reposting from Invisible Adjunct - 8/24/04

Originally posted to Invisible Adjunct 8/24/04


Ah, sorry about the lapse there - got very busy and more or less forgot about the note I'd posted here.

I started to write "I'll try to make this brief" but discovered I can't actually do that. Very short version: after finishing a PhD in political theory and spending several years in an abortive attempt to latch on in the professoriat, I left academia four years ago for fairly gratifying, better-paid work - and much higher self-esteem! - and hardly ever find myself looking back.
If you aren't interested in the early part of the trajectory, feel free to skip straight to the next post.

I was a blue-collar kid from the sticks who went to a first-rate liberal arts college, fell in love with the hothouse intellectual environment I encountered there, and resolved at about 18 years old to become a professor. I ended up in a second- or third- tier graduate program at a fairly big state school on the East Coast, which was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for me professionally.

I spent seven years in New England laboring over my studies, starting a family (3 kids by the time I was 25 - don't try this at home, folks), serving as a TA, and (of course) working second and third jobs as necessary. The worst part about my graduate school experience was the shabby treatment I experienced at the hands of my professors. Almost without exception, they were utterly clueless about the reality of the job market, indifferent to our (or at least my) fate as graduates of the program, and so socially inept they wouldn't have been much help if they had tried.

But like a good working class boy, I finished that degree (the only one in my cohort to finish within 7 years, which tells you a little about the rate of attrition), and went on the market in the mid 90s, only to find.... practically no jobs. I hurt myself by specializing in an obscure corner of the least marketable subfield in political science, and while I'll spare you my reasoning at the time, it's fair to say it might have made some difference if I'd not been so stubbornly hostile to the demands of the Evil Capitalist Market.

For a variety of reasons, I moved back to Oregon & set about hunting for teaching work, eventually winning a couple of one-year appointments back to back at different schools. Then a funny thing happened - I got an interview for a job. A actual teaching job!

This turned out to be a huge turning point. The interview was at a state school with large classes and no graduate program - say hello to classes of 75-100 with no TAs! (The irony here was that my interviewers claimed to be enthusiastic about my focus on teaching writing, which was clearly going to be untenable with that many students). Worse yet, in the kind of classic budget maneuver I'm sure you're all familiar with, this position came open when someone who'd been there since the Pleistocene retired, and the Dean had yanked the tenure-track line from the department. The Chair was "very hopeful" that it would be converted back to a tenure track appointment, but no one could make anything like a promise.

Then it hit me: the worst case scenario here wasn't moving to the middle of nowhere, Great Plains, USA and not getting into a tenure track after a year or two. The worse case scenario might be moving to Nowhere... and GETTING tenure. Because I'd be stuck there forever.
By this time, I was divorced from my first wife, and was in a new serious relationship. And my new partner wanted no part of living in a slaughterhouse town an hour from what passes in those parts for civilization. And I'm not THAT snooty about place, but living in a wonderful city already made it that much harder to trade easily for something that just didn't look and feel like my kinda place.

But given that this was my sole bite in 4-5 years on the job market (and I wasn't ultimately offered the job), that brought up a very big question: if not this, then what?