academic career and its hiring practices. One of the main texts I relied on was  Crip SpaceTime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life by Margaret Price, Professor of English at the Ohio State University and director of the Disability Studies Program there. I highlighted and copy/pasted so many passages from that book that in the end I probably would have quoted the entire thing if it hadn’t meant replacing my entire text with theirs! Turning into a total fangirl, I lurked around their social media for a bit, and then eventually reached out. They graciously agreed to an interview, which happened last August.

The reason for the delay in sharing is that I had hoped to release this interview to coincide with when the 2026 book update came out, and it finally did last month! Find it here!

ANYWAY, Margaret and I ended up talking at such length that I’ve divided the interview into four parts. It’s been very lightly edited for clarity.

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KK: this can be just you know a very disorganized kind of conversation because I will edit it later but basically, i would love to know… well first of all for the purposes of our talk, actually let me take a moment to ask: are you familiar with The Professor Is In?

MP: I know you do individual consulting and coaching and I think that’s sort of most of what I know.

KK: OK I just wanted to you know make sure you had a sense of who the readership of this interview will be. We’ve been around 15 years; in the old days it was mostly grad students and adjuncts but nowadays,  well first of all I’ve been around for so long that folks who were grad students are now coming up on being full professors! So we do all kinds of things now, but the readership is really a bunch of people at all stages of academia who are really, really unhappy about academia, very frustrated, feeling exploited.  Some of them still want to get into it because that’s what they trained for, and it’s what they love. Some people are trying to get out of it because it’s untenable. But in any case the Professor Is In is kind of this combo of truth telling and anti gaslighting about academia being you know what they would always say, “the best job in the world.”  You probably came up similarly to me where we got you know it’s the best job in the world to be a tenured professor and …

MP: I had a very different experience!

KK: Interesting! We can talk about that during the interview!

MP: I think a lot of the reason why I’ve been successful is I went in with such low expectations.  No illusions about it being the best job.

KK: that’s what people need to hear! Because they’re still getting wounded by the gaslighting and it’s very painful in 2025 to see that happening. Anyway, the Professor Is In is about truth telling, anti gaslighting and then practical tangible advice, so that’s that’s my niche that’s that’s my brand so to speak. So that will be my approach in our talk.

Ok, now to get started for real, please tell me about your journey into academia? How did you get here, and  what was it like.

MP:  well one interesting thing –  I mean interesting to me –  is that the reason I’m a professor now is I needed health insurance. I’ve been disabled since I was very young  – 15  – and at the time  – you may remember, you probably do remember this  – you had to have what was called continuous coverage in terms of insurance. You could not have a lapse in your insurance or you could be dumped based on a pre-existing condition. So when I was diagnosed at 15 with a life-threatening condition, I learned about continuous coverage really fast. And so I was always aware of that when I was getting my first jobs.

I knew I was good at writing and I probably wanted to do something related to writing, but at the same time I was being pushed very hard toward secretarial work by my family of origin. I was born in 1969 so I would have been finishing College in ‘91 and I got a very strong message that an appropriate job for me would be as a staff member or a secretary –  we were at that time just switching to the title administrative assistant –  or perhaps a K through 12 teacher.

I’m the first the first person who’s not a man in my family to get a PhD or be a tenured professor.

I was not particularly interested in being a professor at all there were a lot of men in my family who were professors and they didn’t make it look like much fun.  I was groomed to be the helpmate of a man,  a person who worked as secretarial staff or you know other kind of support position, while raising kids.

So in a way being disabled and being queer kind of saved me professionally because I had to realize so early on that that wasn’t going to be a pattern I would follow. But I still wasn’t very interested in being a professor; it just wasn’t something that I thought would be particularly appealing to me for various reasons.  I had gotten an unfortunate opinion that all academics were sort of elitist assholes who did nothing but focus on theory or very abstruse research and make people feel bad and…

KK: oh so you’re saying that’s not true of academia?? [laughs]

MP:  I’ve found it’s not true.  Yeah for sure.  But academia certainly wasn’t a niche that I was shown.  I had to find it myself. So I was kind of bumping along through my 20s; I got an MFA, I worked in advertising, I worked in journalism, I did some manual jobs, I worked in a factory for a while … thought about being a technical writer or grant writer and one of the jobs that I picked up was as an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan and I really loved it.  I loved teaching at the college level. I particularly loved teaching writing and critical thinking.

I then learned that there was this discipline called rhetoric and composition where people were overall a lot nicer than they were in other parts of the academy that I had met. You know people in rhet comp are not uniformly awesome but it’s a pretty collegial, activist oriented discipline.

One of my mentors while I was doing those five years of adjuncting really encouraged me to start a PhD, and I told her over and over again, that’s not for me, I don’t do theory,  I’m not particularly interested in research. And she kept saying no, I think you have a misimpression, I think this is something that you could kind of make your own. So ultimately my contract at Michigan was running out and that meant my health insurance was running out, and my wife at the time (who didn’t have health insurance of her own because she hadn’t finished college, she was in a trade job), she said to me look if you get into a PhD program that has domestic partner coverage we will at least have health insurance for five years, and you know that seems like a big deal.  I was like, you know you’re right, that is a good idea. So I applied to PhD programs, and got into several and I went in fully expecting to just go back to a slightly better adjuncting job after. And we had so-called continuous coverage. What year was that? I finished my PhD in 2004, so I started it in 1999…  they counted my MFA as a Masters.  I’ve actually written an essay about this,  it’s called Fear of Theory. Basically in the course of my PhD I realized that what I had learned that the academy had to be like was not what it had to be like! I could find people who were activist, generous, you know honest, supportive… and of course they’re not like thick on the ground necessarily but they’re findable.  So I finished the PhD and was like, yeah I could be a professor! And I got the job at Spelman and discovered I was good at many parts of the job.

But I just never thought it would be a dream job.  I didn’t go in thinking “what an ideal place.” I have pretty low expectations that any job will be particularly caring.

KK: so do you think that that has to do with being disabled? Does that have an impact on your sort of view of what a job can be?

MP: very likely yeah. I think that being disabled, being queer,  and growing up in a really sexist environment where there are very few women in my family of origin or extended family. There just are not many women living, and as far as I know I’m the only nonbinary person who’s living.  So just a total lack of models. I don’t think I had any impression that I wouldn’t have to be figuring something out by myself and make it different.

KK: That’s a really unusual story

MP: it is yeah and I think I work so closely now with lots of graduate students and lots of junior scholars, and man I don’t know who sold everybody this bill of goods that the academy was this like rarefied awesome place! I also don’t know if we need to talk about it as uniformly as fucked up as we do. You know my partner is not an academic, ze is an engineer.  My ex-wife was a baker… so  like places are both good and bad pretty much across the board.  For sure I think academy had at some point acquired this reputation as being a place that would take great care of people though. Maybe we’re still digging out from that.

KK:  I don’t know why people keep believing that. I really don’t know why. I don’t know of any workplaces where people go in believing it’s somehow separate from capitalism. That’s my big beef.

MP:  exactly. If that weren’t the case, I think folks would not be as easily gaslit about it.

KK: but then of course you know it did appear to be separate from capitalism for a long time in the United states to a degree.  It’s just the neoliberalization of the past 20 years has been so ferocious… But anyway the scales are falling from people’s eyes I think, but they’re still really heartbroken. I mean that’s my whole clientele, my whole readership is heartbroken people who thought it was going to be one thing and now it’s another and they have to figure out whether they can live without it.

MP: I know I’m not supposed to be interviewing you about this!

KK: No, go ahead!

MP: But sorry, I had a question that kind of escaped—where do people get this impression? Do you have a sense of where people are getting this story that academia is this fulfilling kind of workplace?

KK: Ha!  Nobody has ever asked me that before so point blank.

MP: I try to ask the students and scholars I work with but it’s a little hard to ask that in a way that’s not like coming out like “why are you so deluded?”

KK: I could go on and on and I’ll try not to!  I think that college has been the reason.  I don’t think it is now so much, but back in the day, college was a magical time in people’s lives  – four years of kind of magical… you’re living in a walkable environment with all these wonderful amenities and experiences – of course this is speaking of students with a certain level of privilege and so on – you know really there’s no other time like that four years. And you look at your professors, you see them and they’re the central agents, the central aspects of this wonderful experience.  And you look at them, and you’re a wonky weird kid who doesn’t fit in anywhere, doesn’t want to go into accounting you know or get an MBA, and you’re always thinking weird thoughts and stuff, and suddenly you find like a place where you think you belong! Certainly this was all true of me.  And you kind of idolize these people, especially if you grow up in a standard middle class household where academia is just totally outre as a career, and you are supposed to be a wife and mother. And then you think, Oh my God, I can get paid to think great thoughts! But you’re very, very young, so you’re impressionable and you have zero critical thinking skills and zero financial literacy. And it’s the lack of financial literacy that really screws people.  Because they don’t understand the economy of adjuncting and the loss of tenure track jobs,  and the replacement of tenure track with adjuncts…  anyway, I think I think that that gets them locked in, it probably has to do with that youth quality, tied to the fact that they had this magical experience, but were too young to be able to critically understand it, until it was too late.

MP: yeah I mean I’m constantly surrounded by people at a wide range of ages, and that’s atypical. But also there’s this constant refreshing and renewing of our calendar, which also lends a kind of… a really different rhythm than when I was in advertising, for example, where it’s just, oh it’s July we’re doing this, it’s October we’re doing that. I think the sense of the refresh is distinctive.

KK: I don’t know if this resonates with you at all but I work with a significant subcategory of my clients –  mostly women – who come back to academia after a career in something like banking or advertising or something. And they might be in their 50s when they finally get done with their PhD. And they want to get a tenure track job and that’s a whole circle of hell of its own, because  even though they’re older, they also bought into academia being some special place as you and I talked about, some place far better than the advertising or banking they left behind.

MP: I realized now that I was given two massive gifts when I was about 23 and I was first applying to MFA programs. I did not have a good reason to be applying to MFA programs, except that I wanted to be a writer.

I wrote this, well what I realize now must have been very pathetic statement of purpose!  Truly this is what it said, and I’m so sad I don’t still have a copy, because I would show my students in a heartbeat. But the gist of my statement of purpose at age 23 applying to MFA programs was “I’m having such a hard time, I can’t figure out what my point, or what my purpose is, but I really want to write and I’m good at writing, but it’s hard to find the motivation though so I think this MFA program will give me that motivation…”

KK: Oh my God [laugh]

MP:  I mean truly like you know almost like a parodic opposite of what you should say in a statement of purpose!  And I think the fact that I was never expected to be an academic of any kind was what allowed me to write something like this.  I was so far off script.

And one of the program directors of an MFA … well first off, everybody just rejected me you know as they absolutely should have. And one of the program directors wrote back to me and said, “I want to give you a little feedback, which is you’re a wonderful writer, and we would have admitted you on the basis of your writing, but we can’t admit someone who says ‘I’m not sure I want to do this.’  We have too many applicants who are really sure they want to do this.” And he gave me suggestions, he said “here’s some ways to not sound so ridiculous next time.”

That was the first gift, ie, realizing  the point of school  – whether I’m a student or a professor –  is not to give me motivation. It’s to offer a space for something that I want to do. So that was gift number one. And then gift number two was, I audited a creative writing class at the University of Hawai‘i–that’s where I was living at the time with my boyfriend…

KK:  that’s from my PhD’s from, by the way.

MP: Oh, OK! We’ll compare notes later– so much to say right? But my boyfriend did his PhD in political theory there. And you know having nothing more purposeful to do I had just followed him to Honolulu and that’s where we lived. But the second huge gift that I got  – again I was about 23 –  I was auditing this class and I was asking my professor (it was Lynne Sharon Schwartz and actually she was a visiting Prof there and a really tough straighter shooter, love her) and I asked her, what do you think of me doing an MFA?  I said, I’m having problems figuring out what my purpose is and getting rejected really shook my confidence but I know I’m a good writer, and please help me think this through.”  And she said “please don’t think an MFA that will accomplish anything for you other than time. You know they’re not going to train you.  They might train you to write to a degree–some do a good job with that and some don’t – but it’s not going to be a calling card for a job. It’s going to be time to work on a project, so go in with the project.”

And I realized that’s true for everything in academia.  That’s true of a PhD; it’s true of a professorship to some degree; it’s true of an adjunct job too, assuming you’re not teaching a 4-4, 5-5, or 6-6, in which case that’s all you’re doing. And so that that was the second huge gift I got, was the realization that academia is not there to give me stuff,  but it does offer time, ie, a pretty flexible schedule and it offers exposure to people or artistic and intellectual things that I might want to be near.

She said “think of it more like being on a grant project. Don’t think of it as they’re necessarily going to teach you stuff or you’ll be qualified for anything.”

KK: That’s making me think about the monetary value of time.

….

To be continued…