Escape the Ivory Tower

The problem of careers

There’s this myth we have about the importance of careers. We have this idea that our working life is supposed to be coherent and progressive, that it should continually rise towards a pinnacle (full professorship, an X- or C-level corporate job, directorship of a non-profit) that indicates that We Have Made It, that We Are Good And Worthy People. A career indicates expertise and gravitas, “settling down” and “growing up,” all at the same time.

In short, we should have one. But only one.

Now, I’ve got nothing but respect for people who’ve known since they were small what they want to do and who have experienced fulfillment and joy and all of that from that very same career. Power to them! But that’s not what happened in my life. And it’s not what happened in the lives of many people I know.

Many of us fell into careers instead of choosing them. I, for example, went to graduate school because I loved learning, not because I had the faintest idea what being a professor actually entailed. A dear friend of mine got an entry-level job after college in a mailroom to pay the rent and later became VP of that same organization, without necessarily ever having an ambition for international development. An acquaintance got a part-time job telemarketing in college and now runs a division of that company.

But once you have a career, however it came about, it’s not just a job — it’s part of who you are. After all, “what do you do?” is one of the first things we ask new adult aquaintances, and we often conflate the answer with the person. We say, “She’s a lawyer,” or “He runs a non-profit,” instead of “She’s a rock-climber” or “He’s an amazing wildlife photographer.”

In my experience it’s even worse in places like academia, where there’s the combination of a long training period and an explicit working identity at the end of it. When everyone around you is an academic — when your friends, picked up through the slog of graduate school, are academics; when your social life in College Town is all other academics — and when you have put in years of explaining to family just what it means to be an academic (no, we don’t get summers off!), well, it can be really, really hard to realize that this career you have, this identity you’ve taken on, does not make you happy.

And because it’s not just a job, but a career, an identity, it’s easy to move from “I’m unhappy” to “WTF is wrong with me?”

The answer is: nothing. If the career you’re in right now is making you unhappy, nothing is wrong with you. This just isn’t the career for you.

But the myth of The One Career helps keep us stuck exactly where we are, because the very idea of “becoming an accountant” or “becoming a professional photographer” or “becoming a radio talk-show host” all seem so very daunting, so very large. “It’s years of training!” “Do you know how long it would take to get to this level in that career?” And so we suck it up and continue being miserable in this career we have, because examining and changing our identity around work is hard, scary, and frankly, not modeled very many places.

If you’re in that position, if you’re miserable in the career you’re in, instead of thinking in terms of a career, try thinking in terms of the kind of tasks and work environment that make you deeply happy — “doing” instead of “becoming.” Do you love working with people? Do you like involving your whole body in your work? Do you need to be outside? Do you enjoy regular hours, or do you want to work at 11pm? Do you want a mission-based job, or do you like to go home and put work away?

The bottom line is this: You don’t need a career. Think about that. You don’t need a career, which is, after all, an external story about success that has nothing to do with you and your experience. You need a job you enjoy and that pays the bills so you can be your whole self. That’s all.

And then, when people ask you “what do you do?” you can tell them you’re a rock-climbing, book-reading, trivia-loving movie buff — and mean it.

Structures, Myths, and Fit, Oh My!

Although every story of academic struggle and leaving is intensely personal, in my experience those stories fall into three categories: structural reasons to leave, myth-related reasons to live, and leaving because of a lack of fit.

In other words, people don’t leave because they can’t hack it — they leave because somewhere there is a mismatch between the reality of academia and their lives as they have lived them and as they want to live them.

I know I hammer this point all the time, but I think it’s an important one: when you struggle with academia, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you. One way or another, it’s a mismatch. So let’s talk about the most common ones.

Structure

Some structural mismatches are really obvious: You graduate in the teeth of the worst job market in history, and there are no jobs to be had. The jobs that are available want a different theoretical grounding than you have. Your partner has a good job right here (paying better than yours likely ever will), but the only jobs available for you are 1,500 miles away and you don’t want a long-distance relationship.

But structural mismatches go beyond the problems of getting a job. Women who are overloaded with service as assistant professors — which is not uncommon, if not necessarily ever consciously intended — and then who don’t get tenure because they didn’t have enough time to write — that’s a structural problem. A system that requires the most intensive career focus during the prime child-bearing years for professionals — that’s a structural problem too, and one that falls disproportionately on women. Higher education in the humanities doesn’t pay particularly well, leading many academics to take on extra teaching or advising work in the summers, reducing time for research in the quest to pay the bills, raise a family, and start building the retirement savings that are already a decade or more behind. And that, too, is a structural problem.

Whenever the institution is at cross-purposes with our life goals, with common and expected life goals, that’s a structural problem. And although structural problems are common reasons people struggle with academia, they’re also something we don’t talk about — because we’re supposed to just be so fucking grateful we got a job in the first place.

Myths

They’re more difficult to see,  but myths are one of the more pervasive reasons people struggle and leave. Myths are all of those stories we tell about academia and that the larger culture tells about academia — and even when we consciously know they aren’t true, at some level we think they should be true or they once were true or we wish they were true. And then we spend our energy trying to reconcile these myths with the reality we’re experiencing.

So, for example, there’s the myth of the “life of the mind,” the assumption that once we “make it” in academia, that we get to spend our time thinking deep thoughts and talking about important ideas. That, of course, is immediately belied by the endless rounds of committee meetings, advising, teaching, grading, planning, and administration that routinely take up large swaths of academic time — and even how much space there is for research at all is determined largely by the kind of institution you work for. But many of us were drawn to academia through our enjoyment of the reading and talking and thinking we experienced as undergraduates, and that myth dies hard, no matter how clear-eyed we are about the reality.

If myths like this one are part and parcel of how we get to academia, other myths help keep us there. Despite the spotty intellectual engagement many academics experience with their colleagues, there’s a myth that only in academia is intellectual engagement even possible — that the rest of the world is an intellectual wasteland concerned only with capitalist rapaciousness. Myths like this inhibit our ability to imagine a satisfying life elsewhere, no matter how conflicted and difficult our lives inside the academy are.

Fit

And finally, there are simple problems with fit: People who don’t, in the end, enjoy teaching. People who don’t, in the end, enjoy advising, or committee meetings, or the repetitiveness of getting one group of students to an understanding of critical theory or communication or why history matters only to start again with another resistant group.

Problems of fit are hard to talk about because of course this is the greatest job in the world — doesn’t everybody kind of wish they were us?

Structure, myths, and fit aren’t neat categories, of course — they have a tendency to overlap and meld into one another and create unique blends of difficulty we throw ourselves against. But it’s important to identify why we struggle, what it is that we’re experiencing as problematic, because only then can we untangle the stories we’re telling ourselves — that this is the perfect job, despite the fact that we’re miserable, or that there aren’t any other options — and start imagining other ways of being.

The job search is not about you

Yesterday the MLA job list went up, detailing what I’m assuming will be a severely pared-down list of jobs for the 2010-2011 school year. The stories from last year’s job searches, especially for newly degree-ed folks, mostly ended with “they canceled the search,” “the job got pulled at the last minute,” and “I never heard anything after the request for more information,” and this year’s is shaping up to be no less depressing — and no less damaging to bright and sensitive scholars.

The hand-wringing about the overproduction of PhDs is, as always, making the rounds of academic publications, but this year may make the gap between the number of PhDs and the number of tenure-track positions — the holy grail for the humanities, at least — even more stark than usual.

According to MLA numbers, only about half of newly minted PhDs in English got tenure-track jobs during the 1990s, and the percentages went steadily down during that decade, with only 35% getting tenure-track jobs in 1996-1997. And honey, how we would all love this year to look anything like 1996-1997.

It’s really bad out there.

But what upsets me the most is not that people won’t get tenure-track jobs. It’s not necessarily tragic for us to take our passions and our engagement into the world beyond academe. No, what upsets me most is how difficult, defeating, and yes, damaging the job search process is on the people who go through it.

If your department was anything like mine, you’ve been hearing about the crappy job market since, oh, the letter accepting you into the program. (If I remember correctly, and I’m pretty sure I do, my friends and I pouted and wondered why they couldn’t even let us be happy about this accomplishment for a minute; we’d worry jobs down the line. Reality and 20-year-0lds are not generally close bedfellows.)

But we all did it anyway. And we did it anyway because we were, in the immortal pride of late adolescents, sure that it would be different for us. We would be so smart, so prepared, so shining, that we would prevail over difficult circumstances. We would work hard, harder than any graduate student had ever worked, and it would all work out.

Go ahead, laugh. But I’m going to bet that every single person on the job market this year is crossing their fingers and throwing salt over their shoulders and also, at the very same time, telling themselves that it’ll work out for them because they’re smart, they’re personable, they’re great and dedicated teachers, they’ve published, they’ve done service — they’re practically an assistant professor as it is!

It’s only natural to try to find ways to keep up our spirits in the face of dispiriting odds, but the problem with this story is that it inevitably turns into its opposite: If I don’t get a tenure-track job, or if I only get one that my department and colleagues don’t “respect,” then it’s because I am stupid and a terrible scholar and my advisor hates me and oh my god, did they see the evaluation of me on RateMyProfessor.com that criticized my pants?

And I don’t know about you, but I’m relatively non-functional as a human being when I’m telling myself stories like that. When I’m telling myself stories like that, I’m not connected to what I love about my work. I’m hiding in bed with the pound of chocolate I bought at midnight and three trashy mags.

Because I suspect you have your very own version of shutting down when you’re telling yourself stories like that, I want to, very gently, challenge you to try to not take the job search process personally.

Because it isn’t about you. Really.

Look, if you’ve gotten all the way to a PhD, you’re clearly smart and capable and dedicated and all of those most admirable qualities of scholars. If you’ve gotten all the way to a PhD, you are plenty good enough to rock an assistant professorship and rock it hard.

But fortunately or unfortunately, nearly all of the reasons people don’t get jobs are structural, not personal.

Let’s just take a look at the evidence. For a department to run a search at all, its institution has to have the funds to hire that year. A university’s budget? Not about you.

What they search for is going to be determined by the needs of the institution as well as the needs of the department, and a new college-wide composition requirement or the retirement of the Victorianist is not about you.

Who ends up on the committee, how the politics of the department structure what they’re looking for (explicit or not), the personalities of the department as a whole — none of these are about you, but they have everything to do with the elusive “fit,” which, after all, is what it all comes down to once you have a pile of awesome and accomplished scholars in front of you.

So I implore you — whatever happens, however difficult and disappointing it turns out to be, resist taking it personally. You are a wonderful and amazing scholar, and whether or not you get a tenure-track job is largely not about you.

Yes, if you wrote your cover letters in crayon, I might allow that it had something to do with you, but barring complete unprofessionalism, it is not your fault and it is most certainly not a comment on your value.

So as you wade into the piles of CVs and envelopes and stamps and lists of who wants a teaching dossier and who wants recommendations now versus later, know that you’re awesome. You’re fabulous. Send those packets out with joy and pride and with every hope of getting your dream job, but once you drop them into the mailbox, let go. Loosen your grip. Know that whatever happens, you will be okay.

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