| Kali Prasad |
Posted
on 05-May-01 11:06 AM
Putting a Job Offer -- And a Life -- on Hold
By AARON LEONARD
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons --
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes --
So goes the first stanza of Emily Dickinson's poem #258, a work that, like so many of her poems, displays her wickedly contrary intelligence. For Dickinson, other people's ideas of heaven were frequently her idea of something far more disconcerting.
I recently found myself reflecting on this particular poem, because I feel as though I was graced with my own (if you will pardon the brazenness of the analogy) ray of "cathedral light" this winter -- my first job offer after three years on the market. However salvational this light may have appeared to others, though, I decided in the end that its "heft" was too oppressive a burden for me to assume, at least for the moment.
Turning down a position -- any position -- given the job market that the field of English has endured for about the last decade is tantamount to a kind of heresy. So it was only with the greatest difficulty and anguish that I shelved this opportunity, and even now I am unsettled about my decision. I am, moreover, deeply cognizant of the fact that others would make a different choice, or might think mine foolish; I can only say that the decision was the right one for me at this moment.
When I initially received the job offer, several weeks after interviewing with a number of schools at the Modern Language Association convention, I was both excited and cautious. It was a type of position that will be familiar to many in my field -- a non-tenure-track lectureship teaching freshman composition, with year-to-year contracts up to a limited number of years.
As I mentioned in my last column, I had decided to stretch my application boundaries this time out, and I included several such lectureships on my list. I'd avoided them in the past, partly because I did not want to uproot my family for a temporary position, partly because of a philosophical conviction that temporary and adjunct positions -- however necessary they often may be to launch an academic career -- contribute to the very problem that has created the job crisis. Nevertheless, having taken an editorial job outside of academe this past year while teaching classes at night, I had come to realize that I still deeply wanted to obtain a teaching position and did not want to limit my options. So the ensuing dilemma was one of my own making.
I was naturally gratified simply to receive the job offer, and on top of the elemental fact of its being an actual teaching job with a salary -- reason enough to say yes, for many -- the position had certain attractive features: a leading academic institution, a cosmopolitan locale, a reasonable teaching load. A subsequent visit to the campus confirmed many of the positive impressions, including the collegiality of the department and the commitment to both teaching and scholarship among the faculty.
I could not yet commit myself, however. For one thing, I was still hopeful that one of the five tenure-track positions for which I'd interviewed would come through. Normally, one waits and waits with no word from the departments, even after they proclaim that they plan to make their decisions quickly. I suspect that they like to keep the second-choice candidates on the back burner, just in case their short-list candidates don't accept. But my job offer in hand gave me leverage to request status reports.
In the end, one by one, inexorably, I discovered that each of my other prospective schools had ruled me out of the final running. Some gave me the boilerplate response: "We selected the candidate who best met our particular needs." Others were more personal and encouraging. It was depressing to hear the news no matter how it was delivered, but at least I got the information faster than I otherwise might have. Once my final option ran dry, I was faced with a real decision.
My reservations were few but significant. One concerned the salary level. I had expected, perhaps naïvely, that the job might pay close to a real assistant-professor's salary (which I'd been getting in my previous appointment), but of course it offered more or less the going rate for an adjunct job teaching composition -- scarcely more than $30,000 a year. If salary is one way to judge how a university values a given field or position, then adjunct composition jobs rank near the bottom of the food chain. I had also thought there might be an upward adjustment to reflect the costs of living in one of the nation's most expensive cities, but there was none that I could detect.
At another point in my life I wouldn't have given money a second thought; now, with an expanding family to support, it's a more pressing concern. At a certain level, I faced what I like to describe as a simple math problem: the number of dollars coming in on my paycheck each month were not going to cover the number of dollars going out for expenses. While taking on debt to get through graduate school might be an acceptable practice, doing so as an ostensibly full-fledged member of the profession strikes me as ludicrous.
I was disconcerted, moreover, by the idea of taking a position that essentially guaranteed I would have to be looking for a new job within a few years, in a market that would most likely be no better than the current one. "Don't complain," I can imagine some of you saying, "that's just the way the market is, and you have to take what you get." I can't disagree, other than to say that the lack of geographical control has always been one of the aspects of academic life that most bothers me. As the inertial mass of parenthood makes me ever less mobile, the force required to move me becomes ever greater. And with another child on the way this summer, the thought of dealing with a move grew especially daunting.
Despite all my hesitations, though, I was prepared to accept the offer. My reason was compelling in its simplicity: It was the best and only position offered to me. But at the last moment, I got a reprieve. The school that had made me the offer granted me, in an unexpected and magnanimous gesture, an extension of a year to begin my job. Unlike a tenure-line job, where the funding might get pulled if a position is not filled, lectureships such as the one before me can count on future openings and a certain amount of turnover. In the end, I followed this path of least resistance.
Taking the easy road may not win me any medals for bravery, but I know my life will be more peaceful in the short term.
This was not the ending I imagined to my job search this year. In fact it's not an ending at all, but a suspension of narrative, a weird kind of limbo in which I live between worlds. I had planned for this to be the do-or-die year: either end up with a tenure-track job, or get out for good. Instead I find myself hanging on for another year, still plotting ways to scale the ivory tower, still building up my academic bona fides even as I make inroads to the world outside academia. In my final column, I'll reflect on what I've learned about the differences between those worlds, and the prospects for survival in one or the other.
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Aaron Leonard is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. in English who earned his degree from a Midwestern university. He is writing a regular column on Career Network about his search for a tenure-track job this academic year.
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