This fall my wife, with a fresh Ph.D. in hand, began a tenure-track job with a manageable teaching load in a city within an easy drive of family and friends. She is one of the fortunate few among the candidates seeking jobs in the humanities. She found a good one on the first try.
For a few weeks last winter there was a steady stream of voice-mail and e-mail messages requesting more information from her, looking to schedule telephone interviews, and offering campus visits. I became increasingly awed by her success and worried that I would be unlikely to match it myself when I tried the market this year. She had hit the ball out of the park and into the stratosphere. Would I match her big swing, or be stuck bunting for a base hit? Isn't the latter the more typical scenario?
The standard talk about looking for academic employment always reminds me of the pre-tech-boom early 1990s when my friends and I graduated from college. The novel Generation X had just come out, and everyone was talking about "McJobs" with an air of fatalistic futility.
We were a less quirky version of the slackers of Richard Linklater's film -- not lazy or idle, but aimless and nonconformist -- and we saw the B.A.'s for which we had worked so hard as a sad joke. The job market was lousy, and our degrees didn't seem to qualify us for anything very interesting. I viewed career ambition itself with suspicion, partly out of a sense of bohemian ideals and partly out of not having any ambition beyond the vaguest of slacker goals: to create.
My decision to enter graduate school a few years later, after holding a series of unfulfilling real-world jobs, was at its core motivated by every slacker-intellectual's dream. I sought a future that would allow me the freedom to read and write at my leisure and to make my own schedule. In the humanities, they pay you for that!
So when I think now about applying for academic positions, I cannot help but see this process in the same terms as I did my last job search almost 10 years ago. No matter how qualified I might be -- and with degrees from good institutions and a fine record of teaching and scholarship I am probably as qualified as most -- I still figure I could be back in a drab corporate cubicle in no time flat.
And as I look around I see kids my own age -- OK, so we're not kids any more -- making something of their lives. While fellow slackers from college have become someone else's boss, I wait until after 5 p.m. to do my photocopying at cut rates at the local copy shop.
I am 30 years old and what have I accomplished professionally? I have written a few papers that I hope will soon be published, TA'd for a few years and taught some classes of my own, figured out a dissertation topic, and passed a battery of examinations that officially bespeak mastery of my field's literature. I have enjoyed the experience thoroughly, but still sometimes I can't imagine anyone offering me a well-paying, prestige-accruing, impress-your-friends, health-and-pension-benefits, bona fide academic job. Why me?
My wife's experience suggests that the job market is not all doom and gloom. Yet we are a two-career academic couple in search of two appointments within a reasonable commute of each other. It seems a tall order.
We tell each other that the key to our success will be if we can both become really, really great scholars. Surely some school will want to hire us both. They'll be knocking our door down with offers.
It's nice to have a dream, but as it stands, we are at the beginning of our careers and the chances of the same college giving us both tenure-track jobs in the next few years are small. We are, of course, prepared to take adjunct and one-year jobs, jobs requiring heavy teaching loads for low pay, any jobs at all, just as long as we can live in the same place.
Naturally, I wonder sometimes if there might be another career for me. I don't want to abandon my scholarly work, but would I consider it if my own job prospects turned out to be not-so-hot and my wife's career continued to thrive?
A few years ago when I had only recently begun in graduate school, some friends were casting a documentary about graduate students who dropped out to become chefs. I lied and said I was thinking of doing that. While I have always liked to cook, at that point I had never considered it as a career or even a regular lifestyle. Back then I was eating a student diet of cheap pizzas, burritos, and noodles. I considered cooking real meals from scratch the way I now consider miniature golf: fun once in a while. I lied my way into the documentary because I thought it would be cool to be in a movie, and they shot me slicing mushrooms and improv'ing about my faux ambitions.
A funny thing happened. Many people I knew saw the movie and stopped me to say things like, "I didn't know you could cook!" It wasn't long before I was starting to believe my own made-up lines. It was true that I liked to cook, but after being in that documentary, liking to cook became part of my outward identity. I soon found myself reading recipes for fun and watching cooking shows when I should have been writing or grading papers. I stopped buying frozen foods and spent more time learning what to do with those oddities of the produce section that previously left me scratching my head, like fennel and chard. Now when I don't feel like doing my work, I make soup.
So I do have some idea of what career I would like should academia not pan out, and I never would have discovered it if it weren't for graduate school. I could become a chef, food critic, editor for Bon Appetit, or restaurateur.
But what I would like most of all -- much, much more than any of those things -- is a job just like my wife's. It's only when I think about abandoning academe for the world of food that I realize how passionate I am about my work and how reluctant I would be to give it up. I may have been a slacker once, but now I have ambition.
