Balancing Act

The Worst Question

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By Robert Macdougall

The wedding was perfect. The honeymoon seems to have hit a snag.

Today is my two-week wedding anniversary, and it looks increasingly like my wife, Lisa, and I will be spending the bulk of it in the waiting room of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, on the border between Queenston, Ontario, and Lewiston, N.Y. We reached the border at dawn; a guard at the kiosk looked at my Canadian passport, looked at my wife's American passport, and dropped them both into a little canister to be shot off through a pneumatic message tube. We've been sitting in the waiting room ever since.

(In any other circumstance, I would at least find the pneumatic tube part of this experience pretty cool. One of my research areas is the history of technology, and like all historians of technology, I just love those old pneumatic tubes.)

Lisa and I while away the hours wondering where the plane we were supposed to catch in Buffalo might be by now. The air is stuffy and the plastic chairs are astonishingly uncomfortable. The green-gray walls are plastered with signs telling us not to ask questions or to approach the staff. Immigration offices seem designed to make you feel guilty for even wanting to cross the border. Finally, an officer calls us to his desk. He's got the canister holding our passports, and he looks them over. Was that the reason for the wait -- the time it took the little canister to travel 30 feet from the kiosk into this office?

The officer asks me, "Are you a Canadian citizen?" I answer, "Yes."

"And your wife is an American citizen?" "Yes."

And then he asks me The Worst Question He Could Possibly Ask.

I should explain that I'm already quite used to chatting with the INS about my academic career. I have been going to graduate school in the United States for several years. I'm set to graduate this year, and I am going on the job market for the very first time this fall. Each time I re-enter the country, I show the border guards my student visa. It tells them which subject I study (history), which university I go to (Harvard), and the number of years since I began. Any of which is grounds for comment.

I've been accused of slacking, told to sing Fair Harvard, and asked, "What do you think you're going to do with a Ph.D. in American history?" This last question -- and no, it's not The Worst Question, though it is a contender -- is usually asked in the same tone of voice that a protective father might use with his daughter's shady-looking suitors. Border guards act in loco parentis, I guess, lest the daughters of the republic be hoodwinked by foreign casanovas with their fancy talk of Gilded Era reform movements and institutional history.

But the question the INS officer is asking me now is The Worst Question He Could Possibly Ask. It goes like this:

"So, where are you two going to live when you graduate?"

And, since the worst questions in life and academe are always multi-part questions, it continues:

"Aren't you going to be together?"

I dread The Question, because it's the question I feel least capable of answering. I almost feel I'm not allowed to answer it. I'm a young grad student, facing a difficult job market for the very first time. I'm going to look for work in both Canada and the United States, from Boston to Austin to Saskatchewan. I have control over my dissertation. I don't feel I have any real control over what jobs, if any, I'm going to find.

I know that this is not an original lament. Everyone in academe today has faced this kind of uncertainty at some point in his or her career. And everyone who has a partner or family or anyone they love, really, has had to confront these issues. But I don't think it's being overdramatic to say that this uncertainty -- and our awareness of it -- has reached unprecedented levels.

The job crisis for Ph.D.'s in history and many other disciplines became truly apparent in the mid 1990s -- right about the time my classmates and I started graduate school. In other words, we have never been in academe when the job market for Ph.D.'s was not considered terrible. Our friends, our professors, even columns in The Chronicle have done their part to let us know just how brutally competitive it is out there, how dismal are the odds against landing the coveted full-time, tenure-track job. They've done so, I know, with the very best of intentions. But everyone has been so conscientious in protecting this generation of grad students from false hopes or disillusionment that many of us seem to hold out no hope at all.

At least that's the sense I get in talking to my grad school cohort about the job hunt. All of us are so very aware how tough the market is that we're apologetic at even asking for an academic job. The job market is like this INS office. We feel guilty just for wanting to cross the border between being students and being faculty members. And the idea that we could choose beforehand which country or state or city we will live in, or that we might even arrange to live in the very same city as the person we love, seems like hubris to tempt the gods. So for the last few years I've been studiously not thinking about where I might want to live when I graduate, not allowing myself to form a preference. Above all, I hate to think of being separated from Lisa -- and so, by and large, I don't.

But I have to tell the INS officer something, and The Question makes me face the truth. "I don't really know where we're going to end up," I say. "I'll go where the job market takes me. We might have to live apart for a while."

The officer sighs heavily. He's a big guy, and this is a big, full-body sigh designed to let us know just how much our forbidden cross-border love has inconvenienced him. Speaking so slowly and clearly that an infant could understand, or perhaps even someone willing to embark on a Ph.D. in American history in 1995, he says, "The government of the United States and the government of Canada consider it 'normal' for a husband and wife to live 'together.'"

(I silently appreciate his use of finger quotes to problematize the concepts of "normal" and "together" while still employing them as useful if not wholly adequate abstractions.) Then he looks at Lisa and me in front of his desk. We're holding hands, in that newlywed way, without even being aware that we're doing it. For the first time, he smiles, and he says with surprising warmth, "I have to admit, I agree with them."

I look at Lisa. I think about the strength she gives me. I think about how being with her is what makes the huge uncertainty of the next few years bearable. And my firm resolution not to get my hopes up, not to allow myself any expectations at all, starts to crumble. Because the two of us are doing this together. And together, we can think about all the questions I haven't let myself think about on my own. I'll look for jobs -- we'll look for jobs -- in both countries. We'll be flexible and we'll be realistic about what we can do and what we will find. But we'll talk about our priorities, and not feel guilty for having them.