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Cutting the Cord

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By Dexter Coisson

As I sent out application letters this fall, I finally started to realize what it means to no longer be a graduate student.

As a student, my advisers were my polestars, guiding me through academic life. Now that I've graduated and have a tenure-track position in history, however, I am the captain of my own destiny. I'm on the market again this year because my current job, while at an excellent university, is on the wrong continent and I'd like to come home to the States. It is time for some Big Life Decisions, and it's eerie to discover that no one can make them for me.

I still keep my advisers around, my ace bullpen of senior scholars. All of them are warmed up to write ninth-inning letters of reference, read drafts of my writing, and offer advice on career moves. I have been blessed with supportive mentors as an undergraduate, as a graduate student, and as a junior faculty member. I'd call them the parents I never had, except that I have great parents, too.

I've heard and read horrific examples of advisers, department chairs, and other bosses who were tyrannical, erratic, or neglectful. That has not been my fate. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to be stuck in a department with people who don't care about your progress, or who find active ways to sabotage it. No one has a greater capacity to make your life miserable or make graduate-school life seem charmed.

Whenever I entered my primary graduate adviser's office, I was filled with the typical anxieties of a graduate student. Yet I always left feeling inspired and energized to keep working. He was an insightful critic with a knack for spinning my inchoate ideas into something resembling genuine scholarship. At conferences, he made sure to introduce his students to eminent scholars and editors who could help us with our work -- everyone in our subfield seems to like him, and he's unfailingly loyal to us.

I can credit just about every accomplishment on my CV to his assistance or influence. I got advice from him about the proper format of journal articles and cover letters, about the right journals for submission, about how best to devote my time in graduate school. His letters of recommendation were crucial for fellowships and job applications -- at one library, the woman who read his letter assured me that its contents would make me blush.

By the end of graduate school, I had at least six mentors, in three departments, plus two leftover from my undergraduate days. I leaned on them all pretty heavily.

How else is a greenhorn student supposed to know how to get along in the Byzantine world of academe? How are we supposed to know how to write something important without the guidance of someone who has refereed articles and sat on prize committees? How are we to know which career patterns will lead us to crash and burn, and which are reliable paths to greatness or semi-greatness?

If it sounds like I sucked a lot of time from my advisers' busy schedules, I did. Thankfully that seems to have only made them fonder of me.

In 1969, the social psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy called that response the Ben Franklin effect. Franklin was once troubled by a legislative opponent, until one day he asked his adversary whether he could borrow a rare book. Franklin read it and returned it with all due gratitude. From that day onward, the other man treated him kindly, proving to Franklin the old maxim, "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged."

In my case, my advisers were kinder to me because I constantly imposed upon them, than they would have been if I had served them as a gofer for six years. A graduate adviser, it seems, is contemptuous of a servile lackey, but loves a schnorrer (in Yiddish, someone who takes advantage of others' generosity).

On the other hand, perhaps my fierce and humble devotion to them was sufficient recompense. At no time have I been ungrateful. Once I even had the opportunity to give back, writing a letter of support for a mentor's tenure -- which, happily, she received.

I've graduated now. I have thanked them and shaken their hands. Now I have to make my own decisions about the job advertisements that I answer, and those decisions are fraught with peril.

A relative of mine, a slightly older academic, once cautioned me never to solicit my mentors' advice on any difficult question, because to spurn their advice, she said, would risk offending them and would render them undependable for future support. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case so far.

Not lightly, however, does one make the decision to leave a stable position at a major research university for browner pastures. "Do not take a second-tier job!" thundered my primary adviser this summer, when I told him I wanted to apply to some local colleges that weren't research universities. Another said, "Well, an application isn't a marriage proposal," and he urged me to apply more widely.

I chose a course somewhere in between, which means I'm applying to marquee institutions scattered (depressingly) across the country, along with some lesser-known ones a mere stone's throw from my preferred geographic location.

In response, both advisers threw up their hands and said, "It's your life." They said it nicely, though.

In any case, using a computerized dossier service means never having to ask permission: I can send their letters of reference anywhere I want, with or without their blessing. Still, I miss their worldly wisdom and approving nods. These days, they answer my e-mail messages weeks instead of days later. I submit drafts of articles without even their tacit approval. I make my own introductions at conferences.

Perhaps I was coddled too much, and I've grown up to be a little bit spoiled. Maybe my problem isn't so much with academe as with adulthood.

After all, new baby birds are being born all the time, and they have the same hunger I did. Whereas nothing used to lift my spirits more than a "couch session" with my graduate adviser, nowadays I've discovered a new source of energy. During the semester, I sit down with my students and help them grasp the elements of my subject that have enchanted me since I was a sophomore.

"I never thought of it that way," they say, looking relieved and excited.

I sigh wistfully. I know how they feel.

I am my own person now, though. It's time for me to leave the nest and make my own way in the world. Here's hoping I can get the hemisphere right this time.