Why I Quit the Tenure Track

The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia

Illustrations by Erin Jia As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide neon sign reads HOPEFUL. And so I was. My