Monastic Poverty, Take Two
I suppose it’s no surprise that I’ve not taken the time to do the calculations that Marc Bousquet did: I’m busy, after all.? Today I turn in my final grades for the semester, and between my sudden job interview, finishing out a class I’d never taught before and with a larger enrollment than I was used to,? helping Mary wrap up her graduate work, and a dozen other things, I’ve been running myself more ragged than even I’m used to.
Perhaps it’s because I am so tired, or perhaps it’s because Bousquet’s article confirmed some things that I already suspected, but the opening to the essay tells much of the story:
I once shocked a colleague by responding to one of those newspaper stories about a prof ?caught? mowing his lawn on a Wednesday afternoon by saying that many tenured faculty were morally entitled to think of their salaries after tenure as something similar to a pension.
After all, in some fields, many folks will not receive tenure until they?ve been working for low wages for twenty years or more: a dozen years to get the degree, another three to four years serving contingently?and then, finally, a ?probationary? appointment lasting seven years at wages commonly lower than those of a similarly-experienced bartender.
Bousquet goes on to cite numbers that I won’t both reproducing here, establishing a pretty solid case that, if a society pays for what it finds valuable, there’s little to suggest that America values higher education (as opposed to high-level, government-funded research, which is something else) much at all.? To cite one more bit, from later in the article:
No matter how you slice it, most public servants earn a better return on education and effort over the course of a career than most faculty, including those on the tenure track. It?s hard to make a case that the rather unusual instances of lifetime associate profs who skate by on twenty- or thirty-hour work weeks are gaming the system.
Instead, they are the unusual few who have refused to allow the system to game them.
I suppose it’s easy for me to nod to these critiques: I am, after all, as of today, done with my career as a TA.? This summer I start what promises to be a good career as a professor of English at Emmanuel College, a small Christian liberal arts school.? I like the people there, I like what I do, and I stand now to spend the rest of my working life doing what I’m good at for a living wage.? In the terms that I’ve lived with in the decade I’ve been in grad school, I’m one of the lucky ones.? And compared to my compatriots, many of whom will be scrapping in an increasingly tight job market this coming fall, I certainly am.
So I don’t want to make this a rant against a system that somehow ambushed me.? The warnings were there in 1998 when I first started applying for grad school, and all I’m doing is adding one more warning to those already available.? And the warning is this: don’t think of grad school as a career choice.
Going into college teaching is like playing baseball professionally: lots of people have stellar high school careers, and many have standout college careers.? In the world of grad school/minor leagues, you can love what you do, do it well, and put everything you’ve got into it, and you still might not make the show.? The tenure-track positions are always going to have more applicants than they know what to do with, and that’s assuming that nobody is going to go free agent and slide laterally into the job.
The fact of the matter is that Bousquet is talking precisely about the lucky ones in his article.? Many of us work longer than he details in adjunct roles, at non-skilled day jobs, and anywhere else we can turn a buck, never getting one of the coveted professor positions that we set out to secure.? (I’m wrapping up work at a public library at the end of July, marking the first time in a decade that I’ll have only one job.)? And while nobody in the big universities (that I know of, at least) hates grad students personally, the way the system runs, universities just save more money when they hire adjuncts and grad students than when they hire faculty.? Budget money from the state only goes so far, and people are already threatening revolts if tuition climbs any higher.? Thus they hire more grad students and fewer faculty.? Even as more students enroll in college and the workload increases, the system replaces workers as cheaply as possible without sacrificing the base-level respectability needed to draw students.? Thus, if you’re a gambler, you can see how the house always wins.? If not, look at a Las Vegas casino, then look at a graduate student’s office.? Who wins?
This does not make the faculty of the universities the bad guys, and it really doesn’t make the administrators the bad guys.? It just means that, like baseball, the academy as it’s currently configured has a massive and low-paying minor league for people trying to get to the show and a much smaller (and less lucrative, if you look at Bousquet’s numbers) major league.? In fact, that’s part of what makes Bull Durham such a fun movie–late in the story, Annie Savoy reveals that, like Crash, she’s also a career minor-leaguer, and when they hint at Crash’s and Annie’s travels in the final scene, they’re headed to Visalia, a town in California where Crash can start a new life as a minor league manager and, perhaps, Annie can start her own at College of the Sequoias, Visalia’s own community college.
(I might write a post later about Bull Durham as a movie about teaching English, but that parallel seemed appropriate here.)
I should say at this point that I personally have no regrets about spending that decade in grad school, working two jobs, rolling the dice on a career that gives the the odds of? a baseball player to make it.? Yet I don’t think myself a hypocrite so much as a called man.
The idea that some people are called not to good works in general but to certain ways of life is not a new one.? In fact, at least in the Christian circles I travel, congregations are always trying to discern which folks have experienced a call to preaching and other church ministries.? Like college teachers, those folks are likely to be some of the best-educated and worst-paid people in town.? And before that, there were entire orders of people, namely monks and nuns and friars, who entered into regulated poverty in the context of a doctrine of calling.? And although celibacy is not a necessity for professors, and although a professor’s obedience is far less direct than a monk’s, and though the poverty is a relative lack of material resources rather than a prohibition of private property, nonetheless the call to a different sort of life is still there.
Now I’m not naive, historically: I know that the monasteries and convents of medieval Europe were filled with the second and third children of aristocrats who weren’t cut out for knighthood.? But the idea of the monastery or more generally vocation in the first place was that there are certain people whom God calls not to lives of comfort and wealth but to obedience and poverty and prayer and study.? Dante’s celestial sphere of the Moon says something about monastic life that apply to the academic life with brutal honesty: not everyone who finds herself in such a life really fits there because few have a genuine call to be a part of it.? And those who do find themselves called are going to answer a decade’s worth of questions or more about when we’re going to “get a job” (despite sometimes working three of them).? And for the lucky ones, entering into that working pension that Bousquet describes is going to come with the wrath of so many who still don’t consider what college teachers do real work.? No fortune, no fame, nothing like that.? For those looking for reasons, look elsewhere.
I’m not sure whether Heidegger’s call-of-conscience has anything to do with this, and I’m really fuzzy on whether Marxian History calls people to ways of life.? But I will say to anyone contemplating this journey what Fred Norris, my mentor and boss (I was his research assistant while working two other jobs) at Emmanuel School of Religion told me.? (No, not the one that just hired me.? Click on the links.)? The only reason to go into a Ph.D program is an inability to live without one.? To that I’d add that, if you don’t believe that God has called you to it, don’t do it. The only good reason to risk your twenties (and likely your thirties) on a proposition as statistically moronic as teaching assistantships in graduate school is a divine calling.
Happiness is not impossible for those who travel another path: You’ll still be able to read good books–amazon.com is just around the corner.? You’ll still be able to teach–volunteer for Sunday school.? But if you can imagine a life in which you aren’t teaching college, the profession with a success rate like baseball and pay rate like a monastery, pursue that one.? The odds are just going to be better.
Unless you want to play baseball for a living.? Then I’ve got nothing for you.
