In its simplest iteration, Professor Never is the story of my experience as a student, mother, and then adjunct English professor pursuing a career as a tenured professor. In that recounting, however, subplots related to education, race and ethnicity studies, childhood, and disability emerge.

As both a love letter to the humanities and a critique of university hiring practices, the book shines a light on higher education—good and bad. With the obvious problem of a contingent workforce in the foreground, the writing shows how I am challenged and transformed by my humanities education in my study of African American literature, feminist literature, and the Frankfort School. In addition, undergirding my efforts to win a tenure-track job is my research on Whiteness and childhood innocence in American literature and the coupling of my love of teaching African American literature with my uncertainty about my position as a White teacher of that subject. The book includes classroom scenes depicting both my teaching successes and failures in this vein. And last, the work recounts my efforts to balance my responsibilities as a mother, teacher, and scholar. This includes the challenges of my son’s dyslexia diagnosis, the discovery of which sheds light on my own undiagnosed (but different) reading disability. As I turn my research skills toward this new problem, I uncover my own misperceptions about the meaning of “disability” and am able to understand my own graduate school struggles in a new light. Ultimately, the injustices of adjunct work together with my new passion for educating those with learning disabilities persuades me to abandon academe and become a tutor for students with dyslexia.

The narrative raises questions about the aim of higher education, who can access graduate school, the value of a humanities education in opening minds and educating an active and informed citizenry, the role of White scholars in African and Asian American literature, and the meaning of having a learning disability at the highest levels of learning.