On plush academic jobs

reflections from a working-class background

My dad and me as a baby, early 1979

The website First Gen Philosophers recently launched profiles of academics who have a first-generation background, that is, whose parents did not attend university. You can see testimonies by, among others Christine Korsgaard, Kevin Harrelson, and me. Note that not all first-gen people are from the working class, as many middle class jobs did and still do not require higher eduction.

But I am, next to being a first-generation academic, also from a working-class background. My father was a bricklayer, later handyman, and my mother was a homemaker for most of my life.

This background makes that I still struggle with norms in academia. Not in the sense that I don't know them. I think I know them by now. But I had to explicitly look for them, the way an anthropologist tries to uncover the inchoate customs, taboos etc in the cultural she is studying by being immersed in the group that has the culture. It even led me to explicitly try to research, for instance: How strong is prestige bias? Should I with a PhD from a university in Europe with an unpronounceable name (Groningen) bother to send a job application to, say, Princeton? The answer is no. Don't bother. My paper on prestige bias is still very decently cited. So, I know the norms but I struggle to accept and internalize them. Which is why, though I am at the heart of academia, as a tenured prof in a good university, still feel like an outsider.

Overwork: are academic jobs more plush?

Now I want to say something about overwork. One reason I didn't understand just how overworked I was before I developed a serious illness (late-stage cancer) is that I always thought that being an academic is such a plush job.

My father would sometimes leave very early in the morning, and come back in the early afternoon. We could not afford two cars so he had a small, cheaply bought motorcycle that he drove. Then he would lie for hours in the couch, clearly exhausted, reviving in the later afternoon. He would frequently come home with injuries. There's always a risk of things falling on your head (hence hard hats), or of something slipping and cutting your hand etc. Eventually, when he was my age, mid-forties, he had to go for a scan of his back, and the radiologist said “You have the back of someone in his sixties or seventies. Severely worn.”

He saw men die on the job. He once had a serious concussion. I write about these experiences here. It was emotionally straining, and extremely physically taxing.

So, for the longest time, even as I struggled on postdoc positions trying to get something tenure-track, writing deep into the night, writing just the week after my children were born, I still thought: us academics have it good. Academics complaining about workloads are playing the smallest violin (as Glen O’Hara glosses this position in this excellent piece.) And really, we should not feel sad or self-pity at our heavy workload because it's so much worse for working-class people.

Or is it?

My father did have to retire early due to health issues relating to the heavy physical strain. But he would come home from work, and that was it. Work was work. Home was home. He had many interests. Some of these he now discontinued, but they were: black-and-white photography with his own dark room to develop them (a shed). Making cabinets and other small furniture for friends on the weekends. When he ran out of furniture in our house, he began to make them for friends, accepting no payment except what was needed for the raw materials. He had a large vegetable garden that we got substantially much out of, tomatoes, zucchinis, beans, sprouts, potatoes… We had five chickens. We ate the eggs, and also each of the chickens after two years, so they were staggered in age (because egg production goes down). A mature, free range hen tastes very different from whatever is labeled “chicken” in the supermarket. He still loves computers. Makes them himself from parts. We were the first household in our street to have Internet. We also had a tank with tropical fish.

Now, part of our living like this is due to Belgian strong unions. They placed limits on overwork and extra hours, and it meant he could have two paid months off over summer. But unlike in academia, these were genuinely months off, not months to scramble for doing research or extra teaching. And the pay, while not super-generous (as we always scraped by, just about) was still OK, negotiated by the union for the sector. It was livable.

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, I don't want to idealize or romanticize working-class life. It's hard. Working-class people die sooner on average than middle-class people. But I'm now wondering, as I'm contemplating my life up until February when I got diagnosed, is my perpetual overwork really so plush a job?

Racism in working and middle class

There's something else I want to say, at the risk of romanticizing: there was genuine solidarity between these workers. These men had each other's backs. Friends would come over in the weekend. With the cheap motor cycle, for instance, my dad bought it second-hand from an ad. But it stopped working after a week.

A (white) friend from “de bouw” (their slang for the construction workers) came over and looked it over “I'm sorry but you've been conned. This thing is [technical speech relating to motors I can't reiterate]”

My father said “I paid [equivalent of about $200 in money back then] for it. It was all I could afford.”

The friend “Sorry, they still screwed you over. Lemme take this home in my van now and replace some of the parts I have at home and I can make functional for a bit, a year maybe. In the meantime, save up for a better one.”

The little puffing motor cycle held out for seven or so years. And there were many other situations, as well, as when a friend tried to convince my father to take the foreman exam so he could do less physical labor and oversee people, but my father declined.

In spite of all the rhetoric on the white working class, the working class is the most ethnically diverse class, at least in Europe. The white men on the building site there were usually school dropouts. Foreign-born (or second-generation) workers included Turks, Moroccans, Italians, Congolese, eventually also Polish. These workers would mindlessly repeat stereotypical, racist or xenophobic things such as (apologies for reiterating these solely for the purpose of demonstration) “Turks have so many kids so as to live off the child benefits,” “Congolese are untrustworthy,” “Italians are thieves and mobsters” etc. But in spite of that, they worked together. While Congolese were in general untrustworthy, Jeremie here is really a wonderful and trustworthy person. While Turks in general are lazy and workshy, Saleh here is such a hard worker. Italians are thieves, but fortunately you can trust Enzo with anything.

I'm not saying this is ideal! It's bad to say racist stuff. But I often wonder: middle-class people and academics in particular are so concerned with what you say and what sort of ideological position you hold, leading to a lot of psychodrama. But they don't put their actions where their words are. Academia still structurally is very unappealing for people of color, and there is a huge retention loss of female academics of color, Black women in particular. The problem is that the few who make it and manage to get their way into a tenured position, with all the sacrifice it requires and all the rebuilding your entire personality so you are perceived as non-threatening, get burnt out. Moreover, they're often saddled with so much extra committee work because of balance. DEI initiatives only go surface level and often create extra busywork for those people it is intended to serve.

Individual colleagues are lovely, and I have no complaints on that score. Rather, it’s structural: tremendous scarcity in our culture (jobs, journal space etc) demands huge conformity, in the way that is not expected in many other jobs. If you are a Black woman, then you are an asset (in DEI terms) to the university, but does it also allow you to genuinely be a Black woman or do you have to modulate your speech, goals, comportment, everything so it feels acceptable, safe, in the mostly-white environment?

Conclusion: All jobs matter

There's an insidious thought that working-class life is inherently tragic. That people who have such lives are toiling in a meaningless existence, and that we (middle class people) have it so much better. It's a thought a bit akin to the idea that we never had it so good, and that farmers, hunter-gatherers etc of the past all lived a deplorable existence.

But this is not the case. With strong unions that generate enough time off and decent pay, a job that is physically exerting and does objectively lead to more health issues and shorter life span can still be rewarding. I wrote about two factory workers I babysat for here. We should not pat ourselves on the back and say, “Phew at least I escaped [undesirable job]. I have it good.” Rather, we should try to fix the bad aspects of academia. And as a society, make it so that all jobs, no matter how unattractive they look to middle-class people, are livable and provide decent means to sustain yourself and dependents.