Quiet Quitting
If we are to believe social media, the sounds of quiet quitting can be heard everywhere. As a working definition for those who have, for very good reason, chosen social media as a good thing to quit, quiet quitting involves the choice to do the minimum at a given job, to resist cultural imperatives to do more for the same amount of money, and to protect ones time and the border between work and time off. What does quiet quitting sound like, if we listen closely? Perhaps we will hear the gentle thump of dropped tools at exactly 5 o’clock; or the subtle but persistent vibrations of a cell phone on turned to the -not-quite-quiet “silent mode”; or the “no” spoken softly but definitively when asked to take on a new and unexpected set of tasks. There is another name for quiet quitting, which is more spatial than acoustic: quitting in place. This kind of quitting, at least as an ideal, does not announce itself with slamming doors, dramatic exits, or or noisy workplace altercations. It does not announce itself —until it does.
What would quiet quitting look like in my job as a Professor of English snd Director of a Center? Those who get their image of academia from the right-wing press, or even from mainstream movies, might read the question with a smirk. It is truth almost universally acknowledged that professors do almost nothing for a living: they teach a couple of classes for a few hours a day, during which they bellow (noisily) a few improvised profundities, interrupted only by the shrill bell signaling the end of class borrowed from films about high school. At this point the professor finishes her—or more likely his—profound sentence and gathers a sheaf of papers he—or less likely she,—has not consulted during class, into a well worn brown leather briefcase. The students fumble loudly in their backpacks and shuffle out the door. Sometimes, oddly, they clap as though they have just witnessed a play.
In those films and in the imaginations shaped by them, we see or imagine very little of what professors do outside the classroom— unless you count, as I suppose we must, drinking a lot and seducing students during office hours or at parties to which it seems, everyone is invited. Netflix’s recent miniseries, “The Chair,” the most detailed filmic representation of academic life so far, includes in this extracurricular time and space:, attending meetings, fighting, and flirting with colleagues. If you really wanted to, you could cut the sexual tension with a knife.
None of these representations, whether they are right-wing arguments against tenure, or Hollywood celebrations of Deep Feeling and sometimes short poems, show professors doing the kind of work we do between classes: preparing for those classes by reading, annotating, outlining, and making Power Points; commenting on student work; constructing syllabi or assignments that must continually be clarified on university classroom software; writing recommendations; arranging, attending or chairing multiple different kinds of meetings about curriculum, promotion, or budget; holding office hours where the topic is not the student’s cute shoes but more likely their mental health or COVID; advising dissertations; serving on hiring or admission committees; attending and/or arranging talks, workshops, panels; hosting visitors; assessing courses, programs, or entire academic units; writing long reports; recruiting students and colleagues.
Mostly, there is no depiction of the thing that takes the most time—reading. Professors read books, articles, abstracts, grants, files, charts, graphs, archives. Reading is no fun to watch, as I realized when I assigned a shadowing (“sShadowing, not stalking!) exercise in a graduate professionalization class long ago. For those of us who did not choose a special day of parties and awards, much of the shadowing involved the student sitting in our office watching us turn the pages or clicking on a screen. Not good tv, and perhaps not a great advertisement for the profession.
Speaking of the visually underwhelming and temporally significant, these films do not linger on the act of grading. Even when we see graded papers on film, they are just that, papers with grades, big red, circled ones to make it easy for the audience to separate the successful form the unsuccessful student. These glimpses of the graded paper do not include two single-spaced pages of comments, the product of say, 40 minutes of work apiece. The labor that produces and supports the apocryphal classroom moments is invisible.
The professors who show up on film and in letters to the editor tend to fall into certain categories: most of them teach a vaguely humanistic discipline, or in some slightly more specific literary field. Think, for example, Barbara Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces. There are, to be fair, some math professors in these stories, who cover the blackboard with impenetrable chalked equations before stalking out in the filmic tradition of their humanist colleagues. Those humanists are usually there to teach their colleagues in math or science (again vaguely construed) to get in touch with their feelings, often with anin response unprovoked quotation of the same short poems they—the humanists—bellow out in class. There was, briefly, a vogue for films set in law school (think the Paper Chase and its spinoffs) where professors inevitably used what was repeatedly asserted to be the socratic method, which involved yelling our questions to individual students addressed as “Miss” and “Mister” and berating those students when they answered.
Although the status hierarchy is rarely mentioned, except for the occasional improbable tenure “application,” the professors of our cultural imagination are almost inevitably full-time employees, likely tenured or on the tenure track, at elite universities or liberal arts colleges with thinly disguised or vaguely allegorical names and bucolic campuses. It is almost always fall and the leaves are always golden, although sometimes there is a soft and gentle snow. Flying in the face of the sobering realities of real estate, professors even live in large and beautiful houses conveniently abutting the pristine campuses in which they teach. There are no lecturers teaching five courses a semester, commuting several hours from the places they can (almost) afford to live. No one in movies or other popular representations of academic life and sleeps in their car.
One way of describing the tweedy professors who bellow and use blackboards is that they are doing the minimum. For tenured professors who make a living wage—and not all of them do—this approach is theoretically possible to do the minimum. I know of almost no one, who has chosen this course, although I do know some (not many) professors who sacrifice teaching and service to protect their research. There is no “off the clock” for most of us, as, despite our vows to construct and defend “healthy boundaries.” If email time stamps are any indication, we answer student messages—and often those from colleagues—late into the night and again early in the morning. Especially in pandemic times, it seems that there is always a student emergency: a positive test that results in a request to go on Zoom, a mental health crisis. And those are the students who communicate, not those who must be proactively contacted, when, after weeks or months of enthusiastic participation, they disappear. My son was one of those who disappeared froorm his classes when he had cancer: I will never not follow up on prolonged absence.
Given all of this, how does a professor like me who is not in danger of losing her job, practice quiet quitting? Would it mean not taking administrative jobs, especially those for which there is not compensation in terms of money or time off? Would it involve withdrawing from the supervision of graduate students, especially in a period in which academic jobs are scarce and Phd programs rethinking their goals and their relevance? Would it mean not answering emails and forcing staff to add to their labor of hunting me down? Would it mean insisting on working remotely except for actual class time, declaring two days a week protected time? Would it mean saying no to many more requests, perhaps carrying with me at all times the talking pen a colleague bought me that speaks the word “no” in five languages? Would it mean becoming so unreliable or confrontational on committees that no-one in their right mind would ask me to join, much less, chair one? Would it mean not rereading, for the 40th time, the novels for my Victorian novel class and relying on the yellowing notes so beloved by critics of our profession? Would I, could I, do I want to say no to research, which is what many people better at boundaries protect by rejecting other forms of labor?
At my age, would the answer be not quiet but noisy quitting? Would it mean retiring earlier than planned? Would it mean, to connect to my previous post, leaving Texas?
All of these seem on the surface like possibilities, but as with leaving Texas, I, for whatever reason, cannot quiet quit. I can, however, do (or is it not do?) something. Perhaps it is the conundrum of leaving/not- leaving Texas that has inspired a moderate form of quietness. I have decided that I can and will refuse, until conditions in the state change, to be on any sort of recruitment, hiring, or admission committee or to attend any sort of recruitment event. I will not serve as a recruiter for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, or staff, until Texas becomes a more humane place. This vow makes me sad for many reasons. Although recruitment, which can involve on a hiring committee and involve reading many, many long writing samples, is extremely time-consuming, I love meeting prospective colleagues and students. And I like to think I am a pretty good recruiter, mostly because I am genuinely fond of Texas, and especially of Houston and of Rice. Recruiting is also a selfish act; it serves one’s interest to have good colleagues and students. By opting out, not quite quietly, I feel senses of both loss and relief.