Tenure-Track Professors Are Walking Away From Their 'Dream Jobs'

Chronicle of Higher Education, Walking Away From Your Dream Job:

Michael Chen was visiting Disney World with his wife and kids in 2019 when he got the news he’d been hoping for: Nazareth College wanted to hire him as an assistant professor.

The job met all of Chen’s criteria. It was a tenure-track position, in his field of public health, in Rochester, N.Y., where his family had already settled for his wife’s job. And it was teaching-focused — a plus in Chen’s book, though he had learned in graduate school that academics weren’t supposed to see it that way. At Nazareth, which became a university last year, Chen’s classes would have 30-some students at the most, allowing the kind of close-knit environment he felt was important.

Chen had worked before graduate school, at a nonprofit that supports Asian-American families and communities in Boston and at a nonprofit consulting firm. And his graduate program prepared researchers to work in a variety of settings, not just higher ed. But when he accepted Nazareth’s offer, he thought: “If I don’t screw things up, as long as I do a good job, I’ll know what I’m going to do for the rest of my career.” He planned to spend the next three decades at Nazareth, preparing a new generation of public-health professionals, the work he’d come to see as his calling.

And maybe that’s what would have happened, if the pandemic hadn’t arrived so soon after he started, or if he’d had more support. But what did happen is this: Just a few years after accepting his tenure-track job, Chen resigned. It wasn’t because he stopped loving teaching, and it wasn’t because he screwed up. Instead, he burned out. 

This decade has so far been a grueling one for the faculty work force. The job isn’t as stable as it used to be — even tenure is no guarantee if a college shuts down programs or closes completely, or a state imposes post-tenure review. Teaching through the pandemic was difficult, stressful, and often unrewarding. Students needed more support; professors scrambled to provide it. In most cases, their institutions kept asking them to do more, and more, with little reward or even acknowledgment. For many instructors, the pandemic teaching experience seems to have poked holes in the assumption their jobs are better or special — they are jobs.

Things haven’t exactly stabilized since. Many professors continue to struggle to get students to come to class, participate, do the reading. They have cut back the workload and offered more support, but it hasn’t always been enough. Students’ expectations have shifted: Many think they will pass pretty much no matter what. Colleges, in some cases, seem to expect the same. Just when it started to seem like the sun might be peeking through the clouds, many professors realized that generative AI would allow students to hand in passable assignments without doing the work.

Some months before he walked away, in 2022, Chen joined “The Professor is Out,” a private Facebook group meant to serve as a safe sounding board for “academics who are moving on and moving out.” The group, created in 2020 as an extension of the academic job-market hub “The Professor is In,” has some 33,000 members. Its founder, the author and consultant Karen Kelsky, was surprised at how many people joined — and how many of them were in tenure-track and even tenured positions. The active group remains a window into faculty disillusionment.

“The faculty are the least important people on a campus right now,” Kelsky says. If colleges valued their work, she says, they wouldn’t have allowed “adjunctification” to happen in the first place. The current wave of faculty departures — which colleges don’t even seem to have acknowledged — is simply the latest twist in a decades-long deterioration.

“Institutions’ indifference to faculty leaving,” she says, “is a reflection of their indifference to faculty’s being there.”

To some professors, the job they’ve worked so hard for feels untenable. And that’s particularly true for those who, like Chen, pour themselves into their positions and strive to connect with students on a personal level. That’s something that colleges sell to students, but it’s not something they seem actually willing to invest in. ...

Chen felt like he was falling apart. When he was washing the dishes one evening, he had heart palpitations. He decided to reach out to a therapist he’d spoken with before. Chen is a helper; needing help felt uncomfortable. When he put those appointments on his calendar, Chen noted them using his provider’s name instead of describing what they were for, even though his wife was the only other person who might see them.

In one of their first sessions after reconnecting, his therapist blew a seed that blossomed for Chen: You can’t give what you don’t have.

“I think I ran out of gas,” Chen says. “Both in terms of teaching — like the actual, pedagogical, ‘I want to share my passion and knowledge about public health with you, young people, and help you become future leaders,’” and “asking students, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How is your dad in the hospital? How are things at your job? How is your sibling?’ and then not being able to meaningfully help.”

Chen started to consider other options. He knew he had them. In 2022, a classmate from his Ph.D. program reached out to see if he’d like to do some side work for a nonprofit. Chen picked that up, and enjoyed it. Chen remembered there were other places to do good work, and that he might enjoy being there. He started to read “Quit Lit” accounts of academics who had left, and he joined “The Professor is Out” on Facebook.

In December 2022, Chen resigned. He transitioned to a full-time job at the same nonprofit behavioral-health consultancy where he’d been working on the side. (He has since moved to a new job at JSI, a nonprofit where he had worked before graduate school.) ...

These days, Chen can close his computer at 5 in the evening and not open it again until 9 the next morning. There are no more late-night worries about how to fine-tune the next day’s class or if he did enough to help a student who’s struggling. The pay is a lot better, too. When he was an assistant professor, Chen’s students would land first jobs making close to, and sometimes more, than he was making. Money isn’t his main motivation, but that was discouraging.

Chen has been able to keep a foot in the classroom, too — he’s teaching students in Nazareth’s master of public health program as an adjunct.

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Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• University Of California Professor Quits After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was (May 29, 2024)
• NY Times: Why Tax Prof Neil Buchanan And Other Liberal Tenured Professors Are Leaving Florida's Public Universities (Dec. 4, 2023)
• What Is Behind Growing Faculty Dissatisfaction? (Jan. 9, 2023)
• Doug Shackelford Abruptly Retires As UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean: ‘I’m Very Tired’ (Sept. 22, 2022)
• The Big Quit: Even Tenure-Line Professors Are Leaving Academe. 'Why Would I Want To Improve Faculty Morale? I Want These People To Leave.' (June 6, 2022)
• Tenured, Trapped, And Miserable (Nov. 11, 2021)
• Why I Am Leaving My Tenured Faculty Position At Age 53 (Sept. 23, 2021)
• WSJ: Law Prof Gets Tenure, Then Takes Buy-Out To Switch To Stand-Up Comedy (Mar. 9, 2021)
• Chaired Professor Resigns From Kansas Law Faculty After Withholding Student Grades In Overload Pay Dispute (Jan. 30, 2021)
• To Ease Professors Into Retirement, A ‘Terminal Sabbatical’ (Aug. 1, 2016)
• Quit Lit: Professors Who Leave Academe Pen Blistering Departure Op-Eds (Sept. 10, 2015)
• Tenured Prof Retires His 'Boomer Butt,' Leaves 'Authoritarian Hellhole' of Penn State (Aug. 7, 2012)