Balancing Act

Getting Back on Track

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 Jan Yager

I hope this doesn't read like sour grapes as I bemoan my inability to find a full-time teaching job. And I really hope that my experience will help others reconsider the consequences if they, like me, jump off the tenure track at a key moment in their careers.

In 1985, I made the difficult decision to give up my full-time teaching position in the behavioral-sciences department of a Long Island college to focus on motherhood. Back then, I was confident that when the time came to resume teaching, the door would open for me.

I had been teaching five courses including a graduate one. I wanted work I could control more completely than the full-time demands of an academic position. So I worked from home over the next decade, raising our two sons, doing research, and writing.

By 1999, I was ready to return to teaching. Taking a job as an adjunct seemed the best way to get back into it. I figured I could build up my teaching record again, and get on the radar screen for full-time positions.

Five years later, I am still on the adjunct track. At one point, a full-time position became available in sociology at the college where I was a teaching a course. Unfortunately, as a part-timer, I was out of the loop and didn't know about the opening until it was too late. I missed the application deadline. Determined to find a full-time job, I took the next year off from adjunct work to concentrate on my search and to earn money as a speaker and a writer.

Fifty applications, and many rejection letters later, the only position I came close to being interviewed for was at a college almost seven hours from my home. With my younger son in his second year of high school and my husband working in Manhattan, relocating the family to Pennsylvania was not practical (and the college was not open to offering me a flexible schedule).

I began to wonder if I would have made the same decision back in 1985 -- to give up that full-time job -- if I knew that it was going to be so very difficult to get back on track.

When I was getting my doctorate I taught a course in medical sociology at a university in Queens, N.Y. At that time, a graduate of my doctoral program who was an assistant professor at the university had just earned tenure. She told me then that she had made the choice to keep teaching full time even while her children were young, and she expressed regret that she had missed so much during their formative years.

Now that she had tenure, she felt that she could relax to some degree and focus more attention on her children. But they were in their late teens, and she feared it was too late to make a difference.

I was still single when I heard her express her regrets. I hadn't even met my future husband. But her fears stayed with me.

On a personal level, I can state unequivocally that I have no regrets about the professional choice I made. I was there for all the major school events for both my sons. I met the school bus. I am still able to schedule my business commitments around their schedules. I was raised by a working mother whose demanding job had to come first. That was not the lifestyle I wanted for my sons.

But I started having a family much later than my mother did. Her three children were already in college by the age that I was just starting my family. I am now in my mid-50s. I don't know how typical I am of older Ph.D.'s who left academe to focus on their families and returned years later to find that part-time positions were the ones most readily open to them. There doesn't seem to be any association for "former full timers turned adjuncts," although maybe there should be.

It's discouraging not to be offered a full-time position because I've accomplished so much in these interim years. I've published more than a dozen books that have been translated into 14 languages. I've written two popular books based on my dissertation research -- Friendshifts and the sequel, When Friendship Hurts -- that have led to interviews on major talk shows including Oprah, The Today Show, and National Public Radio. I've had speaking engagements throughout the United States as well as in Japan and England. I fulfilled my dream of publishing two novels.

I miss teaching, so I will be returning to adjunct work in the coming academic year. But I long for the day-to-day connections, challenges, and prestige of a full-time teaching position -- as well as the salary and benefits.

I don't know if age discrimination is a factor. Certainly it's easy enough to figure out my age from my CV. I don't leave off the date of my Ph.D., which I earned when I was in my early 30s, some 20 years ago.

I've started to consider what I might have done differently during that decade when I was basically a full-time mother doing some writing on the side. I should have not just maintained my memberships in professional associations, but found a way to be more active, including attendance at a few annual conferences. I should have obtained recommendation letters from the academics I met during my years of full-time employment. I put off seeking those letters and, sadly, the chairman of the department where I worked, who had been my advocate, died quite young.

I should have kept up with colleagues, even if I was not teaching. Those contacts might have opened some doors. I also should have maintained a more active affiliation with all of the institutions where I was educated and worked -- returning for more alumni events, maintaining relationships with fellow alumni and faculty members, visiting the career-development offices.

Maybe I should have hit the ground running when I returned to teaching and sought a new full-time appointment right away, rather than getting stuck in the adjunct role.

Those are some of the suggestions I have for those of you who are considering a temporary or prolonged break from academe.

My sons have taught me so much. I'm glad I did not miss out on those early years with them. (I know there are others who kept teaching full time and who feel they did not miss out on anything but I knew my limitations.) Now I have to prove to my sons, my husband, and, most of all, to myself that I am able to go forward as I begin the next phase of my personal and professional careers.