The Bildung of Rebecca Schuman (Sort Of)

An abortive, sanitized and selectively omissive biography.

Rebecca Schuman was born in 1976, the first child of David and Sharon, who were, at the time — despite their University of Chicago PhDs and an allegedly “easier” market — sharing a single professorship at Deep Springs College because they couldn’t find work together anywhere else. (In order to get the job at Deep Springs, they had to spend a summer cooking in the Boarding House.) Rebecca’s first experience of humanity was thus 25 gifted but iconoclastic young college men, a skeleton crew of faculty and their spouses (some of whom bedded the aforementioned iconoclastic young men as a hobby, given that activities in the middle of the Sierra desert were few), the staff of a fully-functioning ranch, and farm animals (who, it should go without saying, are not human, which Rebecca figured out fairly quickly, though not that quickly).

Given that her only peers were John Nash types, Rebecca Schuman was bound to be a precocious youngster, and she was; she talked at six months and could read her letters at a year. It was assumed by any and all around that she would be so brilliant that her own application to Deep Springs in 1993 would be accepted, despite the fact that she was female. The Deep Springers even made her a special shirt that said DS ’93 (one of the many unorthodox characteristics of Deep Springs is that students carry the year of their entry, rather than exit, since it is a two-year college that does not confer diplomas). This turned out to be wrong on many counts: Rebecca would graduate from high school in 1994, with a distinctively mediocre record of academic achievement that better reflected her priorities (goofing off at the school newspaper offices; tying up her parents’ landline for hours).

This high school was not, it should be noted, located at Deep Springs, or even in Bishop, the nearest town, located about forty-five miles away on the other side of one of the most treacherous mountain passes in the country (where it was also discovered that Rebecca inherited the Schuman gift of severe motion sickness). Shortly before Rebecca’s fifth birthday, the Schumans (now a foursome, with the arrival of the corpulent baby Benjamin in 1979) moved to Eugene, Oregon, where David would attend law school (at the time one of the more viable ways to give an anguished academic career the boot).

Indeed, not only was Rebecca’s preternatural precociousness short-lived, it almost went the other way — so isolated was her Deep Springs upbringing that she had never seen an astronaut before, and when her Kindergarten teacher Ms. Shinn made a home visit and showed her a picture, she identified it as “an Eskimo.” She also allegedly could not identify a wrist, although she remembers this interaction quite vividly, and Ms. Shinn had pointed to the inner pulse point of her wrist only and asked, “What’s this?” and Rebecca quite understandably did not know. However, despite the fact that Rebecca had already taught herself to read thanks to her mom growing so sick of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back that she put it on the high shelf, she was very nearly put in the Special Class.

Somehow, though, she managed to eke it out with the “regular kids” (man was eighties nomenclature unfortunate!) and reach the age of majority, at which time she was rejected from all colleges to which she applied except for Vassar (pretty much the opposite of Deep Springs in every way), where she matriculated in 1994 and “studied” English and German, which consisted largely of relying on her mediocre Sprachgefühl and her junior year abroad to amass enough fluency to eke out a senior thesis on Kafka, whilst subjecting the cohort of her many creative writing classes to innumerable instances of angst-ridden thinly-veiled autobiography. During the summers, when she was not “studying” (smoking cigarettes, which are bad for you!) in Germany, she worked as nanny and babysitter for neighborhood children, and a janitor at the Fifth Street Public Market in Eugene.

After graduating in 1998, Rebecca landed a job at St. Martin’s Press, where she did a supremely god-awful job before quitting to join the first dot-com boom in 1999; she then quit her dot-com job when the dot-com went bust and took a position at Esquire, where she somehow managed to do an even more god-awful job and almost get fired but not quite get fired, before quitting to join the dot-org bubble, before 9/11 ruined everything (or something).

During this particularly ill-advised time, she married her first husband, an aerospace engineer-turned-profesisonal-gambler (seriously), enrolled in the MFA program at the New School (thus subjecting an entirely new generation of cohorts to her thinly-veiled autobiography and also some genuinely made-up drivel that was at least genuinely made-up), divorced her jackass first husband, moved apartments about seventeen-bajillion times, and finally landed in the West Village in a “cohabitation” (that was more like a freeloading situation) with the actor Jacob Pitts, with whom she remained in a very happy relationship for three years, during which time she again held a variety of unimpressive jobs. These included but were not limited to: English instructor at a for-profit college in New Jersey; Associate Editor of Dance Teacher magazine; “professional TV-watcher,” which is not nearly as relaxing as it sounds. She also wrote a column for The L Magazine, in the era before internet comments. She and her editors had an agreement, which was that they didn’t pay her and she wrote whatever she wanted.

It was against this backdrop of a dubiously spent twenties that Rebecca Schuman thought she might go for a PhD. It was to be the sign and the seal — AND the means, for you Benjaminians out there — of her getting her shit together. It was supposed to be the first serious and socially acceptable career path of her life. She reconciled its utter lack of career prospects with the rather retrograde assumption that since her actor boyfriend made a lot of money, she wouldn’t need a lucrative job anyway. So she applied exclusively to programs in New York and LA, got rejected from all the programs on New York, got accepted to two programs in or near LA, and then she and the actor boyfriend broke up. Suddenly she found herself headed to the University of California-Irvine alone, with no plan beyond getting paid an exceedingly modest amount to go to school for five years.

Graduate school went great. Really, it did. All right, well, it also turned Rebecca into a shut-in with some very bizarre hang ups — for example, she stopped being able to eat a meal with another human being, preferring instead to shove down whatever Trader Joe’s monstrosity she concocted in the solitude of her student-housing bedroom, with only Law & Order reruns for company. She developed Tony-Soprano style anxiety faintness attacks. She became vegan, largely as an excuse to further avoid eating with other people, and lost a bunch of weight. She attended seminars and felt like an impostor. She presented at conferences and felt like an impostor. She won a Fulbright grant to Austria and felt like a very cold impostor. She forgot what it had been like to have friends. She forgot that she used to be funny and vivacious. She forgot everything and replaced it all with big smart thoughts about Kafka and Wittgenstein, an area of research for which there was little demand. She went on the job market and didn’t get a single interview.

But really, it was OK. Grad school, that is. The work, especially the teaching, was tremendously rewarding, and she met Waldemar Rohloff, whom she would eventually marry and who would eventually impregnate her. So that worked out.

After defending her dissertation in 2010, Rebeccca took a job adjuncting at the Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where Waldemar was (and still is) full-time faculty. The students were wonderful, and the total unpretentiousness of her colleagues plus the castle-like building lent the whole experience a Hogwartsian feeling.

Still, the lure of ambition was irresistible despite her continuing unimpressive showing on the market (second year: one interview, for which she did at least make the short list). Her adviser recommended she apply for the ACLS New Faculty Fellows program, a marquee postdoc for market losers just like her. She had to be nominated by UC-Irvine even to apply, and she was. And then, to her utter amazement, she was chosen, out of some 700 nominees, along with 60 or so other grantees. Her name was placed in a “clearinghouse” of dossiers to be combed through by all the participating institutions — a veritable who’s who of the R1 top tier — and she was offered a  job (for two years, underwritten by the ACLS) at three different schools. She chose the offer from The Ohio State University because the Chair had made insinuations about a tenure-track vacancy in the future.

Those insinuations were, it turns out, false. Rebeccca made the most of her two years at OSU — teaching up a storm, researching like a madwoman, turning her dissertation into a book, presenting at conferences — but it wasn’t enough. When it became time to go on the market again, she fared better — several interviews plus a campus visit — but still came up short. Meanwhile, two more years living apart from Waldemar had put her under tremendous personal strain. So she made the painful decision to cut bait and never go on the academic job market again.

This already-painful development was made even more painful when Rebecca decided to write about her experiences for Slate magazine, in an article that would be titled “Thesis Hatement” and would catapult her into academic notoriety overnight.

Since “Thesis Hatement” appeared, Rebecca has somehow, at long last, managed to get her shit together. She is now a polarizing but reluctantly influential academic journalist who aims to write honest, heartfelt, punch-pulling-bereft critique of the American academy and the people and institutions who threaten its existence. She is a full-time writer and editor, with regular columns at Slate and the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Vitae site, and rewarding side gigs translating German and editing work that’s been translated from the German by others.

In November of 2014, thanks to the acumen and brilliance of her literary agent Alia Hanna Habib (McCormick & Williams), she sold, on proposal, a memoir about her experiences in Germany and Austria, the manuscript for which she is currently finishing.

In 2013 Rebecca and Waldemar were married at New York’s City Hall, and in January of 2015 they welcomed their beautiful and spirited little daughter.