Since receiving my PhD in astronomy from Harvard in 1982, I have managed to find continuous employment in astronomy by changeing jobs three times: NRL, BDM and now ARC. During this time, I have published nearly 50 articles, taught courses at the Smithsonian Institution, and have written two books. I have also applied for a total of 35 academic positions as Assistant Professor. This resulted in 33 rejection letters, including one from Amherst in which I was politely told that 700 applicants had been considered, and that my qualifications did not even qualify me for the 'short list'.
I did make the Short List twice, once in 1985 at Rensaleur Polytechnic Institute, and the other in 1991 at Franklin and Marshall College. The former actually resulted in a phone call from the Astronomy Department saying that they were going to offer me the position. All that would now be needed was the signiture of the new Dean of Physical Sciences which they were expecting, to make their offer to me final. Well, the new Dean had other plans and decided not to sign the offer letter, so I got a second phone call from the Astronomy Department one Saturday morning, apologizing for the mix-up and explaining what had happened. "This has never happened before. Usually the Dean just approves whatever the Department recommends". I happened to run into Prof. Marc Kuttner at the Washington D.C, AAS meeting in 1994, and as we were talking about jobs and such, he mentioned that after being at RPI for a few years, the 'Dean from Hell' quit his job to become the president of some small Liberal Arts college in the mid-west. I, meanwhile, had been screwed out of my first academic position.
The second opportunity at Franklin and Marshall College came in February, 1991, just after I got the word from NRL that my days at the Space Science Division were numbered. Prof. Mike Seeds asked me to give the customary colloquium, which went very well. He then told me that I was one of two people being considered for the position. He had read my articles in Astronomy on cosmology and was very impressed by my writing style, as he was by my Smithsonian Institution teaching. He then told me about buying homes in the area, and what my schedule would be like for the next few years as an Assistant Professor. It seemed as though I pretty well had the job, until a few weeks later when I got a letter in the mail saying that they had given the job to 'the other person'. Crestfallen, I became very bitter about having come so close to getting an academic position, and each time having it yanked-out from under me.
Taking the long view, however, I see the advantages in not having obtained these positions. Obtaining tenure at either RPI or Franklin and Marshall is virtually impossible since astronomy departments all over the country are shrinking, not growing. In each case, I would have had 3 years of solid work before, again, having to re-enter the job market. I would not have published as many papers as I actually wound up doing during that period of time. More importantly, my wife would have had to give-up her stable job just so that I could continue to be an academic gypsy flitting from job to job; no two in the same state. Instead, what happened is that we stayed put in the Washington D.C area for 12 years, my wife became well-established at the Library of Congress's Music Division, and I got to publish lots of papers, and write two books! Plus, my salary is a lot fatter working for companies like Sachs/Freeman, BDM and Applied Research Corp. than it would ever have been as an Assistant Professor! But what of the future?
I quit my job at BDM and joined ARC to work on the COBE Program with the full knowledge that as a NASA program, COBE would come to an end 2-4 years after I joined. Little did I know but that my old BDM position as Senior Scientist and Education Specialist would also come to an end with all of the contractor-directed cutbacks going on at NASA Headquarters. At BDM, I could have been moved to some other contract, but it wouldn't be in astronomy, have to do with NASA, or would it likely be in the same city! My decision to leave the apparently secure work at BDM to go to work on the COBE Program was not really made through any careful calculation of long term benefits and job security. At the time, in October of 1991, I wanted to find some way of returning to active research, and I couldn't envision that for the next 25 years before I retire, that I had seen the end of my research activity in astronomy. So when John Mather invited me to join, I jumped at the opportunity. Nevermind whats going to happen to the program in three years, for now it would be grand!
Well, now that I am finishing my first year with the COBE Project, I can see the flickering light at the end of the tunnel. The present staff of contract workers will be supported until September 31, 1995. Beyond that date, one of several scenarious will take over.
Scenario 1:
There will be no more time charged to the COBE Program by contract scientists since the COBE Program will not have obtained an infusion of new money from NASA Headquarters. The contract scientists will either be let-go ( fired, riffed etc), or will be re-absorbed into other contracts in their respective companies. Presently, none of these 'other' contracts held by my company involve any astronomical research. They are oriented towards the Earth Observing System Data Management System and require skills in computer and database archetecture, meteorology and theoretical hydrodynamics. Not exactly a good match for an astronomer!
Scenario 2:
The money that the COBE PIs are requesting from NASA to 'ramp down' the work on COBE in an organized manner will be obtained, and allow a much-reduced group of contractors to work on COBE through September 1997, beyond which date NO further money will be available. This only postpones the inevitable, and since there haven't been any new hires in the Government Service at Goddard for several years now, it is not likely that I, or my collegues, will be offered this stable job opportunity.
Scenario 3:
Keeping my options open, I continue to apply for academic positions and manage to get a new offer; my COBE experience and new book, having finally paid-off as I hoped they might.
Scenario 4:
The COBE Program really does come to an end on September 31, 1995, but there are no new astronomical research opportunities for me ready to step-in to fill the void. At Applied Research Corp, I work briefly on a number of different projects, but eventually decide that this kind of temporary work is not the reason why I endured graduate school and got a PhD. I eventually quit Applied Research Corporation and look for a new career.
None of these scenarios are particularly cheery. They all eventually run into the same barrier, some sooner, some later, when I feel I will have to make a radical decission about where next to take my career. With two new daughters to worry about, and a wife's stable job in an even poorer profession ( Music History and Theory) to consider, I do not see on the horizon a lot of exciting options. From my stand point, I feel like I have already shot the wad in terms of adding significant, high-visibility skills and research capabilities to my Resume. Still, I continue to eke-out existence on temporary, short-term contract positions at the age of 41.
At the last AAS meeting, I overheard a well-established astronomer in a secure position make the comment that, if an astronomer has not been able to secure a permanent position by the age of 35, he/she is probably never going to make it, and should consider leaving the profession. The implication is that such individuals are considered 'damaged goods' compared to younger astronomers. I have no evidence that this is a particularly wide-spread attitude among 'tenured' astronomers, but if it is, my decission to join COBE was probably a career-saving move. It would say to my next potential employer that, even at the age of 40, the world-famous COBE Program wanted to hire me to do research and that I am by no means washed-out!
Still, as baby boomer astronomers look at their employment prospects between now and the turn of the century, many of us have begun to swallow the bitter pill that our careers are about to take a sudden turn. When we decided to become astronomers in high school, astronauts were walking on the moon and playing golf there, NASA was trumpeting some mighty adventuresome dreams of space stations, Mars and Lunar colonies, and it seemed that the prospects looked very bright for astronomy. The booming '80's added to some research coffers the windfall money from the 'Star Wars' program. I, myself, developed an infrared camera at NRL which was used both to test-out Star Wars detector technology, and to carry-out astronomical research.
Then as the bubble began to burst in 1990, the National Science Foundation announced that unless something was done in a hurry, there would be a shortfall of about 600,000 scientists and engineers by the turn of the century. If that was so, I thought, why haven't I seen more evidence for this in new job openings in space science? A few years later, my intuition was validated by the NSF retracting their estimate. If anything, there was actually a glut of scientists out there, chasing a dwindeling number of stable jobs. Although educating our young students in the sciences was still a high-visibility national goal, the reason for this was not so that they would become scientists, but that they would become more technically-skilled factory workers lile their Japaneese counterparts working for Sony, Toshiba and Nissan!
Then, as if to clarify the Congressional attitude towards science, in 1994 a group of freshman Congressman succeeded in canciling the funding for the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. With the accellerator 25% completed, and 10,000 scientists and engineers working on it as if their lives depended on it, the rug was pulled-out of this $11 billion program in a highly political deficit-cutting move. Nearly $700 million was then voted by Congress to ramp the development program down; the largest amount of money Congress ever approved for the SSC during any of the ... years it had already been funded.
By comparison to the much larger collection of 100,000 physicists and engineers in America, the 6000 or so astronomers are a small constituency indeed. If the basic research budgit 'hiccoughs' by a few 100 million dollars, it could completely wipe-out astronomical research.