Money and education: Is this the beginning of the end of public schools? Add your voice to the discussion in Table Talk's Education area

How-to, why-not and what-for -- find it all at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author

R E C E N T L Y

Who killed Meriwether Lewis?
By Leighton Woodhouse
A forensic scientist has stirred controversy by proposing to dig up the famous explorer's bones to find out
(03/22/99)

Raging against "the Machine"
By Julekha Dash
A Congolese student says death threats accompanied his campaign for U. of Alabama's student presidency
(03/19/99)

Battling stag/nation
By Jill Priluck
Radical hag Mary Daly stands up to Boston College for forcing coed classes
(03/17/99)

Pimps and Ho's
By Isaac Zaur
One college's theme party is another man's ethical dilemma
(03/17/99)

The fabulous kingdom of gay animals
By Susan McCarthy
A biologist offers the first vision of a tantalizingly diverse natural world: Not all animals are straight arrows
(03/15/99)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

BY CHRISTINA BOUFIS | It was in a college Chaucer class when I first read the "wo that is in marriage" from the Wife of Bath's prologue. Never mind that the rest of the tale, in which a lusty woman recounts her five husbands (three good, two bad), could be read as an advanced feminist tract for the time, I took this seeming truism out of context and convinced myself that it applied not to the public at large but to those in academia. The evidence was everywhere around me. My advisor, just out of graduate school from Brown, was recently divorced. Pretty, smart and vivacious, she was everything I wanted to be when I thought of becoming an English professor. While she talked about pastoral poetry, I couldn't help but think of the genre as a metaphor for her once-happily married state. She would sometimes allude to this herself, though not in so many words. But the implication was clear: Successful academics do not have happy personal lives.

My romanticism professor, married to an outspoken critic at Columbia University, was also going through a divorce. When she referred to her young daughter as a Wordsworthian child of nature, I listened between the lines for evidence that her husband shared this fantasy. It appeared he did not. Perhaps the reason for the divorce? Gradually, as the years of graduate school dragged on, the model of the successful female academic crystallized in my mind: She sacrificed her personal life for her work. Matrimony and academia -- if one tried to marry the two -- could bring only wo.

Fast forward 10 years. My husband (we met in grad school) and I had recently relocated from New York to San Francisco. In the six months we'd lived in this new city, we still hadn't completely unpacked; we'd both been working too hard. The very night I finished my dissertation, I came home from my writing group (an invaluable support network of five female friends) and found a note -- and a half-empty closet. My husband had moved out: no forwarding address, no phone number, just a few scrawled lines telling me he had left. In subsequent conversations, he insisted it was my fault: I abandoned him when I finished my dissertation (he had long ago opted to leave grad school for a more lucrative career). Besides, I had become too much of a feminist; I didn't need him, I had my writing group. "I'm a feminist, not a lesbian," I cried. To no avail. In the emotional havoc of the next few months, the thought occurred (I am ashamed to say) that I would have gladly traded my hard-earned degree for him, if I could have. We had been together 11 years, happily married for six of them, or so I thought. Of course there were other problems, as there are when any relationship ends in divorce, but completing my dissertation sealed the end of our marriage.

My ex-husband's timing was not all that unusual, I later learned. While in New York, where I delivered my dissertation, I met Gertrude Schneider, president of the City University of New York Alumni Association. When I told her about my imminent divorce, she replied that my newly doctored, newly divorced situation was common.

In her 25 years of academic administration, Schneider had heard this story more than a few times. Recently she explained that she thinks it's a "gender thing." "Haven't you noticed this yourself?" she asked. "Usually, it's when the wife gets her Ph.D. that the breakup occurs, not the other way around. Especially when the marriage is shaky to begin with."

If getting my Ph.D. was so hazardous to my relationship, why hadn't I been informed? Were there statistics on this kind of thing, and if so, why weren't they published? It reminded me of the time my car was stolen on the seemingly safe street I'd lived on for years. Only when I mentioned the theft to the friendly neighbors I'd always exchanged pleasantries with did they let me in on the secret: Everyone, apparently, had had their car stolen at one time or another on this particular block.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Dissertation expert draws graphs to determine who to dump