Too Long in School

The title of this post alludes to something Larry McMurtry says in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. McMurtry remarks that he was "of the generation of American writers that stayed in school too long." His comment resonated with me not so much because I am a writer of any sort (although I have spent a good deal of my life scribbling in one way or another to earn a living), but because I suspect I had similar reasons for staying in school so long. McMurtry goes on to remark that by school he meant graduate school, and his reason for staying there was that there was "no more compelling place to be."

He was speaking of the late fifties and early sixties, but the same held true for me in the seventies. I stayed in school because I had no place more compelling to be, and I was good at school. When I finished up my undergraduate years at the University of Texas in Austin in 1968, after changing majors from English to history to classics, and ending up with sufficient credits to graduate in any one of the three, I took my barely serviceable knowledge of Latin off to the Texas panhandle (not far from McMurtry's home) to teach high school for a year in Pampa, a town known to me primarily as the boyhood home of Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory. 

I never imagined I was bound for anything other than an undistinguished year of teaching on my way to Vietnam, but when I failed to pass the draft physical (matter for a different story), I could think of nothing more original than to return to graduate school. And so I did, first in classics at the University of Texas for a couple of years, then in English at Johns Hopkins for another four. When I finally came to the end of my schooling, I had accumulated four degrees and credentials suitable for a career as a school teacher or (to be more precise) college teacher, which I tried my hand at for the next eight years.

Then something happened on my way to an undistinguished career in academe: I took a detour to Washington and ended up on the outside looking in for the next twenty-five years. That's not the whole story, of course, but it is interesting to me (if to no one else) that all of those years in school and teaching were perfect preparation for a comfortable life as a bureaucrat in a small government agency. When I was anxiously looking for work as a teacher, my dad used to tell me to get a good government job (which is what he had done), and I used to dismiss his advice as impractical given my long academic apprenticeship. Turns out he knew what he was talking about. Government work was a pretty good gig for about twenty-five years, although not what I had planned, not at all. But after staying in school so long, it may have been what I was best fitted for.