The many meanings of travel are marshaled toward two ends of a highly charged spectrum spanning honor and shame.  I largely write on how I find this spectrum at the roots of ancient Christianity, but it remains today and is nowhere more evident than in the workforce, where different laborers—even among traditional “professionals”—are interpolated in starkly different ways. While itinerancy marks teachers and students as vagabonds, the mobility of business workers contributes to their canonization as capitalist saints.

While professors (and particularly adjuncts) constitute an increasingly mobile and precarious vocation, enthusiasm over online education raises the specter of eliminating them altogether. A recent piece in TNR by Nora Caplan-Bricker describes the tribulations of one of the more unique MOOC experiments, Black Mountain SOLE (“Self-Organized Learning Environment”) of Ashville, NC. In its first year, the non-accredited, non-degree-granting quasi-college has found mixed results attempting make a profit attracting students—or, not so much students as entrepreneurs looking for networking, personal growth, and, if needed, a marketable skill or two. The last part—skills—is where the MOOCs come in. “From that perspective, what is a MOOC?” asks executive director Dave Dobias. “A YouTube video that teaches you how to make a bottle rocket, or whatever—that’s a MOOC! It’s just a really short one.” Dobias and the SOLEMates who help run Black Mountain see traditional professors and pedagogy as unnecessary obstacles in the path of free-market self-actualization.

One student interviewed in the piece later decided to leave Black Mountain because she entered the program wanting to learn some discrete skills—though she admitted, “I won’t pick up a MOOC unless I know that I’m going to be using it. It makes me more picky . . . because I could be making money.” She thought SOLE lacked concrete direction.  “I think I probably would have brought in more leaders,” she explains.  “I would probably bring in teachers, like traveling teachers, instead of relying on SOLEmates to do that.” Caplan-Bricker does not say if she suggested to the student that Black Mountain SOLE could take the radical step of hiring permanent teachers for a salary allowing them to live at or near the mountain retreat.

While bands of roving instructors may seem convenient to some, few people want professors to be actually homeless—at least, they wouldn’t admit it outright. But we have seen, in recent weeks, of an adverse response to the prospect of professors and grad students moving in next door. A proposed development for a long-stay hotel was rejected by residents of Evanston for fear that it would “devolve into cheap housing for transient academics.” I suppose I’ve lived in some questionable housing since leaving college, but treating my residential options like a prison, power plant, or Walmart really is a low blow. (Rebecca Schuman, as usual, has provided a definitive take-down of the incident.)

Among teachers in higher ed, adjuncts face the greatest risk of academic transience—whether construed as lacking a secure departmental home (or office) or quite literally earning poverty-level wages and living out of their car. Recent media attention and labor activism have targeted the problem. Last week’s faculty strike at the University of Illinois at Chicago attempted to address a host of issues, including the precarious nature of adjunct work. One strike leader explained that action was necessary to keep temporary instructors from living like “academic gypsies.” The ethnic characterization, while unfortunate, reveals the benign neglect (when not explicit contempt) directed at higher ed instruction.

Certainly, forced mobility and labor insecurity has more devastating effects on other populations. Female and non-white faculty have a host of other structural prejudices affecting their vocation. And other labor communities find themselves in a much more pernicious double-bind when it comes to mobility and migration. For many, border-crossing and enforced boundaries are a constitutive aspect of identity, the process by which they are understood by dominant cultures.

It is instructive, then, to observe that the ambivalence of itinerancy cuts both ways depending on cultural and market values. Mobile academics, whether moving from project to project, job to job, or place to place, are simply striving to flourish (or even survive) market realities that have diminished wages, decreased security, and created the precariate as the growing workforce of the twenty-first century. Young workers in other fields, however, are not shunned as transients for similar career-building practices. I was recently introduced to the concept of “Generation Flux,” (h/t The New Inquiry’s “Sunday Links”). Generation Flux members frequently change jobs, cities, and, some suspect all too quickly, loyalties. The successful among them build “lives . . . that are more expressive of who they really are.” Teachers? Of course not. They are management-level workers in business. In an with the Harvard Business Review blog, Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD, comments on how young managers are actually staying in their jobs more often than in the past, that the myth of Generation Flux is simply a creative, “aspirational” narrative—one not a little ironic in light of the decreased loyalty corporations extend to workers. Far from being an accurate marker of a trend, the trope is “a bit like the hagiographies of the saints or the historians’ accounts of the great emperors and warriors.” These young go-getters—“nomadic professionals”—find the self-empowerment to take what they want wherever they can find it, transcending the normal bonds of attachment to employer or region.

You know, these are exemplars—our literary heroes and heroines, as we were saying earlier. They promise a kind of salvation from meaninglessness, from unemployment. Of course there’s a word for a fortunate minority that has this kind of cultural influence. And that word is, an “elite” . . . Let me just say first that a nomadic elite is a very new phenomenon. Until relatively recently, just the two words together would have been an oxymoron. For millennia, elites have been made of people deeply embedded within a stable social structure. Inbred in-groups, within often fairly homogeneous groups.

People who moved around were considered rootless, dangerous to society and possibly morally corrupt. They certainly weren’t the people you would look up to for leadership. These days what we have is a reversal of their status. The status of nomadic professionals has become very high.

High, that is, as long as they chase money. And it is tempting and partially correct to see money as the distinguishing factor between the contemporary myths of Holy Financier and Vagabond Teacher. More specifically, the nomadic manager upholds one of the important truths in the saga of capital—the idea that each worker’s fate is self-determined. Each individual, the aspiring professional believes, can fly unfettered, acquiring skills where needed and wealth where available, without the aid of anyone else, much less of a formative community like a school. The professor in her very being betrays this pious fiction. Far from being a vagabond, the professor is a building block for the type of edifice late capitalism likes to believe it no longer needs. And so professors are scattered, driven from apartment to apartment, job to job, revising syllabi, publications, and strategic plans packed with “marketable skills” for a market whose only value is novel ways to produce capital, workers who can push the boundaries of profit.

Since Odysseus and Paul, wandering has been understood as travel without ostensible goal or intention. In the argument over higher ed, we are debating not itinerary but final destination, the ultimate values that determine society’s direction.