“Unemployed Professors Sucks”
A lot of people talk smack about Unemployed Professors. A lot of people think we suck. Of course, it’s important to defend yourself against such attacks. People hate that this site exists and, hey, haters gonna hate. Unemployed Professors is disrupting the educational paradigm, and everyone hates disrupters.
People who say that we suck are locked into the traditional thinking about education. They believe that a faceless committee should prescribe what classes someone should take, and that if, for example, someone just can’t pass an 8 AM section of English 201 no matter how hard they try, because their professor automatically flunks anyone whose APA headings aren’t perfect, they should be denied their degree and doomed to a life of toil. Believing that education is a gatekeeper for the middle class is the source of belief that Unemployed Professors sucks. Yeah, we suck – we suck at adhering to the mainstream ideas about education and who it is for. For every 10 people who claim that our site is somehow evil, we help 100 people stay in the middle class by ensuring that they can get that last credential needed. We help overworked teachers finish up busywork continuing education requirements. We help dyslexic engineers finish required English classes. We help working moms finish the last history paper they need so they can graduate with their nursing degrees. We help cancer patients stay in school. We help veterans who have put their lives on the line for their country finish editing their capstone projects. Behind every paper here, there’s a story. That story is usually of someone who has been failed by the system, whose time and money are being wasted on irrelevant required classes. We are proud of the work we do here, and we are proud of the papers we write, just as we were proud of the work we put our own names on in our own educational and professional careers.
People say Unemployed Professors sucks, but they fail to see that in addition to helping students, the site also helps professors. It is a well-known fact that most people who finish PhD’s never get a tenure-track job. It is well-established that adjuncts are overworked and underpaid and graduate students often live off starvation wages. The fields these people are in may be undervalued by the capitalist system, but they are nonetheless valuable. However, these people still have to eat. If partially-employing an Unemployed Professor takes someone off food stamps, can we really say that the site sucks?
So, yeah, as you can see our site really sucks. We suck at maintaining the paradigm. We suck at helping rich people stay rich. We suck at helping universities continue to enrol people in classes they don’t really need so they can keep vacuuming up their money. We suck at maintaining the gatekeeper identity of the university, which is the idea that it can cripple working-class students with debt for degrees they can’t finish while ensuring that the wealthy students maintain their position in the upper class.
One of our friendly, tweed-wearing Unemployed Professors is happy to help you tame the paper monster.