* Extinct is a professional blog. But part of professional life is the job market— the worst part, really. That’s what I (Max) want to talk about today. The essay is a personal one. I'm going to share some details from what has been a pretty rough year in my life. Hopefully it won't seem like a pity party. My goal is self-reflection rather than self-pity. But probably it isn't entirely successful. Be warned: there is no paleontology, no philosophy, here. Just some reflections on grief and loss. Here goes…
I was at the library with my two year old when I got the call. My father had been in a bicycle accident. Near the Kwik Trip. Flipped over the handlebars. I could picture the intersection. It’s busy, but not especially dangerous to an experienced cyclist like my dad. Anyway, dad fell hard. He was alive, but was being rushed to North Memorial Hospital, which is a good hour’s drive from the Kwik Trip. The words “traumatic brain injury” might have been mentioned. I can't remember. Anyway, I knew he had hit his head and there was a chance he might not survive.
He did survive, but only after being intubated, then extubated, and then reintubated two more times. Before the last intubation he went into respiratory failure and had to be rushed to emergency surgery. During the operation they found a blood clot that was occluding a good 90% of his windpipe. Dad was so frightened that he hardly slept for days. After a bout of ICU delirium (look it up) he was finally released from intensive care about three weeks after the accident. From there it was on to another hospital where he stayed for a month. Finally he was discharged, outfitted with a tracheostomy tube and a neck collar. He has since been re-admitted to the hospital so many times that I've lost count.
I am processing my father's injuries in fits and starts. I haven't had any other choice given the madness of my life at the moment. Just three weeks before my father's accident my daughter was born. A week before that I began a one year visiting professorship at Macalester College in St. Paul. Because of the nature of my appointment I took just one day of “paternity leave.” (At this point, I'll remind you that I also have a two-year-old.) The crash happened in October. Then, in November, one of my closest friends suffered a brain aneurysm. Against the odds, he survived. Three surgeries later he is rehabilitating at his parents’ house. I've been down to visit him just once, which is something I'm embarrassed about.
Also, during this time I was conducting a job search, and that's what this essay is really about. The search isn't over yet, but it’s already contained a year's worth of disappointment. The details don't matter, and wouldn't interest you anyway. Suffice it to say that I suffered the most painful rejection of my career and now find myself struggling to regain my bearings. At the same time I'm left wondering whether I want to regain my bearings in a profession I am coming increasingly to dislike; surely there is something I could be doing that would cause me less emotional distress. Of course, all of this will sound familiar to anyone who has spent any amount of time on the academic job market. So, let's talk about it.
Sometimes it takes an unhappy coincidence to discern a perfectly obvious connection. In this case, the connection takes form around the concepts of grief and loss. What is grief, exactly? I don't know. I'm not that kind of philosopher. But I know that grief isn't just sadness. I might describe it as a cocktail of disorientation, frustration, and helplessness. Grief is absence and all the stuff that comes along with it. To grieve isn't to do anything, really. It's to not know what to do because something valued has been lost that can't be recovered. People need to grieve to heal, but grief is not the same thing as healing. Better to think of grief as a sort of precondition for healing. It’s more scab than scar. And like a scab it isn't especially pleasant.
What I want to suggest is that grief can be a useful lens for understanding the experiences many of us have on the job market. But I'll come back to that. First, I want to say a bit more about my dad. My dad's life changed forever in October. For one thing his vocal cords are paralyzed. This means that he now speaks in a low, gravelly tone that doesn't sound at all like dad, only it does, because that's how he sounds now. More seriously he is unable to swallow. For a while he was fed through a tube in his mouth. Then it became a tube in his nose. Then a tube into his stomach. And now, because the stomach tube made him nauseous, a tube into his intestine. His doctors say there is a chance he will be able to recover a partial ability to swallow, but the prospects don't seem very bright. Failure to recover would mean that he will feed through a tube for the rest of his life.
I'm grieving on behalf of my father. Grieving because his life has changed, probably for good. Before the accident he was usually in motion. Running, biking, doing home improvement projects, helping the neighbors. Now he spends a good amount of his time hooked up to a feeding machine that pumps food into his intestine in a steady drip. I'm also grieving on behalf of my children, and yes, myself. I was looking forward to my dad doing grandpa stuff with my kids. He's just a lot of fun: the kind of guy who's happy to get down on the floor and play and make silly faces. He's still going to be fun, but it's not going to look the way I imagined it would. It won't sound the same either. A few weeks ago dad remarked that my daughter, who is now six months old, will never know what he used to sound like. Neither will my son. They will know from videos but not from firsthand experience. For them, grandpa will be someone who looks and sounds a certain way, which differs starkly from the way I imagined it would. This is a loss: the loss of an opportunity to know my father as I hoped they would know him. It is the kind of thing for which grief is an appropriate response.
Now, it might strike you as melodramatic or even insensitive to describe job market experiences in terms of grief. So let me be clear about what I'm saying. I’m not saying that failing to find an academic position is comparable to losing a loved one either in terms of its emotional intensity or its influence on one’s well-being. It isn’t. What I’m saying is that I have found it useful to understand my response to my latest job market disappointment as a grief response. That is, I'm finding it useful to understand my present emotional turbulence and feelings of disorientation as an expression of grief. When you love what you do; when your ability to do what you love depends on landing one of a very few jobs in your area; when every application that advances to the interview stage involves considerable emotional investment; and when you fail to find a position (over and over again), grief is both a likely and an appropriate response. But grief is inconvenient. It fucks with your head and takes your joy. It can even alienate you from your interests and from the people around you.
This is basically how I feel right now. But what am I grieving? Lost opportunities I suppose. A certain way my career could have played out but didn't. Perhaps even my career itself, although I'm not ready to grab the eject handle just yet.
A common way that people talk about their emotional response to job market disappointment is in terms of anger or resentment. It's almost as if we lack the resources to talk about professional disappointment in a more sympathetic register. The bitter and angry postdoc is a cliche of the seminar room. It’s as if those of us struggling to find tenure track appointments are incels furiously venting our grievances into internet message boards. But surely we can do better than this. I do feel some bitterness towards the profession, which has to do with specific ways I (feel as if I) have been mistreated. But I don't think I've become a bitter person, or that the best way to understand my increasingly complicated relationship with my profession is in terms of cynicism. Mostly I feel hurt, and my struggle is to reconcile my genuine love for my career with the amount of distress it regularly causes me.
Anyway, framing this latest and greatest professional disappointment in terms of grief has helped me be kinder to myself. And to sort through my complex, and constantly shifting, emotional response. I'm not sure if I'll have an academic appointment next year. That might mean I'm on my way to washing out of the field. Like, I hope it doesn't, but that honestly seems like the most probable outcome at this point. If that happens, it will be difficult. It will feel as if part of me has died. (This is the danger of integrating your work and your hobbies.) But I feel better prepared for this than I would have a year ago, and part of that is having the language to talk about it. As philosophers interested in scientific classification know, there is a power in calling something by the right name. I'm not (just) sad or angry, I'm coping with loss. Best to be honest about it. Good grief.