From the issue dated July 18, 2003
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We're Happy. Really.By MARGARET MARQUIS and BRENT SHANNONBetween the two of us (husband and wife), we have been in college and graduate school for 20 years and have five degrees in English. What our seven parents -- four divorces, six remarriages (Don't be distressed if the math doesn't add up. We're afraid it doesn't) -- can't understand is how we've been studying for two decades and still no employer thinks us qualified for a tenure-track job. And we would take a single job between us for now, being young, married, idealistic, and unwilling to succumb to the dreaded academic commuter marriage that is so common these days. In general, our parents seem to think we read for a living. Well, we do, but we suspect that they believe we read Danielle Steel for a living. One of us has recently completed a doctoral project on men's consumption in Victorian Britain; the general consensus of our parents is that one of us must be same-sex-oriented, in spite of our undeniably traditional, heterosexual, United Methodist-blessed marriage. One of us has completed a master's degree that focused on bodies outside the norm in literature; the general consensus is, "Huh?" Not all of our parents are unreasonable. There are varying levels of confusion. Out of the seven, one parent has a master's degree in education, and three are professors of business or engineering. Collectively, the parents have written award-winning books, performed outstanding community and scholarly service, and been chairmen of academic departments. However, that does not mean that any of the academics in the group have, to use the vernacular, a "clue." Although they may know the rigors of academic careers, they do not seem to entirely appreciate what we do or why we do it. The proof: Father 1 (undoubtedly, they will all know who they are when they read this and put copies on their refrigerators; the numbering is for you) is supportive but appears to worry that we will never find a job. Stepfather 1 has made the same concern clear in several e-mail messages telling us that he loves us and is proud of us, and that we had better get working. As they are the realists in the group, we try never to agree with them. Father 2 understands and appreciates being out of work, but he is in a state of panic at our joblessness. Thus, those fathers seem to be in agreement. They are the first people we tell when a job prospect arises. Stepmother 1 is generally supportive but also frankly uninterested. We are not "doing" anything -- she's much too polite to say so, but she has borne a family of mountain climbers and geologists who actually get dirty at their jobs. We sometimes get paper cuts or carpal tunnel syndrome, but those do not count. The remaining parents are increasingly difficult, we're afraid. The easiest of the lot is Stepfather 2. He's broken a toilet merely by sitting on it, nearly burned himself to a crisp by jump-starting his car without grounding a cable, and called one of us "Amy" for no discernible reason. We like him a lot; he never asks about school, he seems to enjoy our company, and he seems perfectly content with knowing nothing about us or academe in general. He's like a breath of fresh air, relatively speaking. But the mothers. They mean well. We know it. We know you know it, all having had mothers yourselves. Mother 1 is tricky. She thinks she knows about humanities, but there are indications that she does not. She is fond of saying, "If you had gotten your M.B.A., you could have gotten a job where you could afford to buy all the books you wanted." That is probably true. However, she sometimes seems to make up her advice for us during book-club meetings after several glasses of shiraz. The one who takes the cake is Mother 2. To be honest, her misconceptions speak for themselves. She believes one of us is working on a project about ladies' dresses. She thought that we should present a conference paper dressed in the clothes of the historical period we're studying. She urges us to make several phone calls each day to institutions where we've applied for jobs. Finally, she says that we should send a letter of application to every college in the United States (and some in Canada) because "you never know." By our calculations, that would cost us only $12,500 dollars for transcripts, photocopying, and postage. But our parents, we must confess, have raised a crucial issue: In such a tight job market, why do we keep trying to find work teaching English? Why don't we do something else? Our answer is that, having taught freshman composition and survey courses on literature for many years, we still know what it feels like to have even one 18-year-old finally understand why "In today's society" is probably not the most descriptive or effective introductory phrase. We still know what it feels like to have students tell us unexpectedly that they "loved" something, whether it was a writing assignment, a research project, or The Great Gatsby. We still pick up Pride and Prejudice and Their Eyes Were Watching God and read them until the pages fall out, and we have to buy another overpriced copy at the bookstore on our TA stipend -- not because there's a conference paper and a line on our CV's in it, but because we want to. The numbers don't add up. We have too much education to be employable outside of academe, and too little experience to be employable in it. We spend hours at conferences, publish articles in journals, and teach multiple courses, but the proportions are always off. And yet, we press forward. Because we know that at the end of 300 pages, Darcy will still marry Elizabeth, and at the end of 200 pages, Pheoby will still be listening, yet we will have noticed an infinite number of things that we never noticed before. And that's worth years of education and thousands of dollars in student loans and no tenure-track jobs. Margaret Marquis is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. Starting in September, Brent Shannon will be a visiting professor of English at Transylvania University. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 45, Page B5
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education