Moved on to another town
Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up”
Tried hard to settle down
For every job, so many men
So many men no one needs.
Every time you see a job ad that looks like a match for your skills and ideas, you’ll have a moment of already inhabiting that life. In every case, you go through a few hours of imagining what life might be like in your new home in Los Angeles or Santa Barbara, in Minneapolis or Seattle. Imagining how your work might blossom further among your new colleagues at Brandeis or Marquette, with the resources available to you at UCLA or Oregon.
But then no. And then no. And then no.
“Unemployed scholar” sounds like a noun, but it’s really a constant series of verbs, of hopes rising and beaten back, of staying close to your friends as they also succeed and fail, remaining part of the society of insiders who might some day notice your work and open a door.
Being an unemployed scholar means being willing to go anywhere. To not put limits on your job search, to be as willing to live in Manhattan KS as Manhattan NY, as willing to live in Miami as Seattle, as willing to live in rows of soy as in grids of metropolitan streets. I have a colleague who grew up in the forests and mountains; she took a short-term job in a broken border town where everything in all directions was beige. “I just think the desert is ugly. I’ve tried really hard, but everything is just so bare and sparse. I’m still used to Tacoma where it rains for nine months out of the year.” The pain would be equal if applied in the opposite direction. And at the end of this semester, she’ll be cut loose again, on the road with a cardboard sign, hoping for a ride to paradise.
Being an unemployed scholar means that you can only apply for jobs once a year. You look at the Chronicle, where the elite schools advertise in August and September, the middling schools in October through December, and the bottom tier in the spring, all aimed at hiring in the summer for a start in the following fall. You feel your prospects sink as the schools become more meager, but you’d take it, you’d take an offer from any aimless college, some formerly Methodist teachers-and-preachers school now existing only through its inertia, clinging to a lost identity. Much like yourself.
Being an unemployed scholar means feeling yourself getting stale, drying out, losing your juice. The dissertation is behind you, you’ve climbed that mountain safely. But you don’t know what’s next, you don’t have the library and the databases and the lab space to take the next step. You keep trying to sell that old product while the shiny new kids get all the visitors to their booth. It’s like being a thirty-five year old first-baseman for the Fayetteville Woodpeckers, sitting in the ice bath after a hard workout and watching the twenty-year-olds coming for your job.
Being an unemployed scholar means that your .edu mail address is about to expire. Your only contact with your old doctoral institution is through their alumni office, occasionally getting their glossy, undergrad-focused magazine or a request to donate to the annual fund. They’re busy with their new generation of students, have finished with their obligations to you. Write when you find work…
Being an unemployed scholar means wondering every day whether it’s time to quit, but not knowing how to leave even if you could gin yourself up to try. Failed racing drivers don’t have any advantages in the Uber market, and failed rhetoricians don’t have any advantages in writing for HuffPo or on Twitter. There’s no good place in the air if you were bred for water.
“Unemployed scholar” is a daily experience, a chronic ache, a deficiency that cannot be remediated. It is an encompassing, complete shame. It cannot be repaired. It can only be left altogether, with enormous bravery, re-inventing yourself from near zero.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Herb Childress 