Aristotelian dilemma (or: academia as addiction)
So it’s already time to apply for another lectureship next year, and I’m guiltily realizing how little alternative-career exploration I’ve gotten done this year. A dilemma has presented itself: apply for teaching next year and keep looking — or at least, tell myself I’ll keep looking — for other work; or, run for the nonacademic hills as fast as possible, even if the job prospects haven’t materialized yet. I greatly admire people like Rana who have done the latter. I’m usually a deeply cautious person, and I’m trying to counteract that tendency. But I also worry about whether I’m overcompensating for it.
Because I am a big ex-classicist nerd, I’m thinking of the passage on courage as the mean between cowardice and rashness from Book 2 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, especially the part where Aristotle explains that it’s difficult to do the right thing because there are so many more potential wrong courses of action: "it is possible to fail in many ways…, while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult — to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult)." If I fall back into the holding pattern I’ve been in this year, am I a coward? If I sever ties with academia and leap into the unknown, am I being stupidly rash? I don’t think this is a case of only one way to succeed, but there is plenty of potential for screwing up by going too far in either direction.
Part of me recognizes that the most sensible course of action — the mean, as it were — would be to apply for the lectureship so that at least I’ll have work lined up next year (that is, if I’m hired, which is not entirely certain) if other plans fall through. Plan A: postdoctoral fellowship; Plan B: look for other work to supplement my part-time job; Plan C: lectureship. But another part of me, which dreads the thought of another year teaching composition, is whispering "Don’t do it! What if you never leave?" Because I can see myself saying "oh, I’ll just stay for another year and keep looking" and then stagnating here unhappily until the department stops offering me work. It’s like trying to stop smoking: you quit, then you think "oh, what the hell, just one more, I’ll just bum it off someone else, I’m not going to buy a whole pack…" and before you know it you’re starting up again.
Still, I quite like my new part-time job so far. I’m looking at obscure seventeenth-century books and getting a crash course in SGML, and both of those things appeal to me a great deal. It feels so much more congenial than teaching that I think I’ll be able to motivate myself to find a plan B before I have to resort to Plan C.
Only I have to decide soon, because there are deadlines looming. Someone please kick me in the pants.
*kick*
I don’t know that I’m all that noteworthy a role model; I wasn’t so much heading for the hills as waking up, dazed, among the hills. 😉 Although I _was_ growing more dissatisfied with teaching as a career, it took not getting any job offers to make me look elsewhere, and then it was a matter of economic survival. (I’d been trying to survive on half-time teaching the year before, just to avoid the implications of leaving academia — probably a dumb move, and rather like the stagnation you describe.)
My first piece of advice is to assess your current economic situation and see if you’d be comfortable surviving on your part-time salary alone (don’t forget to factor in health insurance costs, which are usually higher as COBRA than as salary deductions). If the answer is yes, don’t bother with the teaching job.
Second piece of advice: figure out how much of a time-suck teaching really is. If it gives you at least a day or two a week (or equivalent during working hours) to scout other career options and get some experience, I’d not worry about getting “stuck.” Learn to view it as a paycheck, not a vocation, and focus on learning what might be a real vocation.
Just my 2 cents. 🙂
I’d also suggest that you think about what counts as “success” for you (and “failure”).
Can you do the lectureship and the part-time job for a year? Or even half a year. If so, that would enable you to continue learning skills (and adding lines to your resume) that will enhance your non-teaching options, all while getting health insurance. (Keep in mind that, even if that’s a crushing schedule for a little while, that balancing act will also help in finding a non-academic job–you were able to learn new skills, do this other work, etc.)
Finally, unless you think you’re going to get a tenure-track job somehow, some way, you should start developing your exit strategy. Apply only for academic positions that meet certain criteria (instead of applying for everything that might possibly be a possibility); continue learning new skills; begin networking in areas where those skills are used; cultivate people at that part-time job; have lunch with people who can help you–stuff you’re probably already doing.
And, as Rana suggests, stop thinking of it as a vocation, unless it truly is, in which case your plan is to figure out how to keep doing it no matter what. (See the discussion over at Invisible Adjunct about teaching at a community college, for example.)
Good luck . . .
Thanks, guys! I’ve thought it over some more and decided to go ahead and apply for the lectureship — gotta have a “pay the bills” option. My adviser has offered to administer additional kicks in the pants if needed, but he also said he didn’t think I’d need them.
Carla, it’s far from a vocation at this point — that’s actually the main reason why I’m getting out. I just don’t want to keep putting off active job-searching. So the question is more “leave sooner, or later?”
Leave as soon as you can! And learn XML while you’re at it, if you don’t already know it; it’s not clear how widely used SGML is. I picked up “The Complete Reference HTML & XHTML” fourth edition, by Thomas A. Powell, which also covers XML and CSS1&2; my programmer colleagues refer to it as “the phone book,” but it has what I need to know. And then learn Java. By then, you’ll really be qualified to find an assortment of jobs, though finding the right one will be a little tricky. Good luck!
If you learn SGML, XML itself will hold few surprises. No promises about the constellation of stuff around XML, however. I am inordinately fond of Neil Bradley’s XML book (in its third or fourth edition), but the O’Reilly _Learning XML_ book is also quite good.