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229 Chapter 8 The Academic Years, 1966–1992 n F rom the time when, in the sixth grade, I decided to become an anthropologist, I never doubted that that meant being a professor . While I was always attracted by the idea of teaching, it was also true there were no other career paths open to anthropologists, apart from a few dead-end museum positions. There were jobs outside of academe but no careers, something that is still largely true today. The nonacademic anthropologists whom I knew in the Indian Bureau and the War Relocation Authority were all biding their time waiting for university positions to open up, and all but one of them ended their days as professors. When all’s said and done, my situation in the Sudan (and before that in Glen Canyon) was the same as theirs in the Indian Bureau; I was biding my time and waiting for an academic position. I certainly didn’t want to be a salvage archaeologist all my life; I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be any kind of archaeologist rather than getting back to my first love, studying living peoples. As I’ve already suggested, I wouldn’t have been in salvage archaeology if I’d been able to get the kind of academic job I always wanted. Yet I might be in it to this day, if not for another of the many lucky breaks that have so largely shaped the course of my life. In the broadest sense I owe my academic career to another of my many unwitting benefactors, in this case to the Russian scientists who sent up the first earth-orbiting satellite in 1958. America was thrown into a national panic by the thought that we could be outdone, in any field of scientific endeavor, by a despised Communist country, and we reacted in the way that Americans usually react to problems: by throwing money at them. One result was a huge expansion in the number and size of C h a p t e r 8 230 universities, most of which decided that they ought to have at least an anthropologist or two. This created, for a while, a hugely favorable buyers’ market for beginning academics. It wouldn’t be fair to say that any idiot could get a job in those years, but it was certainly possible to get a job without knowing very much anthropology, provided you had a degree from a respectable institution. And the University of Arizona, once looked down on as a poor and backward frontier institution, had by this time established itself as one of the twenty or thirty leading schools of anthropology. Even so, without the post-Sputnik expansion I’m not at all sure that I would have gotten a position in 1966, given that the anthropological community has never been much impressed by my accomplishments in Nubia. The Kentucky Position As a result of the quantum increase in available positions, they were much more widely advertised than formerly, through discipline-wide mailings and bulletin board announcements. Actual hiring was then done largely through interviews at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). However, none of the notices reached me in the Sudan, nor was I able to attend the AAA meetings. As of 1966 I don’t recall that there was as yet a regular Anthropology Newsletter in which open positions were announced; if there was, I wasn’t receiving it in the Sudan. Consequently, I went about looking for an academic post in the same way I had always done, through personal contacts. Beginning in 1964, when I made my plans to leave the Sudan in two years, I put the word out among friends and colleagues that I’d be on the market. My efforts resulted eventually in either offers or feelers from at least five institutions: Brown University, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Colorado, UCLA, and the University of Kentucky. The Kentucky position was the lowest paid of the five, but it’s the one that I took, and I’ve never regretted it. For better and worse I’ve been here ever since. I chose Kentucky over the other possibilities for several reasons. The Colorado and Smithsonian openings were not teaching positions, and the one at Brown was in the Department of Egyptology—definitely not my cup of tea. The UCLA position was a “slot-and-filler” proposition; that is, there was a previously existing...

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