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.

She graciously agreed to an interview.  I hoped to post it to coincide with the publication of my 2026 update to The Professor Is In, and with a few delays… here it is. 

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.  This is Part 2 of 4.

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MP: I realized early on that big perk of academia (again, until we get into the land of 4-4, 5-5, 6-6,  which is a very important land to remember is where a lot of people are) which is the flexibility, and the flexibility is one of the things that almost nobody else gets.  My partner has a really hard time just sort of seeing me be so flexible. I mean that’s one of the biggest issues in our relationship that we have to negotiate, is at any moment I could put my work down, but ze has to be on Microsoft Teams all day. And that inflexibility is what most jobs are like.

KK:  So you know what’s interesting though…  and I hope you’re OK with this just being this kind of unfolding conversation as opposed to a totally  scripted set of questions…

MP: yeah absolutely! I’ve done a million interviews where it’s all like
“tell me about your book.”

KK: yeah no I read that interview that you sent me! It was super interesting and recent, so it was really good to read it after these Trump assaults had already started  – although obviously not what we’re dealing with right now right?? But let’s set that aside for a minute or else, you… speaking of things we thought weren’t going to be a part of… capitalism right?

Sorry, my train of thought… the gift of time, partner doesn’t have it; allows me to see what a giant perk that is…

MP: that I think a lot of academics when we talk about “oh we’re working so hard here,” yeah we are and a lot of it is fucked and unfair, but we have a different kind of schedule too.

KK: So actually, though, that thing about flexibility is something that  prompted me when I started doing the new chapter on leaving academia for the updated edition of the Professor Is In book.  This all comes from starting the Professor Is Out Facebook group during COVID.  I started to really get systematic updates from reading people’s accounts of leaving academia, and really getting into the longer narratives that people posted of their journeys, in the Facebook group. And what people consistently say is, they have more freedom and more flexibility after they leave academia, even in corporate jobs!

MP: I have seen that, and I’ve also read those long accounts with interest in the Facebook group. I think you’re absolutely right in some ways.

One thing that I think a lot of corporate jobs will startle people with is where you are filling out a timesheet. Your hours may be billable, you’re going to be doing a ton more collaborative work than you have before, especially if you were in the humanities.  So those kinds of flexibility will not be as abundant as they are in academia, I think that is absolutely true.

What I’m seeing a lot of people being really happy with is leaving academia, and just not being fucked with.

KK: “not being fucked with.” What a great phrase.

MP: yeah, I mean.

KK:  So, I’ve never actually never worked in a corporate job so I have no means to prove or disprove what they’re claiming.  All I’ve ever done I graduated college, I taught English in Japan, then I traveled a bunch in Asia, and then I came home and went to grad school and then I was a professor and then I left and now I’ve been Professor Is In, running this business for 15 years. But, it’s so across the board in peoples’ posts, just this delight in, as you say, not being fucked with.

So conversely then, how are we being fucked with in academia that is so oppressive?

MP: one thing that I think is a problem is there is a kind of scrim pretending that faculty governance exists, and pretending that departmental governance exists.  Maybe in some places it does, but those have been I think pretty questionable for a long time. And then with the enormous bulge in upper administration, like the last I don’t know 10 to 15 years, I think any illusion that there was a powerful faculty governance presence at most schools disappeared. So now there are unilateral decisions made around things like hiring, course caps, research travel…

One thing that I’ve seen a lot on the Professor Is Out is people say [that in non-academic jobs] they are free and in fact encouraged to be either on the clock or off the clock which is one of those things that I think lends that tremendous sense of relief.

KK: because you’re never really off the clock. If it’s summer it’s like “why am I not writing that article?”

MP: yeah that’s another thing where I think my low expectations really helped. I’ve always had a pretty tough sense of needing to protect my own time, because I’ve been … I never know what adverb to use, but like very disabled,  severely disabled since I was very young. And the question of pushing myself through things disappeared a long time ago. I realize now that that has kind of freed me from from feeling like I should  push, or have to. It just wasn’t in the realm of possibility.

KK: so the workaholism that’s endemic to academia you just could not participate in.

MP:  …..was not possible, yeah pretty much.  I mean I still certainly do my share of it especially when I was younger and not as debilitated. Like when I was an assistant professor, for example, I would do things like work before I taught and then teach my three classes and then work after and have dinner and work after dinner . But those would be short periods of time.

I’m also thinking about the question of time freedom. Like my experience with folks who work in the for-profit sector – and it’s probably different in other sectors –  is that there’s a lot of accountability to the project team and to clients and to billable hours, so that people are sort of constantly not only chafing with but often sort of being fucked with by their bosses. One thing that happens in workplaces where things run on billable time is people are strongly discouraged from doing things that are not billable time. So you’ll be allotted this tiny number of hours per week that you can do everything that’s not client focused, and that’s when you’re supposed to do all your e-mail, all your back channeling, all your preparation, all your notating, everything. And people have to figure out how to game that in various ways.

So, I don’t know it’s still to some degree a mystery to me. Like I find that even when I was teaching a 3-3 for all those years at Spelman, or teaching a 4-4 when I was an adjunct…  I still felt like, there’s a lot of flexibility here!  Sure I do a lot of grading, but I also know how to set a schedule.

KK:  Well, it seems to me that you’re a person with tremendous clarity and good boundaries! And that is something that a lot of folks don’t have. And it may be that you’re confronting various limitations if you don’t… if I can use that word? So, at an early age you were socialized differently.

MP:  yeah I think so. And then I had to do really a fucking lot of therapy to cope with just various aspects of my upbringing, which also helped with the understanding what a boundary is.

One fun fact about boundaries that I like to share with my grad students is that a boundary is not telling someone else what to do. It doesn’t have anything to do with trying to control your boss, or me, for that matter. The boundary is figuring out in your mind “if they do X, then I will do this.”

KK: right, It’s what you’ll do.

MP: exactly a boundary is figuring out what you’re going to do, not what you want someone else to do. so I think sort of just having baseline stuff like that matters. I’m really fascinated by what you’re learning from the Professor Is Out though.

like I I’m especially thinking about recent posts where people are really struggling in their job searches and that sounds like such a tough transition from academia and translating into the non academic areas.

KK: I don’t monitor it closely every single day because, well to be frank, I mean, trump is hell bent on destroying the Professor Is In, the foundation of my basic business, indirectly, because if people don’t have any grants and they don’t have any jobs and every institution across the land has instituted a hiring freeze, then I have no basis for a business. So that is absolutely consuming me right now.  And Professor Is Out is not a profit-generating part of the business, so…

But anyway, when I do go in I feel that well the posts have had a of more tragic feel to them lately.  But then again, of course they do because who is not sadder and more tragic right now?  I mean it’s a sad tragic time, and it is a terrible time to be looking for a job. It’s rough.

MP: yeah that’s so interesting; I can’t wait for your book

KK:  Oh all of this stuff will go into a new book I’m pitching to Random House right now, a book called The Professor Is Out. But I haven’t written that yet. Just a proposal.

MP:   I apologize, you probably told me that and I probably lost track of the facts. But congratulations that’s such a great idea.

KK: Thanks, I had hoped to have a contract by now but they’re demanding a chapter so I have to take my summer break  – gah, listen to me, I’m acting like an academic!  My vacation is writing a chapter! But anyway, whatever it’s not about me! Let’s move on.

To be continued….