Hi folks,
I apologize for being so negligent over these past few months in writing or contributing to this blog. It’s been an interesting few months here in Orangevale, and for all of us I suppose. What’s up with you all? Well, on my end, let’s see . . . I built a fence, I lost a little weight, I was diagnosed with a hernia (the same kind my grandpa had!) and will need a surgery for it soon, I taught several classes, I took two more, I got vaccinated, and I turned 40. Clementine and I traveled to St. Louis for the first time in over a year, which was nice (my dad hadn’t seen his granddaughter since late 2019), and I made my first trip to LA since the pandemic started. Like everyone else, the pandemic has affected me in ways that I’ve barely even begun to appreciate. It has been both disruptive and transformative, scary yet hopeful, stultifying yet revelatory. But now that my wife and I are vaccinated, we are looking forward to hopefully enjoying some semi-normalcy in the hopefully not-too-distant future.
The pandemic and the quarantines have helped guide and inspire me to make some changes, however, beginning with this: starting next fall, I will be studying for my Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy Counseling at California State University East Bay. After I finished my PhD, I swore up and down that I was done with graduate school. A terminal Degree is a terminal degree, after all. But I also told myself that if I ever did decide to go back to school, it would be to get a Masters in Counseling. That way I could maximize my opportunities in higher education administration, earn a degree that immediately qualifies me for a wide range of other jobs, and perhaps one day open my own private practice.
I promised myself (and my family) that if I were to get another gradate degree, the program would have to be nearby, convenient for working adults, affordable, and well-established. CSU East Bay checks all the boxes. It isn’t exactly down the street, but with classes meeting only two days a week I can commute via Amtrak and get some work done on the train. The program itself is well-regarded, so I feel like my cohort and I are in good hands going into the fall. And it is affordable, which means . . . no student loans! But even if I did have to take some out, the degree itself would cost considerably less than the new Subaru Forester I bought a few years (and have since paid off).
Regardless of the program’s good fit, I realize it is still a big leap. Yet it makes sense. On the one hand, although I was in no rush to do this before the Pandemic, the switch to online Teaching forced me to reevaluate my career trajectory. For instance, what I missed the most about teaching in a traditional setting was the impromptu, one-on-one meetings I often had with students who wanted to talk about school, history, and whatever else. Moreover, I had the creeping feeling that my teaching load in the future will continue to be, one way or another, increasingly virtual. While I am reasonably well-versed in online teaching (I’ve been teaching online for years), I am happier in a classroom. History is a narrative art, and I prefer telling my stories in person. Finally, I do not want to spend the rest of my professional career teaching courses as an adjunct. Like many other contingent faculty over the past year, I’ve come to terms with the stark realities of the tenure-track job market and the demands of tenure-line labor. Not only is it exceedingly unlikely that I will get a tenure line job, but it is even less likely that I will get one in a place that I like more than where we are in Northern California, or that I would come to enjoy working 60 hours a week for not much more money in exchange for job security. If I’m stagnating as an adjunct and no longer interested in finding a tenure-line position, then I need to reconsider my path.
On the other hand, I am genuinely excited about becoming a therapist. I’ve always wanted to hang my shingle someplace and be my own boss. I’ve always wanted to have a career in which I am able to help people, but with more impact and immediacy than what I have as an instructor. And I’ve always believed that I do a better job of helping people find their best versions of themselves than of constantly fighting the worst versions of people. That might be a controversial declaration these days, given our nation’s deep cultural, racial, economic, and political divides, but I know where my strengths lie. As a therapist and as a member of my community, I believe I can make a tangible difference helping people becoming more accepting of themselves, and therefore by extension helping them become more accepting of others.
Since it’s Memorial Day weekend, it’s also a good time to mention that one of the populations I’m most interested in working with is veterans. We have a lot of veterans in my community, many of whom do not seek treatment for one reason or another for PTSD, depression, and other issues. I’ve posted on this blog before about Give an Hour, an organization that gives veterans, disaster victims, and other at-risk persons with free counseling while simultaneously destigmatizing mental illness in the community. I’ve been happy to donate to this organization and write about it here, but I want to play a more active role in this important effort. Unlike my grandpa, dad, and brother, I never served in the military, but I hope that by doing this I will be able to offer a different kind of service to my community and country.
As I prepare to go back to school (again!) and start my 40s as a college student, I hesitate to frame this next step as a decision to “leave academia.” Like so many other contingent faculty across the country who have already left or who are in the process of leaving academia, I am wary of spending the rest of my career teaching without a true professional home, or teaching for less money and nearly no security compared to my colleagues who have the same credentials I do. However, I still do want to teach, albeit less. I want to be able to teach because I decide to teach a class or two, not because I have to teach four or five.
I also want to continue to write and create. I loved writing my first book, I am enjoying the process of writing the second one even more, and I eventually want to write enough books of my own to fill a small satchel bag. Again, though, I want to want to write. I don’t want to have to write, if that makes any sense. And if I could make those things that I like—big writing projects, small teaching loads—orbit around a new professional home, my private practice, well . . . then I’d be living the dream. In any case, it will be interesting to see how my new professional path informs my historical scholarship. Considering that I’ve already been writing quite a bit about paranoia (e.g., vigilante responses to horse thieves, collective freak-outs over prophecized Midwestern earthquakes, etc), I believe my new intellectual curiosities will remap, rather than erase, my preexisting ones in novel and hopefully interesting ways.
More to come in this space, both with respect to my research/writing and to other things happening in my world. But for now, thank you all for coming here and for reading my little blog, and take care of yourselves!
—Matt
