The Philosophers' Cocoon

By Jake Wright (University of Minnesota Rochester)

There’s an expectation, often unstated, that when one is weighing competing job offers where one is tenure-track and the other is not, the tenure-track job should win out every time.  When I was on the job market five years ago and faced exactly this choice, I chose the NTT job. 

When this came out in a comment thread here on the Cocoon the other day, some commenters, including Marcus, expressed a mixture of surprise and curiosity.  Why, they wondered, would someone choose an NTT job over the tenure track?  What factors might go into such a decision?  What pressures did I face, and how did I weigh competing considerations?  It was suggested that I might write a post discussing some of these questions, and thus, here I am.

Before diving into these questions, a bit of biography might be useful.  In 2014, after earning my Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, I accepted a job as a Lecturer—now Senior Lecturer—at the University of Minnesota Rochester, one of the newest and smallest public universities in the United States.  We have 700 phenomenal students, and this May will see our seventh graduating class.  Prior to entering graduate school at Mizzou, I earned a B.A. from Knox College, a small liberal arts college in Galesburg, IL, and worked for a few years in the so-called “real world.”  My goal, from the day I entered grad school, was to get a job at a college like Knox because of the effect it had on me as an undergraduate.  Fortunately, but as I understand it, unusually, my advisor and my teaching mentor at Mizzou both supported me wholeheartedly in this goal and worked with me to make it happen.

I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by saying that my experience on the job market was a horror show I don’t hope to repeat soon, despite my success.  I applied to seemingly perfect fits I never heard back from, had my hopes dashed after what I through were good interviews for exciting positions, and had an interview where the chair of the search committee literally spent the entire interview tuned out and checking their phone.  When all was said and done, I had two job offers that were genuine possibilities.  One was the job I now have at UMR.  The other was the holy grail itself: a tenure-track job at a small liberal arts college like Knox.

Before accepting the job I had literally spent five years aiming at, my wife and I decided to spend a weekend on campus, exploring the town and seeing how good the fit was for both of us.  She had the chance to meet faculty and spouses that were, to a person, wonderful.  The department, which I’d gotten the chance to know a bit during my on-campus, was filled with what my wife called “my people.”  But the more we explored, the less satisfied we became.  The town itself was in decline in that sort of wistful, “ever since the factory closed…” sort of way.  (This isn’t bucolic, Rockwellian imagery, by the way.  There was a literal factory that had closed about five years earlier, to the enormous detriment of the town.)  As a result, there weren’t any promising employment prospects for my wife, who has both a law degree and a masters in language teaching.  The town was not the kind of place we had envisioned raising a family.  The other philosopher on the faculty, the one I wouldn’t be replacing, described the school itself as “a stable place to look for another job.”

And yet, it was a tenure-track job.  It seemed to have everything that we’re told to value, from the status of the Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor titles to the eventual security of tenure.  No one at Mizzou was pressuring me one way or the other, and my advisor had a knack for helping me think through what I valued and whether what I was doing would help me achieve what I ultimately wanted.  But the social and personal pressure was enormous.  This was only exacerbated by the fact that it was my literal dream job.  Was there pressure to accept the tenure-track job?  You bet.  It took a tremendous amount of self-reflection and working through a lot of self-doubt to turn down that job, and it took some frank conversations for me to work out what to do.

Marcus asked what sorts of considerations I weighed when making my decision and how I weighed them.  Ultimately, I think two factors were decisive, one of which was somewhat unique to my situation and another that I think is more generalizable.  Both, at some level, come down to fit and recognizing what ultimately makes you happy.

The more unique factor was the nature of the job I was offered at UMR.  It was off the tenure track, but it was a dynamic role at a new university that was building things from the ground up.  UMR is built around faculty-driven pedagogical research that informs our decision making.  At a certain level, the choice was between a career doing things the same way at an established university and working to do something new, exciting, and (hopefully) better.  Temperamentally, I’m the sort of person who values the latter, and UMR’s size and nature allowed me to preserve the things I valued about the liberal arts experience.  In that sense, I had the rare opportunity to turn down my dream job because something better came along. 

The generalizable factor had to do with personal, rather than professional fit.  I should say explicitly that my professional fit at UMR is fantastic and I love the opportunity to work with my colleagues every day.  But the fit at the liberal arts college was also an excellent professional fit.  As my wife and I went through our weekend visit, though, the same nagging worry kept creeping up.  What if I get stuck here?  In my mind, if you’re asking that question, it’s not the right place.  You recognize, at some base level, that you will be unhappy and potentially unable to do anything about it.  Our professional lives are important; mine is a core component of my self-identity.  But we still have to live our all-things-considered lives.  We have to raise families, have fun on the weekends, and go shopping.  And if you’re in a place where you can’t do those things happily, you shouldn’t be in that place. 

At this point, I’ve been in my role for five years, and looking back, I feel just as confident in my decision.  There are gripes, sure, but many are the sort of workaday gripes that go along with any job—"so-and-so is acting like a jerk” or “I don’t know how I’ll get all of this grading done.”  There are also very real challenges to being NTT that I don’t want to gloss over, like when the outgoing president of our system responded to my question about what value he thought NTT faculty like myself contributed by saying, in front of the entire faculty, that the best thing about NTTs was how easy they were to fire when budgets got tight.  I make significantly less than tenure-track faculty at my institution, and I technically work on one-year, renewable contracts.  Tenure it ain’t.  But—ironically, since my role carries no research expectations—this job has absolutely revitalized my research; let me branch out into new things like leading the design of our first year seminar; and lets my family live in a place that is dynamic, growing, and fun.  I have goals for what I want to accomplish next, and that includes trying to find my way to the tenure track.  But if I get stuck here—doing work I enjoy in a city I love, with friends whose company I value, in a place where I can happily raise my kids—I can live with that.  To me, that’s a good life.

A student quipped to me the other day that no one should kill themselves over a job that could replace them in a week.  Given the state of the philosophy job market, something like this seems very wise.  Don’t take a job that will make you unhappy—whether it’s a tenure-track job or a you-should-feel-lucky-to-have-any-offers job—just because it’s a job.  We only have one chance to live a satisfying life, and philosophy’s not worth making yourself miserable over.  Do what will lead to a happy and fulfilling life, and figure the rest out as you go.

Jake Wright is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester’s Center for Learning Innovation.  He doesn’t have a SoundCloud or Patreon, but you can follow him on Twitter (@bcnjake) and read his work on PhilPeople.