Leaving academia: The harm and heartbreak of precarity

Dr Una McIlvenna, ANU

The call came a few days before Christmas. It was my Head of School. ‘This is going to be a difficult conversation’, she said. And then my world caved in.

The permanent senior lecturer position that the University had created around my teaching and research, the job that would have given me and my family security at the end of my 5 year contract, had gone to someone else.

As of 31 January I would be unemployed. Anyone who knows the job market in Australian academia, especially in the Humanities, knows that there are no other jobs, and that therefore my academic career had effectively ended.

The fear that every precarious worker knows only too well had materialised for me in spectacular fashion.

You might have read this and thought, ‘Well, perhaps she wasn’t a stellar enough candidate and the better person got the job. Perhaps she hadn’t published enough, or in journals that weren’t prestigious enough. Perhaps she wasn’t perceived as internationally accomplished, of high enough calibre for a world-class university.’

Such assumptions would be understandable, but they would be wrong. You might also think, ‘Well, these days one needs to understand the global nature of the academic job market. Why doesn’t she just seek for employment abroad?’ To respond to what seem like reasonable queries, my journey through academia will be illuminating.

I completed my PhD at a Russell Group university, Queen Mary University of London, at the end of 2010. I then emigrated with my husband and two young children (1 and 4 – yes, I had two babies while doing my PhD) to Australia, where I knew no one in academia. Despite this, I managed to be awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship a few months later with the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions in Sydney.

During those three years, I published a monograph of my PhD research as well as multiple articles on my new project on execution ballads. Having a research-only position for that time was crucial in allowing me to get enough published to make me competitive on the job market: I even published this new research in Past & Present, the top-ranked journal in my field.

But as anyone in a fixed term position knows, no matter how well you’re doing, you never stop checking the job listings. You never stop applying for jobs. The dread of ending one position without another one to move to never leaves you. I probably spent as much time looking and applying for jobs in my final year of that contract than I did researching – imagine if the contract had only been for a year! And as I drew closer to the end of my contract the lack of jobs in Australia was making that dread feel like a ball of concrete in my insides.

Then a one-year position came up in London, back in the department where I’d done my PhD: replacement cover for 12 months for someone who’d won a prestigious research grant. Unlike in Australia, where one is lucky to get a fractional contract to cover the teaching of those who secure grants, in the UK full-time contracts are created to entirely replace them.

These not only allow the grant-holder to focus on the research they applied to do, but also allow early career researchers a measure of security, and to gain experience as a fully recognised member of the department.

And, importantly, the full year contract means that the research you do outside of the teaching terms is recognised and reimbursed – needless to say, one still has to pay rent in the summer!

But the big stumbling block was my family: would they be prepared to uproot themselves only a few years after we’d emigrated to Australia? Luckily my husband viewed it as an adventure and was positive about it – it’s only for a year, we said. We put our belongings in storage and moved the family from Sydney back to London. I moved from a Group of Eight university to a Russell Group institution, with a monograph and multiple publications under my belt, including multiple prestigious journal articles. I was doing well.

So well, in fact, that when the one-year contract ended I had already secured another position, at the University of Kent – and this time it was a permanent position! I should have been thrilled: from what I was told it was the only permanent position in my field in the country that year. But the salary was dramatically lower than I’d been earning (even after negotiation), and the commute to work was two hours each way. I left home in the dark and returned in the dark. My colleagues were wonderful, but the strain was too much on my family. Plus we’d never intended to stay in the UK: our plan, our dream was always to return to Australia.

A year into my new job, a dream job appeared in Melbourne (remember, you never stop checking the job listings). A major philanthropic gift meant that there were jobs in Australia once again. That universities need to rely on philanthropy, rather than the government, to provide jobs in academia is a sad indictment of our current political system, but I was excited about the prospect. I was shortlisted and even flown from London to Melbourne for the interview. But when a month passed without any news I tried to let my children down easily: they wouldn’t be returning home for a while.

And then, over a month after my interview, an extraordinary phone call: I had been successful after all (their first choice had been offered a permanent contract elsewhere and so had turned down the offer), and would start a five year contract. That the UK had just voted for Brexit made our decision to get out of the UK an easy one for my colleagues at Kent to understand.

Once again, we packed our belongings and emigrated for a third time to another continent. Thus, I would work at four different universities in a space of six years, and would emigrate three times in the same space of time. But I was happy to make these sacrifices: they were investments in my career, and ultimately my sacrifices would be rewarded, right?

I’m often asked about the impact on my children of emigrating multiple times. But in fact they’re the easy ones: when they’re young they make friends quickly and that’s all that matters for them. It is your partner, the one who has established a career, a business, and friendships in the place you’ve chosen to live, who suffers the most when your academic career requires you to move once again.

I was fortunate that my husband was willing to do this, but it puts an enormous stress on your partner and on your relationship. Those who have never known the itinerant, precarious life that is so common for those chasing success in academia these days will never understand this.

Despite this, I was viewed as one of the great success stories of the ECR world. I was asked to give talks on ‘how to succeed in academia’. I spoke to the History Postgraduate Association’s annual dinner, giving fresh-faced PhD students advice on how to navigate the treacherous waters of academia, offering them insight into the unwritten rules that govern so much of what often feels like a secret society. I had managed to do well, securing one full-time position right after the other, and I wasn’t going to pull up the ladder behind me. I would share my wisdom so that others could find success too.

I also threw myself into being a great colleague. I organised Staff Writing Boot Camps twice a year where academics from any discipline could come together for a week of uninterrupted writing. I’d organise a classroom for a week during the holidays, and act as friendly disciplinarian, making sure everyone stayed in their chairs typing. The volume of research output from those weeks was astonishing, and I had plenty of Boot Camp alumni who would immediately sign up for the next one. Because being an academic should be about collegiality and loyalty, right?

Five years was, comparatively speaking, a luxuriously long term for an academic contract: I even decided – for once – to turn my job alert emails off. But, despite a full teaching workload, my publication profile never dipped. I completed my second monograph, this time with Oxford University Press, and continued to publish articles and chapters in prestigious journals and presses.

Because as much as I enjoyed not having to constantly apply for jobs, I knew that I could never rest on my laurels; the fixedterm job would eventually end like all the others and I would have to continually strive to prove that I was producing world-class research. And it worked: I got promoted to Senior Lecturer. I was doing really well.

In fact, I was about to apply for promotion to Associate Professor – my performance in every area was agreed by my superiors to be easily within a Level D range. But in the end I was advised not to: a permanent position had been agreed at Level C and would be advertised soon.

The job asked for research in early modern history, and teaching in the subjects that I currently taught. But it was to be advertised externally, I was told. Despite the fact that my colleagues universally wanted me to stay, creating a position that looked ‘just like me’, and that the University had agreed to fund it, I could not have my contract extended. It had to be a ‘genuine external search’.

Months went by before it was advertised, and multiple subsequent delays meant that I was sitting the final section of the interview just before Christmas. As it turned out, there was only one other shortlisted candidate.

I will never know what happened during the discussion when the decision was made. I know that three of the committee were my own colleagues in the department. I will never know what the justification was; I will never know who fought for me. I will never know how those people, my own colleagues, could decide that it was better for the University to give a permanent job to someone who already had a permanent job in Melbourne and make me unemployed at 50.

To say I feel betrayed is an understatement. My family were devastated too: they were convinced that I’d done enough to allow us to finally stay in the place where we’d started to put down roots. I spent Christmas and January in a well of anger and grief at losing the career I had invested so much in. I had been wrong all along: my sacrifices would not be rewarded. The collegiality was irrelevant. There was no loyalty.

On the final day of my contract I emailed the department to let them know I was leaving. Several of my colleagues had still not been informed – there had been no formal announcement. They were just as shocked as those who had already found out.

I then tweeted about my situation, mostly to inform friends overseas about what had happened. To my surprise the thread instantly went viral, and I was flooded with messages, both in the replies and in every inbox I have, of support, of disbelief, and of anger at what had happened. Several said that if someone like me couldn’t secure a permanent job in academia, then what hope did they have?

Incredibly, I was overwhelmed with private messages, many from people I had never met, relating their own stories of how they had been used and abused in the academy. Many were heartbreaking: while my five years in Melbourne were delightful, surrounded by warm, friendly colleagues and a culture where my research was praised and supported, many others have known nothing but exploitation and abuse. I also heard from senior and retired colleagues, many of whom expressed their frustration that little about hiring practices had changed since their day.

Sadly, many of those who contacted me told me how ‘brave’ I was, how I’d shown such ‘courage’ in coming forward with my story. But why should it be considered courageous to simply state what had happened?

I had just said that I was leaving academia because there were no jobs, because that is the reality. What state is academia in that we can’t admit reality for fear of retribution?

Years of defunding by the Federal Government have resulted in a sector that has been decimated. But these problems are also global: the Facebook group that I joined for those leaving academia, ‘The Professor Is Out’, has exploded in recent months, with countless members from all over the world, relating heartbreaking stories of endless precarious adjunct and casual labour, financial exploitation, and a system that seems to only favour a small elite. The academy is in trouble.

In my four universities in six years, I witnessed exactly the same phenomena in each one: the library was effectively rebuilt, with most books moved off-site and most of the librarians made redundant; multiple billion-dollar construction projects were completed on campus (usually for the Faculties of Business, Law or Medicine); huge swathes of academics were made redundant despite massive campaigns of industrial action; casual working practices expanded exponentially to become the dominant model for university labour; and the Vice-Chancellors each earned over a million dollars a year. Maybe that’s a success story for some. It isn’t how I see things.

So what happens to me now? Since tweeting about my situation, I have been contacted with multiple offers: I was immediately contacted by a literary agent who wants me to send them a book proposal for a popular audience, and I’ve been asked to write multiple paid articles and to give paid public talks and podcasts. Two other universities have also approached me to collaborate with them. It would seem most likely that I’ll become a freelance writer and historian.

There is a vibrant popular appetite for the knowledge and skills that I have, free from the bureaucracy of university administration. It feels precarious, yes, but as an academic in our current era that is the only feeling I have ever known. ◆

Dr Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Early Modern Studies at ANU. She is a writer and historian specialising in the history of crime and punishment, and the tradition of singing the news.