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Oldest Living TA Tells All

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By Glenn W. LaFantasie

It's not easy being the oldest living teaching assistant in the world. At 55, I returned to Brown University to finish my Ph.D. in history, although I had already enjoyed a 30-year "alternative" career in the field of public history and as a writer specializing in the American Civil War.

Nevertheless, I had some things to learn at Brown besides getting myself up to date on the historical scholarship of 19th-century America, my major field. At the end of a discussion section, a student blurted out: "You're the sickest TA we've ever had." Really? Sick? Like Michael Jackson on court day? Like Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho? Much to my relief, I subsequently learned that "sickest" to the current generation of college students means what "coolest" or "hippest" meant when I was going to school.

It's certainly groovy to be well liked, and I'm always glad to pick up youthful colloquialisms. But there was still much more for me to learn at Brown.

Twenty-five years have elapsed since I first started the Ph.D. at Brown. Back then I was employed full-time at the Rhode Island Historical Society, where I served as editor of publications. When my wife, Donna, an officer in the U.S. Army Reserves, was put on active duty in Philadelphia, we pulled up stakes and moved, which meant I had to leave my doctoral studies behind.

Although I regretted not finishing, my career followed some fortunate -- and rather unexpected -- paths. For three years I served as director of a project to edit and publish the papers of Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson's secretary of the treasury. Next the Army decided to send Donna to a job in the Pentagon, so we moved to Northern Virginia. I worked for a time as head of publications at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Then in the early 1990s I became a deputy historian at the U.S. Department of State and general editor of the Foreign Relations of the United States series.

After I left the State Department in the mid-1990s, I took on various teaching assignments as an adjunct at a community college and at Gettysburg College, despite the long commute from Virginia. I also became the part-time director of a small historic gristmill museum in Virginia.

Even before thinking about returning to graduate school, I was fortunate to get publishing contracts for three book manuscripts that had consumed about 15 years of my creative labors. At about the same time, my wife left active duty, the kids completed their bachelor's degrees, and the time seemed right for me to return to Brown -- finally.

When the history department and the graduate school agreed to take me back (enthusiastically, I am very pleased to say), I was positively thrilled. My new adviser accepted one of my book manuscripts as my dissertation. So Donna and I packed up our belongings and returned to our roots in southern New England.

At first I found it awkward introducing myself to my fellow TA's. They all looked so very . . . young. Needless to say, our camaraderie suffered from a sizable generation gap. The undergraduates didn't know what to make of me, either. When they seemed about ready to burst from curiosity, I explained how I had ended up landing on their planet and they began calling me the Oldest Living TA

One student joked within my hearing about how it had taken LaFantasie 25 years to complete his Ph.D. Others seemed to find me too professorial and couldn't bring themselves to call me by my first name.

In time, as we got to know one another, things loosened up considerably, and I learned that being a good teaching assistant (just like being a good teacher) depends less on your age than on paying close attention to what students have to say and how eager they are to acquire knowledge.

Other lessons came harder. After spending nearly a decade as an adjunct, publishing a good number of articles and reviews, and having three major books nearing publication, it was my hope that, once finished at Brown, I would find a position as an assistant professor teaching in my specialty, the Civil War and Reconstruction. I entered the job market with high hopes and great enthusiasm but have ccome away sorely disappointed.

Out of a mountain of applications submitted to search committees from Massachusetts to California, I was interviewed for only three openings. No offers came as a result of those interviews.

It turns out that I am facing some obstacles that I never anticipated when I set my sights on finishing my Ph.D. One is that my field, the Civil War and Reconstruction, is not highly regarded among professional historians, although the public remains enthralled by anything having to do with America's greatest cataclysm.

I also write about military subjects, although I consider myself more of a social and intellectual historian than a military one. In any form, military history is simply not a hot topic among academic historians, which is why the so-called amateurs -- the authors who write popular history for general audiences -- produce most of the books on battles and wars.

I am also at a disadvantage, so I am told, because of my willingness -- just like any other recently minted Ph.D. -- to accept the relatively low status of an assistant professorship, despite the breadth of my previous experience as a public historian. Search committees perhaps wonder why I want to start at the bottom or why I am not applying for higher academic ranks. (The answer? Because almost every vacancy that occurs in academic departments is at the junior level.)

Departments may also fear that, because of my many publications, I will be overly aggressive when it comes to seeking tenure. They are wrong, but it is hard to raise such issues and discuss them candidly in a brief cover letter. And given the fact that any advertised academic job usually results, at the very least, in 100 or more applications, there is a very good chance that my cover letters have not been read.

And then there's my age. It never occurred to me that I would encounter age discrimination in such enlightened institutions as colleges and universities, but maybe that's what's happening here, at least in part. The authors of a 1996 report by the American Historical Association found "troubling evidence" that some history departments "narrow the applicant pool through the use of age-restrictive criteria in job descriptions or arbitrarily eliminate otherwise qualified candidates because of age." Ouch.

Mind you, I have no direct evidence that I have been the target of age discrimination, but it no doubt contributes to the lackluster response to my numerous job applications. "The older the violin, the sweeter the music," says Augustus McCrae in Larry McMurtry's novel, Lonesome Dove. Apparently not everyone agrees.

I truly hope that that is not the case. Although I would certainly feel better -- more buoyant -- about receiving my Ph.D. from Brown this past spring if I had professional employment all lined up and my future squared away, I'm still very glad that circumstances (and so much crucial support from my family, the history department and graduate school at Brown, and all my friends) have enabled me to finish something I began so long ago and that finally gives me the credential I have otherwise lacked as a professional historian.

Meanwhile, I am still sending out applications. I will do so until I find a position that is right for me. My hopes are still high that I can leave behind my current role as the Oldest Living TA in the World and take on a new one: an assistant professor of history who just happens to be older than his peers.