First Person

Academic Ideals Outside the Academy

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person The Rejection Letter I Wish I Could Send If we had to make up a story for why you might be interested in our position, then interviewing you was too risky. Peer Review Hirings and Firings The new law school at the University of California at Irvine gets some high-profile hires ... and other appointment news. Ms. Mentor Does This Make Me Look Old? Advice on how best to dress, and act, when you look as young as your students. Career News Gone, and Being Forgotten Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Carole Chabries

Last summer, in a vacation-and-margarita-induced haze, two of my friends hatched a plot: My partner and I would leave our Midwestern college town and move to the large city in a neighboring state, where our friends live. We'd love it, they said. I grinned, imagining the luxuries: restaurants open after 9 p.m. during the week. A vibrant cultural life. Decent shopping. I kept grinning and drank more tequila.

But we're academics, I finally said, as sobriety set in. We don't get to choose where we live. I need to finish my dissertation, I need to be near my department, my adviser, the university's library. I need my job as a teaching assistant. I need, I need, I need. And only the academic world can satisfy. I convinced us all.

So we moved. My partner had recently finished his Ph.D. and didn't have a job. During the year he had been on the market we had discussed the places we would and wouldn't live -- certain that choices would eventually present themselves -- and had prepared ourselves to get out of Dodge.

Still, the decision to leave wasn't easy: We were moving to a new state in which we knew exactly six people. I was leaving guaranteed -- if underpaid -- work teaching creative writing. No department was courting either of us, helping us scout out an apartment, a new dog park, new grocery stores, bars, and coffee shops.

What happened next was, at first, predictable. My partner began working as an adjunct professor at two local private universities where his hours were long, his teaching load heavy, and his students a notch (or more) below those we had become used to teaching at our "home" university. Some weeks he graded more than 100 papers. Sometimes he graded more than 75 papers in consecutive weeks. I continued teaching at the university where I was (am) still a doctoral student. I commuted four hours each way and maintained my out-of-state tuition remission. When I wasn't driving, I graded papers, prepared for my teaching, and worked on my dissertation.

Then a friend e-mailed me about a job opening. The humanities commission in my newly adopted state was hiring, and wanted applications from people who had done graduate-level work.

Like many people, I wasn't exactly sure what a humanities commission does, or what it means to work for one. Reading the online job description didn't exactly clarify things. Looking at the commission's Web site helped a bit -- I could see that the commission works with teachers and older adults, gives grants to writers and artists, helps teach young kids to read. I could also see that if I got the job, my commute to work would be a little under 10 miles each way.

The position was in the commission's Teacher Institute, a program common to many state humanities commissions that provides statewide professional development for school teachers. They are brought together in a seminar format where they learn something new in a given humanities discipline. What better work could I do, I asked myself, than work with teachers toward producing more lively and vivacious students, students whose intellectual curiosity could be sparked? I would, in effect, be aiding my university colleagues who might eventually teach some of these students. I was rosy-eyed. I was giddy.

I wanted that commute.

I also knew I wouldn't get the job. Hundreds of qualified applicants would apply; my CV wouldn't be strong enough, my list of publications not long enough, my dissertation not done enough. This would be the first in a long line of job rejections. What would it matter that I had spent two years training, mentoring, and evaluating new teachers? That I had years of outreach and public-speaking experience? Strong teaching evaluations from students and professors? A campus teaching award? I'd seen the job market chew up and spit out people significantly more qualified than me.

But I did get the job at the state humanities commission, and the list of things I love about it is long and glowing, and barely dulled by the waning of the obligatory honeymoon period. I've met some wonderfully smart, thoughtful, and committed teachers. I've met talented scholars who are committed to sharing their research and making it teachable to pre-college students. I work shoulder to shoulder with accountants, grant writers, fund raisers, and a Web designer who wants to go to graduate school despite my attempts to dissuade her. I have a lovely office with amazingly good light. Those of my colleagues who want to -- and that's most of us -- attend a weekly on-site yoga class, courtesy of the commission.

Oh, I hear the naysayers already: What about my still-incomplete dissertation, and the time I've lost to writing and research? What about the increased difficulty of going to major conferences, or the near impossibility of teaching again? And at a humanities commission, I will never have tenure. I will never be guaranteed my position.

Here the story takes an unpredictable turn.

Writing my dissertation, it turns out, is part of my job -- a part the commission takes seriously. I get paid to do research and to write. Every week I set aside blocks of time during the work day when I do research at libraries, read at coffee shops, and write at home.

Paying for my dissertation is no longer solely my responsibility. The commission covers my out-of-state tuition as well as my travel costs for going to libraries or back to my campus to meet with my dissertation committee. I no longer pay for my own copies, my own mailings, my own faxes. I am told this will remain true past the dissertation, should I choose to continue my research, write articles, go to conferences.

The commission offers some of the benefits of university culture. When I have questions and need to talk to an expert -- the kind of networking that is easy and natural when you're attached to a campus -- the humanities commission steps in and helps, suggesting names and even making introductions. This fall, my bosses are allowing me to teach a creative-writing class for a local private college.

And things are just getting good. The commission's president and the board are working out a new personnel policy that includes extended leave for family and medical emergencies (one of my colleagues, a new mother, is taking off 12 weeks with full benefits and a partially modified salary). This same policy will include support for sabbaticals.

That's right, sabbaticals. From a humanities commission.

When I finish my Ph.D. this fall I will want to go on the academic job market. Call it masochism, call it operant conditioning, or call it crazy, but I can already feel the tension building as I wonder which institutions will be hiring in my field. Some days I think I'll apply only for those jobs I'm interested in, just to see, you know, what will happen: if we'll want to move; if I'll want to teach on a regular basis; if I'll want to be tenure track. Because the graduate student in me knows that that's what I should want.

And then I snap out of it.

My job "outside" of the academy offers an academic ideal that the academy itself rarely delivers: a decent living wage while I write my dissertation, the necessary support to continue my professional development, the guarantee of a raise when I have the Ph.D. It also rewards and makes visible the things that the academy often takes for granted, especially for A.B.D.'s or new Ph.D.'s -- my intellectual well-being, my personal interests and goals, my family. My job outside of the academy promises me all of the things that prompted me to enter the academy in the first place, those very things which, it turns out, the academy often ensures that we can't have.

In just a few weeks, having turned in another chapter to my adviser, I will again be on vacation. I may or may not be drinking tequila. But I will certainly be grinning.