I won the university dissertation prize in 2010. I got a firm job offer from the University of West Georgia. They reneged without explanation in late June of that year. Even though I’d written books and published in top tier journals, the stain of UWG’s revocation destroyed my career before it began. I was never able to get a decent TT job, because I “had to have done something” to cause it. What I’d done was not having spent time as the department chair’s little pet who couldn’t get a job otherwise. Adjunct Hell ever since. That’s what academia did for me.