(My path to becoming a high school teacher has been atypical, and I wanted to share my story for those in academia who might be looking for alternative careers. This is the first part of what may become a series, which I hope to fill out over time.)
I started teaching high school in the Fall of 2016 at a mid-sized, small-town school in New Hampshire. I am now finishing up my fourth year at the school, teaching remotely in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Teaching remotely has led to a lot of personal reflection on teaching, higher ed, academia, and what the future holds for education in general. It has also led to a lot of reflection on the winding career path that has led me to where I am today, which, I will state at the outset, is exactly where I want to be.
My path into academia was very typical. I got a job working in a lab as an undergraduate at the University of Richmond (I studied tadpole anatomy), and used that as a launching pad into a Ph.D. program studying frog evolution at Ohio University (incidentally, recent news about layoffs at OU were a major factor leading to all of this reflection). Graduate school flew by, I was able to publish most of my dissertation prior to defending my Ph.D., and that put me in a good position to apply for jobs right out of school.
My goal was to get a professor position at a small college in New England – my wife is from Maine, I’m from Connecticut, and we were expecting our first child right around the time that I finished my Ph.D., so being near family was important. As a graduate teaching assistant at OU, I had fallen in love with teaching, so small liberal arts colleges seemed like the best fit, despite the skepticism of some (though not all) of my academic mentors. Achieving that level of institutional and geographical specificity in the academic job market can be exceedingly difficult, but the effort I put into publishing while a student paid off, and I was offered a tenure-track job at a small college in New Hampshire in 2003. The salary offered was not great, but it was the right kind of school in an ideal location. My wife also had a job offer nearby (she worked for the Forest Service) that would pay considerably more than what I was making, so we would be financially secure. I accepted the offer.
I was young when I started my job as a college professor – 28 to be exact – and I looked it. I’ll never forget when I went to one of the admin offices at the college for the first time the summer before I started and they asked if I was there for the summer camp! Being confused for a student was commonplace those first few years.
Teaching at the college was great at first – I enjoyed my job, I had a great group of colleagues both inside and outside my department (both faculty and staff – this is still the thing I miss most about that job), and I developed strong relationships with my students. With a growing family at home, the security of tenure was a priority. My goals were to teach well and publish enough to achieve tenure. I was well aware that although quality teaching was valued, the latter was really what mattered for earning tenure and promotion at my school (as is typical for most colleges/universities – that’s a topic for another day), even if the teaching was what I enjoyed the most. I put in my seven years, earned tenure smoothly, and also earned promotion to associate professor.
It was during the latter portion of my time as a college professor that a level of dissatisfaction began to set in, and when I think back on it, I think it really started with an administrative change that took the college in a direction different from what it had previously been (a small liberal arts college that valued teaching). The economic downturn in 2008 was a difficult time, especially for a college with a small endowment that relied heavily on tuition dollars to keep things running. I understood the need for salary freezes and the like, but what grew out of that time was a businessification of the institution. Our new executive vice president began cutting costs all over, and pushing hard for grant-writing as a way of increasing revenue. We were not a research institution, and did not have the personnel or infrastructure to support this type of approach.
The biggest issues I had were on the teaching side. Funds were not being allocated to maintain a level of quality in teaching that I felt we owed to students who were paying a lot of money for their education. Expectations to hire staff part-time without benefits made things very difficult – we either had to compromise on quality of education, or work doubly hard to train people to teach labs (we could not rely on grad students since we did not have a grad program). We did find a lot of good people to do those jobs, but it was hard to keep them – low pay and no benefits is not a recipe for a high retention rate.
Other sources of dissatisfaction were more general and dealt with patterns I was observing across higher ed (this was maybe 2010-2013). Tuition rates were skyrocketing, making college untenable for some kids. Reliance on adjuncts was increasing, not heavily yet at my school, but I saw it only as a matter of time. Adjuncts are cheap labor for colleges, and it’s an exploitative practice that dangles the hope of an ever-rarer tenure-track job on academics in order to get them to accept low pay and poor working conditions (e.g., no benefits, offices, job security, etc.). Money was being funneled into programs to attract more students (aka tuition dollars), often at the expense of the academic side. Administrative bloat was becoming more and more common. I had genuine concerns about the future of higher ed.
I think what finally did me in was becoming department chair my last two years. I had a great department in that none of us wanted to become chair (nobody lusted for that administrative power position), so I took my turn when it came. I had never enjoyed admin work – anyone who has worked in higher ed knows that committee work can be onerous, and that a year spent working really hard on a report that gets binned because someone higher up wasn’t happy with it is an all too common experience. Dipping my toes deeper into the admin side of higher ed as a department chair did me in. I hated it. I began to seriously think about getting out.
Though tenure is the ultimate goal in academia, one of the hardest things about being a tenured professor is that you feel locked-in. It’s not easy to change jobs in academia unless you are a high-profile researcher moving up to a more prestigious school. My experience, at least at my school, is that tenured profs don’t leave. You’re there for life unless you really mess up and they have cause to get rid of you. What’s more, I was so entrenched in the ivory tower that I couldn’t imagine any job options outside of my academic bubble. I had thought about teaching high school on occasion, but the idea terrified me. Five classes a day? The horror! Teenagers? Terrifying! And I will be the first to admit that the academic ego can make a lot of profs look down on high school teachers as second-rate educators (this could not be more wrong…).
What allowed me to escape was a hobby that became a second job. I started a blog in 2009 (I think that was the year), mainly as a place to write about a new passion – running. A number of my students at the college would run the Boston Marathon each year, and I decided that I needed to get back in shape, so I started running with a goal of eventually completing a marathon. Writing about my development as a runner became a passion as well, and it also became an academic pursuit. I started writing about running science, fell in love with scientific communication, and even began to do research on running (which led to two peer-reviewed journal articles and a book). The blog became more and more popular, and the income that started to flow in via ad revenue started to grow. It eventually grew to the point where I was making more off of the website than I was as a professor. I had my out.
Making the decision to leave academia when I was a tenured department chair was agonizing. I had more or less reached the top of my career ladder, with only a full-professorship left to go, and I was under 40. But the thought of spending the rest of my life in a job that was becoming increasingly frustrating kept nagging at me. And I had legitimate concerns about the future of higher ed. I was also eager to have free-reign to work on my writing, so I sent a letter to my Dean resigning my position at the end of the 2012-2013 school year.
My leap from the ivory tower was both terrifying and euphoric. For about 12 months I was living the dream – setting my own schedule, working from home, making a solid and growing income. But I always had this little voice trying to tell me that what I had done was crazy, that I made a terrible mistake. My leap from the tower inevitably led to a collision with the ground. I hit the ground hard, and for a time I never thought I’d be able to stand back up.
End Part I