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Wednesday, March 24, 2004
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Honoring The Invisible Adjunct
"How to atone for the achieved uniqueness?" asks James Merrill in "Tony: Ending the Life," a poem in memory of one of his best friends. Contemplating with sadness the end of the blog Invisible Adjunct, in which a genial, hyper-literate adjunct professor of history presided over fascinating and civil discussions about various unconscionable changes in the contemporary American university and in so doing created a real community, I am reminded of this line of Merrill's. It captures the survivor's guilt that people like me tend to feel (come to think of it, I don't know anyone else who feels it, but that may be because I've never really talked about it with anyone) in regard to the many talented and dedicated people, like IA, who have been unable to get tenure track jobs in the humanities. Of course I don't think I've achieved anything like the "uniqueness" that Merrill has in mind; but I and other tenured professors in the academy have achieved (through some obscure mix of skill and luck) something extremely valuable - a secure vocation that corresponds almost exactly to what we and many other people want: the independent pursuit of ideas through reading, writing, and teaching. Years ago, when I was on the market, I made a campus visit to Princeton, and one of the professors there said to me, "So, this is the nature of the work we do.... If you can call this working." He didn't mean they were lazy - he meant that virtually every element of their faculty life was so marvelous that it didn't feel like working. (And yes, I'm sure there are tenured Ivy professors who complain, but check out my recent post about complaining academics to see how I feel about that.) It is undeniable, in other words, that for those rare Americans who actually want to think with their lives (rather than watch tv or make buckets of money or whatever), the college or university setting is ideal. There are other thoughtful settings, to be sure - excellent secondary schools; think tanks; certain non-profits - but the security and autonomy academia offers are exceedingly rare commodities, and they're worth working hard to try to get. Academia tolerates eccentricity, so you don't feel, when you're a professor, that you're compromising who you are; it's a significantly less corrupt setting than many other workplaces, so you don't feel compelled to become cynical about the enterprise; people on campuses tend to judge one another not in terms of clothes and cars and vacations but in terms of the quality of their thought. Universities are flexible about giving you leave if you want to teach or write or study somewhere else for awhile to vary the pattern of your worklife. It is stirring, on campus, to be surrounded by ever-renewed legions of intelligent, curious young people, some of whom are in turn stirred by what you say to them. It is no doubt embittering for many people to realize that even having worked hard and done brilliantly they are unable to land a tenure-track job and enter this world. Or to realize that the tenure-track job they've landed is in Ickystan and will not do. They are right to feel some bitterness, because an academic life can turn out to be a very valuable life indeed. But one can go too far in idealizing academia, as one can go too far in idealizing anything. It's a big world, and there are outcomes that are just as good, or better. By achieved uniqueness I take Merrill to mean being able to say that you lived your life to some significant degree; and this is an achievement available under all sorts of arrangements. |