coldhearted scientist وداد

One difference between them — the ones who are not tenured or on the tenure track, and who are mad about it — and me is that they made enormous sacrifices to be in graduate school, in the form of moving across the country to some disagreeable place and taking out significant loans because inflation has eaten so much of the real value of a TA salary (my loans were much smaller than those now taken routinely, and I did not take them until the very end).

That is to say that they invested in the idea of really getting a job much sooner than I did. They had to. It is what you are doing when you make a move like that, as I knew later on, moving to Louisiana, away from the labor markets of large coastal cities, away from a state that pays into Social Security for its workers, away from safety nets and away from options. You are really rolling dice when you do something like that, and you have to bet on winning.

A similarity between them and me is that I, from my particular experiences, also know what it is to be pressured to stay in the game when you know, rationally, that the game is up. You are exhorted to keep trying by people who will not recognize that you no longer have enough open credit to get to the MLA, and told that unwillingness to move to a non-research university is a lack of commitment to research. People insist that concrete plans to do something else interesting, and more viable, is mere materialism.

Axé.