Learning to Love Life Outside Academe

by Peter Temes

WHEN I LEFT academe, I often thought about the title of Milan Kundera’s book Life Is Elsewhere. Like many scholars, I had the feeling that intellectual life was terribly thin outside colleges and universities.

My earliest experiences in the 9-to-5 world didn’t help much. In my first nonacademic job, as a marketing clerk at a newsletter publishing company, I was surprised to hear bright colleagues begin each day with long conversations about what had been on television the night before. My boss once asked me – in what he must have thought was a withering tone, meant to encourage
a little less critical thought on my part–whether professors argue all the time. “Actually, yes,” I replied, thinking that here at last was the beginning of an interesting conversation. “In fact, I taught argument at Harvard.” A few paragraphs later, I noticed an angry look on my boss’s face, and I soon began reading the want ads with a renewed vigor.

In those first months after leaving my teaching post at Harvard, where I had been a full-time preceptor hired on a series of one-year contracts to teach writing about history, I constantly looked for opportunities to connect with university life. I haunted lecture halls and seminar rooms at Columbia University, my graduate alma mater. I taught as an adjunct at a couple of local colleges, stealing time from my day jobs to support my professorial habit.

I eventually launched a small consulting firm, but I made several poor business decisions because of my desire to connect my work to colleges and universities. I hired ex-academics who weren’t cut out for business, but were a pleasure to be around. I put too much time into cultivating potential relationships with colleges that didn’t need or want my marketing consulting services. Slowly, the financial realities of expanding my consulting business drew my energies away from higher education and toward the businesses that wanted what I had to offer.

After a while, something strange happened–I stopped caring as much about academe. I still loved the substance of intellectual
life on campus, but I began to notice more of the richness of intellectual life off campus, too. And I don’t mean anything like the academic turn toward popular culture. I mean culture itself–I found a vigorous life of the mind in the everyday world, without the badge of professor hanging on my tweed. I found myself engaged in thoughtful conversations with bankers about medieval art, with accountants about Heidegger, and with the local copy-shop owner about American populism in the 1920’s.

Until I had been an ex-academic for a solid year, it simply had not seemed possible to me that a satisfying intellectual life could exist without some connection to colleges and universities. But that turned out to be true. I now believe that a great deal of the anxiety brought about by the tight job market for academics would ease if more graduate students, unhappy professors, and slave-wage lecturers understood how much life there is, in fact, elsewhere.

My turning point came with a consulting engagement at one of the Big Five accounting firms. Many of the people I dealt with there had been accounting and business majors, but a good number had been in the humanities and social sciences, and some were trained as scientists. They had impressive educations, and they brought the full range of their interests with them to work. Their professional environment was intense, and pure intellectual horsepower was valued greatly. Every day they faced new projects, new cultures, and the social meaning of new technologies.

The respect I developed for those people shook me out of my ex-academic’s arrogance. I began to listen more closely to the people I came across everywhere–at work, at the supermarket, on the commuter train–and heard original and insightful ideas emerge from all corners. More of a surprise to me was how many people do not look to academe as the natural habitat for the best and the brightest. Many considered professors to be isolated, slow, and mired in the private languages of too-narrow disciplines.

The final irony in my transition from the academy came after I had completed a few high-profile consulting projects. Getting in the door of corporate clients as a speechwriter and communications consultant, leaning on my academic credentials as a selling point, I found myself drawn into marketing projects that paid better and were closer to the centers of influence. How did an ex-English professor get marketing work? Because I was seen as a disciplined, creative thinker, and because my skills at running discussions around the seminar table transferred well to the corporate boardroom.

And then, just as I felt that I wanted my new life more than any other, my phone began to ring. A couple of universities where I had friends wanted to hire me for my marketing talents. My life as an exile in the world of business suddenly made me a much more valuable commodity back in academe. I found myself turning down a number of academic jobs–jobs I’d have killed for a couple of years earlier–because I was enjoying the freedom of running my own business and, frankly, because the average university could not give me the intellectual stimulation that my private-sector work was offering.

Then I had an offer I could not refuse. The Great Books Foundation, created by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then the president of
the University of Chicago, and his philosopher colleague Mortimer J. Adler, was looking for a new president. The foundation wanted someone with a Ph.D. in literature, a teaching background, success at building and running a business, and a dedication
to the idea that Americans can create intellectual communities outside formal institutions.

In a typical day, I participate in Socratic dialogues in our Chicago office about authors like Aeschylus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and visit one of the 10,000 public schools we work with–schools where fourth-graders talk about Oscar Wilde and high schoolers talk about Thucydides. The foundation trains 15,000 teachers in the Socratic method and publishes anthologies of classical and modern literature. More than a million people participate in discussion groups that we run in schools, libraries, and people’s homes.

In my office, a foundation poster from 1949 hangs near my desk. It shows two men sitting on folding chairs next to large industrial machines. They’re dressed in dirty shop clothes, and each holds a sandwich–this is their lunch hour. They each also hold copies of a book, the works of Nietzsche. That picture embodies our foundation’s mission and helps me understand how much intellectual life there is to be found–and cultivated–outside the bounds of academe.