Anyway.

Is it so bad that I want to spend the rest of my days working at seat #2167 in the British Library Humanities I reading room?

Now, I speak only for myself here, but here’s how it turned out: not a bad deal in many ways, but not “freeing.” If anything, it’s much more confining—the sameness of the routine, the limits on what you can say and how you can be.

It’s true that the academy is a very totalizing environment: it tends to swallow you up, to annex your entire personal and imaginative life into your work-self.  Some people thrive on that marriage of professional identity and personal, but most of us chafe a bit.  And since that publication/paper-grading/article-reading pressure to keep up never goes away, one is hard pressed to feel “off duty” without the aid of strong drink.

The corporate world, on the other hand, is not like that for most people.  With the exception of specialized professions, your average white-collar worker isn’t asked to identify all that closely with his or her work.  I engage in any number of specialized tasks during the day, some of which involve quite a bit of thought, and others of which are purely rote, with a great deal of stuff in between.  None of it adds up, in the eyes of my colleagues or friends to “who I am”, and I would wager to say that this is true for almost everyone I work with, with the exception of a few designers and hardcore programmers in my workplace.

But the countervailing problem is that the sphere for thought and action is heavily reduced.  I am a “dialed down” version of myself at work, strongly hemmed in by conventions and reminded constantly that there is an immediate hierarchy that must be constantly placated.  In the case of my workplace, it’s an astonishingly benevolent and human-friendly hierarchy, composed of people who are on the whole approachable and reasonable, and who lead balanced lives.  But imagination and critical intelligence are to be kept strongly in check at all times.  (Not that there aren’t incredibly powerful hierarchies in the academic world.  But in Cubicle World, I have to confess that—really—the hierarchy is pretty much all there is.  One’s job is to please the boss, and that’s about it.)

So, in order to exercise imagination and critical intelligence, one comes home and gets to work on something “real.” The project that feeds the soul, that keeps alive the notion that one is a craftsperson at least, to say nothing of an artist or a critic.  The bugbear of Writing that tormented as an academic turns out to be a life preserver—although that doesn’t make it any less of a bugbear.

I will say that the slightly higher income I make in my cubicle life does enable some additional freedoms.  It surely does, and I’d be wrong not to mention that.

But is it any wonder that teaching —although in its classroom-centric high school form more than now-unreachable-for-me tenure-track life—is the “escape hatch” I look longingly toward?  A “day job” that might somehow also feed the soul?  And let me be a little bit more myself?  It sounds pretty sweet.  Although I know I’m willfully suppressing all of the bad parts…

No, really: it’s my dream.

I do have to back up Liz, though, on her implied sense of the post-tenure blues—tenure is indeed freeing, but it comes with so many added burdens that it becomes, as a colleague of mine once said, golden handcuffs.  Gorgeous and lush, but imprisoning nonetheless.  And, as Liz suggests, some portion of that imprisoning has to do with the escalating burdens of administration that often come with tenure.  This differs from position to position—folks appointed in relatively large departments with relatively active senior faculties will likely feel the crunch less than someone, say, who is the sole senior member of a desperately understaffed and overstudented interdisciplinary program.

Just for instance.

On a (rare) non-silly note, I *am* living my fantasy, even if I reserve the right to bitch like hell.  There were fourteen years between high school and college, during which time I worked dozens of jobs and owned two businesses.  When I started college, I was aiming at precisely the position I’m currently in.

So, In fact, I don’t fantasize about ditching it all.  I know what skills I could fall back on if this life went to hell, but all my other jobs were so much less satisfying than this one, I don’t even think about where the towel is, much less tossing it in.

Or I could just have an impoverished fantasy life.

[PS: Food service? Worst.  Job.  Ever.]

And meg, while tenure is in many ways everything it’s cracked up to be, professors who care about their jobs end up working too many hours regardless of their tenure status. Tenure doesn’t make the papers go away, or the students who need advice. And when you become a “senior” faculty member, you’ll have junior faculty to mentor as well, not to mention all those committees to serve on that only tenured faculty members can be on. <sigh>.