I remember sitting on my couch on a warm and lovely fall evening, in the century-old house we’d just bought in a hip part of Nashville. It was mid-Octoberish, and the weather was still pleasant. I’d grown up in Virginia and spent some time in Ohio, but neither of those places had such mild autumns and winters. We’d moved to Nashville from Los Angeles in July — when it was sticky hot out — but this particular autumn, my first in the South proper, reminded me of my years in SoCal.
My wife, our then-toddler, and I were watching the local news while reading and playing. I rarely pay close attention to local news except for the weather report. Our weather, as I knew personally, looked surprisingly good for the remainder of the week. The meteorologist shifted then to a special report about upstate New York. I perked up. My wife and I lived in upstate for one year while she was teaching as a VAP at an idyllic liberal arts college. I recall a rather brutal winter there and discovered at the time, while dusting snow off the car every day for 4 months, how naïve my dislike of carports proved to be.
We survived that winter. We had hoped we could stay, that her position would get renewed and we could maybe start to build a life in the area. Maybe eventually her position would become tenure-track; maybe the school would find work for me too. It didn’t turn out that way, sadly, and like so many other itinerant academics we moved across the country for a different one-year gig, this time my own. It was a fancy-sounding fellowship at a big, mid-tier school. The teaching load was sweet (1–1), but the pay was insultingly out of touch with the cost of living. When the possibility of staying on as a regular poorly paid Lecturer fell through late in the spring, I rushed to turn in some last-minute applications for positions in the area. I was fortunate to land on my feet at the tier-one school down the street. That didn’t last long either.
The meteorologist was saying that the Buffalo area had been struck by a major blizzard and had accumulated an ungodly amount of snow. Something like 8 feet. Apparently that’s normal snowfall for Buffalo in winter, but it seemed ungodly high to me. And in October! I snickered with relief, but also somewhat self-consciously, to my wife, “We could be living in Buffalo right now!”
A year or two prior I had interviewed for a job in Buffalo and didn’t get it. In fact, I didn’t even get a campus invite. At the time I was devastated, even angry. This place was a perfect fit for me. I’d nailed the interview —I even heard from colleagues at the conference that they’d heard from committee members how much I nailed it. I had everything they needed — articles in print, a book under contract. I’d taught grad seminars with 4 students, undergrad literature and culture courses with 700 students, and everything in between. So what happened? What the hell was wrong with these people?
A year later I ran into one of the committee members. This person was sweet and solicitous, more so than I was expecting, and wanted to know what I was up to, what I was working on, where I was interviewing (because obviously a person like me is interviewing somewhere, somewhere fabulous even). They wanted to let me know I really had nailed the interview. “Unfortunately,” they concluded, “the cream doesn’t always rise to the top.” I was angry all over again.
At this point I was 5 years out of my PhD, as was my wife. We both got our degrees from respectable departments at second-tier universities. Our advisors and mentors had aristocratic pedigrees. You’d recognize their names — they were academic celebrities in the field. But they worked at second-tier universities, and no matter how famous they were, their glow could not illuminate enough a diploma that read Ohio State University. Every year out of our degrees we noticed that our Placement Service envelopes at the annual conference were thinner.
We’d had some almost-wins over those years. She was a finalist for a job out west that would have put us close to her family. I was a finalist for job in one the best cities in Trudeau-world. But as my current students — southern boys with sports obsessions — love to say to each other, an almost-win is still just an L.
I also had some almost-wins that turned out to be actual wins for my life. On four occasions I was a finalist for jobs in rather remote places: twice in New Zealand, once in Australia (not the major metropolitan parts), and once in South Africa. All good jobs, I thought at the time.
Cape Town comes to mind often, I’ll admit — sometimes ruefully, sometimes nostalgically. I was fresh out of my PhD when I applied for the job. At the time I thought I needed to cast my net as widely as possible. If I’m being honest, I didn’t think very hard about the consequences of taking a job in southern Africa. When I got the first-round interview, I spent some time trying to rationalize the possibility. I was still young, unmarried and without children, and the adventure seemed exotic. I could always come back when I wanted, right? Maybe I’d put 5–7 years in and then come back to an associate professor position somewhere in the States. When I was invited to visit the university as a finalist, and all during my wonderful 5-day trip to Cape Town, I tried to devote more attention to the consequences, though ultimately I fell back on being young, unmarried, without children and on the adventure.
My best friend was really the only one to puncture my half-assed illusions. Though he was pleased I’d gotten so far in the interview process, he schooled me to some realities I’d forgotten to consider. What if you meet someone there and marry and have children? Will you so easily uproot yourself from a life you’ve grown accustomed to in order to move back here? Will you be taking your children out of school when they’re teenagers? What if one of your parents requires long-term care? Will you have kept up with your scholarship and continued to get your name out by attending conferences in Europe and America? Do you know how long it takes to simply fly to those places from South Africa? Do you realize how few positions there are for mid-career academics in the States? To put it briefly: moving to South Africa means you’re moving there forever.
I hadn’t thought about it that way. I had convinced — deluded? — myself that I had more control over my professional and personal life than I really did. I felt like an idiot.
I didn’t get the position. I’m thankful now that I didn’t. But I also know that my insights today about why I’m thankful weren’t honestly gained back then. I would have taken the position if it were offered. My wife and I had just started dating seriously around the time I applied for the job. She would not have come with me.
Let me state unequivocally: I would have really messed up my life, personally speaking, if I’d taken one of those jobs. I mean to imply no judgment of my former colleagues and friends who took such jobs themselves. I want only to say what I have learned — and only could have learned — after finally leaving the academy. The system — the academy — unduly constrains our lives. That goes for even the highest powered among us, the graduates of the Ivy League or comparable institutions. They too have to make unappealing professional choices. For those like me who come from less competitive institutions? Well, on four separate occasions I was willing to move across the world and leave behind everything that meant something in my life. And that’s frightening.
So I got out.
I wish I could say that my departure was a dramatic and righteous mic-drop. Really my departure was a slow fizzle, rather more like the unremarkable deflation of a week-old birthday party balloon than a sudden pop. It started to dawn on me around 4 years out that I might have passed my sell-by date. That it just wasn’t going to happen for me. No matter how much I published, how many courses I taught, how good of a colleague I was, how many letters of recommendation I collected.
My drive and ambition — perhaps better to call it the chip on my shoulder — kept me working all the same. I published, I taught, I showed myself a good colleague, I collected letters of recommendation. I wanted to be the first person from my program to land a proper R-1 job. I would be the exception, the proof that a second-tier diploma bore no scarlet letters. I would be the standard-bearer of the academy’s vaunted meritocracy.
In my final year on the market — 7 years post-PhD — I had only one interview. And I’m not working there now.
Around the 4-year-out mark I started asking myself about alternatives. I didn’t know much — and this was the time when alt-ac resources were in their infancy — but I did know I preferred to keep my summer break. (You know, so I could #keepupwithmyresearch.) That meant looking into the secondary education market. I randomly heard mention of Carney Sandoe & Associates, a company that provides a placement service for private and college-prep schools. Carney Sandoe took care of me. They also gave me the tough love I needed to stop screwing up my chances of finding a job at the secondary level. Because I screwed up a lot.
In my next dispatch I’ll describe the difficulties I had in transitioning from the academy to the prep school. For now, though, let me unequivocally proclaim: leaving the academy was the best decision of my life. And I’m not living in Buffalo.
Ric Rader worked for 7 years at 4 different academic institutions. He now teaches Latin, Greek and German at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, TN.
