I’ve told this story before, and will undoubtedly tell it again, but when I was a junior at Williams, I had a meeting with my academic advisor, Prof. Kevin Jones, who said “So, you’re going to graduate at the end of next year. Do you have any ideas of what you plan to do after that?” I replied “It seems like you have a pretty good gig, here. How do I get your job?” He said “My job, specifically?” and I said “Not exactly your job, but, you know, physics professor at a small college. That seems like fun.”
And, you know, from my point of view, it really did look like a fun job: teaching classes to students who want to be there (my father taught sixth grade in a rural public school, so I knew plenty about teaching students who were forced to attend, and wanted no part of that…), and doing research on physics with those students. I hadn’t yet worked on “real” research, but I’d done a couple of summer projects on developing optics labs of one sort or another, where a lot of the job was just playing around to see what would work. That was a blast.
Fast-forward about fifteen years or so, and I’m a tenured faculty member at a small liberal arts college, teaching a lab in the sophomore “modern physics” class, where the data collection involves waiting 10-15 minutes for a counter to accumulate enough counts from a radioactive decay to be worth analyzing. While the detector is slowly clicking away, one of the students asked how I ended up as a professor at Union, and I told that story. And that after that conversation, as Prof. Jones had explained, I went to graduate school, got a Ph.D. and a postdoc, and took my chances on the academic market, landing at Union.
There was a long pause, and then one of the students1 said, hesitantly, “So, you’re… livin’ the dream?”
And, you know, I pretty much was. I still am, to a large degree. This is, in fact, a pretty sweet gig. I mean, grading sucks, and faculty meetings are a drag, but when you look at the whole package, I’m paid to teach some of the coolest stuff that humans have ever figured out, and I have an incredible amount of freedom (and access to not-insignificant resources) to study whatever physics I like in the lab. I’m mostly able to set my own schedule, and while at times I bitch about various bureaucratic and procedural issues on campus, the actual burden of that is remarkably light by the standards of a lot of jobs. I am, in fact, living the dream.
I was thinking about this because I was reading the umpty-zillionth “Crisis in Academia!” article of 2025 (I’m not linking because the specific details don’t matter; throw a rock in the air these days and it will land on an academic writing a piece about the status collapse of colleges and universities), and it occurred to me that in the course of reading all this verbiage, it’s awfully easy to lose track of the inherent awesomeness of the job. And of higher education more generally.
The way a lot of people write and talk about higher education these days has become depressingly dour. And not just from the “You need a degree in a Useful Subject to develop Skills that will get you a Good Job” crowd— even the people who (with some justification) denounce the job-skills approach as neoliberalism run amok aren’t any fun. They’re all about positioning whatever field they study as the Last Bulwark Against Creeping Fascism in a way that’s every bit as grim and joyless as the worst of the cynical careerists. In a lot of ways, those two groups are mirror images, differing only in whether the end goal is fighting perceived injustice or making money.
And I wonder if this doesn’t play some role in the much-ballyhooed cratering of public esteem for higher education, especially among the critical young-people demographic. I read way too much about this topic, for obvious reasons, and the main unifying theme of all of it is that none of it seems the least bit enjoyable. Students are presumed to be either plodding through checking boxes to certify Skills in order to acquire a job within the existing power structure, or learning about how everything about that power structure actually sucks and needs to be radically transformed. Both of those seem like a miserable grind that it’s hard to work up real enthusiasm for.
In a lot of ways, the defining characteristic of higher education through much of my own career was fun. Having the freedom to pick classes and not be mostly slogging through mandatory curricula was fun; so was being able to stay up to all hours doing a variety of things that were educational if not necessarily academic. Getting to play with lasers in grad school was fun, and the slowly increasing level of freedom to choose what, exactly, I was doing with those lasers was even more fun.
And to a large degree, those things were sold to me as fun. Yes, there was absolutely some degree of box-checking and credential-accumulating involved, but the steps along the way were inherently enjoyable, and that was always the emphasis. Which made it a lot easier to say “Yeah, that’s a thing I want to do,” and also to power through the elements of tedious bullshit that cropped up along the way.
I just don’t see that very much these days. This is, admittedly, largely a function of being Excessively Online where everybody has been brainrotted by partisan politics, and every topic is diffracted through Left and Right slits. It’s possible that my perspective may shift in a more positive direction as SteelyKid (who just finished 11th grade) moves into the college-search process, and I see more of what’s being pitched to students. Having seen a lot of the materials that we send out, though, I’m not expecting much— the general approach these days throughout the academy seems to be extremely instrumental, with education as a means to one end or another, and not so much a Fun Thing to Do in its own right.
There are still bastions of the fun-in-its-own-right approach to higher education, but they’re mostly aimed at older folks. The other proximate cause of this post was this piece in The Cut about informal higher ed (hat-tip to Dan Drezner)— lectures in bars, courses offered outside of formal university curricula, etc.. There are also things like the “weird Zoom book club” Matt Yglesias wrote about recently. These programs aren’t new, exactly— Union has had a thriving fun-courses-for-old-people program for as long as I’ve been here (I do lectures for them every few years)— but it’s good to see them continuing and even expanding.
What I would really like, though, is to see this sort of view take a more prominent role in the pitch to our primary audience of young people. Because, at the end of the day, I would like more folks to see this as a dream worth living, and not just another grim and joyless piece of some other struggle.
Yeah, I’m Yelling At Clouds again. If you like this kind of thing, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
I remember the two guys who were in that lab group, but I honestly don’t remember which of the two of them said this line. Amusingly, one of the two is now a faculty colleague, having gone to graduate school in physics and come back to us as a tenure-track professor. I think it was the other guy, though, but can’t be sure.
As a college prof who teaches film studies, my entire goal is to have fun. If you can't have fun in a film class (or college in general), then something is deeply wrong.
Nicely done. And, no, this is not yelling at clouds. It reflects a stance toward what's happening in US higher ed that will grow as the obvious measures--budget cuts, enrollment declines, institutions merge or close-- show things getting worse.
People have a way of finding their way to the sunny side of the street when their material conditions decline. Of course, this may be wishful thinking on my part, but that does not make it wrong.