When I walked into the departmental meeting on a bright December day, I did so with only a touch of my usual trepidation. I was in my second year of a two-year appointment as a visiting assistant professor at a small college in Michigan. Susan, my wife, held a tenure-track position in creative writing. We had taken the initial steps of sending out job applications to various colleges, but we were cautiously optimistic that we would not need to pursue them.
Susan had just won the National Poetry Series award and, as an Iranian-American author in a post-9/11 world, was bringing positive attention to an institution that did not have an excellent record on matters of diversity. My own poetry book had been published and was garnering good reviews, and a scholarly manuscript of mine had solicited interest from a major university press. All of these events, combined with our strong teaching records and good relationships with our colleagues, gave us some reason to hope that my position might be renewed and I would not need to choose between uprooting my family, separating from them, or returning to part-time lecturing between two or three institutions as I had done in the past.
My illusion of relative security was shattered quickly, however. Sitting among somber colleagues I learned that the college was experiencing an enrollment crisis and that the president had decided to "trim the waste" by eliminating visiting assistant professorships. Later I learned that Susan and I were the only faculty members affected who had not been forewarned.
It felt like an ambush, and I wasn't sure how to feel or what to do. For a few minutes back in our shared office, Susan and I huddled, expressing frustration and anger at how the announcement was handled. I am blessed with a spouse who supports me, and Susan reiterated her willingness to stay on the job market so that we might find employment near each other and keep our young family together.
Instinctively I felt that I had come to the end of something and feared that I had gambled my family's future away. Earlier that year I had been offered a position at a charter high school that would have allowed security for us and the promise of continuing to live in our large house among good schools and kind neighbors. The salary and benefits were comparable to those I was getting at the college level, and the principal was excited to have me; but like many academic transients I clung almost desperately to the dream of a tenure-track job with all the perks, respect, and dignity that I thought came with it. The idea of teaching at a high school or even a community college seemed shameful to me somehow, a waste of the hard work that had gone into getting my Ph.D.
I looked around at what Susan had and was jealous, saw fellow graduates getting jobs and grew bitter, thought about the many near-misses I had experienced on the job market and got angry. I deserve that job, I told myself, and everyone who knew and worked with me seemed to agree.
In graduate school the idea of "alternative careers for Ph.D. students" was addressed by one or two faculty members concerned with the number of graduates unable to find work or working under the abusive conditions offered to adjuncts and part-time lecturers -- the often well-published, hard-working, tragic heroes giving up their time and nervous systems to hundreds of students a semester for a couple thousand dollars a course and no benefits.
But the cupboard always appeared conspicuously bare -- filled mainly with internships at publishing houses, technical-writing jobs at businesses, freelancing. Alternative teaching careers were rarely mentioned and often openly discouraged. "You don't want to work in a sweatshop," one professor told me when I mentioned that I might apply to a local community college.
And when I casually spoke to a mentor about employment at a private high school as a way of continuing to teach and revive my coaching career, he was openly appalled. "You belong at the college level," he said. "You don't need a Ph.D. to coach J.V. Baseball."
Graduates who found careers outside of the private liberal-arts college or the major university were whispered about as "having fallen through the cracks." At an institutional level all sorts of methods of solving "the job crisis" were mentioned, including shrinking the graduate program by accepting fewer students -- an unpopular and draconian but seemingly necessary measure. But the idea of sending graduates off to teach continuing-education students or 15-year-olds seemed even more distasteful.
I still have my suspicions regarding the reasons. I suppose there was a combination of the paternal desire to see graduates do well and the more insidious motive of wanting to be able to sell their programs by advertising high percentages for the placement of their students at college-level positions.
After Susan left to pick up one of our sons from school and retrieve the other from a baby sitter, I sat at my computer and for the millionth time visited the Web site of Carney Sandoe and Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in teacher placement. I had often looked at the links to the Web sites of the beautiful campuses at Andover, Exeter, St. Marks, but never seriously considered applying. This time I filled out the application.
Then I visited The Chronicle's job site and printed out all the community-college job listings I could find.
Community Colleges were even more of a mystery to me. A year before, I applied for a job at an area two-year college and was told by the chairwoman that while she wanted to hire me, my credentials and educational philosophy threatened some of the older faculty members. I didn't know if I had become less threatening in a year, but I felt compelled to try.
Susan had already begun to receive interview requests by then for the upcoming Modern Language Association meeting in New Orleans and although I had not heard back from any colleges regarding my applications, I remained hopeful. "There's still plenty of time," I told myself. I still wanted that tenure-track job.
But I was upset enough to search out other employment opportunities and cast my net as wide as possible. As I stepped into the elevator to head home for the day, the department chairman jumped in to speak with me. He pulled at his beard for a moment, nervously, as if uncomfortable and unsure of what to say. As we got off the on the ground floor he spoke, "I'm afraid that because of the factors mentioned in the meeting, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to offer you employment next year." As students filed past, with their quick curious glances, I swallowed hard and asked if I could at least get a three-course load in the fall as a lecturer. "No, I don't believe that will be possible."
At that moment all of the cruelty of the profession hit me. Hard.
Of course he couldn't. An extra course would have meant full-time status, which would have meant benefits -- and what about all the other part-time faculty members, sharing desks in the combined office on the first floor? If he gave one person full-time status, wouldn't they all want it?
And I realized that I did not have my position on my merits as a scholar or teacher, but on Susan's merits and the chance appearance of a few thousand dollars extra in the departmental budget. My credentials were irrelevant, my teaching record irrelevant. My job was a gift that could be taken away at any moment. And it wasn't even really my job. My office was not my office. Worse, I couldn't really complain. As a spousal hire I was treated better than 99 percent of those in my situation. And as a candidate in the ferociously competitive fields of creative writing and 20th-century American literature I could probably not have gotten such a job on my own.
But I realized that I didn't want to be a spousal hire any longer. I needed to make my own way. I reminded myself that my father, my sisters, and two of my uncles were in either elementary or secondary education and that their lives were productive, dignified, and meaningful. I thought about this as I watched my chairman duck back behind glass doors and hurry up the stairs -- not wanting, apparently, to wait for the elevator. I could hardly blame him.
Fleetingly, I thought of how I would never want to have to do what he had just done. And what began to happen was that options that seemed shameful an hour before were developing a greater attractiveness. I wanted to be somewhere I was wanted. I needed to matter more than this. I was worth more than this. What had seemed like a single road to my future was now complicated with detours, off-ramps, and exits. I only knew that I was on my way.
Next: Entering the job market of private high schools.
