Our Journey, Day 106

Reassessing "journey"

White dot trail on Mt. Monadnock

I had a talk with a couple of people at the system office yesterday, about helping them develop a Z-Degree Transfer Pathway to make zero-textbook-cost Bachelor’s Degrees available to Minnesota students. Before I talked with them, I had been warned that the way the system office seems to work is they can only hire faculty on a "borrowing" basis, where they contract for part of a professor's time. This seems to actually be the case. I’ll be working half-time in the spring for the system; they’re basically “buying” half of my time from BSU. But it’s not clear there’s a path from that to a full-time job. There really aren’t a lot of full-time jobs at the system office, it turns out. This is probably a good idea, in terms of minimizing the growth of a central bureaucracy. But right now it’s a bit inconvenient for me!

One upshot of that reality is to make this type of work very affordable for the system office. Given the compensation levels in Higher Ed, it’s not surprising that the cheapest way to do anything is probably with faculty. The system’s "Director" positions pay upwards of $90k. They can get me to work half-time for a third of that. So why would they want to hire me as a director? And from their perspective, if not me, there are plenty of other faculty who might be able to do something like what I can do and would be happy to give it a try. Not necessarily quite as well, but from their perspective, probably well enough.

While my instinct is to be offended by this, I have to remind myself "it isn't personal, it's strictly business." But also, as I'm acknowledging that, it should be business for me too. As much as I like the people at the system office, and hope they succeed, and would enjoy helping them, another opportunity for which I’ve been invited to interview may end up offering a much better package for a couple of years. But even that would be only a 2-year gig and would require a (temporary) relocation. Then there are a number of History Professor gigs, which appear to be tenure-track. But so was the job I’m in right now. Nothing is dependable or long-term, anymore.

I think this is the really core lesson in all of this, and it's a hard one. There is really no "happy ending" in the old fashioned sense. It was probably unwise for me to think of this as a “journey” through a valley toward a new peak in the distance. People say the journey should be the reward. But I'm not that sure most of them mean that, in their bones. Now you may be wondering whether it’s dumb of me to be acknowledging all this in a blog where those people I talked to yesterday might see it? Actually, I think it’s probably better for everyone if we’re just up front about this type of thing and don’t try to BS each other. I think they were pretty straight with me yesterday and I think I was as well. Seems like that’s the way to be, so people can remain on good terms even if things don’t work out.

It would probably be a good idea to try to develop an operating system for this new reality. What types of actions and attitudes are positive or adaptive in a world where we're not reaching the destination, but always on the move. Dealing with uncertainty and insecurity. What type of person should I try to be? How should I treat fellow journeyers when I meet them on the road? How cautiously? How generously?

It's funny that I'm reminded of Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything when I think about this. Maybe this, at the end of the day, is the relevance of anarchism.