Real Estate and Your Academic Career

Collapsed on our futons watching This Old House episodes on tape, my wife and I noticed some mice skittering around the edges of the room. They became brave and began to steal crumbs from the floor near the coffee table. Slightly amused, I tossed them a piece of bread. They swarmed on the bread, fighting each other and tearing it apart. It was like an allegory of graduate school.

Now that I was on the tenure track and the proud owner of a 19th-century farmstead, I could afford to laugh at such temporary inconveniences.

The next day, while we were out buying mouse traps, all of the pipes began leaking simultaneously. (Apparently, the chemicals used to kill the bacteria in our well had dissolved the very microbes that held the pipes together.) As I hacked through plaster and taped the leaks, the increased water pressure caused larger spurts in new places. I was soaked to the skin and covered with filth. It was like a scene from Das Boot. Water poured through light fixtures in the ceilings, we lost power, and the basement began to fill with muddy water on top of which floated dozens of dead mice. At least the rodent problem was being alleviated.

That was just the beginning of our move to the country. Today, I’m on a first-name basis with half of the employees at the local Home Depot. If I ever left the academy, I could probably work as a general contractor or an exterminator.

My wife and I -- both only children from a big city -- had a shared dream of raising a large family in a big house in the country. Every time I had an on-campus interview for an assistant professorship, we would search Web sites such as Realtor.com, like children going though the Sears Christmas Wish Book. On campus visits, I tried to sneak away in a rental car, stopping at real-estate agents’ offices, and checking out neighborhoods.

For us, the academic life and our desire for the “Real American Home” and the “Big Family” we had never known were always interconnected.

And yet, academic careerism militates against sinking deep roots into a community. Buying a house is a big commitment. Renovating an old house is a bigger one. Filling it with children, as we have done, is an even bigger one.

The common wisdom, if you want to advance in your academic career, is that you need to move every few years, leveraging one institution against another along the way. At the very least, you need to be able to accept visiting appointments and fellowships without worrying about what’s happening “at home.”

If you plan to sit still for a while, it becomes hard to negotiate with the administration since, in order to get a higher salary or some other perk, you have to promote the real possibility that you could leave for another job. That stance becomes difficult to adopt if you are obviously immobile.

If you want to be an academic careerist, you should keep a moving van parked outside your divisional dean’s window. And leave the motor running.

A not entirely serious colleague once told me that she thought it was presumptuous for a junior faculty member to buy a house before the end of the probationary period: “It’s the same kind of bad taste that causes young faculty members to decorate their offices with their children’s drawings. They want to introduce a personal dimension into the tenure process. ‘If you don’t tenure me, I’ll have to sell my home and move my children. Boo hoo!’”

So, why should any junior faculty member buy a house? Why not just postpone settling down until gaining the relative security of tenure and the assurance that you are a “good fit” for your institution?

For most people, buying real estate just makes more financial sense than paying rent. Real estate is usually the safest investment you can make. Some colleges offer home-buying assistance to faculty members who want to live nearby (though the college may insist on the right of first refusal when the property is sold). Interest rates are still extraordinarily low (they may never be this low again in our lifetimes). In many locations, a modest house can be obtained for a few thousand dollars down. Then there’s the federal tax deduction for the mortgage interest every year (though you do have to pay property taxes).

In many cases, the real-estate agents are correct in asking, “Can you afford not to buy?” Renting, though it enhances mobility, is costly in the long run. For most academics, real estate is their best opportunity to accumulate wealth.

Of course, it’s difficult for many cash-strapped and debt-saddled assistant professors (to say nothing of part-timers and adjuncts), to make a down payment on the kind of properties that are near famous institutions in big cities. When I left grad school four years ago, one-bedroom condos in my neighborhood were selling for more than $250,000. Paradoxically, being an academic at a high-powered institution -- unless you are already a superstar -- requires scaling down your material expectations. You trade material comfort for status, a house for an apartment.

Even though academic salaries go down the farther your institution gets from the top of the academic pyramid, the price of nearby real estate also tends to go down. (The worst case, of course, is to be at an undistinguished college in an expensive city.) Faculty members at less-famous colleges often live much more comfortable lives than their peers in the top tier. If one feels marginalized in the profession by moving to the so-called boondocks, living well, as they say, is the best revenge.

While some of my peers at elite institutions are commuting for an hour by train and subway to their small, expensive, urban apartments, I am driving home in 10 minutes to a property that my dean, half joking, calls “the manor.” Maintaining the place is a lot of work, but tonight I’ll spend the evening with my wife, walking our garden paths, watching our children play on the tree swing and in the rock garden. And there is the sense of autonomy and self-reliance, and the intangible pleasure of rootedness, of having a material stake in a community. Life is less anonymous than it was when we were apartment dwellers. We have neighbors who have been here for generations and expect us to be here for a long time. It’s not perfect -- we are far from our extended families and the urban culture in which we were raised. We miss some aspects of living in a city. We do feel a little bit out of the loop. But on the whole, this life suits us better, for now.

And if our decision to buy property before earning tenure was presumptuous, it was also an affirmation to the college that I have made a long-term commitment. Institutions rightly value highly visible stars, but they should also value long-term citizens, who become the core faculty, the memory of the institution, and the strongest link to the local community.

Of course, young academics often pay more attention to institutional hierarchies than quality of life issues. (Graduate school is partly about indoctrinating students into hierarchical values.) Or they may have different definitions of “quality-of-life.” Perhaps they cannot imagine themselves living outside of a big city. And some prefer the freedom and anonymity of apartment life. But I suspect that many have never really considered anything else. Some assume that “flyover country” is populated exclusively by bigots and bible-thumpers. Or they ask, with Paris Hilton-like condescension: “Do you like, really, buy your clothes at Wal-Mart?”

Even with all the work, expense, and political second-guessing, my wife and I are still sure we made the right decision to buy an old house near a liberal-arts college in a small town. It is a highly personal choice and obviously not right for everyone. Perhaps other young academics -- as they weigh their options in an extraordinarily tight job market -- might do well to consider the joys of real estate along with institutional rankings; and the deeper pleasure of connection to a place over an arbitrary notion of advancement through rootlessness.