Joy of leaving academe: Remembering where it started

Almost two years out from stepping away, I continue to reflect on my fifty years of higher education, now behind me, I recalled one of the benchmark incidents in that career. The particular incident in my mind came in November 1979, at the start of my eleventh year of university life, my second year as an assistant professor of business at the University of Kansas. This was my first 'real' job as a full-time employee, not as a student or graduate assistant teaching a course and working on my dissertation. With the help of my parents, I had purchased my first home, at 2500 Montana Street in Lawrence, paying $36,000 for a three-bedroom, 982 square foot home, with a soon-needed-to-be-replaced furnace in the attic. It took a ten percent down payment provided by mom and dad to fund a thirty-year mortgage at 10.875 percent to set me up in my first home.

All this stands as context for an evening early in the semester, where I was home watching television. In prime time, an episode of Charlie's Angels portrayed a college professor who drugged female students and sold them into a sex trafficking operation. On another channel was an Angie Dickinson feature, where she portrayed the widow of a college professor who committed suicide when he was denied tenure.A low point of the many low points in this movie was when a semi-trailer pulled up to her house after the funeral, unloading 10,000 copies of the vanity press of the book that failed to earn her late husband tenure, a harsh case of 'publish or perish' if there ever was one, as the New York Times review summarizes:

Maybe I should have read the review, which concluded:

Was this the career I was pursuing? Turning to crime, exploiting my attractive female students? Being suicidal after a failed six-year pursuit of tenure? Succumbing to an addiction to gambling in an attempt to bring some adventure to my life?

So this is what I had to look forward to in my career? Or, perhaps more realistically, is this the image the public has of a college professor? The three media images of that night certainly stayed with me through these past than forty years. They had more impact at the time, as I asked myself first, how I saw my choice of careers and, second, how others viewed my role, especially how my students saw me. Were attractive female students going to be a temptation? Will a failed pursuit of tenure literally be the death of me? Will I develop an addiction that will destroy any of my accomplishments?