For the past four years I had a 5-minute drive to my office, before that, a 10-minute walk. Not since a summer job after freshman year have I had to commute on mass transit. Now, having moved to a new city in a new state and started a new job at which I’ve been working since mid-July, I commute about one hour by train each way to an urban campus. After the initial shock and fatigue of the early morning schedule and the rush hour crowds on the way back, I’m adjusting to the new rhythms of my 9 to 5 day. (This is what I get for going into academic administration . . . )
I suppose I could have predicted the annoyances of crowded trains, late trains, missed trains, slow trains, stalled trains, rumbling trains, jerky trains, loud trains, and quiet trains in which one person is yakking loudly on a cell phone. What I didn’t expect are the array of smells that accompany all these trains. Maybe because I’m such a visual person, I hadn’t factored in the other sensory stimuli of public transportation.
Once I’d tired of looking out at the passing landscape, I started reading The New Yorker pretty much from cover to cover every week, which meant that I could limit my visual field and shut out the gazes of other eyes, letting my mind get absorbed in the details of the typical New Yorker piece that goes on just a little too long. I thought a little reading material was enough of a distraction, but then my husband surprised me with an iPod shuffle, which meant that I could remove myself from my immediate aural environment too just by turning up the volume, the irritating chatter of fellow passengers transformed into just more background noise.
But, short of wearing a gas mask or carrying a scented hanky under my nose (how Victorian!—but perhaps worth considering), there’s no way to shut out the smells that waft from all directions. The unmistakable stench of human urine lurks in corners, both on and off the train. Once, the train doors opened and let in a warm, humid puff of pissy air. The air-conditioned air gets stale quickly in the crowded afternoon trains, the faint scents of sweat and cigarettes mingling with various sprays and lotions, all of it obliterated by the occasional silent fart that catches me off guard. The intrusion of these smells brings me back instantly to the present moment, makes it impossible to forget that I’m among other bodies; the idea of personal space is no match for all those vibrating molecules bumping up against me.
One weekend, when I needed to be at an all-day orientation I was helping to run, I drove into the city instead of taking the train. About 15 minutes into the drive, I wondered why I was in such a good mood when I had to work on a Saturday, but then the quiet inside my car hit me like a soft pillow of feathers. I reached over for my coffee mug and drank in the sereneness of it all—the empty road, the car’s hum, the cushioned seat into which I sank a little deeper, and the neutral, odorless air. I’ve always enjoyed driving, but on that day I nearly yelped with relief and gratitude for the respite from the usual sensory overload. If parking downtown were cheaper and traffic weren’t a problem, I’d drive in every day, I must admit. It’s true: after several years of suburban living, I’ve become soft and unfit for urban life. Or it could be that I’ve never been cut out for it. Recently, I met a young faculty member who said he’d moved downtown from a quieter neighborhood to the north, because he liked the hustle and bustle. The idea held no appeal, though at one time, I would have claimed I was a city girl. I live in an even quieter neighborhood in a city smaller than the one I commute to, and I’m so happy for the abundant trees that line the streets.
I realize that it is a great privilege to be living where I am, that all the trees are a function of the socio-economic advantages attached to my zip code, and that I’m fortunate even to have the option of driving to work and paying too much for parking. But having to adjust to the reality of my commute ultimately has less to do with traversing the urban-concrete/suburban-green divide, and more to do with giving up one version of a university life. Though I’m still in higher education, I no longer work on an idyllic campus close to home on a flexible schedule that keeps me relatively removed from the rest of the working world. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to that model of work until it was gone, or how much trees figured into my mental image of that model. The commute, with its noise and odors and waiting, is part and parcel of my ongoing attempts to fashion a life in academe on different terms. Inevitably, this has entailed some compromises.
I think it depends on the type of public transit. I've had experience riding subways and transit trains to work in the past. Personally, transit trains are more comfortable. Subways are always a toss up. Noise and odor aside, just the general crowdedness bothers me on the subway. Transit trains in my area are more comfortable and it is almost a guarantee that I can get a seat from where I get on.
As I start my career, I'm faced with commuting to work as well. Where I'm relocating to is relatively far away from where I'll be working, so driving is a must. Since my job will be in a relatively remote town away from Toronto, parking will be free. Any smell I will encounter will be from road work or road kill. A quick flick of the air conditioner should cure all problems. =)
One of the things that strikes me reading this is the extent to which everyone's relationship to academia is an experience of compromise. Some compromises slighter or more embittering than others, of course, but I've never met anyone who, when asked about their academic career responds: Awesome! Everything I'd hoped, and more!
Which is not to say Boo Hoo for academics, but just to point out that they enter into something like a vocation, drawn by something more or less like an ideal, even if it is a little despite themselves. Paving roads might make for a disappointing life for some who do that for a living, but probably few get into that line of work because of a passion for road-paving.
To drift well beyond the immediate setting of your reflections: I think this is broadly definitive of America's relationship to colleges and universities generally. Discourse about academia (both within and without) is so often characterized by a tone disappointment, if not outraged betrayal. What's interesting to me about this is the collective sense --common despite so many other differences of political orientation, generation, etc.-- that we're all expecting more from our universities than they are giving us. Specifically, these aspirations and frustrations often involve an emotionally-charged relationship to work: from job-training to those lazy, elbow-batched snobs people love to hate, so much of the energy churned up around academia has to do with what kind of work should be done and by whom. People get angry about overpaid, spoiled athletes and actors, but few question the legitimacy of sports or movies as parts of our culture.
Among most people I know: their parents wanted them to do something more practical than humanities (Danger, danger --you're going to suffer!); then came the mixed feelings about graduate school (can't you get a job?); then the incomprehension about the job market (don't you have a real job yet?), and then finally the punch-line: you're so lucky you don't have to work in a real job!
All of which is to say --without wanting to make “us” seem too important or interesting-- that we find ourselves living out the contradictions of this relationship to work, mostly trying to make peace with those angry ideals.
Yes, academia seems to hold out the promise of some powerful ideals about work and the satisfactions to be derived from it. And then reality quickly settles in and demands compromises. I guess the question is, what makes those of us who stay in academia stay? What is it that we're willing to compromise for? Because, obviously, we know plenty of people who left at various stages of the process, whether out of impatience, frustration, bitterness, or boredom, or the desire for other ideals. And there are many ways of staying in academia. But your comments made me wonder what is it about the work in an academic context, however compromised and contradictory, that keeps us in it? Or maybe it's more accurate to ask, is there a relationship to work that's available in academia and not elsewhere, or is that the fantasy we've bought into?
Apologies for the social sciencey tone here, but one way to find out would be to basically test the following:
1. How much less money do people in job X, who are perfectly capable of doing comparable job Y, make than people who are doing job Y.
-- Here you could compare salaries for, say, lawyers and professors, or for English professors and business school professors, and basically say, the non-financial compensations of the less well-paid job are worth approximately $20,000 a year, or whatever it is.
But of course the job of a professor is very different than that of a lawyer. Perhaps more interesting would be to compare the starting salary of an administrative assistant in a university position to the starting salary of an administrative assistant in a non-university position. Or a maintenance worker. It might turn out that there is a benefit in working for a university/college that makes people willing to work there for less money than they could make in business. One name of that benefit could be “prestige,” though others (“enjoying being around young people”; “feeling like one is part of a socially valuable enterprise”; “feeling a form of identification with an employer not defined by purely corporate values, or connected to modes of regional, local, or state being (perhaps via athletic teams) that are in and of themselves valued).”
SLK asks, “is there a relationship to work that's available in academia and not elsewhere, or is that the fantasy we've bought into?”
I think it depends a lot on whether you're working a 9 to 5 job, what kind of research/teaching load you have, and/or whether your job is white or blue collar. Not all academic jobs are “academic” in the same way, though as I suggest above it may be that there are compensations even for totally identical jobs (a maintenance worker or admin assistant) that make academic jobs desireable.
If you're taking about the 2/2 load professoriate, then it's another question, in which the entire structure of academic time (including “vacations”) needs to come into the picture.
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