If nothing else, I hope that struggling young scholars will read this account and, for a moment, feel grateful for their academic surroundings.
I've been chronicling my search for a nonacademic job in these pages, and in this, my last installment, I would like to share what the world of work is like on the other side.
Let me begin with a caveat: Obviously there is a wide range of nonacademic jobs. I happen to have found a job where my hours are strictly 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., where I have enormous discretion to pursue whatever projects seem interesting to me, and where I am working with people with a broad range of educational backgrounds.
My employer is a strange cross between a research institute and a consulting firm, and I am one of the very few people in the organization with a doctorate. My degree is viewed by many of my co-workers in much the same way that I look at people who have a pierced cheek: It's vaguely impressive and was probably quite painful to do, but what, really, was the point?
I like my co-workers a lot -- as much as, or more, than I liked my former colleagues in my academic department. As with many doctoral researchers, especially outside of the natural sciences, my doctorate and postdoctorate years were a pretty lonely time for me.
And yet I now find I miss the scholarly community. It turns out that I am more attached than I realized to a positivist epistemological worldview, where people generally believe that debates and questions can be resolved by reference to empirical research.
When you work in academe, you take for granted a certain respect for verifiable knowledge. Most academics work within what a senior advisor to George W. Bush has dismissively, and famously, called the "reality-based community." In my experience, even researchers working from the most normative philosophical and epistemological positions had a sneaking respect for positivist inquiry in terms of casual conversation about public-policy issues.
It's the kind of thing you don't notice until it's absent.
At my new office, in the lunchroom during my first week of work, a woman named Esther brightly announced, "So, did you hear that they were wrong about global warming?"
Like most workplaces, there's a sort of hierarchy about who gets to answer first. This was my first week, and Esther is senior management, so I kept my mouth shut for as long as I could stand. Which turned out to be about three and a half minutes.
First, there was a sort of muttering around the table. No one had heard anything like that, it seemed. Marco, a young man who works in the manufacturing part of the business, didn't agree. He spoke like an empiricist. "We used to get snow every winter," he said. "It's definitely warmer now."
A young woman from communications wasn't so sure. "We still get snow once a year. I love it when it turns the city into a winter wonderland."
"No, they said that global warming hasn't really been happening." Esther was intent on making the point.
"Do you mean it's not necessarily warming?" I finally said. "You mean it's climate change rather than global warming?"
Esther shook here head: "Nope. Neither is actually happening."
"That's just wrong," I said. "You probably heard an announcement from the government to defend why they aren't doing anything. Or some scientist funded by the oil companies."
There was a moment of silence. Someone laughed nervously.
Esther wasn't persuaded. "I'm just saying what someone else said."
"Who was it? I'm pretty sure that the only scientists who don't agree are paid by the oil companies."
I was expecting that remark to shift the conversation to evidence, to information. But it turned out I was just voicing my opinion.
One of the older guys who works in plastics turned out to be a surprisingly fervent postmodernist. He shook his head, "They'll find what they want to find. Everyone will believe whatever they want to believe." He went on in that vein for some time, and the conversation moved on.
I have experienced other frustrations that seem more specific to my workplace. Here, three weeks into the job, my phone still wasn't working. It was the job of the manager responsible for operations, and, unfortunately for me, the manager in question had an instinctive grasp of Ronald Burt's argument about the importance of structural holes -- insuring that you are the only connection between two groups of people.
"No," she solemnly assured me, when I offered to follow up with the relevant department myself. "You can't call them to check on the status of your phone. People get really mad around here when people keep asking them about something like that."
Eventually, I had a friend of mine secretly call a friend of hers in the relevant department. Later that day, my phone was operational.
Even smaller things: the availability of reading materials. My academic department used to order several daily newspapers and leave them in the public kitchen. There would also always be a scattering of useful journals around the lunchroom or a short walk away. Here, the lunchroom is generally empty of any printed material except, occasionally, some of our own publicity brochures.
The truth is the transition to working full time has been hard. Showing up at the same time every day and leaving at the same time still seems unnatural to me. I get less work done than I did as an academic, but I spend more time working. I often find myself thinking of the Marxist labor historians who contend that industrial organization was never about efficiency, but about control.
Having said all that, of course, there are compensations to nonacademic work. I almost never work evenings or weekends, and I have more collaborators than I ever had in an academic setting. I have financial and social support as I make more connections and build relationships with other potential employers. I am able to spend all of my time on research, even if that largely means spending time writing research proposals and looking for other sources of grant support.
I recently had lunch with my former academic adviser. He, too, spent many years in consulting before returning to academe. I described some of my struggles with the transition to the nonacademic working world. He listened sympathetically.
"But," I said, "I know it's probably no worse than being an assistant professor without tenure."
My old adviser, who received tenure about 10 years ago, shook his head. "No, it's worse."
"Really?" I replied, and told him how one of my favorite professors when I was getting my doctorate had almost broken down in the seminar he taught, when one of the students had asked where he found time to work on his research.
My old adviser shrugged. "Yeah, you have a lot to do as a professor. It's not so bad. You have a lot of control over what you spend your time on. You're surrounded by interesting people doing interesting things."
"I know a lot of young academics," I said. "They're pulled in 30 different ways at once -- teaching, research, and committee responsibilities. They end up working all the time and seem just miserable."
We were eating our lunch outside on the university campus, and, for a moment, my old adviser just watched the students walk by.
"I've noticed that, too," he finally said. "And all I can think is that most of those people have never worked outside of academe."
For me, I think, the jury is still out. Some days I still find myself poring over academic job postings in my field, desperately looking for a way back into academe.
For the most part, though, I have made my peace. Last fall I was able to work four days a week and on the fifth day teach a class at a local university. This spring I presented a paper at a conference. For the time being, those small tastes of academic life are enough; in fact, I have enjoyed the academic environment more in small doses than I ever did when I was fully immersed in the life.
As time passes, I will no doubt either accustom myself to the strictures of my new career, or try once again to find a place for myself in the academic world.
