In a recent Balancing Act column, the pseudonymous Paige Newcastle related her career difficulties as part of a "moderately successful" academic couple: She is at a "very prestigious university" in the Midwest, and her husband is at "a good regional university." She related how she and her husband have had numerous positions and been successful teachers and researchers, but have rarely been able to maintain job satisfaction and security in the same place and at the same time. The couple has finally settled -- uncomfortably -- in a situation where they both commute two hours in different directions to reach their jobs and regulate their family life via cellphones and calendars.
Newcastle wondered if there was a happier story than her own for academic couples with families. We would like to suggest that there is, but it's not where Newcastle and her husband have likely been looking.
We are an academic couple who work in two different fields and have a toddler. Both of us were trained at major research institutions to become researchers. Our advisers were at the top of their fields, and they expected us to replicate, more or less, their career paths.
But, as is the experience of most graduate students after the late 1980s, our initial forays into the flooded academic markets in American literature and environmental microbiology suggested that there would be little room for us at the top. Moreover, it became clear that even if we were both to achieve such "success," we would have difficulty making room for our relationship and other important nonacademic aspects of our lives.
Fortunately, we realized fairly early on that we could become successful teachers and scholars together without sacrificing our desire to pursue things like vacations, hobbies, pets, and children. But to do so, we would have to sacrifice the idea of positions at first- or even second-tier institutions.
We currently reside, fairly happily, at the University of Maine at Augusta -- a small, underfunded public university that caters predominantly to nontraditional students. It belongs to a sector of institutions that has sometimes been labeled the "Third World" of academe. That is a troubling metaphor, but like the relationship between the "First World" and the "Third World" of global politics, our world is much poorer, larger, and more abundantly populated than that of the top-tier institutions.
There are many more tenure-track positions available at campuses like ours than in the tier where Newcastle teaches. It's just that our names are less likely to be visible at national conferences and in the pages of elite journals.
It is possible that Newcastle would not consider us to be "moderately successful" academics precisely because of where we teach. Certainly, our graduate advisers would not have deemed our institution as their first choice for us.
However, we find our university to offer enthusiastic students, congenial faculty members, and one of the most likable and open-minded provosts we have encountered. While we certainly have limited money for conferences and research labs, we manage to find creative solutions in order to pursue our scholarly interests, and we remain interested in and satisfied by our jobs here.
Equally important, the university has actively embraced us as an academic couple. We were not hired at the same time, but administrators expressed interest in hiring the other once one of us was on board. Additionally, we encountered few political obstacles as might occur at a more elite institution where employing anyone less than a rising star would make a spousal hire unlikely.
At places like our university there's also more room to be a well-rounded person than at elite institutions. Not only do many of our colleagues have children, but a number of them have horses (we live in a rural state), some raise sheep, one owns a bookstore, and several coach sports teams. They perform in bands, become state legislators, and establish art galleries. Nearly everyone has a garden and/or a dog.
When we were first expecting our baby, we asked for a paid semester's leave (for Lisa) and a course reduction (for Pete), which we received. No one threatened our tenure clocks or suggested that we would be lesser colleagues once we became parents.
We don't pretend that life at our university is always ideal; it can be difficult to work at a university with few resources and little prestige. It's also true that such work is not for everyone; some of our colleagues inevitably leave for institutions with lower teaching loads and more support for scholarship.
But for those of you who enjoy the life of the mind yet also want to engage in the world in other ways, universities like ours can be a haven. It's an option that few graduate students perceive as viable, though, because academe perpetuates a myth of meritocracy: If you are good enough, you will be recognized for your genius and receive a position in an elite institution. In such a culture, jobs like ours wear the patina of failure.
Newcastle wonders if she and her husband have made the right career choices and suggests that they often made decisions that were less careerist than family-oriented or about important ethical or political issues. She considers that her current, less-than-ideal situation might be a result of a systemic anachronism (academic success based on the model of a male professor with a wife who manages the family) and/or her family's bad luck.
We would assert that it might also be the result of her own definition of academic success. As the self-proclaimed daughter of a "very successful" academic, she may have been especially prone to the very biases that prevent many Ph.D.'s from actively considering careers in the "third tier" of academe.
We know we are unlikely to engage in world-changing research, and our names may never grace the most well-known journals in our fields, but we attempt to make a difference in our students' lives and challenge ourselves with moderate amounts of scholarship. And unlike Newcastle's family, we get by without cellphones, we commute together, and, during the holidays, our baby's face is plastered on the dean's door along with pictures of other faculty children.
Our model of academic life should be considered as valid as the elite paradigm that haunts academe at large. It all depends, of course, on how you define "success." For us, and for many others who are the true workaday laborers of the professoriate, that success is found in positions where we talk tomatoes along with our Thoreau.
