For the first time in quite a while I flew into Los Angeles at night. The plane was coming in from Las Vegas, so our flight path took us over the San Gabriel mountains and south of downtown on the final approach to LAX.
It's a sight, that approach. The city's famous, much-maligned sprawl appears tamed and transformed by the orderly incandescence of the basin's grid of streetlights.
Which is a bit of a surprise. The beautiful elements of this city that usually spring to mind are the beaches, the mountains, and all the pretty people. You will wait a considerable amount of time before you hear anyone extol the aesthetic pleasures offered by downtown Los Angeles. Yet seen from above, under a clear night sky, downtown LA reaches heights of unexpected sublimity.
Gaining new insights through a shift in perspective also characterizes my job search at the moment. I was in Las Vegas to attend the annual convention of one of the country's political-consultant associations. As a Ph.D. in political science, I was exploring whether political consulting might be an interesting alternative to academic work. Since the new year, as my prospects of landing my first tenure-track job have dimmed, more and more of my time has been taken up with exploring my nonacademic options.
For much of my academic career, the thought of leaving and doing something else was more or less a fantasy entertained during particularly rough patches of writing the dissertation or, as I began to teach, when the lecturing, writing, and grading became grueling. "If only I could do something else," I'd think wistfully at those moments, "my case of writer's block would be cured and/or this stack of papers would disappear."
But as this year has progressed, and my applications for faculty positions have gotten no takers, the idea of seeking nonacademic employment has moved from the realm of possibility into that of necessity.
And in the process, I've noticed the distance between myself and academe starting to grow. As I stand of the verge of becoming an outsider, I'm starting to survey my academic career in a way that I never did when I was right in the thick of it.
Certainly one of the best-known stereotypes of university life is that of the isolated, impractical academic who, because he or she deals primarily with philosophical abstractions couched in clever turns of phrase, remains disconnected from real-world concerns and issues.
That impression is easily contradicted, but the sentiments it expresses are nonetheless internalized to a certain extent by academics. You can see it in the narratives written by Ph.D.'s who have left the profession: They write about expanding their horizons beyond the narrow confines of the ivory tower and of entering a field where they have the opportunity to make more of an impact. In the early part of my job search, I know that I thought about nonacademic work, at least in part, in such terms.
But now, as I look back, I'm struck not by my isolation as an academic but by the depth and variety of my engagement with the wider world.
Without the freedom and flexibility afforded by academic life, would I have had the opportunity, while I was doing my fieldwork in Berlin, to also have the time to get to know participants in the city's well-developed squatter scene? Without the educational dimension of the profession, would I have had the chance to teach and advise such a diverse bunch of students, many of whom have gone on to blaze unique and interesting career paths of their own? And if I hadn't been an academic, would I have had the chance to interact with and experience such a diverse array of thinkers and writers?
Questions like those pop into my head from time to time as I'm conducting informational interviews or otherwise doing research on my career options. While I was in Las Vegas, I attended a panel where one of the country's leading political consultants explained contemporary developments in aiming political appeals at specific voters. Taking their cues from the world of commercial marketing, some consulting firms are creating increasingly complex profiles of voters based not only on their political attitudes but also on their consumer choices. With the help of this information, campaigns will be able to create even more finely honed messages and deliver them to receptive audiences with even greater efficiency.
It wasn't hard for me to imagine myself doing such consulting and enjoying it. But while it offered the twin attractions of allowing me to do research and to have an impact in the broader world outside academe, the work also seemed narrow in its own way. It disconnected politics from the underlying ideas and meanings that give it life and that motivate voters, reducing it to the transmission of precisely tailored bits of information.
One of the main lessons imparted by career seminars for academics is how well-developed and diverse academic skills really are. I have dutifully taken this lesson to heart; my résumé sports a lengthy "Highlights of Qualifications" list at its head. Yet I hadn't revised the notion that I gained those qualifications through specialization -- that is, by learning a lot about a little.
In exploring alternative careers, however, I've come to appreciate that I also know a lot about a lot.
That's not to say that I'm an expert in everything. Far from it. But rather I've realized that my specialized knowledge about political theory is built upon a broad foundation of knowledge about politics generally. That has given me more confidence in my search. But it is has also led to a feeling of potential loss. If I move out of academe, will I still have the opportunity to maintain that foundation or will I, in fact, become more and more specialized?
The fluid nature of my present situation makes it difficult, to say the least, to calibrate exactly my feelings on these issues. I am not bitter about the potential end of my academic career. Having observed some bitter colleagues in the past, I promised myself that I would work hard not to let that happen.
I'm not excited about leaving teaching, because I love what I do, but I do have a sense of the potential advantages of doing so. At the moment, it's bittersweet. A simultaneous feeling of loss and opportunity.
