When They Steal Our Future - The Professor Is Out

SubscribeSign in

When They Steal Our Future<br>My daughter brings the collapse home to me

The Professor Is Out<br>Jul 09, 2026

98

16

Share

My young adult daughter unexpectedly quit her high level job with the Democratic Party in DC and abruptly returned to live at home in Oregon for the foreseeable future. If you noticed a hiatus in posting the past couple weeks, that is why. It all unfolded very quickly.<br>I’m so glad she has quit; I’m a lifelong Democratic but I no longer believe in the party. I believe they are entirely complicit in our current collapse, whether through ignorance, corruption, privilege, incompetence, or a combination of all. After her successful stint in the Biden White House communications office, my daughter struggled to find a place in a party committed to enabling democratic failure. By no means are the two of us on the same page politically. She is far more centrist than me. But we can both see the void of weaponized helplessness at the party’s heart. I have been urging her to quit for a long time.

Photo by Jian Liu on Unsplash<br>What breaks my heart, though, is that I know that, if not for our current MAGA/Trump catastrophe - if for example, Hillary Clinton had been elected (and by no means do I think Clinton or Harris would have been ideal candidates) - my daughter could have had a wonderful career in DC Democratic politics. With her Poli Sci degree from Berkeley, and her tremendous instincts for political analysis, she would have moved easily in Democratic institutions, contributed essential Gen Z insights to strategizing and communications, and built a satisfying, successful life in DC.<br>But that future was stolen from her. Any semblance of normalcy died with January 6 (or really that ride down the escalator), and once you have seen behind the curtain of Democratic failure to mount any opposition… you can’t unsee it.<br>In the grand scheme of things, this theft is tiny. Compared to MAGA’s looting of our rule of law, our democratic norms, our Supreme Court, our economic viability, our medical and education institutions, and all the rest… it’s just one young person’s vocation.<br>But it’s all part of the same thing: the theft of our future—individually and collectively.<br>Talking through her options, my daughter said at one point, “I would have loved to think about going into journalism, so I could write about politics…. but that’s dead now too.”

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash<br>Watching her career prospects collapse - and trying rather unsuccessfully to manage my rising panic - I can’t stop thinking about how closely they parallel those of the PhDs I work with. The PhDs reading this Substack.<br>Like her, you imagined a future in an institution - the university - that had endured for decades, if not centuries; an institution fundamentally good and valuable, and necessary to a thriving society. You trained for that future, you believed in it. You were led to believe that it still existed - after all, universities are still “there,” with their campuses and their rituals and their incoming classes. Just like DC is still “there” with its political parties, branches of government, impressive buildings and leafy row houses.<br>But these physical edifices are just relics. They’ve been stripped of all meaningful mission or inner substance.<br>Now, they serve and appease capital. The idea that these institutions represent any kind of higher purpose to which dedicated trained professionals would devote their lives has been rendered laughable.<br>The collapse of academia, of course, has been unfolding since the 1990s. The first edition of my Professor Is In book (2015) was already framed around the exploitation of a structural adjunct underclass. Now that the collapse has engulfed the tenure-track and tenured, everyone is finally paying attention.<br>In the political sphere, I’m less sure about the timing. The GOP has been funneling assets into the hands of oligarchs since Reagan. Racial hatred has served as the central lever in this project since post-Reconstruction, and from the original sins of a nation built on genocide and chattel slavery.

Photo by Brian Kelly on Unsplash<br>But when did all pretense get stripped away? I’m not sure.<br>And more prosaically, how are actual people supposed to keep making their living? Setting aside mission or vision or dedication… people still need to pay their rent. The media is filled with pieces on the collapse of creative work. This one is good. So is this one: I’m Very Good At What I Do. And I Can’t Find Work. This is the NYT one that went viral. The gigs are gone.<br>We are all being starved because the greed of a handful of sociopaths can’t be sated.<br>Rosie Spinks:<br>What I hear in so many people’s anguished LinkedIn posts is a disconnect between the world they thought they were in versus the one they actually are. They sound aghast that the jobs, companies, and industries that were supposed to provide both meaning and security...