I am, it is clear,
where I will end my career.
I wandered briefly
as a younger man.
But fortune brought me here
in my 30s, and now I have settled.
But not given up.
Still striving.
But the geographic puzzle
has been solved at least.
I know where I will teach
and where I will be.
And I'm at peace with that.
Q: Where are you
along the pathway we all share?
Have you stopped moving?
Are you hopping madly
to so many lily pad homes?
How will you know when you get
where you are going?
How long do you search?
I'm where I'm going to stay until I die, probably. If, in a few years, my husband ends up foraging in greener pastures, I will go with him, but I won't ever be able to get another tt job again. If he doesn't, I will stay here and work until I keel over in the middle of whatever class I happen to be teaching at the time. If I'm still half-alive I'll use up some of my sick leave (I will by then have years and years banked away). Then I'll go back to teaching until I keel over again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm going to teach until I'm dead. A little dementia won't stand in my way. They'll need a court order, or a gurney, to get rid of me.
ReplyDeleteOf course by then I will be occupying the last tenure line in existence, probably, and will be replaced with some advanced form of that robot that won on Jeopardy. Come and get me, Watson. Come and get me...
I have no idea where I am....
ReplyDelete....And Stella, that's funny... I know one of the Jeopardy contests tonight...
I'm trapped in my final job for the next two decades. I hate it, I would love nothing more than to leave, but no one in my field moves anywhere, and I have four other people attached to me who don't share my misery. I feel truly horrible for people who would love a t-t job and can't get one -- seriously -- but when you have one it can be a terrible, soul-sucking hell for which you are supposed to be grateful...which makes you feel worse.
ReplyDeleteI've moved before, more than once, and I theoretically remain pretty mobile within a fairly narrow range of institutions. Nobody, or hardly anybody, is hiring at my level, in my fields at the moment. But if they were I could get another job. Whether I'd actually want another job is a different question. There are maybe five or six jobs I'd definitely move to if given a chance, and maybe another six or ten I'd give some serious thought to, but probably wouldn't take in the end.
ReplyDeleteSo to answer the question, I'm not stuck, but I'm relatively unlikely to move again unless one of those first six comes a courtin'.
I looked around before tenure, out of a fearful need for plan B. Now that I have tenure, which supposedly means I cost more (though see Burnt Chrome's post), I'm less 'marketable' unless I become a bigshot researcher in my fairly crowded field.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm here at Tuk U for the duration. It's a double edged sword, since I like the location, but have serious reservations about the job. I'd love to work at a place like Roger Quinn, but I'm not sure how many places I'd be willing to move to for the job.
The odds that someplace I'd want to live has a uni free of the Misery and an open search in my field are so long that I don't spend much time or mental energy grooming myself to be competitive for it.
I like where I am and don't feel the need to grab at the next brass ring. That may be stupid, because where I am, institutionally speaking -- or hell, my entire state -- may be the Titanic. But my department is congenial and the privileges I do not take for granted.
ReplyDeleteIn a few years I will retire. I don’t know exactly how many, but not more than five. I’ve spent 31 years in this racket and, despite the Misery, I have enjoyed it. It was the best of times…it was the worst of times.
ReplyDeleteWhat will I do? Well, I have the good luck [bad luck] to be by myself at this point but I have a nest egg and I owe not a dollar to any man. When the time comes I will move to Amsterdam where I will go to concerts at the Concertgebouw or see if I can hear the Rolling Stones when they sometimes play the (small) Paradiso club between their mega-stadium tours. I will spend my days in the “coffee houses” [wink, wink] and tell myself I have what it takes to visit the brothels. (I don’t)
What I most hope for everyone who shares this “calling” is that, at the end, you will feel confident that your efforts were caring and unselfish. My apologies to those that feel that this is “just a job” or have come to realize that they “get paid either way”.
A few of my students have gained a certain prominence in my field and I’m proud of that. But the ones I feel the best about, and remain closest to, are those that are merely able to provide for themselves and their families partly as a result of what they learned from me.
I mean, they made it….and I helped!
fiddlebright
I am where I will be until retirement in about 18 years, or a lotto win. I like what I do, and most days feel really really happy to be where I am. I live in one of the most beautiful places on earth, and teach at a beautiful campus. I get paid money to talk about things I feel passionate about. I'm in charge of the budget and the schedule...which means headaches, but also means almost total autonomy.
ReplyDeleteOn days when I don't feel so happy, I have great colleagues/friends with whom I can commiserate. And I can visit here!
I made a jump this past year to a great school - after years of CC misery - and my first impulse is to say I will stay here forever.
ReplyDeleteBut my hubby and I like to travel, move, and look around.
I suspect I'll always keep a toe in the market and will be willing to go somewhere else.
Some days I feel stuck. I might be better suited to a place where teaching is the most important thing to do, but with R1 dreams, my institution now values my admittedly insignificant research and publications more than my teaching--for which I have won numerous awards. Reading CM humbles me: my partner was just awarded tenure and I'm promoted. We live in a great part of the country. So when I complain about her gold handcuffs and my platinum handcuffs, I then remember that so many others would gladly want them and deserved them. To make a political point, however, the state broke its promise to me about retirement, adding another five years to my time here. that sucks, but I should not complain. I wish my institution could trade me to another school--like baseball teams do--for two or three young assistant professors who want to change the world with insightful essays about Fur Weaving. I would go to the small-market club and play good defense and hit singles every once in a while.
ReplyDeleteI’m just pre-tenure in my second job, one I took because it’s near my hometown and my partner has a good job there. On bad days, like today, I think: it’s a damn good job that I was damn lucky to get, but I still feel stuck, unhappy, and frankly, resentful. I feel like I trashed my dreams (the chance at a better job, no commute, and an escape from my hometown) for a marriage that’s not that great anyway. Now I have a kid, a condescending spouse, and an extended family that’s a fucking nightmare. On good days, I think: it’s a damn good job that I was damn lucky to get. Most people would kill to come back to their hometowns with a decent job, making their spouses happy and getting the chance to have a great kid, an easy job, and free babysitting. What a bitter crank you are, Cass. Everything – good job; handsome, caring, intelligent husband; gorgeous baby; good friends; a decent living in a good place – has fallen in your undeserving lap, and all you can do is whine and wish for something else.
ReplyDeleteIt's a combination of love and stuck. I love my college. I hate my system. The system is trying to eat the college, and if it succeeds, there will be little left to love. If I could get at least some of the magic back that made me want to work here, I'd stay forever without question or regret.
ReplyDeleteI am very grateful to have a job. I beat hundreds of applicants to get this, and I know how tough the English market is. But as I'm mid-career, tenured, at full rank, and in an institution where teaching is the top priority and most of my research concerns pedagogy or institutional needs, I don't know how viable a candidate I'd be on the job market. I do sneak a peek at the Chronicle from time to time. Once in awhile I see something I think I'd be perfect for. But often it's in a place where my spouse would have a hard time finding something.
I do like TubaPlayingProf's idea though. I wish I could get a package deal for spouse and me on that trade!
I am where I am, but I wish I weren't. It's not a terrible job... the people are fine. I just don't know if my body will last through the 18-hour days, though. I wish I were smart enough to teach something that could be graded by Scantrons...
ReplyDeleteI rather like my institution, and don't even mind my present job, which is a bit sad, since I'm neither tenured nor tenurable (and don't think that will change unless the school does something along the lines of the mass conversions of contingent to tenure lines recommended by the AAUP, which seems highly unlikely), and therefore need to be prepared to hop at any moment. And, since I'm pushing 50, it would probably be smart to do so sooner rather than later. I also really need to earn a substantially higher salary if I'm ever to retire (or just continue to keep afloat financially), and I'm frustrated by my lack of voice in university/departmental affairs (when you start looking at service jobs like a kid with her face pressed to the candy-shop window, you know it's bad -- but really, after over a decade in my department, I do have some ideas about what's going well and not so well, and wish I had a chance to do something more structural than fiddle with my own syllabi. I have some small opportunities of that sort, but I'm not really part of the larger conversation, and that's frustrating).
ReplyDeleteI also wouldn't mind having research be officially part of my job, instead of this odd semi-hobby on which I'm spending increasing amounts of my "spare" time, both because I enjoy it, and because I know that it's my best -- but still very long -- shot at landing a more secure, better-paying job. I'm encouraged by those who, like Darla and My Little Proffie, have made recent leaps, but I'm not entirely confident I can do the same. The description of the time and hoop-jumping required in the job-hunting post above -- not to mention the desire on the part of some hiring depts to see 5 years of evals -- is not exactly encouraging, but does confirm my sense that it makes little sense to start spending time on job-hunting until I've got a reasonable chance at actually landing a job -- i.e., something approaching a decent publication record. I'll still have to deal with the fact that I didn't publish anything for almost 10 years after the diss., but I'm hoping that the fact that I was doing archive-heavy research while holding down a 4/4 plus summer load and presenting pretty regularly at conferences will count for something, especially if I can show a pretty good rate of production of scholarship that draws on the archival work (and the conference presentations) in the next few years.
So for this year, I'm mostly hoping that my multi-year contract, which ends this year, will be renewed, so I can keep doing all of the above. It's a lot easier to leap from a lily pad, however tattered and wobbly, than from the muck at the bottom of the pond.
P.S. I'm also slightly disoriented by seeing a Richard Tingle poem begin with a rhyming couplet with an almost bouncy rhythm. The rest is in a more familiar vein, but I'm still a bit discombobulated.
I'm in Fucktardia, for now. I don't know how much longer I will be here, but that's because my OH's career path is hazy--we may be leaving in as little as a year. Or I may be stuck here forever, because I'm damned certain that I'm not going to get another TT position, and frankly, I don't have the energy at my age, and with 2 kids under age 10, to go through it again.
ReplyDeleteIf I were better compensated, I can assure you that the decision to leave would be harder, because despite everything, I still love teaching. But if things pan out the way we hope, my OH will make FIVE TIMES my current salary. I will be able to quit, and work full-time on my novel (which is currently in a nascent state, by which I mean it's a bunch of notes in a Moleskin notebook and a series of ideas that comes to me in limbo sleep). I will miss teaching, I'm sure. But I won't miss the constant feeling that my dedication and good nature are being taken advantage of by a bunch of churls in the state legislature (along with the idiots who voted said churls into office).