by Christopher Cumo

Forget the Yellow Brick Road. You don’t want to go to Oz. You just want a tenure-track job but the road is under deconstruction, and the jobs in cul-de-sacs in bleak neighborhoods. If you want a tenure-track job, you have to teach part-time until menopause and publish enough abstruse stuff to fill a library shelf. Finally, after years and even decades of privation and rejection letters that pile up like corpses in your psyche, comes the assistant professorship: four courses per term of freshman composition at $31,000 a year, what a used-car salesman makes in six months. Welcome to the rest of your life.

So runs the canonical story, the one that circulates through the corridors of every Modern Language Association conference and on all the listservs. Trouble is the story, like Goedel’s Theorem, is difficult to prove.

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