Never Had a Job?

By Mark L. Hineline

"No, Hineline has never had a job," said the department chairman, throwing me a quick glance across his desk.

I bit my lip, so as to show no emotion. The chairman was talking by telephone to the head of another department, seeking support for a course that I had proposed to teach. He was looking to help me out, and to help his department as well.

I was, at the time, in my mid-40s. Never had a job? I had held dozens of jobs over the course of my life. But in the structured world of faculty positions, he was right. I had never held a "real" job, a tenure-track position.

Few people outside academe understand the boundaries of an academic career. Those within understand them too well. I have spent much of my career attempting to blur those boundaries, to find the 50-percent screen between solid ink and none.

The conversation described above occurred a decade ago. I have still "never had a job." And on an actuarial table, my academic career is at least half over.

I feel successful, but not as successful as I would like to be. There is plenty of room in my career for intellectual growth, for improvements in status, and for greater reputation. But I ceased to want a "job" a long time ago.

During my first two years as a graduate student in the history of science, it seemed that a job was all but inevitable. Through no forethought on my part other than choosing a fine scholar to work with as my mentor, I found myself in a hot new program with a meteoric trajectory. I would have no problem finding a job, I thought; it was in the program's interest to find good jobs for its first doctoral products.

The economic forecasts for academe in the late 1980s seemed solidly in my favor. A wave of retirements was predicted to occur just as I would be defending my dissertation. Alas, faculty members did not necessarily retire as expected and when they did, their positions were as likely to disappear or their courses to be taught by adjuncts -- I prefer the phrase "untracked faculty" -- as to provide tenure-track positions for newly minted Ph.D.'s.

Meanwhile, the cold war came to an unexpected end. One day, Mikhail Gorbachev took down the Soviet flag at the Kremlin for the last time. A week or so later, I took my oral exam and began to write a dissertation.

I shall say nothing here about how I viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union or the way that it was "managed" by the United States, but I will submit that, professionally, I feared the ambiguity of the new conditions in which public policy would be made, especially policy pertaining to education and research. My field had benefited considerably from cold-war financing of scientific research in colleges and universities. The grant money, while little more than crumbs compared to that for physics and other fields, had made possible a great deal of research in the history of science.

My luck continued for a while. I found a nicely compensated sinecure in an elite liberal-arts college, teaching one course a semester for two years, while I completed my dissertation. When that came to an end, I was offered the chance to step into my mentor's shoes for a year while he conducted research under a Guggenheim Fellowship.

It was in that year that my easy path to my first "job" unraveled. The edited volume to which I had contributed a paper, my first publication since earning my doctorate, fell apart when its editor backed out of the project. Meanwhile, the American electorate reversed polarity after 40 years and elected a Republican Congress, which almost at once attacked the grant programs that benefited my field. Worst of all, as the cold war receded into memory, the "science wars" erupted, calling into question the very legitimacy of the academic field in which I had just invested my personal and intellectual life.

I found few jobs to apply for that year. More important, I viewed my prospects as, if not utterly hopeless, then surely a call for innovation. It was my competitive style to search for an unoccupied niche rather than to engage in battle on a crowded field. Before pursuing graduate training, I had operated as a freelancer, and I did not view it as an unacceptable career direction.

That's when I came across an article, in the professional magazine Landscape Architecture, on the career of the geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson. Here was an influential scholar who did not hold a tenured position at a university, but who taught (for a time) at both the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard University, while editing his journal from a small town in New Mexico.

Perhaps, I thought, the way to deal with the paucity of tenure-track positions might be to become a mobile resource -- to teach courses in my field at multiple universities, most of which did not need a full-time historian of science -- while maintaining independence of affiliation. With autonomy and freedom from the service requirements of a tenure-track position, I could address multiple audiences, not just an academic one. I would refuse to acknowledge the validity of the town-and-gown dichotomy. I would cross boundaries on a daily basis.

The only price I would pay would be security. I would have none. I would need to get up every morning and reinvent my life chances.

There were flaws in my theory -- some of which I could see, and some that I did not. I understood, first of all, that I was not J.B. Jackson, who had the clear advantage of inherited wealth, whereas I still had student loans to repay. Jackson was on the rising tide of a school of geographical interpretation in which he was an acknowledged leader; I was -- as far as I could see -- on the ebbing tide of a field that was perceived to have overextended its reach. Jackson was doubtless more charismatic than I was or could ever hope to be, despite the fact that I even went so far as to replace Jackson's motorcycle, a prop that in some ways symbolized his career, with a Volkswagen bus named "Peregrine" as my prop.

But I did not foresee the extent to which the very category of employment I considered an asset -- the notion that I could be a mobile resource -- would be exploited by colleges and universities as a way of coping with their changing fortunes. For every J.B. Jackson, there were hundreds of adjuncts working for salaries that could not sustain them for even a few years, much less through entire careers.

Moreover, I paid too little attention to the research side of my vita. Because publications tended to count less than did good teaching evaluations when I went after short-term appointments, I began to treat my scholarship as a luxury rather than as a career necessity.

Even so, the indicators seemed positive for a while. I was teaching a lot. While some adjuncts were complaining about being "freeway fliers," I was, for one term, flying Southwest Airlines between San Diego and Sacramento each week and making a tolerably good living at it. More often, I split my time between two campuses of the University of California. While I had the bread-and-butter survey courses to teach, I also had opportunities to create courses that proved popular.

I've also written frequently for nonacademic audiences. I do not think of that work as a lark, but as an important aspect of my role as a scholar.

At this writing, I remain employed and employable as a nontenure-track faculty member, teaching courses that I enjoy. Without the promise of job security, I am probably less able to nurture undergraduates than some of my peers; my mind is never far away from how to pay the mortgage next month. Although it is not a problem on the campus where I now teach, there were too many times in the past when I cut short a conversation with a student in order to get back to my car before the meter ran out.

Now I am gearing up to revise my dissertation for publication. It was a mistake to let that project lapse; without publications, the current shape of my career is my only option, rather than a choice I freely make. Before I do that, however, I must complete a work that has engaged me for more than a decade: a book that poses questions from multiple academic disciplines and brings together aspects of landscape and ecoscape in ways that no single academic discipline would be likely to reward.

Today my career is effectively at the halfway point, although some would say that it has yet to begin and others, not as kindly, that it is long over. I remain hopeful that I have acted to correct my early mistakes; that the model for my career is appropriate for me (and maybe for others); and that I will, in time, achieve a sense of career fulfillment.

What would signal that fulfillment? Perhaps it would be a secure position -- a "job" -- that rewards my achievements for what they are, rather than for what they could have or should have been. More likely, it will be a personal conviction that I have indeed "had a job." And that I've done it well.