The depth of my predicament didn't hit me until I couldn't get my pants on. I live in America's soft middle with my wife, son, two basset hounds, and an ill-tempered cat. The people here are very nice, and when we welcomed a baby girl into our family recently, friends and neighbors showered us with covered dishes. A Midwestern casserole could nourish an African village for a month, and after caring for a newborn for two weeks -- gorging all the while on noodles, cream of mushroom soup, and processed cheese -- I began to resemble a sleep-deprived Buddha.
I mention all this in an employment diary because the war between my stomach and my pants is a fitting metaphor for the problems I face when applying for tenure-track jobs in history.
No matter how hard I try to jam my research and teaching interests into a job description, parts of me stick out. I wrote a dissertation that covered the entirety of American history and have been teaching courses as an adjunct that wander across huge chunks of time. To outsiders, this behavior may not seem particularly transgressive, but within the profession, violating time periods can be a sin.
History departments view themselves as intellectual Justice Leagues of America. (Excuse the animation reference. I'm writing this while my son watches his morning cartoons.) Just as the League needed specialists in air and water combat (Superman and Aquaman) as well as comic relief (the Wonder Twins with their monkey), big departments must have a colonial Americanist, a medievalist, and a 20th-century foreign-policy wonk. Each expert has a sharply defined field, and most resent interlopers. To belong, you need to be super and distinct.
Departments construct themselves in this fashion because they can. If they agree on the type of historian they want -- a big if -- hiring committees can find that individual among the swarm of Ph.D.'s drawn to their job ads. Want a 12th-century Greenlandist? In this market you could have one, or six.
Limited only by their collective imaginations, departments exercise their right to stretch their thinking nary an inch. They adhere to familiar job categories and create facsimiles of themselves.
This leaves oddballs like myself in an uncomfortable position. The pressure to conform, to tamp down your differences and squeeze into pre-existing definitions, is immense. So far I have resisted the urge. I research and teach what and how I want. In my best moments, I feel like an outlaw flipping the bird to convention. But most of the time I just feel uneasy -- like a fat man in tight pants.
I cannot speak for all rebels, freebooters, outcasts, and mavericks, but I find not belonging to be a vulnerable condition, not a liberating one. I realize now why gang members wear colors, punkers go for mohawks, and prisoners tattoo their skin: Outsiders are exposed.
To hide their vulnerability and flout authority, they put on scary and obnoxious costumes, but they are fakes, akin to the decorative eyes some moths have on their wings to keep birds from devouring them. Pirates, gang members, and goths look tough and creepy because they live in fear of nooses, jail, hunger, beatings, and humiliation.
I fear rejection, poverty, and the very real possibility that I may have spent my late 20s and early 30s trying to fit into a profession that has no room for me. These trepidations haunt me because, like most American males, I was taught to recoil from any sensation of personal impotence. I hate feeling small as forces beyond my control batter my life.
And the smaller I feel -- the weirder my CV becomes. Instead of toning down my act in an effort to blend into the employment mainstream, I find myself reaching for greater depths of nonconformity. In my first column for higher education's paper of record, I confessed publicly to abusing plastic penguins as an outlet for my anger over the job market. Wisecracks have found their way into my job letters and my statements on teaching philosophy.
Mingling time periods and telling jokes will not get me respect in a biker bar. But it might strand me on the historical profession's version of the Island of Misfit Toys. As a child, I viewed the Rankin/Bass classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer repeatedly each holiday season, and I am only now coming to terms with how completely I internalized the program's moral vision.
In Rudolph, the producers Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass argue that stigmatized subcultures -- ungulates with glowing nostrils, elf dentists, and miners -- not only deserve respect, they are critical to the dominant culture's survival. Without the ingenuity and vigor of the biological and social mutants, toy production and delivery would cease. There would be no Christmas.
Santa Claus needed Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius, and during the show's climactic blizzard, the outcasts negotiated a place within the North Pole's hegemonic power structure: They would fight the abominable Snow Monster and help transport the toys for the good girls and boys, but only if Santa agreed to find homes for their friends, a group of malformed playthings.
One can only imagine the looks on the faces of the children who unwrapped the misfit toys. Did they laugh and cheer for the squirt gun that sprayed jelly and the cowboy who rode an ostrich? The polka-dotted elephant might have been fun, but I have a feeling that the poor kid who received the choo-choo with square wheels cursed Santa for caving into Rudolph's demands.
That's the flaw in the moral universe I share with Rankin and Bass's animagic creations. The program refuses to deal with the consequences of dropping special-needs toys into unprepared homes. It ignores the aftermath of Santa's decision as befuddled youngsters struggle to comprehend and care for their walking airplanes and Charlies-in-a-Box.
Search committees would face a similar response if they brought home a candidate that veered too far from the agreed-upon job description. History departments have no reason to go to all this trouble. The job market spits out dozens of extraordinarily well-qualified candidates for each position advertised. Why nurture a misfit when you can have a smart and intriguing person who wears the job description like an Armani suit?
Search committees want comfortable colleagues, and that is a shame. I have come to believe that perturbation is the best teacher. The only time I know that learning transpires in my classroom is when I topple my students from the intellectual Barcaloungers they dreamily inhabit. Faculties should seek out misfits to keep themselves vigorous. Too much comfort, like too much processed cheese, is a recipe for stagnation.
