Academics who want to do the sort of work I do sometimes ask me, “How do you make this all work financially?” So here’s the answer.

The kind of work I do is pretty inexpensive, materially speaking; it doesn’t require fancy centrifuges, massive computers, or lots of assistants. And that’s a good thing, since not too many granting agencies seem interested in funding what I do. It is highly interdisciplinary and it tends to be too political for scholarly institutions and too scholarly for political foundations. Plus not too many places want to fund salary support for humanists, which is what I’d need. I suppose I could get more funding if I worked harder at it, but I really hate wasting time writing grants that force me to do work the way some particularly agency wants. I’d rather just go do the work I think needs doing.

So how do I pay for the substantial travel I do for research and outreach? How do I pay for my computer equipment, my phone bills, my Fed Ex account, not mention food and housing? For the most part, I use my own income to fund my work, and my partner financially supplements my vocation and my desire to be with our son more than I could if I held a conventional job. (Lucky for me I married a doctah who believes in what I do.) I tax-deduct everything I possibly can legitimately, and that helps some.

My little secret is that right now, because I quit my tenured job to have the freedom to do what I love, I make only about $45,000 a year, with no benefits. I’m told by colleagues that, given my record and reputation, I would probably be making about $90-120,000 plus benefits annually if I bit the bullet and again took a traditional tenure-track job. Today about one-third of my annual income comes from royalties on my books and honoraria for speaking, and the rest comes from my ideal part-time (~20% FTE) position with Northwestern University, a position that is part-time by my request to allow me adequate time to do the unconventional work I want to do.

I take about half of my Northwestern income in the form of a research budget so that I can pay many expenses pre-tax. I have complete control over how I spend that money, as long as I use it on work I am doing. (So I use it to fund telephone calls and photocopying related to research projects, to pay for travel to conferences, to upkeep my computer, etc.) I decide what to work on (no one has to approve my projects), I spend the money, and then I turn in the receipts to our departmental secretary for reimbursement from my budget.

My job comes with no benefits, but I have health and dental insurance through my partner. I would love to have a job-related retirement account, but when I quit my tenured job, it was because I had decided I would rather have the life I want now than more money now and later. (I’ve never regretted the decision.) Living in a cheap part of the country and driving rusty, dusty, twelve-year-old Saturn SLs keeps our household expenses relatively low. And like I said, my partner is a doctor, and now also the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for MSU’s College of Human Medicine, so we do OK thanks to his talents and hard work.

I have been fortunate enough to sometimes be funded by others along the way to this life. Teaching assistantships and my kind parents helped pay for some of my graduate school expenses, the part I couldn’t afford to pay when I cashed in my IRA’s from my five years as a mortgage broker. In 1993-94, when I was in graduate school at Indiana University, I had a one-year John H. Edwards Fellowship, a fellowship awarded “to a graduate student who shows superior scholastic ability and intellectual capacity, and good citizenship and character, including attitude toward University and community service as demonstrated by actual service.” (Yeah, I was a bit of an activist back then, too.)  The next academic year (1994-95), I received a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

The universities for which I’ve worked (Northwestern University, Indiana University, University of Minnesota, and Michigan State University) have all effectively funded me either with direct grants and research budgets or through library services, administrative assistance, and the provision of research assistants. MSU also gave me a $17,000 book grant and a half-salary sabbatical for One of Us.

I developed a good bit of my thinking in conjunction with two working groups: (1) the Enhancement Technologies and Human Identity Working Group, run by Carl Elliott and Margaret Lock and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and (2) the Surgically Shaping Children Working Group of the Hastings Center, run by Erik Parens and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. These were multi-year projects involving lots of meetings, and my travel expenses were paid for by the group’s grants.

The work I did putting together the Clinical Guidelines and Handbook for Parents for the Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development was funded by the Arcus Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and mostly the California Endowment via grants I helped write for the Intersex Society of North America. For the near-full-time work I did over about six months editing, writing, and coordinating the two DSD consensus documents, I paid myself $12,000 out of the grants. (That was the only time I was paid by ISNA, an organization to which my mate and I donated about $20,000 in cash and another $30,000 in in-kind expenses. We have no idea how much we donated in volunteer labor over ten years.)

So there you have it. My secret to doing what I want while still putting food on the table and the occasional pair of fabulous shoes from Nordstrom’s on my feet. Bottom line: yeah, I don’t make what I should be making (and maybe that has some to do with my gender and my sex), but I’m doing what I should be doing. That makes me happy, and I’d rather be happy than better off financially.

Postscript, May 2008: Um, apparently the Guggenheim Foundation funds someone like me! (Which means two pairs of fabulous boots from Alcala’s!)

Relevant links:

1. ‣my c.v.
   

2. ‣updates on my work
   

3. ‣how to invite me to speak