Bowling With Stephen Glass

I’m one of those not-so-unique individuals who got his doctorate from the University of Chicago but never managed to find a career in the life of the mind. The year, 1972, turned out to be a terrible one to face the job market in Eastern European social history. Maybe I didn’t know how to market myself effectively. Or maybe it was because there was a huge glut in the supply of graduating PhDs and a shrinking demand from the smaller market of post–baby-boom college students. All I know is that there weren’t jobs for my graduating year. Even assistant professors back then knew they weren’t going to get tenure and were taking law courses at night or becoming Amway distributors, hawking cleaning supplies to the wives of full professors. Sadly, I concluded that history had no future.