Academic Waste

Published at Chronicle Vitae on February 23, 2016.

The doctorate becomes not the beginning of an academic career, but the end of one. Ph.D. holders, Bousquet explains, are “the actual shit of the system — being churned inexorably outside: not merely disposable labor but labor that must be disposed of for the system to work.”

Let that sink in: Ph.D.s are academic waste. I’m academic waste flushed out of an academic labor system that I was naïve enough to trust.