First Person

Airport Musings

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person Half a Sabbatical Giving up a full year's leave to take only a semester off was a mistake but even a limited break has its benefits. The Fund Raiser Collateral Baggage Who, exactly, is the audience for a capital campaign once it goes public? The CV Doctor Does Your Vita Need Work? Submit your CV and it may be selected for an online critique by our Career Talk columnists. Career Talk Starting Fresh A primer for new professors on what to expect in the first year on the job. 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 William Pilger

I started writing this in an airport. There's nothing much else to do for the two hours that you have to wait to get on a plane these days just because someone may want to blow up aircraft and buildings and people.

Plus, I couldn't really do this at my office. First, I'm a classicist at a high-quality, liberal-arts college in Minnesota -- in the second year of a two-year contract. That means I need to be as productive as I can be; the next job looms.

Second, a photo of a glaring, bug-eyed Theodor Mommsen, the great 19th-century classical philologist, hangs outside my office door. He reminds me that the only satire ve vill vork on at the office is Juvenal, Horace, or Menippus.

Still, all the hours I've spent waiting for airplanes to take off or land has given me plenty of time to wonder what many other people I've encountered are doing in academe, not to mention what I'm doing here myself.

I looked for a job the year I finished my dissertation, which was 2000 -- December, to be precise. I know because I still have the cork from the champagne bottle, and I wrote the date on it.

That academic year I got one on-campus interview -- from a small, public, liberal-arts college south of the Mason-Dixon line and on the East Coast. I'm glad I didn't get the job. The department chairman was a vast reservoir of machismo, and he took my visit with a visible and irritating nonchalance. The dean came off as imperious.

But I liked the president, even though I didn't get to meet him. He wore bow ties. I wear bow ties, too. I tell people I do it because it saves on the cleaning bill. (Classicists are known to wear a great deal of their food; there's even a quite famous scholar I've met on several occasions who would benefit from the invention of a plastic cravat).

I tell some people I wear bow ties because they're cheaper than neckties. Most of my family members understand that. Teaching 18-year-olds Greek and Latin is not as lucrative as law, banking, and accounting. But I actually wear bow ties because I like them. Most of my family members don't understand that.

My campus interview that first year on the market was on February 1. Out of some degree of insecurity, I avoided my general practice and wore a necktie to the interview. When I arrived at the agreed-upon time, no one but the part-time secretary was in, and she was on her way out the door.

So I had to wait all alone in the chairman's office. His name was Dwayne or Dwight or Larry. I don't remember anymore, mostly because I've gotten over it. The college was in a place where the ground never freezes. In Minnesota, where I am now, the frost line is about four feet below ground. I think freezing ground is healthy since it must kill all sorts of microorganisms, and I wonder why people in the South don't get really sick more often. Maybe they do. I don't know. I've never lived there. I wasn't offered the job. Maybe it's because I was wearing a necktie.

Actually, no one got the job. I called back in mid-March to ask where the search stood.

"Don't you read the papers?" said Dwayne or Dwight (or whatever).

"Yes."

"Well, then you know that the legislature and governor couldn't come to terms on a budget. The governor has frozen all state hires -- back in the first week of February."

"OK, thanks."

"He's a Republican."

"OK. Let me know if you elect a Democrat, then."

Come to think of it, all Easterners might learn a thing or two from that exchange. Just last week I was in New York for another interview at a prestigious liberal-arts college. It became a matter of some concern amongst members of the committee that there aren't any bagels in Minnesota. Barely choking back a, "No, we still barter with the natives for squirrel meat," I assured them that there are bagels in Minnesota.

"Not as good as here, though," one committee member replied.

"Well, Minnesota bagels can be quite good," I countered. ("We enjoy the texture of the hand-ground maize flour," I almost added.)

"But there aren't any Jews in Minnesota." Once again, I assured them that Jews do, in fact, live in Minnesota. This time I imagined two wisecracks: "What's a Jew?" My second one better matched the distaste of the whole conversation: "No, we don't have Jews yet, but we were thinking of taking some in on trade for a few Swedes."

The reason I got to go to New York this spring is because my CV looks much better now than it did in 2000. I've had a chance to teach at a reputable college, do a good job of it, and get helpful recommendations as a result. A nice publication record accompanies those recommendations. I have five articles out, several more in the pipeline, a contract to edit a book, and an agreement to publish a revision of my dissertation.

All of that got me 14 conference interviews this time around. One of them was even with an Ivy League university. In that interview, a man asked whether I'd read a particular book. I hadn't -- and couldn't have been expected to since it's way out of our field. "No," I said. Undaunted, he pressed on: What would the author say about Greek inscriptions and the proposed September 11 memorial in Manhattan?

It would have been nice to teach at an Ivy League institution -- mainly for my ego. But I'm still happy with the seven campus interviews that arose out of the initial 14. One of them was at an institution in the Southern Hemisphere, but I never made it to the interview. That's a bit far to go for a position requiring more teaching in English than in Greek and Latin. And I hate to think about how much time I'd have to spend in airports just to get to a campus interview.

Of course, all the interview travel has its upside, too. I've read quite a bit -- also for pleasure, a real rarity. I even read a book by an Icelander, Halldór Laxness. I bet you can buy Laxness only in Minnesota -- even if you can't buy a decent bagel here.

But today I ran out of reading materials so I went to an airport bookstore to buy The Da Vinci Code. I had promised our secretary that I'd read that next. She loved it. Unfortunately, it's available only in hardcover; too costly on a visiting assistant's salary.

You can, however, buy Kurt Vonnegut in paperback. My first encounter with him, some years ago, was Breakfast of Champions. I even wrote an article on Callimachus using an epigraph from the book: It's when the authorial voice tells Kilgore Trout that he's going to kill him and that it doesn't matter anyway since Kilgore's just a literary creation. Hellenistic poets exhibit something close to modern authorial self-consciousness, which I enjoy. So I picked up Slaughterhouse-Five.

When I first read Breakfast of Champions, I thought, "I could write like this." I still entertain thoughts of writing an historical novel, probably about Sappho or Callimachus. Every time I see my Uncle Tim he brings this up. He thinks academic life is crazy. Why would someone with so much education settle for so little? Uncle Tim's advice: Write one page a day of a novel. "And then, look, Billy, it'll be done in a year. I mean, who wants to read a book that's longer 'n 365 pages anyway, know what I mean?"

Three or four pages into Slaughterhouse-Five, I had a Tralfamadorian moment (Tralfamadore, in Slaughterhouse-Five, is a planet whose inhabitants see the historical sweep of all things at all times; our déjà-vues are just moments when glances of that sweep become available to us): "I could write like this."

Plus, on the title page, Vonnegut says he's a fourth-generation German-American. After all those generations his English is pretty good. I'm a seventh-generation German-American. Even if that might explain why I'll never live up to my glaring Mommsen's expectations, maybe I could still write a good novel in English.

Maybe. We'll see how the campus interview goes tomorrow. I'd rather teach 18-year-olds the basics of Greek grammar and struggle never to achieve the learning of the 19th-century German philhellenes than adopt the hand-to-mouth lifestyle of a second-rate novelist. Then again, there's always law school.