First Person

The Research Trip That Wasn't

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines P&T Confidential Facebooking Your Way Out of Tenure How can you minimize the possibility that your blog or Facebook page might hurt your career? On Course Nudging Higher Education A professor looks for small changes he can make to move students toward making smarter choices. Career News No Jacket Required A scholar's study of her own students suggests that while a professor's clothing might affect initial impressions, it doesn't make a difference in the long run. Career News Listserv 2.0 Electronic mailing lists, once hailed as the savior of scholarly communication, must now either change or fade away. 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 Paula Krebs

I'm not writing this at a desk in the British Library, having not taken the 73 bus from Stoke Newington to the Euston Road stop this morning. I won't be having lunch with any of my Victorianist buddies who also work at the British Library in the summer months. And the manuscript of Kipling's Kim that I had requested be made available to me is languishing unretrieved behind the desk of the Manuscripts Room.

The week I had picked to schedule a research trip to London turned out to be just after British police announced they had foiled a new terrorist attack aimed at bringing down airplanes traveling to the United States.

The lines at the airports, the fear that I wouldn't be able to take my brand new laptop -- purchased specifically for this research trip -- in my carry-on bag, and the knowledge that my seat was on one of the airlines supposedly targeted for the thwarted bombings led me to cancel a trip I had been looking forward to all summer.

This was to be the trip on which I would spend all day and evening reading Kipling's manuscript and finding related materials for a new edition I am working on. This trip was supposed to take me back to the days when I did research full time, staying with friends and eating as cheaply as I could so I could afford a pint at the end of the day. In other words, the days before family, mortgage, dog -- when the first book was life or death, teaching still made me nervous, and committee work didn't come before research.

Instead of poring over Kipling's spiky, somewhat crabbed handwriting, or looking for a good illustration of British ideas of racial types in India in 1900, I'm navel-gazing on my home computer, wondering whether I should have chanced it and hopped on that plane anyway.

Twenty years ago, I would have. The research was everything then. Or not the research alone, I suppose, but everything surrounding it. Living in London. A London transport pass in my pocket. Knowing the waitstaff at a local coffee shop. Seeing the latest plays on the cheap, first with my graduate-student ID card, and then, after I found a teaching job, by queuing up in the morning on the day of the show.

I was part of a community of researchers then -- doctoral students in history and literature from Britain, the United States, and Australia, who would meet up at libraries, attend the same conferences, and present papers to each other (and to those faculty members of whom we were in awe) at research seminars at the University of London.

Eventually my research trips changed, as I had to confine my travel to summers once I got a job. But I fit into a different community then -- researchers like me who spent as much of the summer at the London libraries as we could and who met up for lunch or drinks or the occasional movie or play. We were at different stages in our publishing careers, but we could all talk about the same stuff, and we would meet during the academic year at small conferences here.

That community still exists, but in recent years, with child-raising and administrative responsibilities, I've tapped into it less and less. I didn't realize how much I was looking forward to re-entering it, until I canceled my trip. I had lined up lunches and dinner dates for the week, pre-ordered materials at the library, checked out the theater scene. I was setting up a mini-version of my life as it used to be.

It's not that I can't do research in the United States, of course. Tons of material are available through interlibrary loan and even on the Web. And I can chat with others in my field through e-mail or on the phone, if I am so inclined. Many American scholars of British culture never get the chance to work in London at all. Certainly very few get to spend the amount of time I spent there in my dissertation years and in the first years of my job, back when airfare was relatively cheap and I had friends with a flat and a spare futon.

It's pointless to be a crybaby about having to stay home and work instead of using someone else's money to fly to London to spend all day doing the most fun thing I could imagine doing. I used to spend months of every year doing it, before I had a solid professional position, and now I'm in mourning for the one week I was going to get this year to relive my glory days.

It's an irony of higher education that, unless you're in a cushy research-university job, the higher you rise -- either at your institution or in national professional contexts that involve committees and consulting -- the less time you get for research.

That's why it is so important to get out of town, where they can't find you. That's what I thought I would be doing in London, until I gave up the trip. Now I realize that I wasn't actually trying to get away from my campus and my daily responsibilities. I was really trying to get to something.

To the me of 20, or even 15 years ago. To the me who writes about Things Victorian and not just about this year's tenure-committee conflicts or even the latest issues in higher education nationally. To the me who used to take buses and eat curries and see plays and attend evening seminars.

She's still in there, behind the baseball coach, minivan driver, and committee chair. She's just going to have to wait a little longer to put in a reappearance. But at least in pondering this lost week, I have remembered her. And maybe next time I'll schedule two weeks.