Skip to main content

Woke, Broke, and Tenured: A Survival Guide to Campus Politics

Woke, Broke, and Tenured: A Survival Guide to Campus Politics

Congratulations, professor. You’ve made it. You have a PhD, a shared printer that jams on sight, and a title that sounds prestigious until someone asks your salary and you whisper, “...commensurate with despair.”

Welcome to academia — where you’re underpaid, overcommitteed, and one tweet away from being re-educated.

Syllabus or Social Confession? Your syllabus now doubles as a moral statement. Required components:

  • A 300-word land acknowledgment
  • Trigger warnings for Plato, punctuation, and sunlight
  • A positionality paragraph detailing your race, class, pronouns, chakras, and favorite oppressed fruit

Also, quizzes are canceled. Students will instead submit "reflections on their learning energy."

DEI or DIE: You want that grant? You'll need a Diversity Statement explaining how your work:

  • On microplastics in mollusks dismantles late-stage capitalism
  • And how your research on neutron stars uplifts historically marginalized celestial bodies

Rubric:

  • 10 points for saying “decolonize”
  • Bonus points for citing bell hooks in your code comments

Also recommended: refer to your lab as a healing-centered epistemology zone.

Budget Cuts and the Hunger Games: Your department has been "sunsetted." Your office is now a meditation lounge for donors’ pets. But don’t worry — the Dean’s email says your “values live on” in a shared Google Drive folder.

Pro tip: use broken microscopes to toast bread.

Faculty Meetings: Now with Extra Suffering: Meetings start with a solidarity moment for the semicolon and end with a 40-minute debate on whether the word “rigor” is ableist.

Curriculum reform? Tabled. Again.

Twitter = Tenure Roulette: One “like” on the wrong meme and you're attending a six-part seminar on restorative tone management. Your offense? Quoting Nietzsche.

Pro tip: don’t tweet. Don’t even think. Just keep nodding.

Final Thoughts (Before You’re Canceled or Consolidated): Sure, your course evals say you’re “smart but too intense.” Sure, your building is scheduled for demolition. But you’re Woke, Broke, and Tenured™ — and that’s basically academic sainthood with dental.

So sharpen your chalk, align your chakras, and prepare for battle. Because in academia today, you're either publishing… or perishing in a budget reorg.