As if in response to our incoming president’s call to commemorate MLK Day through service, I spent the evening performing an act of departmental service that doesn’t even count as service. That’s right: as much as I would have liked to stay home under a pile of woolly sweaters and eiderdown, sipping green tea, prepping for the class I didn’t cancel, and grazing on bread I baked this morning and slathered with butter made by agitating some fresh cream (wow, I have become quite the hippie off the grid these days), I hosted a job candidate for dinner.
Note that I began with “as if”: indeed, the sadistic routine of the academic job search has no place in the same breath as Dr. King’s memory. Also, I’ve been on the hook for this dinner for over a week now, so it wasn’t prompted by any holiday exhortation to Americans’ better instincts. So my “as if” was nothing but a cheap rhetorical flourish. Sorry.
Over trendily deconstructed peasant food, the candidate was dazzling and hopeful, as job candidates must be, graciously parrying my apology for the lateness of both the flight and the meal on a snowy holiday evening. If the candidate felt butterflies, I did not detect them. Between our conversation and my futile attempt to catch up on blogs, I am acutely reminded of why I stayed away from the market last fall. Sisyphus’s candid, eloquent chronicle of her job search, for example, leaves me speechless (as well as feeling like a shit for entering whatever conversation there is so belatedly). In the current economic climate, there are even fewer jobs, and those who are hiring probably share my department’s obsession with the sure thing, the candidate more than certain to attain tenure: either people with tenure-track jobs and reams of publications or ABDs with scheduled defense dates, solemn oaths from multiple rockstar committee members, and reams of publications. In uncertain times, a failed tenure bid could mean the loss of a faculty line. The same would result from departures for other reasons.
For years now, I have been contemplating one of those departures. My job is pleasant, but I do have serious reservations, about which I will remain cryptic. And then the grass is always greener. In retrospect I can congratulate myself for my loyalty and restraint inertia, since the searches for five of the eight jobs I would have considered have been suspended. Back in September, however, I was disgusted with myself. Is this all I am going to become? Of course, we are not our jobs, but, as the old saw goes, academia is like the clergy and the military in that its constituents are socialized not to regard their jobs as merely jobs. Hence the special, vague connotations we ascribe to that most pretentious of phrases in the language, “My Work.”
From the beginning, this work is romanticized in a way that makes it more difficult than ever necessary, as I remember all too clearly. After being admitted to candidacy, I organized a dissertation-writing support group, which was only fitfully supportive. Tipsy on what was probably Lindemans cabernet, I joked that we dissertators were all grubby, fuzzy caterpillars that would soon be transformed into butterflies. We all snorted simultaneously, spewing cheap cabernet from our noses, like an overeducated fountain with many fonts.
But for a while thereafter, every occasion occasioned a quasi-ironic gift of the Dollar Store’s best Whatever that happened to be emblazoned with a butterfly motif. For birthdays, Hanukkah, Valentine’s Day, and National Dental Hygiene Month, we exchanged butterfly toothbrush cases, butterfly mugs, butterfly scrunchies. I shuddered to think of the Chinese children imprisoned in factories, churning out these trinkets with their nimble little hands. Their handiwork endures in the soapstone candle holder from which a l’Occitane rose-scented candle is making this room smell pleasant. (Seriously, l’Occitane must scent their stuff with the olfactory equivalent of crack.) As for the candle holder, it emits a faint light from a butterfly and the word “believe” cut out of it. And yes, I have been given a wodge of faux beach glass—it’s etched with “hope,” which is not all that different from “believe”—that would look pretty in the dim, credulous candlelight.
Apparently, only half of us believed enough. As for the others, most have left the profession, either quitting the program or finishing and deciding that academia wasn’t for them. (A colleague in another department and I recently joked that these people were the smart ones, but we weren’t really joking.) The believers who haven’t finished are seeing many of their searches canceled and marching forth to campus interviews with the remaining schools. The other believers are, like my dining companion last evening (and, not secretly enough, me), looking to move, to keep alive the hope that This is Not All There Is, or perhaps to negotiate a higher salary. I am nervous for all of them. All of us. The butterflies—they make me anxious.


