These 4800 were mavericks. Receiving their Ph.D.'s when the degree carried with it virtual title to a teaching job, they were for the most part people who chose not to teach. Even so, evidence about them is suggestive. It says something about how graduate training in the humanities has been used or not used in lines of work other than teaching. It also says something about possibilities for continued scholarly work by people whose places of work are not classrooms.
Most of the evidence comes from a second HERI survey, again supplemented by interviews. The objective was to poll a significant sample of Ph.D.'s in English, French, Spanish, history, and philosophy and compare the answers.
- National Research Council, Commission on Human Resources, Employment of Humanities Ph.D.'s (Washington, D.C., 1980).
- Technical analysis is in Lewis C. Solmon, Nancy L. Ochsner, and MargoLea Hurwicz, Alternative Careers for Humanities Ph.D.'s: Perspectives of Students and Graduates (New York: Praeger, 1980).
These efforts produced 1200 responses from PhD/s or A.B.D/s not working as teachers. A comparable sample of teachers was easily found. Alike in most characteristics other than type of work, the two groups together were similar to the HERI sample of graduate students. They were, of course, older and scattered across the age spectrum. Coming from generations that had felt less affirmative-action pressure, the two groups were both about three-quarters male instead of being half male and half female. Not surprisingly, in view of their age, a larger proportion-approximately 80%-were or had been married. Almost half had spouses who worked. Though both groups included many from the population that the American Council on Education had surveyed decades ago, they did not have its characteristic family income distribution or upwardly mobile appearance. Instead, the proportions from rich, middle-income, and poor families were almost the same as in the contemporaneous graduate student sample-heavily weighted toward upper middle. In academic honors and college extracurricular activities, the Ph.D.'s also resembled the students. Twenty-two percent were Phi Beta Kappa's. The majority had been "grinds."
Of those not employed as teachers, a large number worked for academic institutions. The survey respondents were therefore divided into four groups. First, there was the "faculty" group. Larger in number than the comparison sample of people not teaching, this group consisted of about 1600 people, somewhat fewer than 100 of whom were teaching below the college level. The other groups were "academic administrators," "other academic" (a miscellany dominated by college librarians), and "nonacademic." The last group exceeded 800 and thus formed about two-thirds of all those not employed as teachers. Offsetting possible distortion due to inclusion of secondary-school teachers among faculty was inclusion in this nonacademic group of somewhat fewer than 100 who had no employment at all, mostly people going dispiritedly from one fruitless academic job interview to another.
Clear evidence
For the guidance of graduate students and new Ph.D.'s voluntarily or involuntarily considering careers other than teaching, the evidence is illuminating chiefly because it cannot be generalized. When looking back on their time in graduate school, few humanities Ph.D.'s believe that it enhanced their imaginativeness. Anyone who hears students or professors discussing "alternative careers" has confirming evidence, for the range of possibilities seldom runs much beyond librarian, archivist, or curator, with little note that these professions have their own entry systems and surpluses of talent. Teaching at the secondary or elementary level sometimes crops up, despite the fact that the students not to be in college in future years are already not filling chairs in schoolrooms, and despite barriers posed by certification requirements, union rules, and union-school board contracts. The survey sample of non-academics suggests how much more varied are the types of jobs that humanities Ph.D.'s have actually had.
The group did include some who entered another profession by taking another degree. Among the non-academics were 15 lawyers, 15 Protestant ministers, 2 priests, 2 nuns, a monk, a rabbi, and an Episcopalian bishop. Such professionals, however, formed a distinct minority. Most of the non-academics had jobs that required little or no additional specialized training.
Some had careers as researchers, employed by federal executive departments, the Congressional Reference Service, or state or local governments. The largest single collection of humanities Ph.Ds engaged in research appeared to be in the Central Intelligence Agency. Others did research for private companies. At IBM's austere headquarters in Armonk, New York, for example, a philosophy Ph.D. who started out as a poet sat alone in a study seeing if he could dream up chains of logic computers could not follow.
Many humanities Ph.D.'s were editors or writers. A few were at unsurprising addresses such as the University of Chicago Press. Others were with journals such as Crawdaddy West or with newsmagazines or newspapers. A still larger number were connected with corporate house organs like those of Westinghouse, Exxon, and Eastman Kodak. Others listed themselves as staff writers for such concerns as Blue Cross-Blue Shield. Le Anne Schreiber, once a doctoral candidate in the English department at Harvard, went by age 33 from writing about international politics for Time to editing Women Sports magazine to being the sports editor of the New York Times, where from 1978 to 1980 she directed a department of 55 reporters and editors. Now deputy editor of the Times Book Review, she says, "I believe that the two things I have to sell are a highly developed critical intelligence and an ability to teach and write. I just had to convince people that I could translate these skills from an academic to a non-academic environment."
Of the 800 non-academics, one-fourth were administrators or managers. Their employers included Xerox, Cummins Electric, Pillsbury, Gimbels, General Motors, Korvettes, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Academic administrators were a category apart.) One Ph.D. was vice-president for lending at a commercial bank, another a senior vice-president in a computer company, another the proprietor of a men's clothing store, yet another the president of a wine company. More than a score were section heads, office directors, or the like in U.S. government agencies. Two were or had been U.S. senators.
Selling themselves
Finally, apart from a cluster of Ph.D.'s marking time as cabdrivers, gardeners, tree trimmers, house painters, and waiters (one a very well-off French-speaking headwaiter), there were salesmen and saleswomen. During interviews with students, mention of this occupation usually provoked retching sounds and references to Willie Loman. Some humanists who had tried it, however, echoed an outspoken graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who protested a fellow student's saying that he could not imagine thus compromising himself. "That's a lot of crap," she said. "I come from a business family. I play the same damn games my father does. We are trying to sell education now. We are selling ourselves all the time. Do you think people need literature any more than a paper towel?" Arousing interest in a product, said several humanities Ph.D.'s, was not inherently different from arousing interest in a poem or a period of history or an idea. Often, it involved chiefly explanation very similar to good classroom teaching. And some people selling on commission claimed to have more control than college teachers over their hours, days, and seasons of work.
Among the humanities Ph.D.'s whom we interviewed were Robert Brawer and David Matthew. Brawer's degree, in medieval English literature, was from the University of Chicago. He taught for several years at the University of Wisconsin, was recommended for promotion, but was denied it because the line was not funded. Concluding that he did not want any of the other jobs then open, he made use of personal connections to get into the marketing department of Maidenform Inc. To his surprise and pleasure, he found the analytical problems in his new job not unlike those in his academic field. "Market research," he said, "is like any other kind of research. I'm very satisfied." He also commented that "the ability to sell is intimately related to the ability to teach."
Though Brawer had clearly left his academic discipline, he continued to teach part-time at night and to present scholarly papers. David Matthew became an entrepreneur and salesman halfway between academe and the world outside. A Ph.D. in English from Columbia, he taught for a time and truly enjoyed teaching. He became bored, however, with repeating the same material year after year, and he concluded that he did not yearn to produce the type or quantity of publication necessary for success in a prestigious university. After a long search for a nonteaching job, he found one that excited him-devising and marketing business training seminars and programmed learning systems. He said that in working on and selling these systems he was doing at least as much as he could as a professor to use his training in the humanities for educational purposes. And he added: "The difference between the university and business is that in business if you do a good job at what you're paid to do, you get promoted."
Interviews with people such as Brawer and Matthew, together with the survey data, convinced the two of us that the business world had many more openings for humanities Ph.D.'s than the large majority of either graduate students or professors even suspected. We did not suppose that humanities Ph.D.'s were any better suited for business than for government-federal, state, or local-or for employment by foundations or health-care facilities or other such in-between organizations. We did observe, however, that, largely out of prejudice compounded by ignorance, graduate students were disposed not to think of business as an alternative to academe. Aware that the private sector is where the majority of challenging and well-paid jobs are to be found, we sounded out some corporate hiring officers but found them almost equally prejudiced. They seemed to assume that humanities graduate students had made a definite decision against a business career and also that they were unsuited for such careers.
We thought that the barrier of misunderstanding could and should be broken. The New York State Regents agreed to sponsor a demonstration project. Funds came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Exxon Education Foundation, and from companies as diverse as AT&T, Time Inc., the Prudential and Metropolitan insurance companies, DuPont, Federated Department Stores, Pfizer, Sun Chemical, General Motors, and Ford. The NYU Graduate School of Business Administration agreed to offer a 7-week summer "Careers in Business" program.
In each of two successive summers, 45-50 outstanding humanities Ph.D.'s and near-Ph.D.'s were recruited for this program. Once corporate personnel officers saw the quality of these people--many of whom had served several years as assistant professors--more than threescore major companies lined up to interview them. Alumni were hired for jobs ranging from administrator of a corporate foundation to analyst of economic forecasts for an investment management concern to account executive for an advertising agency to line manager in an insurance company. On the average, they were starting at salaries comparable to those of M.B. A.'s and far above that standard for junior faculty.
That humanities Ph. D's can find careers in business appealing and that business concerns can in turn see in humanities Ph.D.'s an untapped reservoir of talent is witnessed by the fact that NYU continued its 7-week summer orientation program, supporting it through a combination of tuition and corporate donations. Further testimony is imitation of the NYU program by Harvard, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, UCLA, and elsewhere.3 As a result of the demonstration project and its effects, students have had before them more role models to challenge their prejudices, and corporate hiring officers have had fresh examples proving that their assumptions at chief point that emerges from least require room for exceptions.
The survey data, interviews
Regents of the University of the State of New York, Careers in Business (Albany, N.Y., 1978), Careers in Business, 1979 (Albany, N.Y., 1979), and NYU Graduate School of Business Administration, Careers in Business, 1980 (New York, 1980). and the results of the demonstration project is that humanities Ph.D.'s and graduate students have open to them career opportunities that are at least as numerous and varied as those open to liberal arts B.A/s. Graduate training does not in itself disqualify anyone for any job. All that people with such training have to do is to define themselves in terms of their general capabilities, not their dissertation subjects or academic specialties.
All this, however, speaks only to the question of whether humanities Ph.D.'s can find jobs outside of academe. Whether doctoral training in the humanities has value in such jobs is harder to assess. It can be argued that the training enhances general capabilities, an M.A. or Ph.D. giving added value to liberal arts B.A. Training in law or in economics is thought somehow to provide advantages in business or government. The proposition is not farfetched on its face that literature, history, or philosophy can hone the mind at least as well as torts and real property, Phillips curves, or shadow prices. Alternatively, it can be argued that graduate training in a subject such as medieval literature, Latin American history, or phenomenology should be considered an indulgence, like a college tennis player's taking a fling on the tournament circuit or a college actor's working awhile in a repertory company- personally rewarding but in practical terms simply postponing progress in a career. It can even be contended that graduate training imposes a handicap. When a group of executives from the news media met with the two of us to discuss the subject matter of this book, nearly all said that they were disposed not to hire Ph.D.'s. A Ph.D., they agreed, was too little likely to be comfortable with the approximations of truth required by newspapers, newsmagazines, and radio and television. Executives in other industries similarly expressed doubt as to whether people who took years to write a dissertation could accommodate themselves to worldly deadlines.
Great variety
Because of the great variety within the sample, the HERI survey results do not say clearly which of these hypotheses has the strongest empirical support. A distressingly high 54% of the non-academics rated themselves as underemployed, and only about a quarter of this group indicated that, for family or other reasons, they preferred to remain so. This group included not only the cabdrivers and tree trimmers but also a large number, mostly but not exclusively female, doing secretarial or clerical work-in most instances as employees of colleges or universities. Note should be taken, however, that the proportion rating themselves underemployed was not much smaller among teachers. In the faculty sample, 40% so described themselves.
The best evidence of how humanities Ph. D's appraise their training comes from the respondents' ratings of the extent to which particular skills or abilities had been enhanced by graduate training, coupled with their ratings of the importance of these skills or abilities in individual careers. Academics judged teaching ability and critical thinking to be far ahead of other needed skills, followed by a cluster that included general knowledge, insight, self-discipline, self-confidence, writing ability, and perseverance. Toward the bottom of their lists were research techniques, imagination, and leadership. Non-academics put critical thinking alone at the very top of their inventories. Self-confidence and self-discipline ranked high, followed by writing ability, perseverance, and general knowledge. Although the non-academics tended to mention leadership more often than did the academics, they also placed it low, along with research techniques, imagination, and teaching ability.
Reflecting on their graduate school experience, both groups concluded that it had enhanced more than anything else the one skill that both prized most highly-critical thinking. Many fewer than half of the academics thought it had equipped them with the other skill they valued-teaching ability. Both groups agreed that their other legacy was knowledge of research techniques, something to which less than two-thirds of the teachers and only a little more than half of the non-academics attached great value. Among skills that both academics and non-academics scored as important but of second order, self-discipline and perseverance were perceived by both as being helpful, followed by general knowledge and writing ability. Both groups agreed that graduate school had added little to their self-confidence, teaching ability, imagination, or capacity for leadership.
Though the humanities Ph.D.'s not in teaching careers cited fewer skills bettered by graduate school, their judgments and those of the academics were thus almost the same. Non-academics generally believed their time in graduate school to have been well spent.
Own experience
Thinking back on her own experience, Le Anne Schreiber said, "I have always believed that the process of analysis honed on anything works anywhere. ... I believe that once a Ph.D. has a job outside him can see the usefulness of his training." Brawer said, "The logic you bring to doing good research is invaluable whether you're working on Chaucer or marketing lingerie . . . ." Evidence supporting his assertion is the fact that skills initially acquired for academe have carried him to a vice-presidency at Maiden form, Inc.
None of this evidence, of course, says whether former humanities graduate students not in academe are better off, as well off, or less well off than if, instead of studying literature or history, they had taken an LL.B. or an M.B.A. or simply started work straight out of college. William Persen, a Ph.D. in history who became vice-president of Business International in New York, argues that he has had a distinct advantage over others who had only the B.A. He had, he said, acquired the ability to use language with greater precision and "to see the multiplicity of choices in the world." He added, "You don't get that from undergraduate training." Anne Karalekas, another history Ph.D., worked for a U.S. Senate committee and then for a large consulting firm. She believes that her academic training has given her greater breadth of perspective than is characteristically found among either lawyers or M.B.A.'s. All that can be proven, however, is that men and women who do graduate work in the humanities and then go on to business or government do not regret their scholarly training, and do look back on it as having had lasting benefit.
As to whether such people enjoy work outside of academe, the answer is very clear. Many who initially hoped or expected to be college teachers found other occupations satisfying, and many who became teachers found their work not satisfying. On the whole, in fact, professors liked their jobs less than did humanities Ph.D.'s who were in administration or who were out editing magazines or marketing lingerie.
The disparity could, of course, be discounted as a function of academic melancholia. A closer look at what the two groups of respondents had to say provokes doubt, however, as to whether the differences can so easily be explained away.
Recipients of the questionnaire were asked to rate 18 aspects of their current jobs. In regard to 13 of these aspects, the teachers registered lower levels of satisfaction than did the non-academics. They indicated significantly greater contentment only with their autonomy and independence, opportunity for scholarly pursuits, and opportunity for leisure. By wide margins, they rated lower than did non-academics not only material aspects of their work-salary, fringe benefits, and opportunity for advancement-but also its social and psychological aspects. They were markedly less content regarding a sense of possessing responsibility or policymaking power. As compared with non-academics, only about half as many academics indicated high satisfaction with the status of the institutions employing them. Perhaps most significant, they rated lower than did the non-academics the challenge and variety of what they did, and they also rated lower the congeniality of their work relationships and the competence of their colleagues.
That those in academic life exhibited a relatively lower level of satisfaction on these last counts is hard to explain solely as a function of the academic temperament. Especially is this so because of contrasting evidence that the group of humanities Ph.D.'s most satisfied on most of these counts were those who remained in the academic environment as administrators. One exception was competence of colleagues. The administrators were even more down on their peers than were the teachers. Although they felt a great deal less autonomous and independent and lamented their lack of leisure and opportunity for scholarship, academic administrators registered almost twice as much satisfaction with the challenge of their work. On most other counts they seemed more satisfied than faculty members.
That humanities Ph.D.'s should be comparatively less content as professors than as businesspersons or government officials or college presidents or deans is probably to be explained at least partly by evidence regarding attitudes of graduate students, for most students never considered any career except college teaching, and the majority had unrealistic notions about a professor's work life.
Asked to compare benefits of academic jobs with jobs in government or business, over 90% of humanities graduate students cited greater flexibility in the use of time. Two-thirds or more mentioned freedom to do as one wished, opportunities to experiment with differing life-styles, and ability to flout social conventions. On the down side, one-quarter to two-fifths expressed suspicion that a teaching job would carry less social prestige and less job security. They were divided almost evenly on whether teaching would involve less leisure or more. The chief drawback to the academic career identified by the majority was relatively lower earning power.
Interviews confirmed that most graduate students had little sense of the variety and complexity of the world outside academe. A doctoral candidate in philosophy at Stanford defined government work as "delivering mail." One in history at Berkeley said, "If you have morals or ideas, you can't last in government." A woman studying English at Bryn Mawr spoke of all corporations as populated by "little gray people." A woman at Berkeley in the same field defined a career in business as "being a waitress or a bottler of cough medicine for horses."
Expressions of discontent by professors probably reflect disillusionment experienced upon learning what really lies on the other side of the podium. One graduate student interviewee voiced suspicion that his level of enthusiasm for Browning might fall by the time he had taught the poet's works five years in a row. One can infer from the survey data that many actually found this to be the case. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine experiences that could produce answers evidencing a low level of career satisfaction. Many college teachers find themselves repeating material that no longer excites them. Free time is swallowed in committee meetings (where doubts about the competence of colleagues develop and flourish) and in counseling sessions with students or parents.
Experimentation with life-styles turns out to involve little more than a daily choice of whether to be costumed as a student or as a com-muter. Meanwhile, the expected drawback does materialize. Whatever the life-style, it costs a lot. Much time and energy therefore go to lectures in extension courses or in summer school or to small-fee talks before local service clubs.
The survey results show clearly that dollars and cents turn out to be more important than most graduate students anticipate. To be sure, the students are right in supposing that certain academic environments can be rewarding in their own right. Among faculty members in the survey, those in universities were significantly more satisfied with their work than were those in 4-year colleges or 2-year colleges. They registered about the same levels of contentment as did administrators or people in business. But income was a factor, even for them. When those expressing generally high satisfaction with their work became specific, they cited satisfaction with expected earnings more often than any other factor. Non-academics did so a little more frequently than academics but not much more so. The second factor that showed up most often was the extent to which the individual's job was related to his or her doctoral studies, though this held true only for academics.
When scrutinized more closely, responses from the two groups actually turned out to be more different than at first appeared. With allowance made for all nuances, salary proved to be more than twice as important for non-academics, whereas the relationship of job to doctoral study outstripped income as a determinant of satisfaction for academics. At comparable salaries, Ph. D's in teaching or academic administration tended to feel slightly more satisfied than non-academics. Having a job related to doctoral study seemed to trade off with 12-15% of salary. Someone with earnings much more than 15% below the mean was prone to be dissatisfied, no matter how closely related the job. Someone with earnings 15% or more above the mean was likely to be comparatively satisfied with a job completely unrelated to his or her field of doctoral study.
Satisfaction levels
That satisfaction levels for professors of humanities may be greatly influenced by salary level should cause no surprise. With their backs to the chalkboard, they are no longer in school; they are at work. The academic world becomes for them the "real world/' with all its incentives and rewards. Though intellectual excitement and certain types of freedom may be easier to find in a college or university, and eccentricities of one variety or another may be more readily tolerated, the differences between academe and the rest of the world are marginal. The failure of graduate students to recognize the narrowness of the margin probably accounts for some of the dissatisfaction displayed by those who became teachers with little other work experience. It may also account for some of the high satisfaction felt by those who found the outside world more congenial than anticipated.
The principal findings from the survey of graduate alumni thus are, first, that those not in teaching careers regard their graduate education as enhancing skills they need and use in nonacademic work, and second, that, if paid well enough, they like what they do. Combined with other evidence, the dissatisfaction of many in teaching careers suggests that all people who are enthralled by literature, history, or philosophy are not necessarily people for whom teaching offers the most satisfying career. The remaining question is whether, even so, the ones who are cut out to be scholars have to be teachers if their scholarship is to thrive.
That scholarly writing can be done by people not employed as teachers is demonstrated by a few illustrious examples, most of whom are people who did not even need a Ph.D. Edmund Wilson, Barbara Tuchman, and Theodore White are three who had no occupation other than writing. Douglas Southall Freeman was a hardworking newspaper editor. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Not many such examples jump to mind, to be sure, but neither does the mind instantly produce a long catalogue of professors comparable to such gifted and successful writers.
But it is not, in any case, works such as Wilson's To the Finland Station or Freeman's Robert E. Lee that are in question. Rather, it is the closely focused, carefully documented, not widely read article or monograph that provides the grist for syntheses such as Wilson's and Tuchman's. What is at issue is whether, for practical purposes, only people with professorships can or will produce such work.
In other countries it does occur. Sir Lewis Namier composed his meticulous histories of the parliaments of George III while working 10-hour days as secretary for a Zionist organization in London. Sir Harold Williams became one of the world's leading authorities on Swift while an active barrister and magistrate in the north of England. Montagu Woodhouse became a leading writer on modern Greek history while serving as a Conservative MP., and Sergio Solmi and Antonello Gerbi acquired high standing among students of contemporary French literature and the history of Spain, respectively, while rising in the executive ranks of the Banca Commerciale of Milan. They have few counterparts in the United States.
It may be that this cannot change. Scholarship is facilitated and stimulated by contact with other scholars, including students in graduate seminars and undergraduate proseminars.
People who do not teach do not have this resource. The types of nonacademic jobs that provide satisfying challenge and variety are apt to make heavy demands on time and mental resources, and the person purposeful enough to have made a mark as a scholar is apt to be ambitious to succeed in a nonacademic environment and hence to devote most hours and thought to real-world problems rather than to texts or documents or theorems. And others do not have the professor's incentives. Their pay and status are not likely to improve as a result of publishing work on obscure, even arcane topics. More than in England or Europe, moreover, they may run risk of ridicule from co-workers or criticism from employers who feel that they should give their all to the jobs for which they are paid.
Survey and interview data demonstrate, however, that conditions outside the academic setting do not deter all people from pursuing scholarship. In the HERI sample of graduate alumni, the faculty group did more scholarly work than any other. Overall, faculty members were twice as likely as either academic administrators or non-academics to have published a scholarly book or article. The striking fact, however, was the reciprocal. The average faculty member in the sample had published three-quarters of a scholarly book and just fewer than three scholarly articles, whereas the average person in the nonacademic sample had published a third of a monograph and almost one and a half articles. (See Table 3.9.) Of course, some of the latter had previously been teachers and might have done their publishing while in academe. Even so, given a presumption that this was not true of all and that few people not employed as teachers could have expected to gain financially or otherwise, the fact that the amount of publication was so large suggests that some people not in academe are inwardly prompted to continue the activity for which they were trained in graduate school.
Also suggestive--though not encouraging--is evidence those academics in the sample did not derive much satisfaction from scholarly publication. About one-fifth of those who listed publications said they were very satisfied with their jobs, but when the entire pattern of answers was analyzed, what surfaced was an indication that this was the case because the record of scholarly publication correlated with income. For sheer satisfaction, independent of the money brought in, academics put non-scholarly publications far ahead. By a slight margin, non-academics seemed to take more joy from scholarly work. Perhaps it was because almost all of them did it simply because they wanted to.
Faculty members in universities produced twice as many monographs and half again as many articles as did faculty members in 4-year colleges. Still, the more striking fact is that, person for person, graduate alumni not in teaching careers published more than did those teaching in 2-year colleges and almost as much as those teaching in 4-year colleges.
Once the fact is observed, the explanation seems obvious. The routine, repetitive, time-consuming, unexciting aspects of college teaching become more prominent the farther the re-move from a research university. In a college not located near a major library, with only minimal library holdings of its own, a professor hired to be the one person "covering" a field faces forbidding obstacles even trying to be a teacher, let alone to be a scholar. In many such institutions, moreover, social pressures oppose scholarship. In nonacademic settings, the fact that an individual writes for learned journals represents no reproach to colleagues who have hobbies of a different sort.
In a college, it may be otherwise. Commenting on his own impressive publication record, a professor of philosophy from a small school in the Midwest observed that in his environment "such activities were neither encouraged nor rewarded. The sole incentive was internal."
That a person with such internal motivation can find a non-academic environment congenial is suggested by the example of James Cortada. He did not make a choice between a life in scholarship and one in business. Instead, he developed a captain's paradise. When a graduate student in history, he recognized that his passion for reconstructing nineteenth-century Spain made him too much an antiquarian to reach the very top of the academic tree. Making an early decision not to teach, he finished up a Ph.D. in 3 years and cultivated his quantitative talents. After graduate school he went to work selling computers for IBM. He did so with a conviction that IBM's latest models in fact represented the best that a customer could buy. Earning a large income and controlling his time, he was able to order first editions from Spanish booksellers and to take time off to visit archives. By his early thirties, he had a list of articles and books, in both Spanish and English, long enough to inspire envy in a full professor twice his age.6 "I like the realism of business," he said. 'T like having known benchmarks. In business I use history and the skills I developed in graduate study. I also have freedom. ... I never had the academic ideal of the integration of my life and work. That's part of the academic myth."
Within James Cortada is an inner fire. He would have done what he did almost regardless of how he earned his living. Most humanities Ph.D.'s are not thus driven. Many who became productive scholars as professors might not have 6 James Cortada's most recent historical works are Two Nations over Time: Spain and the United States, 1776-1977 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978) and Spain in the Twentieth Century World (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980). Their bibliographies provide leads to his other writings.
