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.