After the panel was over, a senior academic put up his hand and said, ‘These papers were all excellent, but one thing struck me – why are you all so conservative?’ I agreed to the point of formulating a clap or two. None of the three early career academics who had been asked to talk about ‘the future of the humanities’ at this ‘sandstone’ university were angered. One, a French literature academic, even embraced the comment.

In a recent Slate essay, Rebecca Schumann, a visiting assistant professor of German at Ohio State University, demonstrates tidily the alleged lure of academic life: ‘Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired?’

In 2011, I left Perth for Houston Texas to begin the internationally prestigious Masters of Fine Arts in poetry. As part of my funding arrangement I was offered a teaching assistantship, and at the time I thought this was a great deal.