Professor in the Peace Corps

This is a copy of an article I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education when I origianlly joined the Peace Corps. I am thinking of doing another one as a follow up:


Professor in the Peace Corps
By Peter J. Vernezze
First Person
Personal experiences on the job market
Halfway through my academic journey, I lost my way. At least I think it was halfway through; by that point, I had quit keeping track.
I had been at my college for about 15 years, reaching the rank of associate professor of philosophy. I figured I had roughly the same number of years left until retirement. At some point, I can't say exactly when, the wheels started to come off.
To be sure, there were a few personal events that contributed to the situation, but I won't get into those details here. The simple fact was that after a decade and a half I had become bored with my job.
Part of the problem, no doubt, was a function of my institution -- a teaching-focused university with no philosophy major. That meant I invariably taught a heavy load of lower-division courses, repeating the same few every year. Perhaps if I had been given a reasonably varied teaching schedule, worked with philosophy majors, or taught more upper-division courses, things might have been different. Perhaps not.
Because, in truth, I have never been very comfortable with teaching. A natural introvert, I am much more at home in the library than in the lecture hall and find the classroom more exhausting than rewarding.
My issues with teaching might have resolved themselves if I had been able to immerse myself in research. But a heavy course load leaves little time for writing articles and books. And the truth of the matter is that I have faint interest in combing over voluminous amounts of secondary material and familiarizing myself with the minutiae of interpretative strategy, both of which are necessary to get published in my profession.
Actually, what troubles me is not the research itself but the type of writing you have to produce to flourish in academe. Regardless of the discipline, the process involved in writing an article for a refereed journal is the same: You carve out some position of your own while duly reporting and refuting all previous views. So in my attempts to come up with something quasi-original to say, I invariably wound up dealing not with the great thinkers I loved but with what successions of scholars have had to say about those thinkers in obscure footnote-laden articles of interest to no more than a handful of people.
I soon realized I possessed neither the desire nor the ability to excel at that undertaking, although I did enough to get tenure. (Should I have realized all of this before pursuing a job in academe? All I can say in my defense is that my thinking on this issue has evolved since receiving my doctorate.)
Given those conditions, it is amazing that things went on as long as they did. But the life of a tenured college professor is a good gig, and I wasn't ready to give it up. Still, I couldn't continue, either.
My options at that point seemed limited. One possibility was to try for a job at another university. But with an undistinguished publication record, that was not likely to happen. Besides, my suspicion was that if I was bored teaching at one university, I would be bored teaching at another.
That meant a career change might be in order. But it was getting rather late in the game to be contemplating such a drastic move, which would probably require going back to school and starting over again at a time when most of my colleagues would have one eye on retirement. I doubted whether I had the energy for such an undertaking.
Even now, I am not sure when the idea of the Peace Corps entered into the equation. Of course I knew about the organization and had actually looked into applying at one point in my distant past. And when the idea arose in my mind again, I did not see how joining that organization would resolve anything. If I was unemployable outside of my tenured position, giving it up to spend two years overseas would just exacerbate things, leaving me to start from scratch even later in life.
Nonetheless, I went ahead and filled out the application, which was available online, and thought no more about it until I received a message from a recruiter asking to set up an interview. I still don't think I saw the Peace Corps as a viable option even after I received word that my application had been accepted.
But when the call came to start discussing possible overseas assignments, it was clearly time to contemplate what my life would be like if I actually went through with this.
The image that came to mind was Wile E. Coyote going over a cliff in mad pursuit of the elusive roadrunner, holding up a "help" sign in a last-minute act of desperation. In short, I would be abandoning everything I had spent half my life working toward in order to take up a two-year volunteer position from which I would return unemployed and almost certainly unemployable.
It was completely irrational, and wasn't I a philosopher, devoted to reason? Well, I wasn't a very good philosopher, so maybe I wasn't that rational.
But I still had enough of my reasoning faculty left to realize that there was an alternative between remaining desperately where I was and throwing everything away: I could petition the university for a two-year leave of absence. It seemed like a half-measure, or perhaps it was the middle way. In any case, it was a long shot. But it was worth a try.
Emphasizing my 15 years of service to the university and the reputation of the Peace Corps, I pitched the idea to my shocked but somewhat sympathetic department head.
In the meantime, I discussed possible postings with my Peace Corps recruiter. Although you don't get to choose which country you will work in, you can request a geographical location -- Central Asia, the Caribbean, East Africa, for example -- that coordinates with a particular job. You then make a list of your top three assignments and the Peace Corps tries to offer you one of them.
Given that it was weariness with teaching that started the whole process, there was more than a little irony in my ultimately being offered an assignment teaching English in China. But what the hell, I thought. My real desire was to be of use somewhere, and if that was where the Peace Corps thought I would be of most use, that is where I would go.
Like the servant in the story who sees death in a marketplace in Bagdad and flees to Samara, only to learn that death had, in fact, been scheduled to meet him in Samara, perhaps there was no way to avoid this teaching thing.
My leave was approved. Last July I began 10 weeks of training with the Peace Corps, and in September I was assigned to Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu. So, after nearly a year in China, how are things going?"
I needed to walk a different path than the one I had been walking for the past 15 years, which had become a rut. Volunteering for the Peace Corps has allowed me to do that. Yes, I am still in the classroom, but teaching Chinese students to speak English is such a different activity from teaching philosophy as to almost qualify as another line of work. Lectures are out, as are any discussions that rely on words of more than two syllables; games and group work are in.
Everything else -- from immersing myself in a completely foreign culture where even a trip to the grocery store is an adventure to being forced to exist on a volunteer's stipend -- is an attempt to make it clear to me that I am not in Kansas (or rather, Utah) anymore living the comfortable and familiar life of an academic.
Most of all, I have tried to quiet my mind. I don't know how to explain that except to say that the philosophical mind is a busy, analytic one and that, as a result, I have tried to avoid all activities that remotely resemble logical analysis. In doing so, it strikes me that I am trying to bring my being back into balance and that Chinese culture is particularly suited to that sort of activity.
I am not sure what will happen when these two years are up. Situations don't magically resolve themselves, and there is no reason to think the same issues that troubled me before won't reappear when I return.
But sometimes you need to get some distance on an issue in order to see it more clearly. I hope that is what is going on here. In any case, I tell myself there have been two-year stints of my academic career that I cannot now even vaguely recall. I'm pretty sure this won't be one of those.