First Person

Excess Baggage

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 Anna Devoll

A friend of mine has been throwing away one household possession a day for over a year now in an attempt to streamline her life. Some items are relatively small and inconsequential -- old plastic Mardi Gras beads and Martha Stewart Living magazines. Other objects have greater symbolic weight -- that favorite but out-of-date sweater or dusty books bought with every good intention of reading.

If something has gone a year or more without being used or noticed, she figures, she should have no problem tossing it out or at least sending it on to a recycled afterlife. However, as any closet-cleaner knows, some possessions are easier to part with than others -- no matter how long they've lingered unused. For my friend, the items she can't seem to part with include love letters from a long-past boyfriend, family mementos, and boxes filled with her dissertation research material.

Perfectly understandable, you might say. Letters and mementos remind us of our past, our loved ones, where we've been, and who we are. So do dissertations, especially if you consider the time, devotion, expense, and even suffering that can go into creating them. Newly minted Ph.D.'s rely on their dissertations to get jobs, land seats on conference panels, and acquire all-important book contracts.

But what about those of us who decide not to enter academe? My streamlining friend does not have a traditional academic job, nor do I. Yet we both lug hundreds of pounds of dissertation-related material with us wherever we go. Is this excess baggage or a necessary link to our academic roots?

I have my own dissertation material spread out among three closets and two buildings. I rationalize this with what is probably faulty architectural reasoning: The old wood floors in my closets just might not hold all the weight, I say. More than saving the floors, however, I really don't want to confront a dissertation mountain every time I reach for a skirt or dig out a coat. The boxes weigh in heavily on the emotional as well as the physical scale.

Years after its completion, I still feel the need to justify the dissertation. I suspect I'm not alone. Dissertations contribute to knowledge, yes, but in all honesty, do most make an impact? Do the majority effect change or solve a social ill? Do many get read by anyone other than committee members and kind relatives?

Sadly, oftentimes the answer to all of those questions is no. If I were ever back at my alma mater and needed a quick $20, I could head to the library and leaf through some friends' dissertations. I happen to know that some left cash prizes for anyone checking out their dissertations. The money's probably pretty safe, and I say this not to be mean. I fully expect that my own dissertation also languishes unused in the stacks.

But, that doesn't mean it didn't serve a purpose. Thanks to the dissertation, I spent a year abroad conducting research. Ah, but what was the purpose of all that, relatives still ask. Take what many people consider a dull topic, set it in a remote region of a country in which few outsiders speak the language and what do you have? Well, for me, a fine year meeting a lot of interesting people and learning more about a place I'd wanted to know. No, it wasn't very practical. In fact, it was pretty self-serving and, when I think back on it, a luxury. I suspect that this may be the case for quite a few dissertations, though I don't think many academics would admit it.

After finishing the dissertation and the Ph.D., I tried to focus on the "real world," or at least the real academic world. I took a visiting position and packed up all the dissertation material, along with crates of old notes, syllabuses, and books dating back to my undergraduate years.

Maybe it was the weather (awful) or the place (dreary). Maybe it was a first true glimpse of petty departmental politics or the needless push to publish at any cost. (Should a department chairman really discourage a faculty member from visiting a dying parent because he might fall behind on an arbitrary publishing schedule?) Maybe it was that my partner enjoyed a tenure-track job in a sunnier location.

When I tallied up the positives, I found I really enjoyed only a local hiking trail and the vacation schedule. You'll wreck your chances of an academic career if you leave, the infamous department chairman warned. He also had a vested interest in keeping the ever-vanishing hired help. It may have turned into a tenure-track job, my adviser moaned. Both may have been right. Despite the offer of another visiting year, I moved near my partner and took an industry job.

I'm a terrible decision maker, though. I brought along all the teaching materials, all the dissertation data, and most of the old syllabuses, notes, and books. I'll keep my toes in the academic waters, I thought. I'll sort out whether I really want to do this. In my off hours or between other jobs, I took some teaching assignments. I went abroad for another visiting position where I loved the location and the work hours but still felt generally neutral to negative about teaching.

Adjunct teaching, in particular, tipped the scales to negative. Twice I have announced that I would never adjunct teach again. The first time, my partner and I toasted my freedom from poorly paid academic temp work. I had a career all worked out in business. Finally, I would have the flexibility and the salary to prove that I had made the right decision in leaving that first visiting position.

The corporate job fell flat. So did my resolve and my savings account. When another adjunct offer came, I caved. It's not about the money, the program head cooed over the phone. Of course, it's about the experience, the excitement of teaching, building up that CV, using all that training.

The class did have its enjoyable and enriching moments. However, after long weekends and late nights of grading, I decided it was also very much about the money, a paltry $400 a month that all went (rather symbolically) to fix our septic tank. It also took time away from work I realized I wanted to be doing a lot more than teaching. After the semester was over, I once again vowed never to adjunct teach again.

I've held to my vow, though it's probably too early to declare success. I know where I'm weak. It goes back to the dissertation and those nags from cohorts, relatives, and advisers: What are you going to do with that? What a shame you can't find a teaching job. We always wondered when you went into that discipline.

It all makes me wonder if I should try to release myself from the dissertation's emotional and physical clutches. Maybe if I just got rid of the stuff?

It could be cathartic, another friend suggests. She has her own dissertation material stuffed in her in-laws' garage somewhere in southern Michigan. Unlike me, she's always stood firm in her decision not to enter academe. Sure, she has no great career in the works right now, but she makes no apologies for what she's doing. She keeps the dissertation around, she says, to remind her of the fun and accomplishment of conducting the research. She knew from the start she wouldn't necessarily "use" it. Will she ever throw it away? She doesn't think so. It's part of who she is.

I've had several chances to tackle my dissertation albatross lately. I cleaned the upstairs coat closet but left the dissertation boxes pushed to the back. Too warm in here, I thought. I'll come back in the winter. My partner's office is being remodeled as well, forcing me to repack the boxes and books I'd stored there. I tossed some old journals and, with only slight hesitation, several dozen old research papers. I couldn't face the dissertation, though.

I'm starting to think that maybe my friend is right. I can keep portions of the dissertation around as pleasant reminders of interesting experiences, people, and places. I can occasionally reminisce over the seemingly useless bits that I found fascinating but that never made it into any paper. Other parts, however, deserve a cathartic trip to the recycle bin.

In particular, I can rid myself of the many boxes of dry, out-of-date data. Those boxes carry the most emotional weight, a nagging guilt that I should use the data again, even though I don't want to, or need to. By saving the parts of the dissertation that really matter to me and discarding the rest, perhaps I can finally rid myself of the excess dissertation baggage I've carried for so long.