The Geography Question

Displaying all of the tact for which he is justly renowned, Loomis got himself into a fracas on twitter over the weekend.

Then I made the same case and folks got upset about points that I find both obvious and beyond challenge, suggesting that I was arguing that Black people and gay people and women shouldn’t get Ph.Ds, and also that I was a Nazi sympathizer and a White Supremacist for not understanding that the South is bad, and in general all of the things that you expect from an enthusiastic, if small-scale, twitter pile-on.

I do think that this is an important topic. Consequently, I’m going to make the argument orderly and comprehensively:

1. People shouldn’t go into academia. When folks on twitter insist “you don’t want women to go into academia,” they’re right! Women are people, and I don’t think people should go into academia! I like my job, but the job market is awful, getting worse, and within just a few years will get way way way worse. I like my job, but it’s a lot less fun and rewarding than it was a few years ago and it’s going to continue to get worse as administration takes firm control of university life and as public esteem for higher education declines. I write letters of recommendation for Ph.D. programs only with extraordinary reluctance because I want no responsibility for someone being unemployed and in debt six years from now. This position can only hold in context of the currently-existing extreme mis-match between the number of Ph.Ds and the number of available jobs, but that’s the world we’re living in for as far as the eye can see. As such, “you should hesitate to get a Ph.D if you’re uncomfortable living in a rural, Southern community” is but a subset of the “you shouldn’t get a Ph.D” belief that I hold dear.
2. People are allowed and encouraged to have any reason they want to choose where to live. Family, climate, politics, time zones, food, language… all of these are good reasons to want to live in one place and not in some other place, and to tailor one’s professional life accordingly. I personally find Southern culture to be tolerable and even to some extent charming, Southern politics to be dreadful and maddening, and Southern climate (especially in the Deep South) to be almost unendurable.  I would struggle to enjoy Florida less because of Desantis and more because of the weather, but it’s absolutely fine for mileage to vary on this point. I would suggest that all of the reasons that a person would not want to live in a particular area should be part of a weighted calculus rather than an absolute (I’ve applied for jobs in Florida and Alabama and I probably would have taken a job at an Alabama institution where I made it to the job talk stage about a decade ago) but to each their own.
3. Academic jobs are unusual for “creative class” in terms of their geographical dispersion. There are faculty jobs in big cities in red states, in big cities in blue states, in small towns in red states, and in small towns in blue states.  Academic jobs are a little more concentrated in the East and the Midwest than in the West largely because many small liberal arts colleges were founded before the land grant system came into being.  One of the things that surprised me about Kentucky compared to Oregon and Washington was the number of small, private colleges (many of them quite good) distributed seemingly at random across the state. This creates the problem, such that it is, of a workforce whose cultural preferences and cultural experience tend to favor urban, blue areas while many of the jobs are located in rural, red areas.
4. People should absolutely be aware that geographical restrictions limit their job choices, and that this should have an impact on their decision to pursue a Ph.D. If you do not believe that you can live in red states and in the rural, conservative parts of blue states, then you need to factor that into your decision to spend six years getting a Ph.D., because a) a considerable percentage of academic jobs are in those areas, and b) jobs in urban areas in blue states are super-competitive, in part because there are lots of folks with Ph.Ds who have exactly the same feeling about living in red states and rural areas.  To be sure, this is an “is” rather than a “should” condition, and maybe after the Revolution we can all be professors in Brooklyn, but if you want a career in academia you need to take “is” into account. I believe that it is incumbent upon a faculty member advising graduate students to make this clear; if the student cannot envision living anywhere other than western Washington and does not include Tacoma as part of “western Washington,” (I have known several graduate students who fit this description exactly) then the faculty member is doing the student a grave disservice by failing to make clear the professional implications of this geographic exclusion.

Two further points that have a bearing on the argument but that aren’t central to it, regarding especially the reluctance of many academics to consider working in the American South.  This reluctance is absolutely not new, and it is not limited to women, Black folks, and Queer folks; my advisor at UW told me quite openly that he had never considered applying for a job south of the Mason-Dixon Line and that he would never consider applying for such a job.  This should not be regarded as a Defense of the South (although, as noted, I do find aspects of Southern life to be charming) but rather as things you should consider if you’re contemplating moving to the South.

5. The local swamps the regional.  Athens and Atlanta are in Georgia and Lexington and Louisville are in Kentucky, but all of those places are going to be a helluva lot more familiar to people coming out of Seattle or Eugene than will La Grande or Cheney. Liberal cultural spaces are endemic to urban life in the United States (you can find liberal small towns but it’s awfully hard to find conservative big cities). In pretty much every city of a reasonable size in the United States you will find a thriving Queer community (I’m in Salt Lake City at this very moment and was able to enjoy the city’s exceedingly enthusiastic Pride festival over the weekend).  A robust Black cultural community is more hit or miss and depends a lot on demographics, but you’re almost certain to find thriving Black spaces in any city of reasonable size in the American South (Lexington is kind of an exception to this for weird historical reasons, but Louisville definitely is not). There’s certainly variation (Plano and Eugene are NOT the same, and by and large that’s a good thing), but even in Plano you’re going to be able to find cultural space for yourself.
6. But state laws do matter! Red state legislatures are worse for the academic profession than blue state legislatures.  “We need to take away your autonomy because the legislature is coming for us” is about 75% an administrative scam to reduce the power of faculty (the fact that the Professional Administrative Class tries to run the scam in deep Blue states is a tell), but it’s 25% real and it’s worse in Red states. More importantly, Red state legislatures are bad in consequential ways for women, Black folks, and Queer folks. The degree of the badness can be overstated (twitter is prone to overstatement, as you may know) because of point 5 (locality matters to the functioning of law) but the badness is real.  Trans folks are at risk of loss of bodily autonomy; Black folks are denied political representation and subjected to harsher legal scrutiny; women are denied reproductive rights. All of these are good reasons to decide not to take a job in the American South (or in many parts of the West or Midwest), and I would never try to argue anyone out of that decision.  I would add that anyone who has loved ones or family members that fall into these categories also suffers from this badness; if one of my teenage daughters ever needed an abortion I would need to drive or fly to Illinois. College faculty are a privileged enough class that this is usually an inconvenience rather than a crisis, but nevertheless.

I’ve worked at the University of Kentucky for 18 years, and I’ve grown to quite enjoy Lexington. I also enjoy my job.  There are conceivable professional opportunities that would tempt me to leave Lexington, and there are probably a few places (Pacific Northwest) where I would accept an essentially lateral professional move. Having lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for a year I know that I can manage a small town, but I’d rather be urban than rural for a whole host of reasons. I have known plenty of faculty who have come to UK with the intention of leaving as soon as possible; many of those folks have come to like Lexington or at least to tolerate it sufficiently that moving lost its urgency. Others have left as soon as opportunities presented themselves.  My final bit of advice for folks who have already done the Ph.D thing is to embrace flexibility to the extent that it is possible to do so. If your primary objections to living in the South (or Utah or Idaho or what not) are cultural and pre-emptive (you’ve decided you don’t want to go there because of what you’ve heard, not because you have personal experience) then at least consider taking advantage of professional opportunities in such places as they arise; you might be surprised with what you can tolerate and even grow to enjoy. If your objections are about the political environment I cannot gainsay, but at the same time be aware that there are lots of Black, Queer, and female faculty who have carved out productive careers and satisfying personal lives in places like Lexington, Tuscaloosa, and Baton Rouge.