Advice from a liberal arts professor who got a job in 2010:

“Trust your instincts and get the fuck out.”

He teaches at a pretty well-known top tier liberal arts college, and he said that it’s a bunch of rich kids and the older professors are so out-of-touch that it’s like “Nero fiddling while Rome burns.”

Also, though I’ve never gotten that from him, some kids put on his evaluations, that the words he uses “are too big”.

And, his department chair called him on the carpet for that!

A few weeks before that, I met at an art opening an MFA on a tenure-track job at a smaller Catholic school in the city, and she said that there and one other place she knows of in the city, the admin are going after tenured profs’ salaries, saying that it’s necessary to save the school, money is so bad.

“I’m honestly thinking of leaving,” she was like.  “I made more money as a home healthcare aide, and the job is just getting awful.”

I told these stories to my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend, and he just grimaced.

“And those are supposedly the good jobs,” he was like.

Honestly, this is the year that higher ed has completely gone down the tubes, even 2 profs at the school where I’m finishing my degree have said they wish they could leave, the finances are so stressful, and that’s someone with tenure and another guy who’s going up for tenure.

Plus, I know of at least 8 or 9 state schools in the news in the past few months, where they’ve busted tenure lines or merged departments or called off searches or tried to gut tenure.

I think this is a sign of worse to come, and tenured profs are sitting ducks almost everywhere and are the next big target.

They have very low job mobility, tend to be p*ssies who try not to rock the boat, and not only would most people around think they’re overpaid, but they also wouldn’t lift a finger to help them, since they tend to be self-absorbed and to not go out of their way to help anyone else.

Pattern-wise, they remind me of public workers in Wisconsin when Scott Walker busted them by saying “why should you fund people who make more money than you?”.