New York Diary

Something I Didn't Consider in College

I find, as I become more firmly ensconced in the working world, that I become more boring as well. This seems to me a shame, but also not entirely a bad thing: being boring is not the same as being bored, after all, and I suspect that boringness and dependability go hand-in-hand in this world of ours. A student--of the humanities or liberal arts, at least--is expected to spend her time reading interesting things and commenting upon them all day long. She has the summers off to travel, or to work in one of many short-term jobs (each short enough to remain perpetually new and interesting), or to spend time with friends who are, one hopes, prolifically interesting when at their leisure. She can stay up late at night to talk about the meaning of life, and if she is tired in the morning, she can go to class groggy or skip class altogether.

Others get paid to lead interesting lives: the travel writer, I suspect, must work very hard to make her life uninteresting.

But the tradeoff is very real. The travel writer doesn't precisely have a home (even if she has a house), doesn't have a dependable income, doesn't have a family (or else doesn't see them very often, or else has to figure out how to move frequently with spouse and children in tow). In being predictable, one is also predictably available; I may go to work every day from 9 til whenever, and I may go to class once a week for my own perpetual sanity, and I may see the same people at each place day in and day out (and this may indeed be relatively boring)--but at least my work friends and my classmates and my bosses all know how to find me. My buddies know I'm in the city, and I will be next month, and they can plan on that. My landlord knows where my rent will come from. I know, roughly, whether or not I'll have time to go see a show on a Monday night in three weeks.

It's a boring, plodding kind of life, but it is still a good life. One needn't dislike what one boringly does.

Here, however, is an insight: professordom is an anomaly. Convincing somebody to pay you a regular, dependable salary for work that is discrete (a paper here, a new discovery there, a 9 month pedagogical period) seems to me reasonably unusual. It is made more remarkable by an expectation that one will read and investigate precisely that which is thought-provoking; indeed, this is often considered the most important part of the job. And this all seems truly fantastic when one considers that the professor does all of this in a context in which it is considered necessary to take extended periods time off (summers, sabbaticals) in order to do or discover or create explicitly interesting things. Indeed, the university professor is largely being paid to be perpetually exciting or noteworthy; if her ideas, lectures, and papers present nothing new and pique no one's interest, she has not done her job well.

There may be myriad other jobs that successfully combine stability and excitement (whether that excitement be merely intellectual or physical and bodily as well); Anderson Cooper undoubtedly has one of them, as does Derek Jeter. The insight is not therefore that professors have the best jobs in the world, but merely that such professions do exist, and are popularly attainable. Though certainly it has never before occurred to me that my fascinating history prof was as much a product of his lifestyle as a driving force behind it...

posted by Skay @ 6:55 PM