Have Fun Storming the Castle

I once knew a girl (or should I say, she once knew me) who'd grown up on the affluent North Shore of Chicago and had expectations for the future: She’d be more successful in a career than her successful father, she’d always live in a neighborhood like her parents’, and if she wanted bigger and better things she’d just go out and make more money to pay for them. As her parents had surpassed the class status of their parents by at least one step, so would she.

The American Dream, that anything is possible with gumption, is probably open to only a very few in any generation—if their dreams are ambitious enough, anyway. Some dreams take all of a nation’s history to accomplish. But let’s call what many think of as the American Dream The American Hope instead: a more pragmatic and even modest expectation that many in our society will continue to improve their lives, step-by-step, over time.

This was not my family’s experience, so I’ve always been cautious about generalizing those possibilities in American society. This is terribly simplistic—I’m working on something—but let’s just say that it took only the death of my patriarch grandfather and the divorce of my parents to drop my mom and me many rungs down the class ladder. It’s been a long fight back up and in some ways I’ve not yet reached the previous level of my parents. (But it’s complicated; in other ways, I’ve surpassed them.) Of course there are always ups and downs, but in the last eight years many more Americans have had to face this failure of possibility.

The worsening economy will affect both adjunct positions and new tenure-track hires. Because I’m a delicate flower, I can feel the vibrations from provosts’ lawnmowers all across the land, cutting everything down to core programs and personnel. There weren’t nearly as many job listings in my field this year. Two of the tenure-track jobs I applied for have been aborted due to lack of funding, and many of the other listings were for impossible combinations such as playwright, novelist, poet, technical writer, and sous-chef. (I’m versatile but no playwright.) Still others were in places we’d worry about schools for our kids, etc.

But a few were solid, and I retain hope. I’ve been publishing, I’m a nominee for another teaching award, and even Rory, who has an ego that would nearly fit in the football stadium, generously says he wouldn’t want to interview against me if only because the Churm thing provides a focal point for what’s otherwise often an awkward discussion.

To mix my metaphors, I described to Crazy Larry the process of trying to find some stability, pay, and respect in academe as a walk along a balance beam. At some point you feel yourself start to fall and can either step off gracefully or make a run at top speed for the far end. If you fall off running, you could get hurt. I’m running, but it’s going to be close.