First Person

Enjoy the Walk

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By Jim Harris

I got a job on the tenure track.

It's a pretty great job, too, in my opinion. In fact, back when the position announcements were first showing up, it was one of two or three that jumped out as dream positions, especially given that my wife and I were weighing the merits of moving to Canada or taking one-year positions at junior colleges thousands of miles away.

The position is at a lovely little college in the Southeast about an hour from my hometown and very similar to my own undergraduate institution. My wife's sister went there, and it will be pretty close to my in-laws, which, decades of comedy clichés aside, is actually a really positive prospect for both of us.

There'll be a lot of teaching, but no more than at most small private colleges -- and besides, part of me feels that an English professor objecting to a lot of teaching is like a carpenter balking at the idea of doing a lot of woodwork. I'll definitely be able to continue my research. If I could manage this year, while juggling a teaching load of three courses each semester and a particularly vigorous job search, I should certainly be able to stay productive there. And I will be supported generously for conference travel.

Perhaps best of all, because of its location and atmosphere, this was my wife's number-one choice among the more than 70 jobs for which I applied. Anybody remotely familiar with the job market in English knows what a long shot that is.

Lest I sound too smug and self-congratulatory, I should refer readers to my previous column, which I wrote in the spring of 2003, just as the realization had sunk in that I had come up empty on the job market.

At this time last year, in the aftermath of my first full-fledged assault on the job market, I was finally coming to terms with the fact that nothing was going to materialize that year. In that doleful essay, I described the disappointment, the exhaustion, and the insecurity that inevitably accompany the too-common experience of a failed job search.

Despite all the reassurances I received from family and colleagues, despite the practical knowledge that it usually takes three or four years, and often longer, for new Ph.D.'s to find tenure-track positions, I was beset by doubts about my career choice, my individual worth, and my place in the universe. The eternal footman, I felt, had unceremoniously dropped my coat in the mud.

This year's search was categorically different. I entered the market with a better basic job letter, a year of full-time teaching under my belt, and a contract to publish my dissertation. I had only one interview at last year's Modern Language Association convention; this year, I had five, three of which resulted in campus interviews.

While one of the three went by the wayside fairly quickly, I spent the last couple of weeks of my search wondering, essentially, which of my dream jobs I would end up getting: the high-powered research position at a state university an hour away from my family, or the kind of job I had always envisioned for myself since deciding on an English major in college: teaching at a small private college in the South, with collegial faculty members and good students, all of whom seem genuinely glad to be there. Despite conventional wisdom and potential prestige, I think I'm actually happier that the latter option was the one that worked out.

This morning, as I was moving with my usual breakneck speed from car to office, I realized that I was missing out on what was perhaps the most beautiful day of the year so far. Struck by an epiphany with the force, if not implications, of Newton's apocryphal apple, I realized in the way that someone teaching three sections of poetry is apt to do that that walk reflected too much of my graduate career.

As grad students and instructors focused always on the next step, we tend to see our experience as a series of hurdles: pass the comps, get the dissertation done, and, finally, and most dauntingly, find a job. An unfortunate but often necessary mantra among graduate students is that "done is better than good."

Now that I'm viewing the whole scenario from a very different perspective, I want to urge present and future job seekers, graduate students, instructors, and lecturers, to try to appreciate the process of getting to that first job. I realize that I risk sounding like a graduation speaker here, and that I might not be saying this at all had my search turned out badly again. But I am absolutely in earnest.

Graduate course work can be frustrating, but, if you're in the right profession, also fascinating and rewarding. I now look back on my long summer preparing for my comprehensive exams as one of the best times in my life: When else can you expect to immerse yourself so completely in the subject that you love with that degree of autonomy and single-mindedness?

The dissertation work was wonderful as well, in its own way, viewed from this side of the defense: I remain fascinated by my topic, and, as I complete the manuscript revisions, find myself enjoying them still.

Even the moments of maximum frustration have had their share of enjoyment. I remember very early in my graduate career, as a friend and I were sharing, over a couple of beers, our mutual frustration with what seemed like endless and empty theoryspeak, we developed an idea for a parody book entitled All I Really Need to Know About Theory I Learned in Kindergarten.

The chapter we discussed in the most detail argued that both Edward Said's concept of Orientalism and James Clifford's ideas about self-reflexive ethnography could fundamentally be boiled down to the phrase, "I'm rubber, you're glue." (An alternative title for this chapter might have been, "I know you are, but what am I?").

Although I have since (mostly) moved beyond such frustrations, I still appreciate those moments, and take comfort in the ability to maintain a crucial level of ironic distance from some of the more overbearingly earnest aspects of the profession.

Even the job search, arguably the most dreaded gantlet of the academic career, has been enjoyable in retrospect. Certainly, it has been frustrating, and torturous in its uncertainty, but it has also been gratifying and validating in a lot of ways. Each request for more materials, each MLA interview, each campus visit reassured me that my credentials as a scholar and myself as a person were making positive impressions.

I was wined and dined (well, dined, anyway) by scholars whom I respect, and who in several cases have had great influence on my career. For a few two-day periods, I was the focus of an entire department's attention -- everyone wanted to talk to me about my work. Regardless of the outcome, those are rare situations indeed, and I would encourage every candidate who can get beyond the inevitable nervousness to savor them.

Writing as someone who has experienced the depths of job-search depression, and who has questioned not a few times whether academe is really the place for me, I hope I can offer some comfort and encouragement for those who are going through the same thing.