I am an academic of sorts, and as someone with a long-distance partner, you’ll be horrified perhaps to hear that my partner and I left two tenure-track jobs at a small college because they were draining our lives away. Your post about giving up health prompted me to respond because I am a freakishly healthy person who rarely gets even the common cold. So it was a huge wakeup call when I got pneumonia during my fourth year of full-time tenure-track teaching.

It was the 3-3 load (2 hours/week per course, though, so 12 hours in the classroom per week), the chairing of multiple committees, helping to rewrite the Women’s Studies and Asian Studies curriculum (in addition to developing my own with the attendant 15 new course preps over 5 years), attending an average of 1.5 department events in the evening each week, including 6-hour-long critiques of the senior art majors twice each semester, and the list goes on. This on top of my attempts to stay active in research, writing, publishing, and giving papers. A familiar group of tasks I’m sure. My students were wonderful, many first-generation students with such drive and energy, and I felt very fortunate to be working with them. But when I received two pre-tenure course releases in one semester, my workload decreased by very little.

This frightened me, as I had gotten into this small college thing because, well, I went to Pomona as an undergrad and I wanted to spread the liberal arts ethos, help to create an intellectual environment for students like I had had, and then in my third year I find I am spending as little time as possible on teaching because of my service load. It was the following semester when I got pneumonia.

Finding the balance is hard, and I can’t say I found it, at least not in the context of a full-time post, as I’m currently an independent scholar for the second year in a row. I suppose my partner and I decided that we would not be able to find the balance while still maintaining our core commitment to the liberal arts–we could “check out” after tenure, quit all the committees and focus on publishing, having a life (weekends?) and pursuing things intellectual, but that didn’t seem to be a viable option. Or at least not one that we could live with. So we opted to see if there might be space in the academic universe to be intellectuals, teachers, and contributors to a community in some sort of integrated balance. We’re currently in the UK, where my partner has a position at the university here. Classes have just begun, so we’re figuring out how it works. I’ll let you know if we find the balance.

and don’t get pneumonia. not worth it!