A link to this article was erroneously placed in the November 21, 2006 daily-report e-mail. To view the November 21 article, click here.
A year ago, when my wife and I began searching for tenure-track jobs in the same field, I wrote my first column, offering some weary reflections on the uncertainty of it all.
I already had a tenure-track job in the humanities at Big Moo University and she had just defended her dissertation, but we were giving the market another go to see if we could find something together in the same location.
All in all, it was a good year, with an unexpected and generally happy ending, though, as with every job search, it never quite lived up to our expectations. Looking back, we both see a combination of compromises and opportunities.
When last we wrote, my wife, Regina, faced a decision. She could accept a tenure-track offer at Far Away State University or take a non-tenure-track, renewable position at Big Moo U, where I teach. In the end, Big Moo proved pleasantly accommodating, allowing her to teach some of her own courses and giving her limited service commitments, as well as a travel and computer budget. While it was nothing like the wooing she received from Far Away State, Big Moo's offer did help her feel wanted, rather than merely tolerated.
Perhaps the most important positive outcome of that compromise was the possibility to settle down. For years now, Regina and I had avoided putting down roots -- buying a house, starting a family, or getting involved in our community -- while Regina spent months at a time in her home country due to visa restrictions, finished her dissertation, and interviewed for tenure-track positions in the East, the South, and the West.
On the one hand, that lifestyle had taken its toll. Not only did the constant scouring of job listings, revision of vitas and cover letters, and whirl of interviews sap our energies, but the uncertainty of not being settled also led to predictable arguments.
On the other hand, there is no better motivator than a short-timer mentality for getting a lot of work done because you don't need to worry about making friends, fixing leaky faucets, weeding overgrown gardens, or chasing after toddlers. Plus, I discovered, the fear that we might not wind up together was a great motivator to keep producing.
Now, with the harried nervousness that drove my efforts generally gone, the possibility of finding a life in its place seems inviting.
In our work situation, however, we cannot avoid facing the fact that Regina sits a rung below the tenure track in the academic hierarchy. And what gets so maddening about that hierarchy for me is that, while most everyone is highly attuned to it, no one wants to admit to thinking of and treating people differently because of the supposedly egalitarian nature of the profession.
Instead, the hierarchy works subtly, and we are left to wonder whether our perceptions of mistreatment are real or imagined.
When Regina has students overloaded into her classes and I don't, or when teaching assistants under her supervision don't return e-mail messages, she wonders whether it's because of her rank. It's the same thing I experienced as a new assistant professor: Every time my department head asked me to do extra service, I wondered whether it was merely a way to shift burden off of tenured faculty members.
What has been interesting for me, and a little humbling, is how my perceptions of the academic hierarchy change when it affects my partner rather than me. I often find myself trying to convince Regina that her concerns are unfounded, that everyone experiences the same thing, even when the evidence of her differential treatment is obvious.
Of course, one big reason I deny those expressions of hierarchy is that I worry she will regret her decision to stay here. After all, she turned down a tenure-track offer, and I want the position here to be everything the other one could have been and more. Unfortunately, my capacity to ensure that outcome is highly limited.
Despite our worries about her second-class status, however, Regina's position gives her a lot of latitude in her research that she would not have found in a tenure-track position. Even though the research expectations of her job at Big Moo are limited, she still plans on pursuing a tenure-track position one day, and I know from experience how modest expectations can actually prove highly motivating. In my first job, nominal research expectations helped diminish the anxiety of having to produce and, I'm convinced, allowed me to research and write at a much speedier pace than I otherwise would have.
While I enjoyed the speed that came from less oppressive expectations, Regina found that they gave her room to experiment.
This summer she submitted a paper to a conference and a journal outside of our field because she was convinced that they would be most interested in that part of her work. She learned a valuable lesson about the challenges of mastering the literatures, debates, and distinctions of other fields. When her argument was ridiculed at the conference and the paper was promptly rejected without having been sent out for review, she says she learned à la Mark Twain that "if you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way."
Submitting research outside my field, or even my subfield, is not something I would have dared to risk, nor, I think, would most untenured professors at research universities. Regina is beginning to see why, and she is glad she didn't have to wrestle that cat while on the tenure clock.
Meanwhile, I react to Regina's career successes and disappointments much less like a seasoned mentor and more like a partner.
When the editor of the journal that rejected Regina's work asked whether she had a different type of research that she could use to revise her article, she told me, "He's right. That kind of research is great, but it's rare for a reason. I have yet to see something like it in that journal on my topic." My suggestion was to fire off a snippy e-mail to the editor pointing out how that research is next to impossible to find and that he should know that.
The fact is, I would never write such an e-mail, nor would I recommend that any of the graduate students I mentor do so. What I have trouble remembering sometimes is that I'm not Regina's mentor, I'm her partner, and that clouds the way I look at a lot of the professional decisions she faces.
That observation leads me to the closest thing to a "lesson" that I have learned over the past year of anticipation, disappointment, fear, and elation: My advice is often far less helpful (and wanted) than my support.
Maybe it's my gender or maybe it's my upbringing, but I think that's a difficult lesson for a professor to learn, especially if we've been in the habit of guiding graduate students and junior colleagues through the job-search process.
In the meantime, Regina's decision to stay at Big Moo has permitted us to buy a house and to think about starting a family. As a friend of ours who is still looking for a position near his partner recently observed, the whole arrangement feels so grown up.
We may simply be putting a positive spin on things. I'm sure that if Regina had taken the job at Far Away State, I would be writing about the good things in that decision, too. But we realize there are compromises as well as opportunities in all of our professional decisions, and we're at least trying to be sensitive to how each of us reacts to those compromises.
Our positions at Big Moo U may be a compromise, but for now, it's one that holds out several opportunities both of us want in our lives.
