Similar to Isaac Deutscher’s “non-Jewish Jew, I am a non-academic academic. What this means is I’ve got all the goods to be an academic (PhD, a slew of peer reviewed articles, a monograph published with a university press, and plenty of teaching experience), but I chose not seek out a tenure track teaching position. It wasn’t, however, always this way. When I was in grad school, I was fairly certain I’d wind up in a university History or Jewish Studies department. But, you can’t always get what you want. But sometimes you get something you need and it might be better than what you thought you wanted.
I taught as “part-time faculty” at Rutgers for seven years. It was nothing short of great. I loved teaching, and my colleagues in the department were awesome. In addition, I took a lot of translation/research/journalism jobs to supplement a meager income. At one point I took a one-day-a-week job handling the fellowship program at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Having done most of my grad research there, I knew the place well as a locus for quirky Yiddish brilliance. After curating an exhibit there on a whim, I was offered full time work.
I knew at this point that the Rutgers job would never become tenure track and, not wanting to leave New York, the YIVO position seemed like a great opportunity. Not only would I get to work in the Yiddish belly of the beast, the most amazing archive of such material anywhere, but I could still have a foothold in the academic world, still publish articles and books, still teach, and still give conference papers. Not only do I work in an academic environment – YIVO’s location in the Center for Jewish History places it in the eye of the Jewish Studies storm, a place where virtually everyone connected to early modern and modern eventually wander through - and my colleagues, past and present, are consistently amazing and brilliant. Best of all, I no longer have to go to New Jersey.
As the humanities continue to contract, you may be wondering what it’s like to have a Ph.D. and not have that university teaching job you always dreamed of. There are much better things to worry about right now. If and when we bounce back from civilizational collapse, your research and writing abilities will leave you well placed for a lot of untapped opportunities in academic and humanities adjacent fields. If I have any advice, it’s to keep an open mind. After all, grading 200 intro level papers may not have been what you wanted in the first place.
