Beyond the Ivory Tower

I Loved It Once

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By Jasper Owen

Last August, as I was putting my dissertation through the editorial wringer for the last time, I began to consider participating in The Chronicle's annual call for First-Person narratives on the ever-enthralling job search. How could readers fail to thrill at the trials and tribulations of a thirtysomething Ph.D. and married father on the market with a strong CV and teaching experience?

I didn't consider it much, though, because the job search itself soon overwhelmed me, as did the start of the fall term at Faraway University, where I was teaching as a full-time instructor.

That fall semester was, to paraphrase, the best of terms and the worst of terms. I received high evaluations in the end -- nearly 5.9 out of 6, if numbers count -- but I saw less and less of my family as I sank deeper into the job search and into a depression that I had been only wading through since my daughter's birth.

I began drowning in it in late December while we were visiting family, unable to focus on the holidays and obsessed by job prospects that dimmed day by day. I checked and rechecked my e-mail, my voice mail, and my cellphone, but there were never any messages. By the time we returned home in the last week of December, I had only one interview invitation -- for a job at Bigtime University's ignored satellite campus that included teaching at what the job description called a "correctional facility."

At that point, I knew that both my job search and my life in academe were over -- or so my depression told me.

I came to realize that my future lay in "scrambling term to term in adjunct hell ... resigned to permanent impermanence," as Raymond D. Tumbleson wrote in an article in the Modern Language Association's Profession 2005 issue.

I had always repressed the idea of failure. My state of mind throughout graduate school was, as Poe's narrator describes in The Imp of the Perverse, one in which "I would perpetually catch myself pondering upon my security, and repeating, in a low undertone, the phrase, 'I am safe.'" Yet, like that narrator, I found the safety I conjured under my breath was false. The truth became clear as the dates for the MLA Convention rolled past and the only phone messages I had were from a friend attending the meeting who called to ask where I planned to stay.

As the winter term started, I began to crumple even further. I loved teaching at Faraway University, but the low pay and the three-hour commute were only adding to my stress. I did my best to keep that stress out of the classroom, but as the winter term started, I could not find the motivation to return. To put it plainly, for five days in January I was hospitalized for severe clinical depression.

I wish I could tell stories of straitjackets, foaming-at-the-mouth psychotics, untested experimental medications, and sharp but unclean medical instruments, but really it was just a boring, white, clean, and well-lit place where I slept, ate, and read. Mainly I read books my students had recommended. (The Da Vinci Code was a better read than I expected, silly ending aside, and The Golden Compass was my favorite in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.)

During my hospitalization and subsequent medical leave, I determined that returning to teaching was not an option for me. In my resignation letter, I mentioned my failed job search as well as the pressures caused by the university's poverty-level wages and my long commute. I also felt the need to apologize in my letter: "How I handled my medical leave was disappointing and unprofessional. Explaining that my condition and the sudden hospitalization left me unfit to communicate with the department does little to assuage the burden left to bear by my students, you, and the department's staff and faculty. In particular, I am grateful for what my wife described as your earnest compassion and understanding in conversations with her."

I will sincerely miss the students and colleagues I met at Faraway University, but I'm not sure I'll miss academe. I loved it once, but after being unable to find a job with a livable wage this past year -- despite having a Ph.D., a published book (egads, only one!), essays in both established journals and well-received books, high student evaluations, and excellent recommendation letters -- I need to move on.

At Faraway, I was qualified to be a professor, but for budgetary reasons I was hired as an instructor, a title which means half the salary and twice the work. The flip side of that was my feeling that students were not getting what they paid for. They pay to be taught by well-prepared experts, but many "professors" (students often called me that despite my actual job title) are "instructors" who have no more knowledge of a subject than the students. The ethnic-studies class I was assigned to teach this past term is a case in point. Asking me to teach that class was like asking the cable repairman if he could also fix the refrigerator.

The further away I am from academe, the more I hear the voices of mentors past warning me off. The path to being a professor, I was repeatedly told, was not easy, and once you found a job, it was far from glamorous. I left both high school -- where a well-loved drama teacher warned me not to major in English -- and undergraduate education with an "I'll show them!" mentality. That mentality sustained me until last January.

Since then I have been homebound, and my 2-year-old daugther has delegated me various entertainment and educational jobs. I have mounds of coloring to do and a pile of toys that need attention, some of which haven't been played with in days. I often have to master on-the-spot dance routines.

At least one more question remains: Why write about all of this now?

Because I still receive rejection letters. One day, not too long ago, I opened the mailbox to find only one letter inside: a poorly sealed envelope with a mailing label addressed to "Dr. Jasper Owen."

I opened the letter right there at the mailbox and read it, as I always do with belated rejections, even though I knew what it would say and had known for nearly four months. I decided, as I walked back inside, to take it as show-and-tell to my therapist, who is still trying to help me understand why I couldn't be a giving father, a loving husband, a devoted teacher, a dedicated academic, and a happy person all at once.