By the mid and late 1990s I was looking for ways to escape the ivory tower because by that time I had not only been cured of the romanticism I had about the academy, I also had little interest in teaching a bunch of teenagers and teenagers beyond the teen years who had little interest in scholarship and who instead saw college as a rite of passage one had to complete before getting ones monetary rewards in the post-college afterlife. One way I found to escape academia was by working. By 1995 I was, while simultaneously attending grad school, also working in one of those corporate bookstores that was a predecessor of those mega corporate bookstores where books were regarded as little more than a commodity. It was a nice diversion, a diversion that led to friendships if fleeting friendships, from the bureaucratic humdrum of graduate school, but it was not the work career that I envisioned for myself despite my continuing love for books. I simply could not see myself working in a corporation that saw books as something akin to Serta beds.
Therefore in 1997 I decided to move to Moscow leaving graduate school and the corporate book world behind, or so I hoped. Before I left the US, however, I decided, a month or so before the end of the academic term, to take my comprehensive exams just in case. I passed them despite having only a few weeks to study for them, despite misreading one of the questions on the exam, and despite taking time out from the exams to go to a lecture given by a noted scholar who hoped to teach at the university I was attending at the time. He did not get the position, rumour has it, because, sadly, he was considered too conservative in his politics.
When I returned to the United States from Europe in 1999 I was, of course, jobless and I needed to find a job so I could live. I had little interest in continuing my graduate school education for the reasons I noted earlier and because, frankly, I always got more from books than from graduate school. As an introvert and secular Calvinist (thanks particularly to the Shoah) whose goal in life was to limit my interaction with other humans as much as possible I found the books I chose to read gave me a better education in what I was interested in—my interests were more eclectic and multi-disciplinary that graduate school allowed—than did graduate school seminars and all without the routine and formulaic interactions even graduate school is full of.
Fortunately, I had other options. A friend suggested that I go to work at the place she worked, the Encyclopedia of New York State. The Encyclopedia, a publishing project of the Syracuse University Press, had set up shop in the Culture Education Center in the capital complex in Albany where I lived thanks to the support the project got from New York state. So I applied for a job as an editor with the Encyclopedia. After some hesitation—the lead editor on the project did not like the clothes I wore to my interview as they weren’t apparently professional enough (I had just come from working at a dirty video store before the interview and did not wear “professional” clothes to that job for obvious reasons)—hired me as one of the editors for the project. I was now responsible for finding contributors to write for the religious, ethnic, and cultural components of the project, which I did.
I liked working for the Encyclpedia for the most part. I was doing something related to books which I loved. Like any workplace the Encyclopedia had its plusses and it had its minuses. Since I knew and liked several of the other editors working on the project and I enjoyed finding contributors to the parts of the project I was working on it had more of the plusses than the minuses. The big problem with the position, however, was the fact that it was freelance gig (one that required filing taxes as an independent rather than as an employee of Syracuse University Press and that was a pain) rather than a career. So, when an acquisitions editor position opened up at the State University of New York Press in Albany 2000 I applied for it and after a couple of interviews got it.
I liked working at SUNY Press quite a lot. I acquired books in the social sciences, including a few that I was quite proud of. One doesn’t always have much choice in acquiring books at a press that doesn’t have the prestige and hence acqusitions options of an Oxford University Press or a University of Chicago Press, for example, and I had to, as part of my job contract, acquire 24 books a year. On the plus side, and something else required of me by my job contact, I was required to continue a publication plan that had been put into operation by my predecessor. I had to establish a publication programme in New York State Studies at the Press. And while I was not the initiating editor of the Press’s acquisitions in that area, I helped create the first logo for the series, saw the first book in the series go into publication, and helped get the series rolling, all of which I was quite proud of. I was also proud of the fact that my first performance review was very positive, something that allayed any fear I might have had about succeeding as an acquisitions editor in the academic publishing world.
I now envisioned my work life as one revolving around a publishing career. I did not envision it as starting and ending at SUNY Press, however. So, when an acquisitions position in history came open at the more prestigious University of Illinois Press in 2001 I applied for it. I really wanted the job given the fact that the University of Illinois Press was one of the leaders in academic publications in history, the fact that it had one of the most prestigious if not the most prestigious Mormon Studies publication programmes in the United States and the world, the fact that I adored college towns, and the fact that I would be able to, I was told, should I be offered the job and take it, be able to take over the Mormon Studies list after the current editor of Mormon Studies retired given my expertise in Mormon Studies and the relationships I had developed with scholars in Mormon Studies. So when I was offered the job I took it.
The problem was that when I was offered the history acquisitions position at the University of Illinois Press—I was apparently not the first choice for the position given my limited experience in publishing—I was told by the editor-in-chief that the director preferred that I cut my shoulder length hair given the “conservative” nature of the history profession. This request, one which I did understand, had a sobering impact on my decision to go to the University of Illinois Press as I found the request rather petty (as did the editor-in-chief). The request to cut my hair sucked all of the joy I got from being offered the position at the University of Illinois Press and took all the romance I had about the Press and what I might do at the Press out of that job opportunity. Another thing, an ultimately somewhat petty thing, that turned me off about working for the University of Illinois Press, was the fact that there were limited Indian cuisine restaurant options in Champaign-Urbana at the time. So when SUNY Press matched what the University of Illinois Press offered me in terms of salary I decided to stay in Albany where there were several excellent Indian food restaurants one could eat at.
In retrospect—there is nothing like Monday morning quarterbacking to make one see things in a different and more realistic perspective—it was the wrong decision. When 9/11 brought the inevitable economic bust that is so common in the neo-liberal American economy I, being one of the last hired was one of the first fired. As I was sent hurtling out the door I, of course, got the typical corporate speak from the Press that when the economy recovered I would probably, possibly, be rehired. By that time, however, my feelings toward the press were hardly positive and I did not see myself as coming back to the Press after the way I was treated. Additionally, I was not fully convinced by the rhetoric of a future job opportunity at the Press, a hypothesis confirmed when I was not rehired after applying on a couple of occasions for positions at the Press.
After being made redundant I, of course, went on unemployment. I involved myself with the Communication Workers of America who were trying to unionise graduate student researchers at the University at Albany. I had a few publishing job interviews including one at Greenwood Press and one at the University of Alabama Press, where I was apparently choice number two for the acquisitions position. No cigar was forthcoming, however. Eventually I moved back to Texas for a couple of years but left the retail dead end job I had in Austin to return to Albany to adjunct in History and later in Communications Studies and Sociology. With few options and despite my love-hate relationship with academia and with teaching, I decided to finish my Ph.D writing a dissertation of Mormon Studies which was later published in much revised form as a book. After sixteen years of teaching I retired with a small pension from New York state which, along with Medicare, enabled me to squeak by month to month until, as is the case at the moment, my financial situation was tested by increasing health problems and increasing health costs in an America with the worst health care insurance system in the core nation world.
And so it goes in the brave new postmodern world...
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