Step three involves asking the right set of questions before you accept a new position, particularly one in any of the new categories of academic work.

“Ask how you are to be evaluated and how your contract will be renewed. Ask how your rank will be assigned and what is the relationship between salary and rank,� says Lornell. “And get it in writing. Don’t believe anything they tell you orally because they can always deny it later.�

But the final step may be the most important one. You’re going to have to exorcise a persistent ghost — the image of the “perfect academic career,� Bender says.

She came face to face with her ghost on a parents’ weekend visit to Wesleyan University, where her son was an undergraduate.
Bender walked into a male professor’s office that seemed drawn straight from a movie set. It was “a big, old room just lined with books. There was a beautiful rug and a pipe stand on his desk and a stack of manuscripts he was going through, and the whole room smelled of an aromatic tea he was brewing.

“It was the academic career I had always dreamed of, and I knew I was never going to have it,� Bender says. “He was talking about his graduate student days and I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s your career — it’s not mine. I have three kids, one in college. I’m teaching, and I’m going to school. It’s never going to be like this.’�

But it can still be rewarding and fulfilling, says Arnzen, “if you’re valuing what you do and following your own light.

“It’s like John Barth says. So often people are looking for the magic key to open the treasure. But that’s all wrong,� Arnzen says. “The key to the treasure is the treasure.�