Luke Peterson
In the evenings, between grading and writing lectures, between answering student emails and planning for next semester, I write a journal to my four-year-old son. I talk to him about all of the things he likes to do, the games he likes to play, the books he likes to read. I tell him about his preschool, which he loves, about his teachers and friends, and about his favourite toys strewn about our cozy home, surely the first one he will be able to remember in the years to come. The instability of our lives, however, leaves our family unable to plan for his future.
Being a non-tenured faculty in the American university system means existing in perpetual liminality. It means being on the move, everywhere and all the time. It means renting, not owning, guessing about the future, and living without a net. Worse yet, it means putting your family though all of that uncertainty right alongside you. It means constant, unending, deeply ingrained stress. It means near obsessive levels of seeking on job sites offering potential opportunities in far-flung locales. In means callous and indefinite silence from Search Committees month after month.
But the most difficult thing to accept through this lonely and occasionally humiliating process is the fact that I am, by all outward indicators, a highly successful young professor in my field. I excel as a teacher; I am an active writer. I work hard every day to make sure that my classroom is a challenging, open, and engaging environment.
But, despite all of my successes, I do not have a permanent place at the table at the University of Pittsburgh.
Years from now, I will print and bind my journal to my son. I will give it to him as a gift: a gift of memory. Together he and I will remember our time in Pittsburgh, our cozy home, and the early imaginings of his young life, flowering as it did in the din of the Steel City.
And I have no idea where we will be on that day.
--Luke Peterson, OSHER
Being a non-tenured faculty in the American university system means existing in perpetual liminality. It means being on the move, everywhere and all the time. It means renting, not owning, guessing about the future, and living without a net. Worse yet, it means putting your family though all of that uncertainty right alongside you. It means constant, unending, deeply ingrained stress. It means near obsessive levels of seeking on job sites offering potential opportunities in far-flung locales. In means callous and indefinite silence from Search Committees month after month.
But the most difficult thing to accept through this lonely and occasionally humiliating process is the fact that I am, by all outward indicators, a highly successful young professor in my field. I excel as a teacher; I am an active writer. I work hard every day to make sure that my classroom is a challenging, open, and engaging environment.
But, despite all of my successes, I do not have a permanent place at the table at the University of Pittsburgh.
Years from now, I will print and bind my journal to my son. I will give it to him as a gift: a gift of memory. Together he and I will remember our time in Pittsburgh, our cozy home, and the early imaginings of his young life, flowering as it did in the din of the Steel City.
And I have no idea where we will be on that day.
--Luke Peterson, OSHER
