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Going Over the Falls

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By John S. Brady

Surfers call it "going over the falls." Instead of gliding down the wave as expected, you find yourself being drawn back up its face only to be pitched out in front of the wave as it breaks. For a moment it is terrifying and exhilarating, a tilt-o-whirl experience of spinning disorientation as you free-fall towards the ocean's surface.

And then it is just terrifying. In the instance that I am thinking of, the one that can still cause me to catch my breath in remembered fear, the wave, much larger and more powerful than I had anticipated, sucked me up its face, caught me in its lip, threw me out in front of it, and then drove me deep, deep beneath the surface. Helplessly tumbling in the turbulence, I was trapped with no way of knowing how long I would be held down. I didn't really even know which way was up. I thought I was drowning.

In situations like these, surfers will tell you, the key is to remain calm. As my surf partner once remarked, "Nothing burns oxygen like panic." Wave dynamics being what they are, it's best not to fight them because sooner or later you will be freed from the wave's hold to find the surface. But this time it felt like the wave would never let go. So I fought it. I struggled upward through the aerated water and after what felt like minutes, but was no more than seconds, broke the surface, gasping for air.

Waiting for waves, sitting half in and half out of the water, surfers straddle the border between two worlds. Below is the liquid world of the ocean, features of its benthonic topography -- the reefs and sandbars -- shaping the waves surfers ride. Not far off is land, the solid and relatively safe venue for everyday life. Part of surfing's allure comes from playing at this frontier, skimming along the margin between the hospitable and the inhospitable, flirting with the risk of a wipeout before paddling in to shore.

When I moved to Los Angeles in August to start a one-year job as a visiting instructor of political science, I knew that much of my time would similarly be spent in between worlds. As someone seriously contemplating a career switch, I would be negotiating the border between the academic and nonacademic realms.

As I contemplated my past experience as a postdoc and thought about what lay ahead as a visiting lecturer and job seeker, I thought that the main question I needed to answer was when to leave, exactly. That is, When should I cross over for good and leave academe behind to pursue other options?

Since then, I've come to realize that that was the wrong question. Looking back on my 10-plus years in academe, I see now that one of the things that first attracted me to graduate work and then motivated me to persevere when it became a bit of a slog was the field's singular combination of a clearly defined career ladder, a strong institutional infrastructure, and a high degree of individual autonomy.

Once you start grad school, you tread a path with distinct markers of progress -- master's, dissertation, Ph.D. -- that continues, hopefully, on into a professional life marked with equally distinct markers of success. Along the way, you are supported by a multifaceted, highly developed network of formal and informal institutions such as departments, libraries, research institutes, speaker series, journals, and conferences. Within this structured environment, you have a very considerable degree of autonomy to define and pursue your research and teaching interests.

Reflecting on the last 10 months, I see that in the face of a potentially very fluid, dynamic situation, I sought some of the same sense of clarity and structure I had come to appreciate in university life. I defined my situation and the choices I faced in stark and mutually exclusive terms. I would choose either academic work or a life outside the campus gates. I would get a tenure-track job or would not. I imagined myself moving from one well-defined career path to another.

Defining my options so starkly was a mistake.

On the one hand, it made doing my present job that much harder by compromising my sense of motivation. I quite like lecturing. A significant part of practicing political theory involves interpreting texts, and in my lectures, I derive a healthy sense of satisfaction from teaching my students what a lively and engaging process this can be. But as with any type of lecture, preparation is often a lot of work and, over the course of the term, can get to be a tedious exercise.

In the past, part of what kept me going, especially if I was teaching a class for the first time, as was the case these last two quarters, was that I knew the initial investment of time and energy would be rewarded in the future. With a set of lectures already in hand, I wouldn't have to start from scratch the next time, but could instead focus on honing the initial presentations and integrating new insights and material.

But in my desire to bring some order into my muddled career situation, I had defined my options in either-or terms and in the process taken away that sense of an extended time horizon that had helped motivate me in the past. As I struggled, for example, to decide which aspects of John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems to discuss with my class, I found myself asking, "If most likely I'm not going to be doing this in a year, if this is the last time I'm teaching this, why am I working so hard? Why don't I just phone it in?"

Thankfully, my ingrained sense of duty, my unwillingness to cheat my students, and, frankly, my aversion to appearing ignorant in public kept me working. But it was hard. Working without that sense of long-term security made writing lectures in the fall more difficult than usual.

Defining the stakes as I had also made the job search seem even more charged than usual. The bulk of tenure-track jobs in political science have application deadlines in early to mid-October. Unlike some other disciplines, there is no official round of preliminary interviews at our national conference. You receive a campus interview or you don't.

If you haven't heard anything by late November, early December (and I hadn't), you can more or less write off your chances in this first and main round. I had planned to devote myself to a nonacademic job search if I hadn't received any campus interviews by late December.

But then in January there appeared -- scattered among the increasing number of job ads for adjuncts and sabbatical replacements -- a number of listings for tenure-track positions. And suddenly I faced the question I thought I'd decided to put behind me, Should I apply? They were good jobs. Not ideal for my needs or my partner Sarah's, but good jobs, nonetheless. Applying was certainly tempting. And with that, my mind was spinning:

"If I'm leaving the profession," I found myself thinking, "why apply?"

"But at the same time, it's important to take every opportunity. Who knows, maybe this time it will work out!

"Work out? Don't be such a chump! With the market the way it is, chances are slim to none that I'll get an interview, let alone a job.

"Still, it can't hurt to apply. These are good jobs that I would be more than happy with.

"Not hurt? I'll only get my hopes up and defer making the mental adjustment to postacademic life.

"Perhaps, but it just may be worth that risk."

And around and around.

After much hand-wringing, I applied for the jobs. But in doing so, I made an important second decision. I decided to shift my approach to the job search in general and stop thinking in such stark either/or terms.

Instead, I began to consider my academic search as part of a larger general job search. That meant accepting a certain level of indeterminancy. Perhaps I would have an academic job in the fall, but perhaps, if the right opportunity came along, I would find myself toiling outside of the ivory tower. I might also find myself somewhere in between, teaching part time and working part time in a nonuniversity job.

Accepting that lack of structure not only changed my attitude toward job hunting, it also made it easier to write lectures. My time horizons lengthened. Who knows? I may have the chance to teach a class and draw on the now fairly large set of lectures and presentations I've written in the last three years.

So my academic job search continues. I've applied for some of the tenure-track jobs still trickling in, and I've even begun to seek out temporary positions, something I thought I really would not do once my present position expired.

At the same time, I have expanded my nonacademic search. Since the start of the new year, I have begun vigorously seeking contacts and interviews. I find the process immensely enjoyable. Not only am I gathering information about potentially interesting alternative careers, but I have a greater sense of optimism regarding possible career choices. Even better, I have a renewed sense of control. I'm actively seeking out information and making contacts, instead of passively waiting by the phone, hoping for that search-committee call.

Which isn't to say that there aren't still some nights when, just as I'm falling asleep, I will be gripped with a particularly acute sense of panic and jerk back into full consciousness, thinking, "What if I don't find a job? What if none of this research and interviewing pans out? What if I'm being wildly optimistic?

Sometimes something similar will happen after I've had a particularly nasty fall surfing. I'll be drifting off, only to be confronted with an image of my wipeout from earlier in the day. Suddenly very awake, I'll shudder at the possibility of how badly hurt I could have been. It takes a while to fall back asleep then.

But I always go back to the beach, looking to play along that frontier between land and sea despite, even because of, the risk of going over the falls.

No longer willing or able to incur the costs of trying to shoehorn my job search into a narrowly defined set of choices, I have come to accept that, for the foreseeable future, the search is going to be much more like surfing: fluid, dynamic, potentially turbulent.