I had no words to describe my self: Job scarcity and identity in the dying university

Jessie Seymour

Check email again. Not expecting anything, but not quite able to stop myself.

There’s a new message. It’s a rejection. Automated and impersonal. Doesn’t even have my name at the top.

Relief. At least it’s an answer.

This wasn’t even an academic job. I already applied to those – lectureships, short-term contracts, anything remotely within the field I trained for. No, this was a Casual Janitorial Staff role.

They don’t even want me cleaning on campus.

I close the inbox.

*

I’m trying to decide how I feel about being an academic. Or if I’m even allowed to keep calling myself that.

I don’t need to tell you that the state of Australian academia is looking green around the gills. Peter Fleming calls it the “Edu-factory” in Dark Academia: How Universities Die. He writes that higher education “has been pulverised over the last 35 years as universities morphed into business enterprises obsessed with income, growth and outputs” (p.2).

He says that universities function as sites of intellectual work that sell scholars as productivity units. These academics “generate outputs”, absorb casualised teaching loads, and navigate precarious, fragmented employment conditions alongside growing administrative and student-facing pressures.

For many scholars, this reality falls short of what academia once promised: a vocation grounded in intellectual curiosity, meaningful teaching, and professional stability.

This all didn’t just happen while I was away. The universities have been like this since I first applied for my thesis program in 2012. It’s why I went overseas to find work: because things were slow Down Under, and my supervisors encouraged me to cast a wide net. I landed a big fish in the Netherlands. Then another in Japan.

But I kept one eye on Australia. After years of teaching that spanned countries and systems, over two dozen publications, I had assumed – perhaps naively – that I would eventually come home. That I would earn my callouses elsewhere and find a place in Australia once I’d earned it.

But Australia, it seems, wants more.

*

I keep a list of the ‘No’s. I don’t know why. I guess it started out as intellectual curiosity – don’t all things? The quiet piling-up of refusals was fascinating at first. Then the list jumped into the triple digits, and it became a kind of self-harm.

But I had this image in my head of my future success. I imagined that I would be sitting in an academic role, on some beautiful campus somewhere near my family, sipping the kind of stale coffee you can only get from the staffroom Keurig, and looking at that list. I would be able to say that the slow erosion of my self was worth it. That I’d survived.

I package my self in the CVs that I send to universities. I distil my working life into a series of graduate and postgraduate accomplishments, hoping it will be enough for an institution to acknowledge me.

The automatic rejections are difficult not to take personally when the thing being rejected is, unmistakably, me.

It’s quite a blow to the ego, I won’t lie. The prodigal daughter returning home and hearing crickets. I’ll admit to the bruises that were largely driven by the gap between my expectations and my reality. I’m aware that this disappointment is my own fault.

It was cumulative, too, which was the worst part; the steadily increasing rejections gathered like dust in the corners of the spare bedroom that my brother graciously allowed me to live out of while I “got on my feet”. For a year.

And with that came a quieter, more difficult shift: I had no words to describe my self.

No university email address, no departmental home, no colleagues. I had all the skills and practical qualifications, and the callouses I’d earned building roads towards a destination I’d heard of but never actually seen.

Without a contract or affiliation, the identity I once wore began to feel provisional. It required justification I could no longer provide.

*

Academia is all-consuming. Even Fleming notes this in his treatise on academics in the institution. He calls us “extremely self-motivated” and “driven by an intrinsic commitment” (p. 27) which necessarily becomes a part of who we are when we greet the world.

I did not anticipate how quickly the practical problem of finding work would become an attack on my identity.

What unsettled me was not just the absence of work – and the subsequent, marrow-deep fear that I would be unable to pay for luxuries like food and shelter – but the sense of becoming unintelligible within a system that I had spent years learning how to belong to.

The longer I spent in this cycle of applying to jobs and being summarily rejected, the harder it was to ignore how many others were moving through similar patterns: highly qualified, experienced, circulating between short-term contracts and fractional roles, begging for scraps in exchange for days and weeks of unpaid application labour.

The processes themselves seemed to demand increasing amounts of time and specificity. Lengthy selection criteria, tailored resumes copied and pasted into online forms, questioning whether it would be in my best interests to admit to my race or gender identity, or if I should quietly tick the box labelled ‘Prefer not to say’. Knowing that I’ll be one of hundreds, maybe thousands, who are applying for the role. Wishing my competition well and ill all at once.

*

The system does not explicitly tell you that you are inadequate. The system produces outcomes, and you – I – produce meaning from them. Even when I don’t want to.

In the end, the question was no longer whether I could continue pursuing academic work. It was whether I could afford to keep waiting for it. I had to set my ego and my training aside, and move on.

Decades of work, training, and skill do not disappear, but neither do they always lead somewhere. I earned my callouses, and now I have no use for them. Still, there are moments when it is difficult not to ask what was being built, and for whom. And it’s hard, so hard, not to call it a waste.

I am still deciding how I feel about it.

 

Works cited

Fleming, Peter. Dark academia: How Universities Die. Pluto Press, 2021.

 

About the author

Jessica Seymour is a writer and independent researcher based in Sydney. Over the years, she’s tried her hand at journalism, high school teaching, and working in a jewellery store where her tiny wrists made her the perfect children’s watch model. She’s now an author and poet in her own right with credits in Voiceworks, Needle in the Hay, Meniscus, and HelloHorror.