The Job Search

I can sympathize with these American workers who agitate to keep jobs here in America and not lose them to foreign workers in far off lands.  When I started work, it was the reverse in my field, and probably quite laughable.  I trained to be a professional in ancient literature and history, the Greek stuff, especially.  I know it sounds laughable when the deserted industrial Middle West is talking about whole truck factories decamping to Mexico, whereas I am reminded of the British trickling in from Oxford and Cambridge or pretending to hold degrees from there, with their fairy upper class Brit accents, all of them named "Nigel" or "Spencer," and clutching testimonial proof that they were already fluent in both Latin and Greek when they got high marks on their "A level," whatever that might be, sort of high class high school diploma needed to get into university.  Enrollments were down in the fifties, jobs were tight--we were competing with returning veterans as well as these Brits--.  Who wants to hire some newbie when for a bit more you get get the genuine article, a terribly smooth,, elegant male who had sat at the feet of one of those luminaries we only knew because we saw their names on the back of important books.  They brought such authority to the classroom, when they spoke in departmental meetings, even if what they said was nonsense, it was like music to the senior faculty's ears, attuned always to their own memories of a year of study at Oxford or Cambridge.  Then there were the refugee Jews who brought not only great knowledge and skill along with impenetrable accents and a complete disdain and ignorance of American teaching methods and goals who had built-in stardom that made us pale in comparison.  That all of these gentlemen were beyond belief boring, entirely indifferent to a learning situation that they thought should have been done in high school (because, let's face it, the study of the classics in the USA usually begins at the college level and you have to squeeze together years of study and preparation in order to emerge with you BA degree and a tolerable knowledge of the subject so as to go on to graduate school.)  The irony of it all was that these Americans who achieved that were the brightest of the brightest whereas the imports were more often than not the ones who, having failed to find a slot at home, had to ship out to foreign ports to look for employment, or in the case of the refugee Jews, they were often men whose career had been in something quite otherwise who desperate in a new country dusted off something they vaguely remembered from their teen years at the gymnasium.  So it was a laughable scene those home grown scholars bending the knee in homage before the imports masquerading as know-it-alls.  It took about ten years for it to sink in, but it has made me fully sympathetic for the plight of a young person starting his job search and knowing that the jobs were going to some other ethnic group somewhere else.