Academia looks like it’s dying.
But let’s start much earlier.
Back in the early to mid 2010s, I was a professor. I taught my final class a decade ago, as a part-time Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Iowa. It was my departure from academia. After that, I’d only see it from outside the academic priesthood.
The changes rocking academia in the 2020s would’ve affected me differently had I not left. But hopefully there’s some value in the reflections of one who once knew the world from the inside.
Leaving the Priesthood
At the time, I didn’t know it would be my final class. And honestly, I don’t even know it for sure today. No one banned me from teaching. If the philosophy department asked me to teach a course again, I’d consider doing it. But the end of the fall 2015 semester marked a transition for me - the final stage of a transition that began in early 2013.
In early 2013, I took my first full-time non-academic job after finishing my PhD. Many grad students in those days talked a lot about ‘alt-ac careers,’ or variations on that phrase. But I implemented it.
The job I took was a serious one, not merely a placeholder until I could find a faculty position. It came with a real salary and benefits, comparable to - and probably somewhat better than - what I would’ve found in a tenure-track position.
By 2015, I had completed my transition. And a decade later, I see in academia many of the things I feared at the time.
The job and the new world pushed me to learn how to see academia from the perspective of the rest of the world. And that perspective provides a window into academia’s long decline.
Neoliberalism Finishes the Job on Academia
I spoke with a professor friend a few months ago about recent trends in academia. I told him that it looks like universities want to turn professors into grade school teachers and grade school teachers into McDonald’s cashiers.
He agreed.
But let’s expand on the point. Academia is a key target in neoliberal efforts to finish the job. The 2008 recession and its aftermath - the cauldron in which I finished grad school and hit the job market - drastically cut the number of good faculty jobs.
In the 2020s culture of backlash and creeping authoritarianism, not only do we see job cuts, but we also see shrinking protection for academic freedom and free speech. Combined with this, the federal government is cutting funding, and red state governments are cutting into curriculum decisions as well as decisions about academic structure.
In short, a flurry of forces are combining to destroy the humanities and social sciences. They dismiss these fields as ‘impractical,’ moving some (but hardly all) of their funding to more ‘useful’ fields. They do so even when those fields are neither useful nor meaningfully ‘practical’ (e.g., business).
Professors Caught in the Middle
My outsider’s perspective allows me to see the saddest part of all - professors aren’t even directly involved in the debate. They might think they are. But they’re not.
Professors like to fancy themselves ‘essential’ to ‘democracy.’ At the very least, they see themselves as the target of neoliberalism and Trumpism because they present a danger to those forces. They think Trump hates them because they’re a threat.
But they’re no threat at all. A renewed and powerful academia would present no greater danger to the far right than a fragmented and retreating one.
Here’s a more accurate way to see it. Professors are caught in the middle of a neoliberal economic war and a Trumpist versus radlib culture war.
Neoliberalism target professors for the same basic reason it targets teachers and nurses. These are working-class jobs with comparatively high salaries and job security. To boot, the jobs involve the use of government funding. In the midst of an all-out assault on government funding at the federal and state level, professors became inevitable victims. And the culture of administrative bloat built from the 1990s through the 2010s ensured that professors would lack even the basic institutional clout to fight back.
It’s that topic - administrative bloat - that explains how professors got caught up in the culture wars. Trump’s base resents and despises university administrators even more than professors, especially the ones who staff and lead ‘DEI’ offices. Most DEI offices were, at best, marginally helpful to university communities. They served, more than anything, for the purposes of marketing and legal protection. And their creation came largely at the expense of hiring and retaining faculty.
In this way, faculty got the worst of both ends.
Academia From the Outside
Every once in awhile, I find myself wondering how my academic career would have gone, had I stayed in.
I probably would’ve done fine, in the short term. It wasn’t easy to find a job in the early 2010s. But I had a compelling case - a book contract in hand, and a decent teaching record.
But things look less promising after that.
Would I have gotten fired in the 2020 Covid era disaster? Or would I have been denied tenure in the ‘woke war’ politics of the late 2010s and early 2020s? Or would I have been a casualty of the state budget cuts and department consolidations of 2025?
It’s not easy to build a career as a non-academic. And the same forces of neoliberalism attack jobs in my industry, too. But when I look back at academia a decade later, it seems exhausting in a way that goes beyond my current career path.
Why? I still see in academia the myth of a ‘vocation’ - the notion that one is ‘called’ to one’s field or research topic. Academia still encourages this special attitude, even in an era of undeniable decline and decay.
That’s something I don’t worry about too much these days.
What Comes Next?
With all this said, where’s it all going? What’s going to be left of academia in a few decades, and what will come next?
At the very least, I think we can say there will be a lot less formal, academic work in the humanities. In my own field of philosophy, I suspect the top academic journals will eventually decline in terms of their output.
However, that’s actually not happening right now. Indeed, due to the fierce competition over jobs in the last decade or so, we’re seeing more academic work getting produced than we used to see.
That won’t last. As universities consolidate or eliminate their PhD programs in response to budget cuts and lack of jobs, those numbers will come down.
Beyond that, humanities work will still happen. But it’ll happen increasingly outside of the academy. And, while this might free people up to create things currently suppressed in academia, it will also reduce the overall quality of the work.
I see tough times ahead.
