After the Fall

In 1972 someone even younger than me, and with (at the time) a less impressive teaching and publication record, was suddenly given tenure in sociology. I had to give up my big office as a result. My book went out of print. A race-relations reader I edited did not sell well enough to recoup the advance. The race-relations text was never written. A partially written introductory text done with several colleagues, and which was supposed to make us comfortable and even rich, was rejected by the publisher. A number of editors I knew lost or changed jobs. After more than a decade of receiving everything I applied for, a grant application was rejected, and then another. The Republicans had taken over Washington. Whites writing about minority groups and favoring integration came under increased attack from segments of the left and the right. Liberal approaches to social issues became less fashionable. Advertisements made up an increased proportion of my mail. The reporters stopped calling. The pink phone messages were mostly from the library about overdue books and reminders to bring home a quart of milk and some bananas.

When my two most supportive senior colleagues and mentors left Harvard for Stanford, I realized that it was time to look further afield for work. Yet by 1972 the job offers had become fewer. A long-promised job in the University of California system turned out not to be there when I finally wanted it. A promised year at the Russell Sage Foundation suddenly fell through. I had several years left on my Harvard contract in 1973, but in an anticipatory version of you-can't-fire-me-I-quit, I left Harvard for an associate professorship at MIT. Al-

though certainly a good move in a market that was starting to tighten up, it was not the move to full professor that I naturally assumed would be my right should I leave Harvard.

My son made some great ashtrays in his progressive private school, but my wife and I came to have doubts about its permissive learning environment. Leaving Harvard meant giving up our ideal Cambridge apartment in our ideal academic ghetto and moving to a faceless suburb with affordable housing and neighbors whose politics, life-styles, and landscaping were far from what we had become accustomed to. The engine block in our foreign car cracked. A forest fire burned our land on Martha's Vineyard and exposed its proximity to the Edgartown dump. We sold the land.

I now had to confront ghosts that had lain dormant during the past decade of continuous graduate school and professional success. My need for achievement had been well served in those early years. I was able to leverage the success I found against inner demons always ready to tell me that I was not worth much.

Of course the need to display occupational merit badges is part of the American achievement ethos. But I was also responding to childhood experiences with a father who, whatever his virtues, was difficult to please. His own needs were such that he made me feel very inferior.^[9] As a result I had a strong need to prove myself. Seeking the external symbols of success was a way to demonstrate to the world and myself that the inner doubts I harbored were mistaken. Like Max Weber's Puritans looking for a sign of redemption through their worldly striving, I looked for evidence of my competence through competitive efforts—in high school through athletics, speech contests, student government, and stylish conspicuous consumption,^[10] and later in graduate school and beyond by applying for grants and submitting papers for publication.^[11]

My experience in those early years had supported a simple, adolescent, Nietzschean (and probably male) view in which the world could be neatly divided into winners and losers, leaders and led, those in the inner circle and those outside it. Of course, depending on the arena, one might be in or out. But many of my youthful memories revolve around a desperate need to be in that circle. Good taste required not openly acknowledging the intensity of the drive or that sweet, smug feeling that success made possible. But the quiet, invidious feelings achievement permitted were terribly important. Through grit, determination, hard work, and luck I had done a good job of showing the world where I stood—at least up to the early 1970s.^[12]

Then things changed. The appropriate tragic model was not the Greek hero destroyed by his own virtues, but the Biblical hero Job brought down by random external forces. I was the same person doing what I had always done (and probably even doing it better), and yet things were not working as they had before. I had jumped through what I thought were the appropriate burning hoops, but the cheers were now muffled.^[13] I had worked very hard to reach the brass ring, but it was always just out of reach. I had constructed a positive self-image based on possessing a nice suit of clothes, but they now were in danger of becoming outmoded and even being repossessed. I was suddenly vulnerable in a way I had not been before. What is more, the achievements that had given me so much pleasure in the past seemed less fulfilling on repetition.

Not even old enough for a real mid-life crisis, I went through a period of reassessment and asked all the familiar questions: What did it all add up to? Was it worth it? Why keep playing the same old game if the connection between merit, hard work, and reward was not assured or if the reward was not all that great to begin with? What were my goals? Who was I, after losing some of the formal trappings of success? What was important? Was there life after Harvard and the bountiful harvest of my first decade in sociology? My answers were hardly original, but they worked for me.

I came to terms with both winning and losing and was better able, as Kipling advised, to "meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat these two imposters just the same." I developed a perspective that made both failure and success easier to understand and accept. A part of this perspective is awareness of a Woody Allen paradox wherein when we do not have what we want, we are unhappy, but should we get it, it turns out not to be enough.^[14]