First Person

Next Stop: Cairo

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person It's Not a Zero-Sum Game Are a moderately heavy teaching load and an active research program mutually exclusive? First Person Pothead Ph.D. This is most definitely not a cautionary tale. First Person Subject Experts Need Not Apply Recent job postings and hires suggest that many academic libraries are losing interest in hiring humanities Ph.D.'s. Career News When Laptops Disappear Stolen computers containing sensitive data are a growing and costly problem for colleges. 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 Daniel Kowalsky

Did you hear the one about the Ph.D. in history who had to take a job in Egypt in order to stay in his field? You think this was a bad joke circulating at the last American Historical Association meeting? Or a spammed e-mail originally posted on an H-Net thread? Not quite. It happens to be the story of my life.

But not so fast. Having already given away the punch line, let me now back up and bring you up to date on the recent developments of my so-called career.

When you last met me, I was by all appearances happily ensconced at my comfy one-year appointment at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching a relatively light load of courses, all of them in my field. I discovered that I loved teaching, and decided somewhat belatedly that my choice of profession was not so misguided after all. At the same time, however, a dark cloud hung over me; to wit, the fleeting status of my position. Almost as soon as I settled into a routine of lecturing and getting to know my students, I was already scrambling to line something up for the following year.

As I went through the usual motions of sending out dozens of applications -- for the third year running -- it occurred to me that there might be a worse fate than simply emerging from grad school, striking out on the academic job market, and moving on to another line of work. A far more terrifying prospect would be to get a taste of the good academic life and then have it snatched away forever. This scenario is not all that uncommon.

I recently met a young historian who was hired A.B.D. for a sabbatical replacement at an elite, East Coast liberal-arts college. He was enthralled with the position, captivated by the idyllic New England locale, and, as if this weren't enough, his students apparently adored him. But just a year later, through no fault of his own, his professorial life had been stolen from him, and he was jobless and living in his parents' basement in Sacramento. As Churchill liked to say, success is never final.

And so it isn't, as I've learned in my personal life as well. Indeed, the inherent pressures of hitting the market while preparing new classes were nothing compared to my other problems. I was, up until recently, one half of an academic couple. Last summer, my wife had taken a tenure-track job in Michigan, where we purchased a house, and I was to commute from St. Louis. I am sorry to report that our seven-year relationship lasted exactly three weeks into our two-city, two-job solution. The various stresses associated with what would assuredly have been a long, and perhaps even permanent, physical separation proved so dispiriting that the marriage quickly collapsed under the hopelessness of our predicament. There is naturally much more to the story. Let me only add a word of warning to those couples who plan on pursuing a similar strategy: These stories do not necessarily have happy endings.

The separation and subsequent divorce did make one major difference as I went on the academic market: I was no longer bound in my job search by any geographic limitations; easy access to the Lansing Regional Airport had ceased to be a consideration. This allowed me to consider positions that I would have earlier rejected out of hand.

Let's now take a look at how things have played out. Apart from my shattered psychological state -- easy enough to conceal from potential employers in boilerplate cover letters -- I had a good feeling about my prospects. As a degreed, visiting assistant professor at a well-regarded research university, I reckoned that my position since the previous autumn -- when I was still a lowly A.B.D. at Wisconsin -- was greatly strengthened. Then, just before the New Year, came an unbelievably fortuitous coup, which buoyed my spirits even further. On the eve of the annual job conference, I learned that the American Historical Association had awarded my dissertation a prestigious prize, which included a publication contract with Columbia University Press.

I was suddenly convinced that my career worries were over. I'd stroll into the conference, bag a plum job, then hunker down to recover emotionally. A few large bills on therapy, I reasoned ... or a case of Johnny Walker Black Label ... perhaps six to eight months on antidepressants? Yes -- no doubt about it -- I would rally and be in top form before my new job even started.

Of course, these things never turn out quite the way you expect. I could not nab a job at a decent institution for the simple reason that none offered me an interview. Although I applied for around 35 advertised positions, only three shortlisted me, and these were all in departments at second- or even third-tier colleges, with teaching loads hovering between 8 and 10 classes a year. Apparently the prize and publication contract registered too late to win me a single promising interview with a research university.

And yet -- here is the cruelest irony of them all -- the same book contract that might have earned me a shot at a research university job now effectively disqualified me from the hard-core teaching positions. This became all too clear at my first interview following the prize ceremony. Here are the verbatim notes from that meeting:

Committee: Dan, we want to congratulate you on the prize.

Me: Thank you. It was quite an honor. I'm looking forward to getting started on the book revisions.

Committee: Yes, that's what we are a little concerned about.

Me: Oh?

Committee: Dan, you know that our department is looking for a colleague who is above all a dedicated teacher of history, right?

Me: Of course, that's why I am so enthusiastic about this opportunity.

Committee: Frankly, given what we perceive as your emphasis on research and publishing, we are worried that your priorities may not mesh so well with the goals of our institution.

Just like that, I knew I was sunk. What did the committee expect me to say? That this would be my last book -- I promise? That I would never enter another archive so long as I lived, so help me God? I could hardly believe that I was being asked to rationalize, and to explain away, my success in getting my research published.

Thus the conference was a non-starter and a complete doddle; it yielded not a single call-back. As a job candidate, I had fallen between two chairs: too ambitious for the average teaching college, not good enough for tenure-track positions at research universities. Who, I wondered, was going to hire me?

The fall-back was the prospect of another term appointment, typically announced after the regular positions are filled. Shortly after the January conference I was shortlisted as a finalist for two temporary jobs: one at a major university in Ontario, Canada, the other at the American University in Cairo. By late winter, I knew that I would be moving to either North America's cleanest city or Africa's largest. Were I to get neither job, well, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what I would have done; my parents live in a split-level, postwar ranch. There's no basement.

But the worst-case scenario never materialized. Eventually, I was offered the Cairo job and I immediately accepted. I am moving to Egypt this August.

While I am enormously relieved to have this job, my enthusiasm is shared by few of my friends or family. Some of them have expressed horror at my decision to work in Cairo. "You are an American Jew!" they say to me in disbelief. "You want to move at this moment of crisis and instability to the Arab world?" And then, invariably, the follow-up question, always presented as if it were a brilliant alternative: "Can't you just get another job somewhere else?"

There are two ways I can deal with these concerns and protests, and both are equally honest and true. On the one hand, I tell my critics that the Cairo position was my only reasonable option for employment next year. Indeed, though the United States has thousands of history departments scattered across all 50 states, not one of them offered me a job. If I want to continue in the career that I spent 10 years training for, I have no choice but to relocate to the Middle East.

But that's not the way I usually choose to spin the Egypt move. Instead, I say that I look at this as a rare opportunity for personal and professional growth, and real adventure: I'll be living in the middle of a bustling, exotic city, where I will be teaching European history to an entirely different pool of students. I'll get to study a new language and experience what day-to-day life in the Arab world is like. Yes, it is true: I had no choices this year; Cairo was the only option. It also happens, however, to be my dream job.