I want to record something here that so far, I’ve kept rather private. Not my vote, which I’ve cast, and which is now a part of this election cycle.
As changes in my life go, the biggest one is the baby, of course. But there are other things too. I’ve been worrying about my professional plans for some time now, not just during this job search season, and not even starting with the last one, for that matter (which was the only one during which I actually searched, albeit rather half-heartedly).
Lately I’ve been thinking again about some of Jill Walker’s, Clancy Ratliff’s and Dr. Crazy’s posts about academia and the choices it forces people to make, written in the fall. I’ve been ambivalent about academia for a long time. I love ideas, I love to do research, to write and teach, and I don’t much mind committee work either. It’s all part of being a member of a particular kind of community, which one tries to be when working… anywhere.
So the probable day-to-day specifics of a tenure-track job are not what I feel ambivalent about.
But I do have problems with the tenure system. I believe it weeds out too many talented people who are perhaps not quite adept at working the system, which - especially in the humanities in America - is an integral part of work as an academic. To my mind, way too much writing needs to be done in service of working the system and not much else. And I don’t see that the people who do it have much choice about it either if they want jobs & tenure. Their choice consists in leaving the system or doing this kind of writing. That’s not to say that there’s nothing good being written, not at all. But there is too much written that is not quite so good. And inevitably it has to be done at the expense of other forms of conducting, disseminating, and responding to research and knowledge, which include things like communicating research to the non-academic general public or even teaching.
But there’s another thing too. I find another consequence of the tenure system perhaps even more deeply problematic: that in order to get a job, I’d have to be willing to move to just about any part of the country, far away from the place that is now my home, and far from the people I know, such as - for example - the father of my child. And I want to live in the same house with him, not just sometimes when one of us is on vacation but always. He feels the same way about moving as I do, which is that he does not want to. Having to leave family, home, friends, one’s life is a price that is just way too high to pay for any job in my view. It’s something that, for example, illegal immigrants don’t have much choice about - but then, academics are not impoverished, disenfranchised illegal immigrants.
Finally, there’s the adjunct faculty question. It seems to me that something closer to this way of organizing college teaching may in fact be the way of the future. If there weren’t some pretty huge, and very specific problems with it, I don’t even think it would be so bad. For one thing, it would allow people to have more control over where they live. But the minimal salaries and no benefits (i.e.: no health insurance or pension plan) that plague most untenured teaching positions keep them below the radar of most institutions, if not most of society. They’re outside the system: the illegal immigrants of the ivory tower.
I do believe that a national, universal health care system would improve matters tremendously. To put it in extremely sharp (and somewhat imprecise) terms: one would not be forced to choose between a place one considers home and a job with health insurance, for example. With the baby coming, I’ve been taking a very close look at my finances lately, and most of the debt I currently carry comes from paying for health insurance, which for various reasons I’ve never been able to go without. I shudder to think how much more my debt would be if I had tried. I know full well that I’m very lucky… because it looks like I can pay most of it off now. But I don’t like the degree to which this is dependent on luck. Anyone making a living by adjuncting is completely dependent on some form of luck: either the good fortune to have money from someplace else (family, a past job, a spouse) or to not get sick. To have more security not just in your job but in your life (in things like health insurance) you need to get yourself into the tenure system, which comes at the - to me - unacceptably high price of probably having to move somewhere very very far away.
Before this election I never thought about how many aspects of U.S. society are poisoned by the lack of a national health care system. Let’s leave pensions alone for now - health care is the thing that’s an immediate concern throughout one’s life. The way health insurance is dependent on deals negotiated between employers and private insurance companies gives far too much power to employers over our lives, not just in academia but elsewhere too. And this flies completely in the face of what is, to my mind, perhaps the best thing about American society and culture: that everyone gets a second chance, that there’s no social stigma to starting over in - say - a whole new career, not just a new job but a new life and profession. One typically cannot do this without damage to one’s social standing in other countries. But one also cannot do this if if thereby one loses any chance at - for example - having health insurance. I am, in fact, firmly convinced that healthcare reform is THE biggest issue of the current U.S. election, possibly bigger than foreign policy even, whether we like it or not.
