First Week of School: The More Things Change

It's an interesting moment in time to be teaching first year students. I mean that in a broad sense, but I also mean it in a "teaching the first week of classes during this particular week in August of 2026." Let me unpack that statement a bit:--Tuesday March 11 was our first day of classes. It was also my first day as an Associate Professor on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College, which I wrote about in this blog post. Just before I went to my first class of the Fall 2026 semester, I read this article in The Atlantic about a professor leaving his tenure track job. His college, Bates College in Maine, is in many ways completely unlike mine. The beginning of the article made me think I was reading the complaints of an incredibly privileged man who got a teaching job right out of grad school, but it's more nuanced than that.Here's the 5th paragraph (the nuanced part comes much later): "When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing…