A better line of work

When I moved to Boston for grad school, I left behind an inoffensively bland office job -- one of those ubiquitous, middling white-collar jobs boasting an internal culture that feels suspiciously similar to Office Space. The building was beige. The cubicles were beige. The company was beige. The work itself was fine and even fun at times, and I liked my coworkers. But the pay was mediocre and, as a misclassified contract worker, I was working full-time-employee hours without any benefits and under the shadow of a significant tax burden. It was easy to leave and turn my face towards the shining sun of higher education. There were more things in store for me than were dreamt of in their TPS reports.

Of course, I didn't actually leave. I continued to work for Beige, Inc. on a part-time/remote basis throughout my tenure in grad school. It was a vital financial lifeline that filled the gap left behind by my insufficient PhD stipend. It was a job I could churn out in the background while pursing my more pressing goals.

And then, when I finished my program, achieved my goals, and discovered the academic job market to be as supportive and sustainable as the ice planet Hoth, Beige, Inc. was still there, waiting for me with open arms. In February, they offered me a full-time position with a salary and benefits package better than I'd get as a tenure-track professor and promptly promoted me to a managerial role. 

The building and cubicles are still beige. The work is still fine and even fun at times, and I still like my coworkers. Now that I'm older and wiser, (Fun fact! All at once, about a year ago, cashiers started calling me ma'am), I appreciate the job as offering a line of work that utilizes my skills as an erstwhile teacher, researcher, and critic. I have a lot of flexibility and ample work/life balance.

Is this a professional success story? It might be. It sounds like it could be one.

The problem -- the source of my ambivalence, and the reason I keep beating this dead, angsty horse in posts like this one and this one and this one -- is that my PhD program, like pretty much all PhD programs in the humanities, equated professorship with success and was designed specifically to funnel you into a career in higher education. After you get your PhD, it's tenure or bust. Pursuing a career -- literally any career -- other than "college professor" is cutely referred to as the Alt-Ac route and is quietly understood to be the slush bucket destination for people not talented, driven, or persistent enough to hack it in the mean streets of academia.

It's an institutionally indoctrinated mindset, and one that is actively harmful in an age when even the MLA (organizational czar of the academic job market) is seeking to legitimize the "academia and industry are both cool options, guys" ethos that is already taken for granted in the sciences. It leaves people like me feeling un-tethered from reality, genuinely uncertain of what we want (or think we want) for our careers, or what "success" might look like outside of academia's monomaniacal model.

This is one of many reasons that being back in the offices of Beige, Inc. for the past six months has felt a little surreal. I'm not sure if I'm going to stay, or how I'm going to make that choice. Am I content? Is this working? I'm still in the process of deprogramming myself, developing the tools I need to check my own pulse.