When I was in high school, I had an imaginary “Council of Wisdom.” The council included intellectual figures I found inspiring and who I pretended to take on as mentors by reading their work. I started with a handful and kept expanding to ten, twelve, fifteen members. I’d doodle in class and draft philosophers and writers into the council, sometimes knocking one or two off in the process. One time I told a friend about my venerable Council of Wisdom. She mocked my list, pointing out that virtually all the members were white men. My most “diverse” member was Flannery O’Connor, a white disabled woman. In truth, I harbored unconscious reservations that a kid who looked like me could enter the rarefied air of intellectuals.

Adults started telling me about a place where I should go, a place where my curiosity would be rewarded. “Think about college,” my high school guidance counselor said dispassionately. “You have a decent reading and writing score on the SAT as a Latino male.” The heady interim pastor of the Baptist church I attended told me to stay away from fundamentalist Christian colleges. He had a Ph.D. and always welcomed my critical questions about faith after Sunday services. Whenever he talked about his “dissertation” and “grad school,” his voice took on a warm, oh-those-were-the-days tone. What he discussed—Karl Barth or the “Death of God” thesis—would often fly over my 16-year-old brain, but I was mesmerized by the image of a place where people could caress ideas day and night without inhibition. It hadn’t exactly worked out for him. The pastor lamented his bad luck with securing teaching positions. But there was an unspoken hope that I might have the chops to go on, not only to college, but to graduate school and then on to discussing these types of things forever.

If I wanted to spend the rest of my life around ideas and books, and around other people who cared about these things, there seemed to be a clear track. I started to follow it until the path no longer made sense to me and I felt more like a moth flying toward a shiny light that would obliterate me.

When I was completing my master’s degree in divinity between 2013-2017, I found a website called “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School.” Reading it became my preferred mode of procrastination. Why stress out about a paper or exam if my life no longer needed to revolve around producing the perfect grades and CV for acceptance into a top Ph.D. program? I could beat the whole rotten system before it destroyed me! I’d quit before even applying. My dream for an intellectual life would have to survive—if it could—beyond some academic fairytale.

The blog ruthlessly laid out in a series of posts all the reasons why one shouldn’t pursue a doctorate in the humanities or social sciences. Some of the reasons were obvious to me, like 8. There are very few jobs or 16. Where you live will be chosen for you. No offense to the states of Iowa or Nebraska, but I didn’t want to feel forced to move there if those were the only places that offered me a tenure-track professorship. And as someone who had tasted the difference between writing online for a general audience and presenting an academic paper to a room full of eight people with perhaps three interested in what you’re saying, I was sadly reminded that in academia 88. You are not paid for what you write and 89. Virtually no one reads what you write. Then, there were other reasons I hadn’t thought about before such as 44. Advisers can be tyrants or 45. Nice advisers can be worse.

When I was enrolled in my master’s program, I was in a serious relationship with someone on a totally different career track. So, thankfully, I could avoid reason 48. The two-body problem, which describes the improbability of two partnered Ph.D.’s both finding academic jobs within commuting distance of each other. But I was still potentially subject to 58. The one-body problem, which describes the difficulties faced by a couple where one person pursues a Ph.D. I was already tired of doing long-distance with my fiancée who lived in New York while I was doing my master’s in North Carolina. She was chasing her own dreams in a competitive profession that, unlike mine, was more likely to yield solid opportunities on the horizon. Would I try to rip her away from that or reduce our future marriage to semester breaks and a few weekends together a year, all for the sake of me resentfully grading student papers out of a decrepit van while making below minimum wage?

These are the thoughts that raced through my head. I knew the blog presented academia in the worst light. That’s what I wanted to see. I remember few students and professors around me having honest conversations about the dirty underbelly to the detached debates taking place in neogothic buildings overlooking green, immaculately manicured quads. In my world, people were applying to Ph.D.’s left and right. The problem of what to do with a humanities education was solved by getting more humanities education. The problem of what to do about your student debt was solved by becoming a student again and putting your loans in deferment. Still, I looked up to some of the well-positioned professors in my school. I was once like some of my googly-eyed classmates who sat enraptured, wanting to emulate the figures behind the lectern. But then I started to see them as the intellectual 1% who happened to win a lottery.

There were also costs for the ones who actually made it, costs that were compounded by discrimination. I was surprised when I heard that one of the superstar professors at my institution who was Black had bigoted white students who regularly complained to administration that he was unfit to teach their intro classes. He was one of the gentlest souls I’d ever met—even if you properly weighed my standards as a New Yorker living in the South. His work was winning awards and sending shockwaves within the field of Christian theology. He mentored students from all backgrounds and often sacrificed his time performing administrative duties for the school. I imagined that his academic co-workers would have his back. But all I can say for sure is that before I graduated, he was gone from the institution. Several brilliant Black professors, who had turned the school into a vibrant destination for students like me, were all gone in the span of a few years.

I saw, through how others were treated, that having a Ph.D. couldn’t protect me from people who held racist assumptions about my intellectual inferiority or who saw me as a threat. At the same time, I witnessed students and professors in academia lie about their identity or inflate their background and connections to particular communities for the sake of personal advancement or a weird inner rush. Somehow all of this could co-exist. Real discrimination persisted alongside rampant ethnic fraud.

91. Downward mobility is the norm. For the longest time, it seemed that getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor was the only way to fulfill my desires for intellectual life. The idea that getting more education would automatically lead to a better life made sense within my immigrant household. Many first-generation students believe advanced degrees lead to abundant opportunities. Consequently, the economic realities of advanced degrees may come as a shock. As one Ph.D. candidate recently put it, “On my darkest days, I’m left with the feeling that no matter how hard I try to blaze a trail for myself and other first-generation students, the work I’ve been doing could lead me straight back to a life of little career opportunity and of economic instability—a life from which I once was sure higher education would rescue me.”

63. Your friends pass you by. I think of my old childhood friend Marvin. We grew up in the same neighborhood. The one where my mom taught me to keep my head in books and my butt in church pews and away from MS13 and Bloods and Crips. The intellectual curiosity I displayed through my questions about the Bible in Sunday school signaled to my elders that education was meant to be my salvation. My friend Marvin wasn’t necessarily lost in the streets, but his thing was cars. His eyes would light up in a driveway while talking about different models and rims. When I went away to a liberal arts college in Michigan, he stayed behind and kept doing stuff with cars. When I went to North Carolina for my master’s degree, he was making bank as a certified mechanic at a dealership. Next thing you know, I had accumulated all this debt and I’m pretty sure I saw him post something on Facebook about buying a house.

“Congratulations, you’re now—what I like to call—a thousandaire,” the financial aid adviser told me as I stood in front of her desk. I’ll never forget the moment. I wasn’t sure if she was throwing subtle shade at me or trying to inject some humor into an otherwise sad situation. There had been an issue with the federal loan I was trying to receive that semester. But now that the issue was addressed, my bank account would go from several hundreds of dollars to several thousands. I wasn’t at immediate risk of overdrafting again. I was a thousandaire.

54. “What do you do for a living?” In addition to the financial risks of non-wealthy people going for a Ph.D., there can be isolation in other people not understanding what this entails. “Danny, I can see you being a professor teaching kids in colleges,” my older sister who is a public elementary school teacher would tell me. “You would be so good at it!” She meant it with love. I thought, and still think, that I would enjoy it. But it was becoming increasingly hard for me see the traditional Ph.D. route as logistically possible without embracing extreme personal suffering. I forgave the relatives or friends who innocently asked me why I couldn’t try to become a professor as if it were as easy as applying to work at the local mall. It wasn’t worse than the naïve hope I used to hold.

Like many of my academically inclined peers, I used to think my goal was humble. I’m not asking for much, like teaching at Harvard or Yale or appearing on MSNBC. I would be happy to teach at a no-name school. I don’t have to redefine the field or publish tons of books. Even my personal research time could suffer. I just want to be surrounded by thoughtful colleagues, wear tweed jackets, talk about my favorite books and topics, and host adoring students for dinner conversations at my modest home while I have health insurance and the promise of employment for the foreseeable future. That’s all! Of course, I wasn’t the only one thinking this. And then I read that only an estimated 7 percent of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences get a tenure-track job. That’s all.

78. It takes a toll on your health. When people ask me today why I didn’t go on for a Ph.D., I typically say that I wanted to support my partner and that I wanted to continue to write and engage ideas within a broader context outside the ivory tower. That’s true. What I less often share is that I was also afraid of what pursuing a Ph.D. would do to my health. I already saw what a master’s degree could do to me. At one point, I had nearly dropped out of the program. Going straight into a master’s after undergrad, I was feeling burnt out. I was homesick. I lived with a housemate who I didn’t like, who didn’t clean, and whose room gave off a strong stench of what I imagine Doritos Cool Ranch would smell like if they grew wet and moldy. I missed my girlfriend/soon-to-be fiancée, proceeded to tell one of my friends at school that I had a crush on her, and then told my girlfriend who almost broke up with me. When I went to the campus counseling center, the psychologist asked me: “And when your mind drifts off into space during lecture, where does it go?” I replied, “Nowhere. I feel unmotivated, which is weird because I’m such a theology nerd. I feel nothing.” My grades weren’t suffering. I could still do the work. It was about what was happening to me.

A dean kindly accepted my request for a leave of absence. But I had to meet with someone in the registrar’s office who tried to talk me out of leaving. When she realized I wasn’t changing my mind, she said abruptly: “To be clear: You are, during your leave, by no means, allowed onto the premises of the school and you are prohibited from using the library.” I scrunched my face. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to be all the way in New York.”

Before I left campus, I had one more meeting with a professor I had long admired. He was one of the main reasons why I chose this school. When I emailed him as an undergrad, he wrote back and he even signed a book for me when he gave a visiting lecture in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Inside the book flap, he wrote: “To a great, young intellectual.” I stepped into his office in my jeans and hoodie trying my best to hold back tears. Here I was, yet another student eating up the time of a faculty member encumbered with unrealistic and unpaid mentoring expectations. I was slipping into the thing I thought students should never do: treating professors as their psychologists.

He listened to me as he sat stoically with his shiny bald head and circle-rimmed glasses. When he began to talk about his own journey and the conceit of other theologians, he burst into a deep belly laugh. It was a puzzling laugh that I had heard in his lectures. It’s like he was cracking himself up. The students, the audience—we weren’t in on the joke but along for the ride. He’d interrupt himself with laughs and then turn serious on a dime. I rocked back in a super comfortable chair in his office, sobbing: “I don’t know if I’ll amount to anything. What if I’m never a success?” He looked at me and said, “Daniel, you already are one.”

During my leave of absence, I moved back into my parent’s house on Long Island. I struggled with bouts of anger and finding a job. Nobody was getting back to me. Finally, I got called in for an interview at Barnes & Noble. I was excited. I’d get to spend time around books and could expertly organize their religion and philosophy section! Or so I thought. When I sat down for my interview with a store manager, she told me: “I’m sorry kid. The only opening we have at this store is for barista at the café.” I pleaded, “But I can eventually transition to the book floor?” “It depends,” she said. Then, the manager looked down at my resume again and mentioned my philosophy major. “Oh, you’re going to fit in just fine! I have a master’s degree in English literature. And Jolene and Terrence at the café are also humanities.”

After a year in New York, I went back to North Carolina to finish my master’s. But my mentality had changed. I was no longer dead set on going for a Ph.D. I was going to make school work for me rather than sacrifice all of myself at its altar. I started to blog and write articles on the side. I went to see a career counselor on campus who told me he rarely saw anyone from my program. I graduated with honors. I got married. I worked odd jobs while freelancing and slowly transitioned into writing and editing. I decided not to apply for a Ph.D, year after year.

Dear reader, this is the part of the essay where I’m supposed to tell you that I overcame my struggles. That I walked away from academia and successfully rebuilt my life around my passions, and you can too! This is where I could hyperlink you to an inspirational Instagram post that amounts to me screaming “LOOK AT ME NOW.” But that would be a simplistic narrative. If you know anything about the state of journalism and writerly compensations, it’s more like I escaped one fire only to jump into another one. The reality is that I still don’t know what will come of the path I’ve taken. I have my first book contract. But I’m not sure where my future paychecks will come from once the advance runs out. I’m lucky to have kind editors and various kinds of thinkers—even academics who overlook my lack of “the three magical letters”—who see me and value my work.

“I’m not going for a Ph.D.,” I’ve told my wife when she’s caught me scrolling yet again through academic departmental websites on my laptop, looking up doctoral requirements and the specializations of different faculty members. “Sure! I don’t know why you have to keep telling me so much.” She rolls her eyes at me and walks away. If I’ve sounded defensive when I’ve kept saying that I’m not going for a Ph.D., it’s because I must keep convincing myself. When Kendrick Lamar says, “Satan wanna put me in a bow tie,” I take that to mean that I must resist the temptation of applying for Ph.D. programs and finding my validation in becoming a professor.

Don’t get me wrong. I still read and cite plenty of scholars. I’m constantly engaging with professors on social media. If I were offered a reasonable teaching post in the future in a pleasant city, I wouldn’t necessarily turn it down. And for full disclosure: I would like to thank New York University for underwriting the Revealer, which is allowing me to publish these words. Academia is still a part of me. Far be it from me to act like some supposed radical influencer-thought-leader who says fuck the classist academy all the while accepting most of their speaking engagements on college campuses.

With that said, treating the Ph.D. as the only respectable route for pursuing one’s intellectual hunger is an approach that is setting too many people up for failure. Yes, ideally, it would be nice to live in a society that invested more in education and forgave student debt. We should strive for that. I could get on some secularized pulpit and preach to you about how the sin is capitalism, how the savior is democratic socialism, while making an altar call for everyone to organize and unionize. I applaud those values. All well and good. But what about the here and now? Until the revolution comes, or the Democratic Party gets its shit together, what should aspiring intellectuals do? In the longer history of the human species, would-be philosophers and storytellers had to express themselves in whatever ways they could, right?

Now that I’m 30 years old, I’m seeing more peers of my era starting to graduate with Ph.D.’s. Many of them won’t get tenure-track jobs. But some will and a few already have. I’m genuinely happy for them—or at least, I’m trying to be. I hope that others also find the teaching posts of their dreams. I can’t pretend that my own path is a prescription for others. But the exceptional cases are just that. It’s dangerous for an overwhelming number of people to continue to believe that they will make a living as professors.

In an old episode of The Simpsons, Marge tells Bart: “Don’t make fun of grad students, they just made a terrible life choice.” The episode continues to a scene depicting impoverished grad students flocking to eat breadcrumbs that Lisa is throwing out to geese at a park. I used to laugh so hard when I found this clip on YouTube. But it’s become harder for me to take it as an exaggeration after I learned about the case of Margaret Mary Vojtko, “an adjunct language instructor at Duquesne University who, despite twenty-five years of service, could not afford health care or even electricity,” and who died “at the age of eighty-three, having never earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year.” I learned about the harrowing case of Thea Hunter, a pioneering scholar who graduated from Columbia University but got trapped in an adjunct cycle that destroyed her. I read about the growth of “Alt-Ac” (Alternative Academic Careers) and “Post-Academic” literature. I see novelists depicting adjunct hell. I recall the man with a Ph.D. at my local church in North Carolina who asked the community to pray for his job search because he didn’t know how he was going to feed his kids.

Herb Childress eloquently describes one version of the heartache that’s happening to so many others:

“The grief of not finding a home in higher ed — of having done everything as well as I was capable of doing, and having it not pan out; of being told over and over how well I was doing and how much my contributions mattered, even as the prize was withheld — consumed more than a decade. It affected my physical health. It affected my mental health. It ended my first marriage. It reopened all my fears from childhood about abandonment and rejection. It was a chasm into which I fell during my job search of 1996-97, and from which I didn’t really fully emerge until I left higher education altogether, in 2013.”

We don’t yet know what the full fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic will be on the already bleak academic job market, and even on vulnerable faculty who have jobs. But what we do know is that declining birth rates are projected to lead to a dramatic falloff of college-age youth starting in the mid-2020s. (This is a projection that hasn’t factored in the future impact of declining births during the pandemic.) Schools that are already gutting their humanities departments, such as the University of Vermont which completely eliminated its religion department, will likely continue to make cuts in the future— if the schools don’t merge or close altogether. Considering all these conditions, I believe it is irresponsible, unconscionable, and downright cruel to provide false hope or bad advice that greases people’s lives as they slide down directly into a wreckage.

When I was on a writing retreat before the pandemic, I zealously talked about the “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School” blog with other attendees. One person looked down to the ground as if I was out to heartlessly stomp on people’s dreams. Another attendee used their phone to find the blog and squealed that the last entry stopped at 98. (98. Your family pays a price.). Maybe the author had succumbed to the horrendous conditions of academia and failed to outrun its shadow before completing the blog? As I write this, the anonymous author of the blog hasn’t posted another entry since 2018. I honestly don’t know what happened to the author. But I pray that they are staying alive and carving out their own path. Most of us have no other choice.

I recently moved to Houston, Texas for my wife’s work. In our apartment, I’ve thrown all my books—the ones not in storage—into a few bookcases from Ikea and have yet to organize them. “For in much wisdom is much grief,” an ancient writer once said. “And he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” As I stare at my collection, I think back to my training, to my old classes and conversations, which seem to no longer have any living context. I can’t let go entirely. All of this must have some use, I want to believe. My parents sacrificed so much to give me a chance. I don’t want to waste anything.

 

Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for the Revealer. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners. Writing with a focus on religion, race, and history, his work has appeared in publications such as Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post.