When I began writing for The Chronicle, I was determined not to fall into the pattern of pessimism that characterizes many First Person pieces. Looking back over some past columns presents an array of soul-crushing experiences -- from tenure denials to institutional racism to disingenuous departmental promises to brutal academic snobbery -- that paints academe as a pit of vipers and an ash heap for ideals and dreams.
Granted, a lot of this negativity can be attributed to the fact that academic nightmares are generally worth writing about: more instructive and, yes, grimly entertaining, than testimonials of pure satisfaction. We would all be fairly bored if every entry were an expression of uncomplicated joy, each titled something along the lines of "Pedagogical Bliss Pays Unbelievably Well," or, "Courted like a Quarterback Prospect at MLA."
Still, I had hoped to keep things fairly light. The last thing I wanted was for some Ph.D. candidate or college English major to read my columns and become discouraged about entering the profession by my hand-wringing lamentations. After toying with the idea of cribbing one of W.C. Fields' aliases (like Cuthbert J. Twillie), I settled on Jim Harris, a pseudonym reminiscent of the Southwest humorists, and set out to join the voices of optimism -- measured, ironic optimism, but optimism nonetheless -- that balance out the horror stories.
It's hard, however, to be upbeat at the end of a fruitless year on the job market.
As I took down the posters I had made to keep track of responses and dossier requests, threw away the map on which my wife and I plotted the locations of our various possible destinations, and dumped the file with all my correspondence from various briefly interested colleges, I felt a sense of overwhelming weariness.
The cumulative effects of the last five years of what my wife and I refer to as "gradual school," of my intense sprint to the Ph.D. right out of college, seemed to wear on me all at once: the past two summers devoted to intense academic activity -- first, preparing for comprehensive exams, then finishing the dissertation -- without pay; the Christmas break usurped by an admittedly enjoyable but nonetheless exhausting trip to the Modern Language Association convention; the adjustment to teaching a three-course-a-semester load for the first time while on the job market.
I was deeply tired, and filled with the sense that, for the first time in my academic career, I had failed at something. In the midst of my self-pity, my mother called and asked about graduation (even though I completed my doctorate last August, my university doesn't hold an official ceremony until the following May). Some relatives were coming up, she said, and wanted to know the schedule. As I spoke to her about the milestone that had come to seem almost meaningless to me, in that it has not yet translated into a job, I was struck by the vast gulf between academic recognition of success and "real-world" success, and how vastly different my life at this point looks from academic and nonacademic perspectives.
From an academic perspective, my situation looks pretty good. I've got my Ph.D. at 27; I jumped all the hurdles the first time through. "Look how many people in their mid-30s and older are still looking for their first tenure-track job," my mother said, ostensibly to cheer me up, rather than to offer me a vision of my own future. I have a pretty good lectureship at my degree-granting institution that enables me to build up teaching experience with excellent students and to keep my head above water financially. My dissertation is almost ready to go out to publishers for consideration.
Sure, I struck out my first year on the market, but it was a pretty awful year for Americanists, and average time on the market is between two to three years. It would have been nice to break through this year, but generally, from an academic point of view, I'm doing pretty well.
The problem is that right now I'm in a kind of limbo between the academic world and the real world -- the world in which 27 isn't all that young, in which it's getting to be about time to buy a house and start a family, as my wife's older sisters have already done and as my brother is about to do, the world in which I could have made what I'm making now in my first year out of college, in which my wife most definitely lives as she works at a job outside her field until we can move somewhere more supportive of environmental educators.
I see my friends advancing in their careers, starting families, while I live from semester to semester, for the first time in my life not progressing toward anything definite or tangible. This is why the graduation ceremony seems hollow to me, a marker less of achievement than of an end to life in a world where such things really matter.
I know that the Ph.D. will matter, as soon as I'm able to bridge the gap between academe and reality by landing a tenure-track job. And I know that when I do, the reasons I've stayed in the game this long will still hold their allure -- the ability to think for a living, to interact with a constantly changing cast of exciting young minds, to bring together my love of literature and learning and the genuine intellectual excitement I feel in my research in a stable, reasonably well-paying position.
In the meantime, my wife and I are trying to make the best of our life in limbo, this tenuous place between my life as a student and my life as a professor. We try to focus on the benefits of being where we are, on enjoying another year or two as a couple before we think about starting a family, on the excitement of still having our lives before us.
And we try to ignore that in this limbo, time does pass, and opportunities are doled out by the year rather than by the day.
Now, as I anticipate the graduation ceremony, I try to break out of my self-centered funk and realize that, in a sense, this ritual carries more meaning in the real world than in the world of academe. I'm only the second generation on either side of my family to finish college; my 82-year-old Italian grandmother is traveling hundreds of miles to see her grandson get his Ph.D. My nonacademic friends call me "Doctor" with a sense of wonder that not even the ever-present air of irony that tinges our conversations can fully mask.
Job or no job, this degree is important -- ironically, it matters more to people outside of academe than it does to those on the inside. So, I will celebrate, surrounded by loved ones who cared enough to drive or fly up and see me walk across the stage. I will make myself see this as a meaningful achievement, one not completed by all who attempt it.
And I will have faith that, however naive it may sound, this is what I was born to do, and that the ultimate reward will be worth the struggle. Even in this limbo, I have the opportunity to teach poetry to eager and enthusiastic students, to spend afternoons reading Twain and Faulkner and call it work. Even without the security of a tenure-track job, I have to keep a kind of real-world perspective on what I am able to do for a living, and know that if nothing else, as a ranch hand acquaintance of the Louisiana writer Jean Stafford once put it, "It's good work, and you can do it in the shade."
