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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Moving Day

Today I told my department at Nameless University that I would be leaving to take a job at University of the Unnamed. It was both a hard and an easy decision to make. Easy because U of U is in many ways a dream job, in terms of location, graduate program, colleagues, established reputation not only in the Renaissance but in my sub-specialty as well. Most people I talked to, including some of my colleagues at NU, assured me that this was an easy decision. In fact, I was out for drinks with one of them when he gave me this offer I couldn't refuse:
me: It's a tough decision.
he: No it isn't! If you don't take this job, you're crazy. You will have pissed off everyone at U of U, and your career will be over!
me: Quite a retention pitch you've got there.
he: Shut up and drink.
He was only half kidding, but don't tell my other colleagues that. Most of them tried to convince me to stay and indeed the chair made a very nice counter-offer; I kept telling them that they didn't really have to "convince" me, because I already knew and agreed completely with everything they were saying about the place. That's what made it such a hard decision; except for location, NU has many of the same qualities as U of U. And at NU, you can apparently get through many years of professorhood without really teaching. At least, most of my friends never seem to teach. Something that U of U doesn't share; oddly enough, they actually seem to make you work for your living. And I've known for several years now how incredible the colleagues I have at NU are--and how unusual this is, since academia is populated mostly by insane egomaniacs who seem to think that the conversational opposite of "talking" is "waiting." At NU, I actually have friends that I would want to be friends with even in the real world.

In the end, though, there was just too much appeal to U of U, and the colleagues there seem great too, so I took it. And I'm extremely excited about it. But as a friend of mine who recently decided to move as well told me, there's Anxiety, Guilt, and Regret (the triune god of academia) whether you stay or go.

  • At 2/28/2006 05:53:00 PM, Blogger Simplicius wrote…

    Congratulations! I predict that NU will be a fond memory and that your new life at U of U will rock.

     

  • At 3/01/2006 11:22:00 PM, Blogger Greenwit wrote…

    I, for one, will be glad to have you in the geographically indistinct area around which my own nameless university town is located. Welcome to wherever we are.

     


 Scribble some marginalia



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