The Season of Dark Academia
image from article, with caption: Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
Excerpt:
[T]he very real world of academia feels a little too dark and unhappy of late. The towering, all-powerful professors of yore are now often adjunct or contract instructors, with lower pay and tenuous job security. In 2004, 17 percent of four-year institutions said that they had replaced tenured positions with contingent appointments. In 2022, that figure was 54 percent, according to a study by the American Association of University Professors. As of 2020, about 62 percent of faculty members who teach were on contingent appointments.
Poverty, alas, doesn’t quite capture the romantic ideal of dark academia, but it is a reality for many in higher education. Around a third of adjunct professors earn less than $25,000 a year, according to one 2020 report. Grad students, who have been fighting to unionize in recent years, may earn as little as $10,500 a year. Meanwhile, students increasingly worry whether they will be able to earn enough to pay off the massive debt they took on to pay for their educations.
Such concerns may be in part responsible for skyrocketing mental health issues among students. In 2018, more than 60 percent of college students said they’d experienced “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year. Over 40 percent said they felt so depressed they had difficulty functioning. It is widely believed that the pandemic has only exacerbated such trends.
Who wouldn’t want to reclaim some of the romance of higher education — the musty glamour of hushed libraries full of undiscovered tomes, a sense of earned status and future promise, the heady access to power and privilege and undaunted knowledge? The notion that college is a cloistered moment in life, followed by infinite possibility?
In this dimmed light, Oxford and Hogwarts and small New England colleges can feel like safe harbors. You can understand the allure of an aesthetic that offers TikTokers “a version of a dream life in which they can spend their days reading the classics in a centuries-old library,” as CNN put it. “Many of its acolytes harbored dreams of attending storied schools across the pond and studying history, art or classic literature — subjects some college students might be discouraged from pursuing.”
Oh for a time when the true darkness dwelled only in the academy’s fictional realms. When one could listen raptly as a professor waxed rhapsodic about the urgency of 19th-century literature, holding tight to a world that esteemed learning for learning’s sake, dreaming of becoming a beloved classics professor or pursuing poetry to widespread acclaim. Without ever having to pay a price.
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