If Dad Could See Me Now

Among the many things I did that drove my father to distraction, one of the worst was my decision to major in history.

At one level, it was if I had decided to become a ditch-digger.

At another, it was as if I had slapped him in the face as hard as I possibly could.

Like many parents, my father assumed that a history degree had little market value. His actual advice to me was, “Major in what you want, but minor in computer science.” He had no faith that I could grasp the brass ring of a career as a college professor. So he did what he could to persuade me to be at least a little bit practical, and learn something in college that might yield a job with some earning potential.

Thus for the ditch-digger analogy. But what of the slap in the face?

My father was the first in his family to graduate from college. He did so on the GI Bill, after his discharge from the Navy, and he did it in only three years. He had focus and he also had a passion for learning—a passion that after graduation he put to work teaching English in a small North Carolina high school. (His wife taught Home Economics just down the hall.)

My father liked teaching. He was good at it. And he could have made a career of teaching except for one thing.

He had a firstborn son who was sickly, and the teaching job wasn’t enough to pay the doctor bills.

He needed a better paying job and he needed it fast. He went to an employment agency. It transpired that that there was a need for something called an underwriter at the Raleigh branch of Nationwide Insurance Company, and because he was a responsible man he did the responsible thing and flung away his dream of being a teacher in order to become a white collar drone, toiling at a job for which he felt no sense of calling because he had an infant son—me—whose welfare depended on it.

The conclusion my father drew from this experience is that when you’re young, you can have dreams, but when you grow up, those dreams have to die.

Nationwide, it turned out, was not a bad fate for my father. He found ways to enjoy the work and within a few years he was a promising mid-level manager. But from what I could see, my father worked 50 weeks a year doing something for which he felt no passion in order to spend 2 weeks a year indulging his passion for catching largemouth bass.

The conclusion I drew from my father’s experience was that you figure out something you really like to do and then you figure out a way to make money doing it.

So when I matriculated at Ohio State in 1977 and announced my major, airily dismissing my father’s concerns for my future financial well-being, it was my way of saying that I thought my father had made the wrong choice concerning one of the most consequential decisions of his life. And we both knew it.

My father lived long enough to see me graduate from Ohio State with a so-so undergraduate GPA, to get a master’s degree from Kings College London (which I paid for out of my earnings from a modest job as well as the revenue from a modest inheritance), and to return to Columbus, where I spent almost a full year before I secured any job at all—and the one I did secure paid a pittance.

My father lived long enough to see me hospitalized for a manic episode and to see that job evaporate because my employer fired me the moment he learned I had a mental illness.

My father lived long enough to see me emerge from the hospital and take a minimum wage job at a Burger King just off the OSU campus.

My father lived long enough to see me accepted into the history graduate program at Ohio State, but without a teaching associateship, and long enough to see my new fiancée pay my tuition with her credit card.

My father lived long enough to see me do well enough during my first year that for my second year the history department awarded me a teaching associateship. He lived long enough to see me receive a summer internship at RAND Corporation. (His only comment, when I called to tell him that I got the internship, was to ask how much it paid. I told him the summer salary, he multiplied it by four to see what it would be if it were an annual salary, and grudgingly conceded that it was close to a respectable wage.)

My father lived long enough to see me go through my second year as a PhD student and he lived long enough to see me marry my fiancée, an outcome that gave him needed assurance that there would be someone in my life capable of taking care of me financially when I inevitably came to nothing.

He did not live long enough to see me compete successfully for the position which I now hold, he did not live long enough see me become the first OSU history professor to be hired directly out of its graduate program, and he did not live long enough to see me sign my contract as a new assistant professor, which I did while seated at a table in the Burger King where I had briefly held that post-hospitalization minimum wage job.

No: three years before that event, my father died of lung cancer. He was only 54.

Thus my father did not live to see me prove to him that I was right: that it was indeed possible to choose something you loved doing and then figure out a way to make a living doing it.

Thus my father did not live to see me prove to him that he was wrong: that the dreams of your youth can survive into adulthood.

And there was one more thing my father did not live to see. He did not live to see me essentially break faith with the pact I made with myself when I was young. He did not live to see me lose track of what I loved in favor of doing something that I didn’t love—or rather, trying but failing, year upon year, to do something I didn’t love.

Well, I’m rediscovering what I love to do. My problem is that it isn’t what my department thinks I should love to do.

And what is that thing I love? You’re looking at it right now.

But here’s the thing.

I teach at a Tier 1 research institution. Historians at such institutions get paid, in effect, to publish major archivally-based monographs of original scholarship.

They may also do what I am doing now. As an example I give you the superb young historian Heather Richardson. Heather currently has a Facebook page, “Heather Cox Richardson,” which has 139,000 subscribers. (I have less than 160). Since the start of the Ukraine scandal she has pumped out, night after night, first rate analyses of the developments for that day. Each of these nightly installments is shared, on average, about 4,000 times, meaning that 4,000 readers do what I do each night and place her updates on our personal Facebook walls, so that our FB friends can read them.

But Heather is also the author of five books. Her sixth, entitled How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for America is forthcoming in March from Oxford University Press. (Last night she completed the index to the book before completing her daily summary of the impeachment.) Put simply, she excels at the traditional role for a historian at a top research institution.

Heather and I are both engaged in a conceptual project known as “public engagement.” Within academe public engagement is recognized as a legitimate professional activity. It counts for something. There’s a space on my annual activity report where I can inform my department of what I have done during the year by way of public engagement.

So in writing my posts about the rise of right wing talk radio, and discussing diversity in the context of right wing media, and so on, I am doing my job (along with other things like teaching and service, of course).

But what if I decide that * this * is what gets me up in the morning, that this is what fires my passion, that this is what is restoring a too long absent sense of meaning and purpose?

What if I decide that my department can demand the elusive “promotion book” all it wants, but that I don’t want to do the promotion book: I want instead to do something I love to do and get paid to do it?

What if I decide to make this my professional main effort? I increasingly think I want to. Everything in me is telling me that I am finding my way back to a love of my work such as I have not experienced in years.

And there is this: Is it a coincidence that my Student Evaluations of Instruction for this semester—the university’s principal measurement of my effectiveness as a teacher—are stronger this semester than they have been in years?

Because it does seem to me that the sense of personal fulfillment I am somehow getting from this project has already had positive spillover effects in other areas of my professional (and personal) life.

So will I decide to say in effect, fuck that promotion book, and then throw my energies into this fledgling venture? I don’t know.

Could I do it and get away with it? Absolutely. I have tenure. Tenure is a many-splendored thing.

But would it be a “transgression,” as we academics like to call such things, if I did?

You damn sure better believe it.

So if I did this, I’d have to approach it with the same totality of intellectual commitment I would bring to a more conventional project.

And you better believe that if I actually took such a step, the quality and the outcome had better be pretty damn impressive. Otherwise this would simply be an inventive way to achieve professional self-immolation.

It’s too bad my father is 30 years in his grave. I’d be curious to know what he would make of this.