In I found myself simultaneously single and on the academic job market for the first time. I was thirty, several years into graduate school and at work on a dissertation about nineteenth-century poetry and pleasure.
Literary studies, my dissertation argued, was blighted at its core. It had forsaken pleasure, the very reason most people devote their lives to literature in the first place—and the likes of Shelley and Hopkins were apostles of an enlightened hedonism that promised a way out. There was, of course, another blight on the profession. I entered graduate school in , at the start of the economic downturn.
The story is a many-times-told one: the retreading of the American university into a for-profit institution that runs on adjunct and graduate student labor, and, looming behind it, the disinvestment in the life of the mind by the American public.
In , 75 percent of university faculty were tenure stream and 25 percent contingent; by the time I sent in my first application, the two figures had flipped. In , the English academic market featured around twenty tenure-track job vacancies in my specialty area, each of which had between two hundred and three hundred candidates from around the world—many of them already professors—vying for it. The jobs for which I was training hardly existed. This was a reality that we graduate students banished to the frontiers of our consciousness, for the sake of sanity and self-preservation, as many do the knowledge of their own deaths.
Picture a pilgrimage through desert expanses, or Antarctic freeze, over seven years—a trial filled with luminous discoveries, in which, perforce, you band together with your fellow travelers, forging bonds that become the best and deepest of your life—where you know early on that you will likely never make it to your destination. Small wonder that so many of us become at least mildly depressed, while others succumb to more serious forms of mental illness.
