Balancing Act

The Next Chapter

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By Paige Newcastle

I went to graduate school (repeatedly and in three disciplines) because I was going into the family business and it seemed the path of least resistance. The firm and relentless socialization offered by graduate school is such that when you finally emerge with Ph.D. in hand, it is difficult to imagine that you had any other option.

Graduate school attracts single-minded people who, once set on a course, are difficult to dissuade. I am one such person. So is my husband.

Collectively, we have had almost every experience described in these pages. We have endured many ridiculous job searches; been denied tenure at teaching-oriented colleges for doing too much research and at research institutions for doing too much teaching; worked in good departments and in dysfunctional messes; had great students and lousy students; and lived in big cities and isolated Midwestern towns.

As a couple we have repeatedly negotiated harsh job markets, heartbreaking geographic separations, even more heartbreaking resentment, and years of unrealized hope -- all without the benefit of a "star-quality" spouse blazing the way.

We both realized recently that we were each secretly hoping that we could have been the "trailing" spouse. No such luck.

Both of us are moderately successful in academic terms. We have pretty good publication records and good-to-great records in securing grant money. Most of our students like us, and, between the two of us, we have more experience collecting and analyzing data than most moderate-sized departments in the social sciences.

In other words, we are the everyman and everywoman of academe. I now commute two and a half hours to work as a research faculty member at a very prestigious university, while my husband commutes two hours in the other direction to teach at a good regional university.

One adult is always home for our teenage daughters, and we live by cellphone, calendar, and the grace of the federal highway system and global warming.

In the job-hunting accounts published on these pages, I always want to read the next chapter in the stories. Are the writers happy now? Did the department offer him a position? Did the baby ruin her chances for promotion? Did tenure solve her ambivalence? Are they really still together?

My husband and I are one version of those next chapters in the painful but mostly optimistic stories printed here. In taking stock recently, we both realized we would not choose to be academics if we had known the toll it would take on our lives and, truthfully, on our self-concept.

Have we always made the right career choices, in true Ms. Mentor fashion? Frankly, no. Often the "right" choice conflicted with our desire to stay married, to raise healthy children, to voice an opinion, or to right a wrong. We were too busy living our lives to put our ears to the railroad track, and, anyway, the sound of the oncoming train was very different in different places. Perhaps, our "failure" was our decision to put our lives ahead of our careers.

I have finally set to rest the idea of academic work as a "calling," an idea that came to me as a byproduct of having a very successful academic parent.

My current job is a good one; I am working on active research projects with lots of support and great colleagues. I make the drive because it is a job worth having, given my career history. But since it's a non-tenure-track position, it nevertheless remains a step down in the academic pantheon.

I have been in that type of position before and always developed articulate rationalizations for friends and family. This time, however, I am clear on what this job is: It's a job.

The model career path offered as an incentive in most graduate programs has now permanently faded from view. For me, there is some poignant relief in being able to do the job I have instead of the one I think I should have had. More important, it will likely suit me better than the more widely coveted alternatives.

Middle age brings such reflection to everyone, not just academics. My husband and I have been mostly successful in avoiding the harsh self-judgment that often accompanies that reflection. Like all good Baby Boomers, we blame the system.

The system rewards unmarried, geographically unattached, childless women and married men with spouses who manage their lives. It favors the silently collegial or the brash productive types, depending on the environment. It undercuts the value of communal activity and, in some environments, punishes those who feel there is value in being actively engaged in students' lives. It adheres to notions of research productivity that encourage a great deal of career-based scholarship with little intrinsic scientific value or substantial public benefit.

I wish we could say that we both engaged in civil disobedience by the choices we made in our careers, but neither of us is that heroic. We simply conducted ourselves the way we thought we should.

Would I encourage my bright and wonderful teenage daughters to become academics? Absolutely not.

I envision lives for them in which the whole range of their talents is rewarded rather than a very narrow subset. Perhaps the next 20 years will put enough pressure on universities to diversify academic career paths in important ways. They do offer wonderful environments for the bright and curious. The independent life of a scholar -- in the ideal (which is achieved by very few) -- is enormously attractive. I am not, however, hopeful enough to want that for my children.

So this is one of the alternative middle passages in the pulp-fiction serial of academic life. The good news is that we are happily married, our children are wonderful, and we have remained sane. We make a living and think we make a contribution to the places we work.

The moral of our small parable is that to assume that academe is a meritocracy that efficiently sorts individuals is to subscribe to a harmful myth. We have found that academe is, instead, a socially bounded meritocracy with segmented and cruelly unpredictable anomalies. Making the choice to enter the profession must be accompanied by that realization.

I would encourage others who have a happier story to write their version of the middle passage through academe. Superstar couples need not apply -- just moderately successful ones with children who are not yet in rehab. I am open to being convinced that we suffered only from bad luck.