Since the moment I left a promising career in journalism for a Ph.D. program in comparative literature, there was one comment I feared above all else. Fortunately, I never heard it during five years of course work, exams, and conference presentations. But then, at my dissertation defense, there it was:
"You have no scholarly apparatus," a committee member said.
The truth is, I never stopped being a journalist. A more difficult truth: I never felt totally at home as a doctoral student and was never completely convinced I would go on the academic job market.
But I was too stubborn to quit. I was too stubborn to admit that I had gone to graduate school for many of the wrong reasons -- all the ones your advisers tell you not to consider when choosing a graduate program. Most of those reasons revolved around the academic lifestyle: not having to clock in and out of a job every day, long vacations, and instant friends. Like many other students, I faced indecision about my path in life.
Indecision, however, has its up side. After all, it's natural not to feel totally at home in anything you do. Perhaps it's a good thing to retain some critical distance from your career.
In 2001, I was working a boring job at an information-gathering company in New York. I compiled facts all day long and stared out the window across the Hudson River, wanting to escape. When September 11th happened, I took the attacks as my cue to leave. I went back to Texas and graduate school, where things moved slowly and I could live comfortably. I used my New York connections to start writing as a freelancer.
I wrote a couple of good articles, one of which turned into a major national news piece about workers from India who were sold into virtual slavery at an oil refinery in Oklahoma. Whenever I could write those kinds of articles, I felt connnected to the world around me.
In the meantime, though, graduate school started to grow on me. By my third year, I was on dual career paths and at home in both worlds. I tried to balance my freelance writing career and my coursework in literature by only doing journalism after the end of a semesters.
It didn't always work. Once I felt terribly guilty for canceling a class I was teaching to work on a story about Midland, Texas, right before the 2004 presidential election. I had gotten an assignment from a well-known magazine to explore whether Midland still held the same values as George W. Bush, as he had famously quipped four years before. While other graduate students were sharpening their teaching and research skills, I was writing op-eds and book reviews for the local newspaper.
Unlike many of my fellow doctoral students, however, I enjoyed preparing for my comprehensive exams. When you've worked in newsrooms, there's something romantic about surrounding yourself with hundreds of books and having nothing else to do but read them. It was a welcome break from the schizophrenic career I had created for myself.
Academic conferences were another draw of the profession. I liked traveling to places like New Orleans, giving a short talk about a topic that happened to interest me. Sure, many of the panels were insufferable, but it was a good excuse to see new places and meet new people. Sometimes, I thought to myself: You can do this; this is your natural environment.
Some graduate students -- mainly those interested in so-called "critical theory" -- openly derided my journalistic work. They said it wasn't serious. It dumbed things down. It was complicit with hegemonic power structures and ultimately reinforced race, class, and gender relationships. I have always been amused that the most radical leftist critiques in academe seemed to emanate from people utterly detached from the real-world conditions of people outside the ivory tower. But that's another story.
I was lucky enough to find a dissertation topic that combined my interests in literature and journalism. I wrote about a literary magazine that was financed by the CIA but published some of the great works of the boom in Latin American fiction in the 1960s. I sought out contributors and interviewed them. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, something that made me feel like a good citizen even though it yielded no worthwhile information.
I soldiered on for three more years, doing archival research during the academic year and working on various journalism projects in the summers. In the meantime, I met my fianceé -- a graduate student in the English department -- and started to feel like a grown-up for the first time in my life.
I hit my 30s. Suddenly, the academic job market seemed like a necessary plan B at the very least. I needed a real career, not just a hodgepodge collection of assignments that left me waiting months for a paycheck.
After I had a couple of dissertation chapters under my belt, I threw my hat into the ring at the Modern Language Association convention last December. I gave a halfhearted attempt, but I was more fearful of the job I might end up with (a heavy teaching load in a rural, snowbound place) than I was excited about finding my ideal position.
So I started to apply for jobs in journalism as well and found a few that seemed relevant to my background.
But journalists often look down on Ph.D.'s. That was the flip side of my problem. There's a mutual disdain between academics and journalists that is based more on an unwillingness to understand the other's position than anything else. Academics are in constant fear of being misunderstood in the popular press, and think journalists often miss the nuances of a particular subject.
In any case, I accelerated my job search this spring. I had to finish the dissertation and move on. I was getting older, I was getting married, and I didn't find much common ground with the slacker graduate students I met at parties.
At one point, I realized I might confront a fork in my career path. What if I got offered a job in journalism and one in academe? Both of those industries have very tight job markets (believe it or not, journalism is even tighter than academe), so it wasn't likely, but what if?
Sure enough, after months of botched interviews and polite rejection letters, two offers came through: one as a writing lecturer and one as a writer. My first instinct was to take the academic offer because it would be familiar and safe. It paid more. It had the word "postdoctoral" in the title.
But, in the end, I opted for the writer position, even though I was only guaranteed six months of work. I had to decide whether I wanted to spend the majority of my days teaching writing or simply writing. Put that way, there was no competition: I feel most fulfilled by writing and have never been completely at ease leading a classroom.
I had made my decision and now it was time to defend the dissertation.
The appointed hour came in May. The committee members were frazzled from their end-of-semester duties. They got word that I had taken a job as a writer. Some were confused, others excited. One professor told me the job was "glamorous." Most of the reactions were positive, and I was told that the two careers were not mutually exclusive. Perhaps someday I would be a "public intellectual," a professor told me after a meeting in his office. I blushed.
The defense was a wake-up call. One faculty member, when his turn came to comment on my work, recited books and articles that do not appear in my dissertation. How could I have left out such important contributions to the field? And what about the field of semiotics, which is not even mentioned in my dissertation? I tried to answer that I was doing literary history, that I was looking at literature in its historical context, but that didn't satisfy him.
Things weren't going as smoothly as I had hoped. Then he made the "scholarly apparatus" comment. I sank in my chair and fell silent. I felt like I had been outed as a dilettante and a fake. I would be lying if I said it didn't hurt.
I was sent out of the room so the committee members could deliberate. When I returned 10 minutes later, they were smiling and everyone congratulated me.
"But," my adviser said, "there are some revisions that we would like to see happen before submitting the final paperwork. Can you do them before you take your job in a month?"
Of course, of course, I answered. I'm a journalist: I work best on deadline.
