My Experience as Artist and Adjunct

I was grateful to the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession for inviting me to be a part of the 2005 "Got Life?" panel, especially given that I am not a woman. Being a gay white man, I carry my own set of privileges and disadvantages in my negotiations within academia. I wanted to recognize this up front and be clear that I could not systematically deal with that aspect of my personal experience in the short paper I was presenting at the conference. More, I hoped what I had to say would provide insights for everyone to consider in light of their own situations. Of course, each panelist brought her or his own particularities to the discussion, which ultimately influenced the perspective they represented. What I focused on, and what I was invited to address for the panel, was my experience as a scholar of religion who is also a performing artist and the challenges I have encountered teaching as an adjunct professor. The essay that follows is based on that presentation. Although a few changes in my circumstances have occurred since that time, the issues I discuss remain as relevant as ever.

From the time I was asked to participate in the "Got Life?" panel, I made notes to myself whenever something popped up in my life that I thought was relevant, so my thoughts in this essay represent the themes that recurred most frequently in my notes and the ideas that resonated most strongly for me at the time. I organized my thoughts into three nebulous categories to provide some kind of framework: philosophical, practical, and political. You will see that all of my thoughts overlap and these categories are somewhat artificial, but I believe this point in itself is what the panel was all about: the boundaries and constraints—both real and imagined—we encounter in making a life for ourselves. Setting boundaries can be a tricky business: we make them as part of the task of maintaining balance in our lives, but sometimes these boundaries later confine us because others perceive them as limitations or deficits.

So, let me start with the "philosophical": I think at the heart of my reflection is a basic question about what it means to pursue a career and what it means to build a well-rounded life. Sometimes, as my fellow panelists make clear, constraints are enforced upon us externally, so some choices feel out of our control. I could list a number of life events that have intruded on my plans and forced a rethinking. In the absence of those kinds of pressures, however, or when such constraints feel managed (and I should note that I do not have children, but I do have a partner), I feel a certain amount of freedom to pursue my "dreams," whatever that means. I have wanted to be a musician since I was young and I want to nurture that part of me as more than just a hobby. This is a challenge for anyone interested in pursuing the arts in a serious way. But I also have a number of academic interests that are not always about my art. In my liberal arts education, I internalized the message that developing an array of skills and talents is a good thing, not only because it would make me a better person but also for the practical reason that people these days change careers more often than in the past. The philosophical question then emerges of how much energy one devotes to "forging a career" versus "making a meaningful life" and how much these pursuits overlap. I believed that getting my PhD was a way of doing both, although I have always been unsure exactly what this career path would look like. Now, on the other end with my PhD in hand, it feels like a narrow focus is rewarded and other pursuits are viewed as distractions.

This leads me to the "practical": as much as I internalized the message that developing an array of skills and talents is a good thing, it does not always translate...