Sixteen years after receiving my Ph.D., I am, at long last, a "professor." I don't dare tell my mother.
"You mean, you weren't a real professor all this time?" I can hear her say.
Like many nonacademics, my mother has little appreciation of the complexities of the university promotion and tenure system. How could I expect her to comprehend the hierarchy of rank and the long, slow slog from postdoc, lowly instructor, and adjunct professor to tenure-track assistant, tenured associate, and now full professor? In her mind I've always been a professor.
I don't doubt that she's proud of me. For the benefit of her bridge friends, my books and scholarly offprints lie exhibited (albeit unread) on the coffee table of her living room.
But I can't shake the suspicion that she harbors a bit of disappointment when she surveys my career. After all, I teach at a PAC-10, land-grant university in the remote Pacific Northwest, a far cry from the Ivy League universities that I attended. As far as my mother is concerned, I could be teaching in Afghanistan. From her perspective, my career is not an upward ascent but a precipitous fall from grace.
"Where's Corvallis?" she asked when I proudly called 13 years ago to tell her with relief of my tenure-track job at Oregon State University. I explained that it was centrally located in the idyllic Willamette Valley, an hour from the ocean and the mountains and 80 miles from Portland.
"So, what you're telling me is, it's in the middle of nowhere?"
When she first visited here, I made the mistake of taking her to see the campus of the University of Oregon, our "civil war" rival in nearby Eugene. The U of O she liked. And for the next few years I would occasionally hear her ask, "How come you can't get a job at the main campus?"
My mother is not alone among parents who are clueless about the workings of academe. When one of my colleagues explained the job process to his parents, all they could ask was, "What does your boss think of that beard?" This at a university where so many of the male faculty members have beards you would think it was a Taliban training camp.
My mother's incomprehension of academe also extends to grants and fellowships. She typically refers to them as "good deals." A distant cousin spent a summer at Cambridge one year. "Why can't you get a good deal like that?" My explanations about the competitive process -- that minimally your research has to be in the field covered by the grant -- fell on deaf ears. To get a "good deal," you had to know someone, and evidently I didn't.
A few years ago I received a Fulbright and spent half a sabbatical year in Morocco doing research. Unlike the less famous, but no less terrific, fellowships I had all through graduate school, the name Fulbright my mother knew. My cousins -- every last one of them, it seems -- had all gotten Fulbrights. But a week after I called to tell her of my good fortune, she called back.
"You must not have a real Fulbright." One of her bridge friends told her that if I was going abroad for only half a year, it could not be the real thing.
A week later she called again.
"Why can't you get that other fellowship? You know, a McDonald, a McSomething."
I explain that you don't apply for the prestigious, lucrative MacArthur Fellowship, that recipients are nominated, and that the whole thing is a glorified crapshoot, the Irish sweepstakes of academe.
"Well, they must not give it out in your field," she opined.
"Oh, no, not at all. People in my field have received MacArthurs," I say.
"Then you must not know anyone."
It boils down to that. "Not knowing anyone."
Through some inexplicable process of human genetics, even my children have learned this fundamental truth of human existence. One evening we watched a PBS special together, where one talking head after another was a former classmate of mine. When I remarked how odd it was to see old friends on TV, my daughter, not even 10 at the time, observed, "Well, they can't be such good friends, or otherwise they would have invited you to join them."
Not knowing anyone is only one explanation for the limitations of my academic career. The supposed "obscurity" of my research is another. A few months ago my high-school-age nephew, while making the rounds of colleges and universities, met someone in my field. She spoke admiringly of my work. Imagine my family's surprise. The shocking fact wasn't that I had a reputation but rather that someone else worked in the same "obscure" field as I!
As I've discovered, scholarship is actually inconsequential. For friends and family, the real measure of success comes when you've written a popular book, a title that people will recognize. I remember a cousin of mine teasing his daughter, a Ph.D. in classics. "You need to have sex in your book," he said. "Then someone will read it." "But, Dad," the daughter explained impatiently -- no doubt for the 20th time -- "I wrote about eros in Herodotus. It is all about sex."
The Chronicle lists hundreds of newly published academic books each month, and many are indeed sexy. But very few get reviewed in the newspapers or find their way to the shelves of your neighborhood Borders. In the popular mind -- and not only for the editors of The New York Times Book Review -- "academic" has become synonymous with "irrelevant" and "boring."
The eroding status of the professoriate is nothing new. Higher education has always been the great incubator of sour grapes. But in a world where money is the sole measure of worth, it's no wonder that professors no longer enjoy the prestige accorded to other professionals.
One friend swears that his father on his deathbed puzzled over the fate of an older brother who was a professor of neurology. "Do you think Ben will ever go into private practice?" the father moaned.
The father's dying words go to the heart of the matter. Parents are right to feel anxious about their children's material well-being. In an age of diminishing academic opportunities, how dumb can you be to want to teach and do research? And a son who went to medical school, a doctor who teaches but doesn't practice, why, he has to be the biggest imbecile of all.
Even I now tell my better students to become doctors or lawyers, that they shouldn't bother seeking a Ph.D. unless being an academic is absolutely the only thing in the world they think they can be. Or better yet, if you like university life, become a football coach. In Oregon, as in many states, our coaches are our most esteemed and therefore our highest-paid public employees.
In my case, all is not lost. My ever-helpful mother -- who never went to college but whose native intelligence has never failed her in 83 years -- has already found the remedy. For the past few years, she has routinely been sending me newspaper clippings that document the six- and seven-figure salaries of university presidents.
Full professor, what's that? My mother's solution to the existential predicament of academic being and nothingness is for me to become a dean, a provost, and, yes, a millionaire university president.
In her words, that would be a "good deal."
I might protest that becoming a college president is easier said than done, but why bother? I can already hear her reply, "You must not know anyone."
And, of course, she'd be right.
