The Road to Harvard

In April, Gainesville State College invited me for a campus interview, one of three finalists (Asian and world history). I did not get an offer. If I had gotten one, we might not have accepted. The college is in an urban sprawl area an hour and a half northeast of Atlanta. The school is in transition from a 2- to a 4-year institution, so there would have been limited opportunities to teach courses other than surveys. In May, my friend Liu Sheng forwarded an offer from another friend of his to teach at Jiangsu University in Yangzhou. The opportunity (U.S. history and English) was very attractive, except that the salary was too low for us to live comfortably in the U.S. during the summer. In June, Nottingham University invited me to the UK to interview as a finalist for a position (US-Asian Relations) at their campus in Ningbo. As my liaison subsequently informed me, my "candidacy was not successful." A one-day walking tour of Nottingham was great fun, though. In July, Southern Illinois University, after a phone interview, offered me a one-year lectureship in Asian and world history. From what I could learn on the Internet about Carbondale, it sounds like a neat college town. The university itself is attractive -- big library, seemingly collegial department, big center for Dewey studies. The offer was inferior to my current position, as I was fairly certain would be the case. Still, it was good practice -- and we'll know each other, in case a tenure-track search materializes in the future.

Plodding along on the publication front. After spending nine months with my book manuscript, Stanford U Press declined it, based on a "should be published but not here" review by a political scientist. That rejection may have doomed my prospects at U of Nottingham-Ningbo. I am moving on to other university presses, one by one. In the meantime, I have submitted some of the material to the J of American-East Asian Relations as an article on the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. The editor, Chuck Hayford, sent an initially encouraging reply.

After the rejection by U of Nottingham-Ningbo, Terry and I decided to place a bet on my teaching long-term at MSSU. Specifically, we began house hunting soon after returning from Israel (a trip we began two days after I returned from my UK interview). The first time out, July 3, we found a house we liked, made an offer, and signed a contract. We'll close next week, July 30. One consideration was that any house we purchased be easy to re-sell, in case I get pushed or pulled out of Joplin. This one meets that requirement. More on the house in a future entry. In addition to wanting to get rooted again, several other factors were incentives to buy now: the 2009-only $8000 tax credit for first-time home buyers (we qualify, having rented for the past three years); our kids' (Inga and Noel) decision to buy our house in Prairie Village; the current depression in both housing prices and mortgage interest rates.

--- Norty