Higher Education Circular No. 15, “Increases in Salaries of College Teachers,” Department of the Interior, 1919.
I am happy to announce that I was offered a tenure-track Assistant Professor position beginning in the fall of 2020. Even though I had no other offers on the table, I had to decline.
It was my first year on the market and I obtained the elusive tenure-track job offer. I should have been grateful, right? People are on the academic job market for years before getting a single offer. Some argue this is simply because the market is saturated with PhDs, but the real problem is that the overall number of full-time tenure-track faculty positions has been declining for years, now making up barely a quarter of all faculty positions in the US. Now with COVID-19, universities and colleges have chosen to take even greater austerity measures, meaning already-marginalized and contingent faculty will be hardest hit in the coming years. Under these conditions, why would I decline this job offer? I declined it because the offer was a bad one.
My application for this position followed a similar schedule to many tenure-track jobs in the US. I applied for the position in November 2019, went for a campus visit (final interview) in February 2020, and the dean of their College of Arts and Sciences called with me the offer on March 4, 2020.1 Since the position was at a regional state university, I knew that their funds might not allow them to propose much. But the offer I received included no moving expenses, no start-up funds, and no guaranteed conference travel.
These are all standard expectations of a tenure-track job offer. Reimbursement of moving expenses has long been par for the course in a field where getting a job almost always means moving to a different state, or a different country, often right after finishing a required degree during which a scholar earned very little. I understand that smaller state universities were struggling even before the pandemic. But when the convention for tenure-track positions is that employers will cover moving expenses, at least in part, then a search committee should put in their job ad that moving will not be reimbursed if that is the case. Being honest with job applicants allows them to make an informed decision about spending time applying to that position.2
Start-up funds can be used towards research, conference travel, books, a computer, or other technology, and they are important for doing exactly that: starting the work of a new position before you’ve had any opportunity to apply for research funding the university offers to existing faculty. None of these things are considered perks in my profession; they are necessities for doing the job and keeping the job.3
Despite all this, my counter-offer requesting funds for research, professional development, teaching materials, and conference fees, as well as family relocation assistance, was swiftly rejected. Since they were unwilling, or unable, to offer any of the other allowances I asked for, I came back with a request to be paid on par with recent hires of the same rank in the department.
This job offer came from a public university, so all the salaries are available online. Before attempting to negotiate for a higher salary, I confirmed the starting salary with one of the recently hired Assistant Professors, and read through their newly ratified contract, which listed the salary ranges for different professorial ranks. I had been offered the lowest possible pay for an Assistant Professor.
Honestly, I was considering taking the position, even with their refusal to provide some of the expected financial support needed for me to do my job the way they would have expected. In the end, the deal breaker was that they refused to pay me the same starting salary as the two most recent hires in the department—a white man and a white woman.
All the job market advice says that we are supposed to negotiate and that most people of color and white women do not negotiate. Here’s the thing. I am good at negotiations. My entire life has been one big negotiation. When I rented my first apartment in New York City, at twenty-one years old, I got the real estate broker to lower the rent. Almost a decade later, I was able to get out of my lease in New Jersey early. In my cover letter for the job I was offered, I wrote about how I organized an AAUW “Work Smart & Start Smart: Salary Negotiation” workshop at my school. I was prepared to negotiate and I did.
But I also knew that the academic labor market had serious racist and sexist issues in hiring and pay. For example, many faculty unions have worked to get “Faculty Salary Pay Equity” included in new contracts. In 2017 AFT-AAUP local union at Rutgers University conducted a faculty survey as part of their Gender and Race equity committee. The union reported that “92% of TT faculty and 91% of NTT faculty stated that gender and race equity in hiring, promotion, and salary were either “very important” or “important” in the next contract.
So stop telling us we don’t negotiate. Instead, consider addressing the fact that our white male counterparts are offered a higher starting salary to begin with. Or the fact that many of us do negotiate, but are penalized for it, as with one story that haunts many job applicants: a recent PhD whose job offer was rescinded after trying to negotiate. It’s not our job to individually fix academic institutions’ systematic refusal to pay us equal to our white or male colleagues.
I originally shared this story in a Twitter thread that went viral, which led to this essay being commissioned. So many people kept asking me to “name names!” Maybe it’s selfish on my part to withhold the university’s name, as apparently the reasoning behind the demand to “name names” is that doing so protects other academics.
The problem with naming names publicly is that if you don’t have some sort of institutional protection then you end up torpedoing your career. You get labeled “difficult.” If I named names, would these random people in my mentions help me get a job? Would they speak up when they see their university taking advantage of their colleague? While I refuse to remain quiet, I will not be anyone’s sacrificial lamb. I have no institutional protection. I am a mixed race woman in academia. I am also a light-skin Latina, and while I know that has contributed to my success (colorism is real), I am still a racial and gendered worker in academia and it was made clear in the offer I received.
Recently, the actress Thandie Newton stated in an interview that the reason why she preferred not to speak of her abuser was because “it’s not just an individual; it’s a system . . . because it makes that person more special. It’s a whole fucking system of abuse, exploitation.” While unequal pay is not at all the same as sexual abuse, they are both systematic forms of oppression. In my case, naming a specific university puts the blame on that individual institution, as opposed to holding the entire system up to critique.
As long as colleges and universities continue to systematically lowball marginalized academics, there is no way to close the salary gap in higher ed. If you are worried that the university that made me this job offer might be your university, then it probably is.
It was a really hard decision, but I was financially able to say no. My partner and I will be able to survive on my adjunct pay and his non-tenure-track lectureship in the fall. However, I’m losing my health insurance at the end of the semester, so I am by no means living it up. Yet I know not everyone has the option to say no. I said no for every other scholar of color who can’t say no. Universities continue to exploit those conditions, just like they do every other wage laborer in the higher ed system.
Even the argument that “doctoral programs are churning out too many PhDs for too few full-time faculty positions” falls into this trap. It’s not that academia doesn’t have enough jobs, it’s that the system purposefully makes jobs scarce. Tenure lines continue to diminish as higher ed moves toward the full adjunctification of the university. These are purposeful decisions being made.
These decisions allow universities, like the one that gave me a bad offer, to think that we will take whatever job we can get. But I said no. I refused my labor; that is the only power I have right now.
On the face of it, come the fall, it will look as if I will have failed to get a job, but this is not true. My job search was successful. It’s the academy that failed.
- It may be tempting to explain away this experience as a result of the pandemic, but it is important to remember that the parameters and budget for this job were established before the pandemic. The budget for this position was approved well before COVID-19 hit the US and the job offer came before schools started canceling searches. Whether I received this job offer before the pandemic or after, I should still be paid the same as my other colleagues. The pandemic doesn’t inherently justify me, or anyone else, being paid less.
- A typical application includes writing and assembling multiple documents specific to the position, department, and institution, a 25-45 minute video interview, and then finally flying out for a 2-3 day on campus visit. The time spent on the initial application alone is significant, and academics must complete dozens, if not hundreds of job applications each year. In addition, they must complete applications for fellowships, grants, post-docs, and non-tenure-track positions at the same time.
- A tenure-track job, after all, isn’t the same as having tenure. The research productivity required to earn tenure is significant.
