Things may not always have worked out as planned.  But surviving each encounter or episode gives you more resource to deal with the next.  Nietzsche said that whatever did not kill him made him stronger. True, but only if you are in a learning mode.  There is no point in surviving if you just do the same thing all over again.  That’s a good recipe for quiet desperation.  Einstein said that you can’t solve problems using the same mindset that created them.  Santayana advised that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.  Freud observed that the neurotic repeats instead of remembering.  All these self-defeating habits are bound up with our sense of identity, with ego and its reptilian drive for self-preservation.  The past is addictive—or rather, our stories about the past are addicting. We cling to them and to the self-image they reinforce.

Part of the flexibility that a warrior needs is keeping a light hold on one’s sense of identity.  It’s one thing to say, “I am a professor.”  It’s another to say, “I have a teaching vocation.”  A job is not a calling; it’s merely one segment of that path along which you respond to that call. The important thing is not to secure this or that position, but to keep to your path.

I sometimes think that a career is like climbing a mountain.  You begin with the route description in the guidebook and a view of the peak from the base.  You start up and sooner or later have to make an unexpected move.  By the time you’re halfway up, these moves have multiplied, and the climb has begun to morph from a game plan into a story.  By the time you’re done, it’s all story, and the guidebook description no longer matters: it’s obsolete, the road not taken.  Possibility has changed into history.  Success can, but does not have to mean reaching the summit.  Even more important is coming back with a good story.

Consider the Warrior II Pose, also called viribhadrasana or Warrior B.  You stand with both feet firmly grounded, one pointing ahead and the other rooted behind; you spread your arms into a T and sink forward, looking straight ahead over the middle finger of your forward hand.  You can feel energy rising up through your feet and legs and shooting along your arms.  Your back and torso stand straight up, as if a steel lightning rod ran from the crown of your head down your spine and into the ground.

Warrior II Pose

Now think about what this posture betokens.  Your feet connect you to the earth; they are your foundation, grounded on your wisdom and skills, the fruits of your experience, education, and character.  You draw strength upward from these sources, which can never be taken away.

Your head, spine, and torso connect you with the sky, with heaven.  This is where your hopes and aspirations, your best values, and your creativity all come from. The heavenly energy and the earth energy meet in your eyes and shoot out through the arm along which you gaze. This arm reaches out to meet the challenge.  It focuses and directs all your energy forward, but it also touches and learns.  It does not shrink from contact.  It lights up and ignites whatever it meets.

Your other arm reaches back to draw strength from those behind you, that multitude of comrades and supporters who have a stake in your struggle.  These are your parents, friends, teachers and mentors.  They all care; they all want you to flourish and succeed. They back you up and push you forward.

A warrior needs to remember and practice four-way vision in order to stay balanced and meet the challenge.  Can you turn what comes at you into what comes to you?  That is the question.

When I arrived in my first (and only) tenure track job, I probed my colleagues delicately for their tenure history, not to betray too green an interest in my own fate.  Yes, they had used temporary faculty with some regularity, and no, not everyone had gained tenure, unfortunately. They sounded reassuringly apologetic but also a bit vague. There had been unusual circumstances, sometimes of a personal nature, or the fit wasn’t right, or it turned out to be a bad hire, or the person’s career had taken a new direction, that sort of thing.  Mostly, they did not know what had become of their former colleagues, although in one case the person had gone to work for Target and was now making pots of money; he had come down for a visit driving a big fancy car and was apparently putting his intellect and communication skills to good use, with few regrets about escaping from freshman comp and Intro to British lit. This story was conveyed in hushed tones that suggested an odd mix of pity and envy.  It gave me a whiff of hope for other possibilities should things not work out as planned.

Eight years later, amid the unplanned wreckage, I met David Cave.  He had done graduate work at Chicago and Indiana before taking a PhD in religion from a seminary down in Kentucky. Newly-minted and with his dissertation published by Oxford he looked to be in excellent shape for a tenure-track job.  He and his wife, an oncology nurse, had moved to Cincinnati to be near her family; he had obtained a temporary assistant professorship that had recently ended, and he was looking around.  Despite great credentials and active scholarship, he could find nothing in the way of a regular job.  He had spent several years adjuncting, networking with all the local colleges, and even doing regular commentaries for NPR.  He was determined to maintain an intellectual life and keep up his scholarship.

But economics began to catch up with him.  Their son was growing apace and the family needed money.  He finally took a development internship at one of the big hospitals; he learned the ropes and found that he liked the work of building relationships and helping people find meaning and purpose in supporting a charitable mission.  When the internship ended, he became development director for a very small Catholic college, and after five years there he moved over to the University of Cincinnati Foundation, where he worked raising money for the humanities.  And five years after that, he moved to the University of Michigan.

During all this time, Dave continued to read, think, teach, and publish.  He gave talks, wrote radio commentaries, kept a journal of ideas, and stayed in touch with colleagues in his field.  He also organized book groups and found other informal means to pursue the intellectual life.  He liked working with faculty and was received as a colleague because of his scholarship and devotion to teaching and education.  Now, at Michigan, he’s actively involved with the humanities, engaging individual graduates and friends of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts to support the priorities and ventures of departments, programs, and the college as a whole.  He and his wife live in wonderful Ann Arbor, where they host a popular literary salon.  His development work takes him to places like Washington, Atlanta, and Miami where he cultivates visions and ideas with smart, well-placed alumni.  And he continues to read and publish actively in his field.

Dave inspired me with his resourcefulness and devotion to a felt calling.  Initially, he was disappointed not to land a regular teaching job, but he found ways to stay alive intellectually and other venues in which to pursue both teaching and scholarship.  He found another way to make a living that proved surprisingly rewarding, not only for its intrinsic satisfactions and good income, but also for keeping him  connected to the university.  I was reminded how many poets, musicians, and artists have had other day jobs: think of Wallace Stevens or Charles Ives, both of whom sold insurance, James Joyce, who worked in a bank, or William Carlos Williams tending his patients.  The truth is that most of us have more than one passion, and there is always more than one way to use our skills.  A job can’t and shouldn’t provide everything.  Like Thoreau, we’d do better with a broad margin to our life, to keep a light hand on the tiller and take the widest possible view of our horizons.

With this entry we begin a series of occasional posts on the organizing fictions of academic life.  Today let’s take a look at the connotations of “newly-minted Ph.D.”

In ancient times precious metals were originally valued by weight.  Adulterated shekels or talents might look and feel the same as the real thing while actually containing less silver or gold, the rest being copper, tin, lead, or other “base” metals.  For this reason,  mints were established to produce coins whose consistent content was verified by the image of the ruler stamped indelibly upon them.  This image was inseparable from their very substance as money.

To be minted, therefore, is to be verified as true, worthy, and authentic; your value is approved and advertised by having the image of authority — in this case, your doctoral institution — stamped indelibly upon you.  Without it, you are not bonafide; you’re worthless.

But that’s only half the story.  A newly-minted coin looks bright and shiny.  It hasn’t been tarnished by the handling of sweaty fingers or greasy palms, or by traveling from pocket to pocket (some deep, some not).  It hasn’t been worn down or worn smooth: all that will happen in due course.  Perhaps the coin won’t lose its intrinsic value, its inner worth, but it won’t look bright and shiny any more; it won’t catch anyone’s eye.  So there’s a cruel judgment hidden in this metaphor.  We’d all rather pocket a bright, shiny coin than a dull, well-worn one, despite the fact that both should be legal tender.  A dollar from Harvard or a dollar from Podunk U. should both buy the same amount of beer.

On a deeper level, the metaphor construes the whole situation under the aspect of economics.  What is your degree worth?  It depends on whose image you bear.  Are you hard currency or soft?  Would you rather be dollars or rubles?  If there was any idealism for teaching or the life of the mind, this dismal metaphor crushes it out, as if academia were not about life, growth, or unfolding, but merely a matter of desire (that shine!) or exchange.

I know that some will say this is too dark a view.  Surely a school’s reputation must count for something.  Thousands of grad students make the investment every year; surely they can’t all be wrong.  Even the most jaded of our colleagues will agree that some schools are better than others, with more demanding programs, more accomplished faculty, better labs, bigger libraries, and brighter students.  Surely not all PhDs are created equal, and what’s more, the job market demands it.  Judgments, after all, must be made, responsible judgments by knowledgeable people.  Rank matters.

Indeed, we all know how exquisitely sensitive academic people are to matters of reputation and prestige. A covert but meticulously calibrated pecking order can be observed at any conference or search committee meeting: people want to know where you studied or teach, and the same for your references.  If you land a position at a reputable school, it can feel almost as good as an above-average salary.  Prestige is a kind of emotional currency, like Jerry Brown’s “psychic dollars.”  It provides a warm glow of satisfaction that you have done better than your peers.  Of course, that won’t pay the bills, and you may be tempted to identify too closely with the institution.  But at the beginning of a career, this can feel pretty good.  It’s almost as if you were made of money.

So I went forward with this plan, slogging ahead with the dissertation while exploring entry-level or temp jobs at Yale.  There were some possible admin or support positions, including sub-sub deanships, assistant program coordinators, and the like that would have kept me in bread but felt, at this point, like potboilers.  I thought about writing on the side, for self esteem as much as anything.  But in any event the positions wouldn’t come open until summer. There was nothing for it but to finish the diss, which seemed an increasingly hopeless chore.  What was it for?  Wouldn’t it just mean I would emerge overqualified for anything other than college teaching?

By the middle of March I had become inured, both to winter and to the general hopelessness of my prospects.  But then, unexpectedly, a call came from the department secretary.  They had heard of two temporary positions that might be attractive, “given your unusual interests.”  She meant, of course, mountains, wilderness, and nature in general.  Remember that this was the heyday of deconstruction; no one at Yale had heard of the nature writers, and ecocriticism was not even a blip on the horizon.  The positions  were at the universities of Montana and Utah, so of course she was right.  Both wanted a “utility infielder” to teach interdisciplinary humanities courses for the next three years, a perfect fit for a comparatist.

I applied right away and heard back within two weeks: a form rejection from Montana but from Utah an invitation to interview on campus. I remember stepping out of the plane to the uplifting sight of the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains towering eight thousand feet above Salt Lake City.  No doubt it was my enthusiasm as much as my degree that got me the job.  But after a winter of despair resided over by dismal numbers, it felt like a stroke of the purest luck. And three years seemed like all the time in the world.

What had I done to deserve this?  No more nor less than any of my grad student colleagues.  I was prepared for failure.  But I got lucky.  I got a start.  At the time it felt like a lottery, just like they were using for the draft.  It seemed a matter of chance rather than justice.  But all the same, before you can stay in the game, you have to get in.  And once you’re in, there’s a whole other set of issues to deal with.

But more on that later.  What did I learn from this experience?  First, you can do everything right and still not get hired. Qualifications are necessary but not sufficient; you also need luck and chemistry, both of which lie well outside your control.  Second, you need friends. Barb’s innocent comment shook me loose from paralysis, and I realized that no one would talk to me if all I did was mope and complain.  Third, you need a plan and you need to keep working.  Idleness only feeds depression, and almost any plan is better than none, as long as it gets you moving, and besides, you can always change it as things develop.  And finally, a bit of savings can make a huge emotional difference.  Knowing I could get by for a year gave me breathing room to imagine alternative futures.

These lessons paid off dramatically in the years ahead. I also saw them reflected in the experiences of colleagues and friends, both in  job searches and tenure reviews.

Having never imagined any career other than teaching—having, indeed, considered teaching a vocation rather than a job—I had no idea, no Plan B.  By early February I had become seriously and uncharacteristically depressed.  I could not concentrate on reading; I could hardly write, not even notes or sketches.  My guts hurt like a clenched fist.  I slept lightly and woke in a sweat from anxious dreams.  But by day I tried to keep up appearances, as if routine itself would somehow magically compensate for the disaster ahead.

One day as I walked in to campus past a row of stately mansions that the university had purchased for offices, a door opened and my friend Barbara came out of the anthro department.  She had been working on a dissertation in Old Norse when her advisor had suddenly died, and no one else in the English department had been willing to take her on.  Then her fellowship had expired.  Now she was trading water as a secretary.  She waved and smiled, “Hey JT, how’s it going?”

“Aw, Barb,” I said, “no interviews. I’m depressed.”

Her jaw dropped, “But you’re the blithe spirit!”

I shrugged, waved, and went on, thinking, “Shit, even my friends won’t let me be depressed.  This is the worst!”  But at the same time I realized the utter futility of it.  The feelings were real—the worry, the anger, the sense of injured merit—but they weren’t getting me anywhere.  Self-pity was not productive; there was no point in wallowing in it.  The thing was somehow to salvage my career and make a living. I had to figure something out.

Barb’s comment, so kindly meant, was really a whack on the side of the head.  I needed it.  It was a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for moving on.  I would also need luck, and plenty of it.

In October the MLA Job List arrived with about a hundred positions in American or Comparative Lit, a third of them in tempting locations.  I pulled out my Hermes manual typewriter and set to work.  This was long before word processors, flash drives, or email.  Each letter had to be composed and typed by hand, with a carbon copy for reference.  Rereading those letters now, after thirty years on both sides of the desk, I’m struck by their wooden formality and self-conscious posturing, both natural and logical consequences of following the MLA’s bad advice: their template for job letters guaranteed that readers would learn as much about the candidate as they would from a dissertation abstract.  But who knew?  We did what we were told.

I typed and mailed thirty-five letters, then sat waiting for replies, as nervous as a teenager hovering by the phone two weeks before prom.  A few places acknowledged my application, seven requested my dossier, and two invited me to interview at the MLA convention in New York.  Two out of thirty-five seemed like pretty tough odds, but at least I was doing better than some of my colleagues.

I remember standing on the sidewalk outside the Hotel Americana in Manhattan, wondering what my first MLA convention would feel like.  Inside were over two thousand English professors of every rank and station.  When Dante envisioned Hell, he simply crowded like-minded people into small, overheated places where they all talk past one another and nobody listens.  Such was the scene that I encountered inside.  Senior professors, fat with privilege, sailed through the press of job- and tenure-seekers like forty-foot yachts riding a light chop. The rest of us, lean and hungry, ranged about looking for sessions or interviews.

I arrived for my first interview at noon and was promptly offered a drink.  I noticed that the shades were drawn and the air smelled of whiskey.  After fumbling through the preliminaries, my host asked how I would teach Henry James, something that neither the job ad nor my dossier had mentioned.  It soon became clear that he had no idea who I was nor, indeed, what job he was trying to fill.  At my second interview, two hours later, a team of eight professors sat in a semi-circle firing questions as if I were a duck in a shooting gallery.  I must have held my own well enough, for they invited me to a departmental reception that evening, during which I was cornered by several grad students and regaled with horror stories about junior faculty life.

All in all, this hardly seemed like an auspicious start.  Nevertheless, I returned to New Haven undeterred and modestly hopeful.  After all, I had made the second cut and was still in the game.  I might still be called for campus interviews.  And both places were located in California, a stone’s throw from the glorious Sierra Nevada.

As we traded stories, it became clear that he had actually fought in many battles, from which he still bore scars.  He had nurtured junior colleagues only to see them denied tenure; his scholarship had been publicly attacked by ideologues; he had arm-wrestled with deans for the resources needed to sustain a nascent environmental studies program that is now regarded as one of the best in the nation; he had been tempted by offers of high-ranking administrative positions that would have given him power at the expense of family, community, and teaching.  How had he managed to survive with both soul and career intact?

Our conversation rvealed that warrior skills are not just for war, but for life, and for peace as well.  In order to prevail in these conflicts, he had had to keep his balance, cleaving to his core values while listening to others and trying, always, to turn the conversation down a creative path.  I remember him saying how much he valued the moral support of his wife and friends in the community, and how he had drawn strength from poetry, nature writing, and religious practices such as Quaker meeting and Zen meditation.  Throughout it all he had clung to his faith in the best possibilities of human nature, forgiving as best he could those who had crossed or attacked him, recognizing their own suffering, inviting dialogue while standing his ground.  He never lost hope or aspiration.  He never became embittered or indifferent.  But it was not easy.  He suffered, and he sometimes lost.

My friend is a remarkable man, but his situation and skills are not.  He is a man of peace who had to become a warrior. For conflict is inescapable in human life, because we are different, and whenever we get close to one another, the differences rub and chafe.  Friction causes warmth at first, then a spark, and finally an explosion.  All that energy!  How can we use it for creativity, growth, or healing instead of blowing up the house or wounding each other?  Every conflict with others is also a struggle with ourselves, with our own ideas, identity, and limitations.  It’s always easier to push the other away than to entertain a threatening idea or listen without anxiety. And if attacked, we first react defensively, striking out or running away.  To stand our ground and listen takes a lot of work.  In the end, peace is not only nobler, but more challenging than war.  It takes more strength, balance, will power, and imagination.

Think about it.  Which is harder, overcoming the other, or overcoming yourself?

Consider the odds.  Of those holding “newly minted” Ph.D.s, no more than a third are likely to secure tenure-track jobs.  The rest will choose the best option they have at the time, perhaps taking contingent or temporary jobs as adjuncts or visiting assistant professors, or veering into one of the many collateral paths open to people with research credentials, such as work in administration, foundations, think tanks, government, or business.  The profession no longer follows the “standard model” of a single, deep-flowing river, but rather a braided stream of postmodern, globalized, nomadic, and even entrepreneurial endeavor.

For those who remain in academia, the game  – to shift metaphors – can often feel like musical chairs.  Imagine thirty players in a room with twenty seats.  On the first round, ten are eliminated; they are the ones squeezed out of teaching altogether.  On the second round, ten chairs are removed; ten more players exit the game, having failed to secure tenure-track jobs; they disappear from the historical record.  On the third round, there are only six chairs, because universities are reducing tenurable positions and also denying tenure to some candidates. In the end, only a fifth of those emerging from grad school in this cohort have achieved tenure; the rest have likewise vanished from view.  It is hardly surprising that, by this time, those still in the game may feel an unsettling mixture of gratification, entitlement, and survivor guilt.  No matter what happens, it’s a challenge.

Navigating these shifting, treacherous pathways requires the warrior skills of strength, flexibility, and centeredness.  In forthcoming posts we’ll look at the job search and the tenure review through the lenses of warrior stories told by survivors who can offer object lessons in staying alive no matter what happens.

Just what tenure is—its definition(s) and its value—is elusive in the forum postings. Yet the personal costs of the normative timeline for tenure, the practice of working toward tenure, and the granting of tenure (or not), is clearly problematic for a number of participants. Here is one example:

In my experience, tenure does not provide, or secure, freedom to do anything. How does a person who successfully endures tenure retain any personal integrity whatsoever? Tenure is, in fact, granted only after a professor is successfully indoctrinated into a particular institution, and department. How can professors submit to such pressure to conform and then proceed to “be free” to teach students? After six years of frantic publishing and pleasing those in power is it possible to remember who we are, and what drove us to teach in the first place? Are we able, after tenure, to go back to who we really are, or is that person lost to us after six years of conformity? After tenure are we transformed, instead, into a kind of Stepford Professor that fits nicely into a particular institution, or department? Or worse, are we so damaged by what we have endured to achieve tenure that unknowingly we transfer similar abuse to the new crop of tenure seeking assistant professors?

This comment succinctly summarizes the pressure to conform (“pleasing those in power”), the loss of integrity that comes from conforming to external motives (“frantic publishing”) and the resulting neglect of one’s students and, more importantly, one’s self.   To earn tenure, in such a system, faculty members are encouraged to force intellectual projects into a fixed timeline; they are drawn to low-risk committee work rather than pursuing a more risky department or campus project or initiative; and they spend the minimum amount of time on campus and with students as they chase the gold standard of professional success: publication.

Experiences of the tenure and promotion process vary widely across institutions, for sure. In my experience, the process of tenure invites conformity and too many tenured faculty are content with the idea that untenured faculty members’ careers are in danger from their tenured colleagues to fester. Too often there are smart and well-intentioned junior colleagues showing restraint and caution and senior colleagues perpetuating a system that promotes the kind of intellectual and personal growth we purportedly value.

Changing the system would require senior faculty to promote the idea that working toward tenure, and the awarding of tenure, should involve taking intellectual risks. Quantitative measures of scholarly production may work in some institutional settings; however, a more flexible qualitative measure of a teacher and scholar’s work, as it relates to the mission of the institution and the department or program, would ask junior and senior colleagues to create conditions for innovation and creativity rather than perpetuating a six year period of professional life a junior professor must “endure.” In my experience, the tenure process can promote a professional life with purpose and integrity. The trajectory of intellectual work should not be constrained by a six year period but rather should demonstrate unambiguously a professional life marked by a clear sense of purpose and significant growth. (The best proposal for faculty promotion I know is by the former professor of English at the University of Chicago, Wayne Booth, that I wrote about last year in the posting titled “Scholarship and Competence in the Curiosities.”)

I would argue that we need tenure to assure the freedom of faculty to teach and design curriculum unfettered by prevalent assumptions and ahistorical motives that are all too often reductively imposed upon people trying to do their work well. The alternative (that would retain tenure, and for good reason) would be tenured professors working together to rebuild a system to promote professional integrity and a commitment to meaningful contributions among those who aspire to receive tenure. We would all need to work, institution by institution, to dispel the lore that inevitably breeds fear and restraint. We would create the conditions for fresh intellectual ventures, challenging discussions and vibrant classrooms where professional integrity is cultivated and rewarded as the sine qua non.

If this all sounds too idealistic or naïve, we can continue to let the system move in the direction it has been moving for the past thirty or more years. Gradually and inexorably, tenure is going away, and it is up to the tenured faculty to make a better defense of this powerful and transformative idea.