American male careers
I’ve been writing lots of columns recently, an outpouring of words that’s been glorious procrastination for me. There’s been one column though that I’ve been scared to write, scared to admit I have such thoughts, scared of what all the feminists friends of mine might say, scared of becoming too personal in these pages and losing my professional distance. I’ve been working through a confusing jumble of thoughts about my job and career recently, and I’m just now realizing how much an odd version of masculinity haunts my thoughts. I finished my Ph.D. in Ecology this past spring, and I left Duke fresh-faced and idealistic and generally optimistic about my future. I also left Duke madly in love with my fiancée, and determined to not be one of those bicoastal academic couples.
So it was a rude shock to go through to process of jointly searching for jobs, overcoming what academics cutely call “the two-body problem.” In the end my fiancée got a job at Harvard, which trumped all my offers- it’s Harvard, for heaven’s sake! - and so I followed her up here. While I was able to swing quite a cool 1-year post-doc out at Harvard Forest, I have to admit that some part of me, some male part of me, was ashamed to be following anyone professionally. I think men judge each other almost exclusively by our careers, at least all too often. I know it was hard to have colleagues and friends joke about me riding someone else’s coattails, when I’d always considered myself a decent scholar in my own right.
All of which isn’t to say I’m not happy with my current post- I am. The ecologists I’ve gotten to work with here have a deep understanding of history and how it shapes ecology, and perhaps because of that focus my institution has a patience that is rare among ecological institutions, methodically stalking knowledge. Now that my stretch here is ending, I’m beginning to realize how good this place has been for my intellectual growth, how lucky I am to be a citizen of this great country with a roof over my head and some health insurance. “You don’t know you got till it’s gone,” I guess…
I lie awake at night sometimes. When I was younger I never thought I would do this, I thought insomnia and fear were something for sitcom characters, and yet now I lie awake, thinking, “what now?” I have a burning desire to unravel some more of nature’s mysteries, as an ecologist, and to find a small role for myself moving the world toward that illusive goal of sustainable development and global justice. And yet I have a deep desire for love, for not letting my drive for a career lead me miles apart from my lover. Equally, I don’t want to be that kind of person, hustling and bustling and cutting corners in my emotional life, “measuring life out with coffee spoons.” And all these unknowns lead me back to broader unknowns. Where is the moral place for an ecologist that wants to do good? How ironic that after four years of graduate school I know less than when I started about the big questions.
