A Winner in the Losers’ Bracket

Tales of an Improbable Academic Career

[UPDATE: I’m a little unsure why I wrote this post. I’m sure that it comes across negatively to people who have had an even harder road than me, perhaps rightly so. I also had a hard time doing the kind of reflection I planned to do on my new status, because the process of writing this post naturally dredged up a lot of the less positive emotions. I suppose the issue is that I periodically come across people who assume that I must be happily tenured of long standing, etc., and it feels important to me that people understand my real situation. Forgive my self-indulgence — I promise to vent apocalyptic levels of anger and cynicism at the world in the next post.]

In many ways, my academic career has been a charmed one. Despite choosing a lesser-known school for my PhD and despite graduating into the Global Financial Crisis, I have been continuously academically employed since the fall semester after my graduation. My teaching has been exceptionally varied and interesting—embracing all areas of the traditional liberal arts—and I have been blessed with enviably small class sizes for most of my career. I have had great success in publishing, and my profile as a public intellectual has helped my academic work to reach a larger and more miscellaneous audience than is typical. I have an international network of colleagues and have been an invited lecturer on four continents. If we add that I am living with a wonderful partner in a major urban area we both love, I can only concede that I am living the life I want to live in every important respect.

Yet my career has always been a precarious one, and at decisive points in my trajectory, my career has basically been saved through purely fluke events. My first visiting position is a case in point. I was originally offered some adjunct courses as a partial retirement replacement, and only after some alums raised a stink about the perceived downgrade of the school’s religion offerings did it get converted to a full-time visiting position. And then, after washing out in the almost non-existent job market of the year after the Financial Crisis, I was offered a second year because their new tenure-track hire requested a delayed start—which he didn’t actually turn out to need in practice. I then lucked into a job at Shimer College, an institution I only heard of when I asked aloud on my blog whether there were any Chicago-area jobs I was missing and I received an email from an alum who said I should apply because my blog was popular among the students. The independent Shimer struggled financially, until being rescued by North Central College, which acquired the school in 2017 in an act of generosity that I still don’t fully understand and that certainly no one could have predicted.

And throughout that rocky trajectory, I have suffered nearly continuous anxiety, at times punctuated by humiliation. I loved the independent Shimer College and fully intended to devote my entire life to it, but working there was a constant struggle because I wondered every year—realistically, even every semester—whether it was going to close. The merger removed that worry, but our integration was anything but smooth and was accompanied by a demotion to “visiting” faculty—in the very year when I was set to have been promoted to associate at the independent Shimer. Only in the last few years were we granted ongoing (though non-tenure-track) contracts and offered the opportunity for promotion and official institutional recognition.

But once our status was regularized, things started happening fast. In 2024, I received an institutional award for exceptional scholarly research—the first award of any kind that I had ever received in my career. In August 2025, I received promotion to associate professor (though not tenure, which I will almost certainly never have)—the first promotion I had ever received in well over a decade in higher education. And just last week, I was notified that I was approved for a sabbatical leave in the 2027-28 school year—the first teaching release I have ever received.

As these opportunities got closer and closer, I was more and more tormented by the delay and more and more humiliated by my lack of status and official recognition. I complained more than was prudent about being trapped at the entry-level assistant level for over a decade, when my record of professional accomplishment far exceeded any reasonable expectation for full professor. For many years, I had been asking my hosts at invited lectures not to share my faculty rank in their introduction, as I found it embarrassing to have been downgraded to the status of a first- or second-year professor just as Neoliberalism’s Demons was dramatically raising my profile. I was consumed with all the broken promises and personal sleights that had gotten me there, and often resentful of colleagues who seemed to be “lapping” me professionally despite having done much less. It wasn’t that I thought I “coulda been a contender” in the sense of getting a top-tier job and all the privileges that came with it. Shimer College didn’t have tenure and would never have the resources to grant me a sabbatical, and I was content with that. But being at an institution where such things were the norm and expectation and being arbitrarily deprived of them felt intolerable.

And then, suddenly, within the space of one year, it was solved. After more than 15 years of anxiety and lucky breaks, I had finally attained the almost impossible dream of a secure job at a nice stable liberal arts college, with some degree of support for my research. This long and improbable odyssey has culminated in what should be (but is no longer) a normal academic career, and the sheer dumb luck of it all has motivated me to try to enjoy what I have even more fully. I worried that my bitterness might outlive its occasion, but it’s amazing what a positive change in one’s material conditions can do.