I earned my Ph.D., landed my first tenure-track job, and lost it when my new university closed — all in the span of 13 months.
Unfortunately I fear that my experience will become more and more common in the years ahead, especially at small colleges. This past spring, The Hechinger Report noted that colleges in 2024 were “closing at a pace of one a week.” Recent stories in The Chronicle have focused on campus closures and particularly on the future of the “endangered small college.”
Many talented faculty members may soon face the unsettling questions that accompany losing your teaching job: What happens when you suddenly find yourself back on the tenure-track market? How do you navigate it while your institution is closing? And what if you’re lucky enough to find a new position? What’s it like to jump right back into work at an entirely different campus?
In August 2022, I started my first tenure-track job as an assistant professor of English, rhetoric, and composition at Iowa Wesleyan University. Just a few months earlier, I’d completed my Ph.D. in Victorian literature at the University of California at Riverside. I packed up my cat and my belongings, and moved halfway across the country to live my best happily ever after in Iowa. Or so I thought.
Iowa Wesleyan brought me back to the small liberal-arts environment that I had thrived in as an undergraduate and longed for as a graduate student. I joined a tiny department and enjoyed collaborating with two excellent mentors and co-workers. Sure, Iowa Wesleyan had its challenges, and my colleagues and I shared office space in Pioneer Hall with cannibalistic hornets, occasional birds, bats, and various critters. But despite those minor inconveniences, I was on cloud nine.
I fell off that cloud on March 28, 2023, when the university’s Board of Trustees called a nonemergency meeting with faculty members at 8:30 a.m. At the time, I lived close enough to the campus to walk to work every day. I remember texting one of my colleagues that morning to ask if they had seen the email, and we expressed mutual concern. I knew bad news was coming when I saw multiple police vehicles parked in front of the building and officers in uniform. During the meeting, the board chairman announced the university would be closing at the end of the 2022-23 year. I froze, started crying, and could not stop.
The next few days were a flurry of meetings. I spent a lot of time with my students, grieving with them, providing information about other institutions, preparing them for the transfer fair, and guiding them on other procedures they needed to complete. The last thing I wanted was for my students to become part of the majority who do not finish their degrees after their college shuts down.
It was about a week later that it dawned on me: Like it or not, I had to face the tenure-track job market again. My story does have a happier-than-expected ending: I did find a new tenure-track job at a small college in Missouri, which required yet another move but only one state down from Iowa. Here are some practical tips I learned along the way that I hope will help other academics who find themselves in this distressful predicament.
Allow yourself the time, space, and grace to grieve and plan. I was only at Iowa Wesleyan for a year, yet I was already firmly attached to the place. The sudden separation was unnerving for me, and, no doubt, emotional and stressful for faculty members who had made a life and a career there. In some ways, a faculty position is “just a job.” But for many academics, it also becomes an identity and losing it can be traumatic.
Reach out for help. Some academics might be skeptical of life coaching and career coaching, but they can be a great way to consult with an outsider and help you sort through your options and figure out which job market is right for you.
People who haven’t been on the academic job market for 10 or 20 years will find it very different now — with more contingent openings and fewer on the tenure track. Institutions close to your campus know that you are entering the job market. Do not be surprised if you immediately receive inquiries (as happened to me) from surrounding institutions about potential adjunct work. Have plans A through Z in place, and ask for deadlines to respond, but do not put undue pressure on yourself to accept the first job offer you receive.
Form a job-search group with your soon-to-be former colleagues. It is true that you may, in some cases, be competing for the same positions. But starting an informal group to share materials and get feedback is a great way to polish your application and find openings.
My Iowa Wesleyan colleagues and I evaluated one another’s cover letters, CVs, teaching statements, and other documents. Remember: You all brought different skills to your institution, so you might find positions that are a strong match for a colleague but not for you, and they might be able to do the same.
Check the hiring pages of your college’s “teach-out partners.” In simplest terms, when a campus shuts down, its “teach-out partners” are the other higher-ed institutions with which it has transfer agreements. Students in good standing from the closing college are able to transfer their credits and complete their degrees at one of these campuses.
But aside from taking on your students, these colleges might also be places for you to look for a teaching job. Some of Iowa Wesleyan’s teach-out partners posted tenure-track positions shortly after our closure was announced. A few of my former colleagues ended up in those jobs.
If a job ad is still up online, apply for it. Do so even if the posted application deadline has passed. Yes, the result may be a lot more misses than hits. However, the advertisement for the new tenure-track position I secured at Westminster College, in Missouri, had a full-consideration review date of January 13, 2023. That date had passed when I saw the ad, but applying for it anyway was the best decision I made in the process. I got the job and started work in August 2023.
Do not underestimate yourself. If you’ve only been a faculty member for a year or two when your college shuts down, don’t assume that puts you back on the same footing on the market as when you were first hired. A friend at Iowa Wesleyan told me, “You are one of us and proved yourself already. You are not in the same position that you were a year ago as a grad student.” He was right.
Likewise, if you already have tenure, do not count yourself out on the faculty market. You lost your job through no fault of your own, and institutions will recognize that and desire your skills and experience.
It’s OK to be vulnerable while interviewing. On more than one occasion, I started crying when discussing Iowa Wesleyan’s closure and my students. I learned to keep a box of tissues nearby for Zoom interviews and made sure to bring them to my on-campus interview.
Advocate for yourself. Once you have a job offer, don’t hesitate to ask for what you need (within reason). That includes asking about the possibility of receiving credit toward tenure (I didn’t have to ask because Westminster raised the issue for me). Most institutions realize this kind of job transition is not typical and are willing to do what they can to accommodate you. When I accepted my new tenure-track position at Westminster, campus officials gave me much-needed flexibility regarding my start date and offered to help with almost everything.
Embrace the bittersweetness that comes with your new job. In Grey’s Anatomy, the titular character Meredith Grey put it best when she said that second “chances can feel like an insult if you can’t get over what you lost the first time around. Or they can feel like a miracle, like a hard-fought victory. A chance to live the life you’ve always wanted.”
Finding a tenure-track job, after facing almost-certain unemployment or underemployment, feels like a miracle at times. But the dislocation and the transition to a new campus will also cause moments of frustration, too.
After all, you are a new hire, which means you very likely will be lectured (no matter your level of experience) about how things work. People will assume you don’t know things that you do, in fact, know and colleagues will point out your mistakes, all of which may rankle since you may feel that your college’s recent closure taught you a lot about the inner workings of higher education. Give your new colleagues the benefit of the doubt as you adjust. And be patient with yourself, too: Adjusting to a new institution might take you longer than it had in the past.
Survivor’s guilt is normal. Some of my former colleagues secured teaching jobs faster than I did. Others found local positions that were not in higher education. And several colleagues were not as fortunate and are still job hunting. I could not help but feel guilty that I secured a fantastic position and some of the folks who helped me get on my feet as a professor were left behind. I still cannot shake this.
Impostor syndrome is normal. Throughout my first year at Westminster, I worried far too much about whether I was qualified to be there. It was an enormous transition. I kept asking myself, “Why did they hire me?” That kind of thinking is a trap. Rest assured that the academic job market is as rigorous as ever, if not more so, and you were hired for a reason. Even though you may have entered the job market later and under different circumstances than the average academic job seeker, your new institution still had the option to say no and resume its search later. It didn’t; it hired you. Take comfort in that.
Some days will be easier than others. My grief has lessened with time and experience. For me, March 28 — the date of the closure in 2023, and oddly enough, the date I signed my initial contract in 2022 — will always be painful. It is normal to feel a sense of loss.
Most important, take steps to connect with new friends and colleagues from the get-go. I didn’t. My biggest mistake this past year was keeping to myself too much. But it was hard to put myself out there and build a new community, when I was afraid I would just lose it again. In hindsight, I wish I had tried harder to build meaningful connections and relationships with my new colleagues. I am working on that, but my most significant breakthrough was when I hosted the English-major senior dinner at my house. For the first time in a long time, I felt a sense of connection and belonging again.