Read an Exclusive Excerpt from ‘How to Succeed in Academia’ by Ross Bullen
New this week from Humorist Books: How to Succeed in Academia (While Failing at Everything Else), by funny person, career-track professor, and podcaster Ross Bullen. It’s a book about the surprisingly terrifying quagmire that is being an academic for a living. Here’s a taste to get you to sign up to take the whole course.
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YOU GOT THIS: Student Loan Debt, High Blood Pressure, and a 1995 Toyota Tercel
Are you passionate about learning, teaching, and making less than $15,000 a year? Do you enjoy tweed blazers, crisp autumn afternoons, and stealing lunch from unattended cafeteria trays? Have you ever longed to drive, sleep, and hold your office hours in a 30-year-old car? If so, then a career in academia might be right for you!
“But wait,” you ask, “how can someone like me break into a field as prestigious and rarefied as academia?”
First of all, you need to understand that academics never ask each other questions this directly. If you want to fit in, you should try something like:
“I have a question that is more of a comment.”
Or “I have a two-part question. And one of those parts has two parts, so it’s really three questions.” You should then ask no fewer than seven questions, none of which have anything to do with what the other person was talking about.
Or “I know I was on my phone the whole time you were talking, but I’d still like to deliver a 12-minute, uninterrupted monologue about how everything you said was wrong.”
Second, you should know that this is not how books work. I’m writing these words long before you are reading them, so it’s not like this is a conversation. If you’re just learning this fact about how books work now, you’re probably not cut out for a career in academia. Sorry.
Likewise, if you’re the kind of person who genuinely enjoys a good conversation, you’re probably not going to enjoy working in academia either, unless you think asking “so what are you working on these day” and then ignoring everything the other person says counts as a good conversation. If that sounds like a deal breaker for you, close this book right now, place it back on your bookshelf, and immediately purchase several more copies of this very same book to see if one of them works out better for you.
“But wait,” you ask, “who are you to tell me what career I should choose?”
Good question. Although most books, including this one, feature an author biography that answers all of that, we’ve already established that books are scary and new for you, so I’ll help you out with this. My name is Ross Bullen. I’ve worked at a beer bottle factory, a small-town Renaissance Faire, and a McDonald’s across the street from a maximum-security prison. I’ve also spent the past two decades teaching off – sometimes way off – the tenure-track. And I can attest from personal experience that getting shafted by the Ivory Tower hurts just as badly as it sounds.
For those who don’t know, “tenure-track” means a job where you are expected to receive tenure, i.e., a job for life, unless of course you work in Florida, West Virginia, or [INSERT NAME OF LATEST REPUBLICAN-RULED NIGHTMARE STATE HERE]. The typical tenure-track career path is Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor – at which point you can either become a Dean, a Vice-President, or Jordan Peterson (disclaimer: none of these options are healthy or endorsed by the author). The problem is that the number of tenure- track jobs has been declining steadily for the past 40 years.[2] These days, most professors work jobs with weird titles like LTA (Limited-Term Appointment), VAP (Visiting Assistant Professor), or RACCOONS (Rejected At Community Colleges Or Other Nice Schools). But the majority of college teachers are what’s known as “adjunct professors.”
The original idea behind adjunct professors makes sense: sometimes schools needed an outside expert to teach a class in a niche area, and even though this expert usually had another job, the school still paid them a stipend for their trouble. So far, so good. The problem is that once colleges realized they could hire professors on the cheap, they decided they should always do this. And although a handful of new tenure-track professors get hired each year, most people teaching at colleges in the U.S. (and elsewhere) do so as adjuncts. The typical adjunct professor career path is Adjunct, Adjunct, Unemployed, Subway Sandwich Artistä, Adjunct. Technically, tenure-track professors get paid for research and service in addition to teaching, and adjuncts don’t, but that just means that adjuncts wind up doing research and service for free (how else are you supposed to prove that you’re worthy of a tenure-track job, should one ever become available?).
If all of this sounds bad, that’s because it is. But this book is not called How to Avoid Working in Academia (although if anybody has a book like that, please, for the love of God, send it to me ASAP). It’s How to Succeed in Academia, and that’s just what I’m going to teach you to do. This book will guide you through every step of your academic journey, whether it’s finishing your dissertation on time (or at least before the heat death of the universe), applying for an academic job (by summoning the ancient Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu), or overcoming imposter syndrome (even if you’re a family of raccoons living in a Fjällräven Parka).
So, grab a seat, a nice mug of warm milk, and settle in for some good old fashioned book reading (at least until your shift at Subway starts). You’re an academic now!
How to Succeed in Academia (While Failing at Everything Else) is available now from Humorist Books.
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