The Taylors are moving, and it’s complicated

The Taylors are moving to Norway. I’m accepting a position at NTNU in Trondheim, and Allison has taken a remote job at a law firm specializing in regulatory law.

My hope is to explain why we’re doing this and how I’m feeling about it (Allison’s got her own reasons, and this post will be long enough with just one perspective), but I think this is doomed to be a disorganized and contradictory post. We’ve been weighing this for a year, and day by day my feelings and priorities shift radically. What’s really important and essential one day feels irrelevant the next. We have changed our minds over and over.

Two years ago, we would fantasize about living in Norway, but we had a firm idea of what the rest of our lives looked like, and that wasn’t it. Our jobs were ones we were good at and enjoyed. We had bought our forever house, which I honestly believe is the best house in Annapolis. We had a village of friends and family. My job was super stable, and Allison was so good at hers and so respected in her field that there would always be another one. We’d go back to Norway for a sabbatical every seven years. Anybody would want that.

I’ve been a professor at the Naval Academy for 15 years now, which has been an uncommonly good fit. The teaching environment is unbeatable, the students are good kids, my department is outstanding, and the culture is interesting. “The mission” of building officers for the Navy and Marine Corps provides culture and context that I’ve really enjoyed and taken advantage of, whether it be adding military application into my lectures, taking Annalise to see the Marines fly helicopters around, or recreationally getting tear gassed at Quantico. Just out of my own curiosity, I just did a five-week seminar on Marine warfighting doctrine. It’s an interesting place, and I have been proud to be part of it.

The best parts of the job came from the classroom and the Computer Science department, which was and is a special group of people. We worked really hard to learn from each other, provide a great learning environment for the students, and develop a relevant and valuable education. There were a lot of strong opinions, but we expressed them with respect and trust, and enjoyed being around each other. We were creative, hard-working, and committed to our students. We kept the main thing (educating midshipmen) the main thing, even if our advocacy meant making our bosses’ lives more complicated or us working harder than we needed to. As a team, we were really good for a long time.

I arrived at Navy as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was ending. The school brought in people from outside to hold seminars for officers and faculty to acclimatize to the new, more diverse culture. The seminars were optional but well attended; it was rewarding and inspiring to see officers who had clearly never thought about working with a gay person before be willing to ask stupid questions because they wanted to do their jobs well. Later, when transgender sailors were allowed, they held similar events, including discussions of experience with panels of current and former transgender members of the Navy (including an incredibly brave then-midshipman). I kept the index-card-sized certificates from the seminars outside my door, which directly led to meaningful conversations with two students of mine who wanted to talk to someone. The military is a human institution with human contradictions, but I was proud of the overall commitment to doing a good job by tolerating and working with everybody. It was representative of a place that worked hard to become better.

While I was on sabbatical, Trump took office, and I got an email that my certificates were no longer allowed; a colleague had had to come around and take them down. As my sad little protest, I’d hang them up in my office where students in my office could see them, but people in the hallway wouldn’t. Our department Instagram page was scrubbed of pictures from a conference for women in computer science. My colleague who was officer in charge of the Chinese-American club had to tell those students their club was disbanded. Books on gender and race were pulled from the library, and when that made the news, an officer was sent in to question librarians to find who was talking to the press. Our published papers now have to be approved to make sure they don’t touch on banned topics. Outside speakers are vetted for “professionalism.” While our school leadership believes in us (I really like our Superintendent and Provost), the Trump administration has a deep suspicion of civilian faculty, with efforts to remove civilians from leadership positions, withdraw civilian tenure, remove the opportunity for sabbaticals, or altogether replace civilian faculty with presumed-less-liberal military faculty.

View this post on Instagram

Other problems began, as well. Scientific funding, which I need to get my full salary, has been sharply curtailed nationwide, causing an academia-wide problem; I had a grant pulled back, and worked for free for a bit. There is an overall shift away from the idea that “academic quality is better because it makes better leaders and officers” and toward the idea that “academic quality is less important because service academies should exclusively train students to fight wars.” Our traditional work flexibility, necessary due to the fact we all work significantly more than 40 hours a week but also want to see our families, has been replaced with a strict always-present-in-the-office policy.

Some of those new policies are indefensible, and others have arguably-positive elements, but all of them are hostile to the civilians who are expert in teaching their field and oversee long-term curriculum development. As a result, many many people have left the academy without being replaced, including several outstanding members of my own department. In scheduling students for a new semester, there aren’t enough courses offered, and the courses offered don’t have enough seats. We now regularly tell academically ambitious students they have to do less, because doing more takes seats in classes from students who need them to graduate. We’re just not doing as good of a job as we used to do.

I don’t expect the Trump policies to remain forever, but I do expect the damage to the Naval Academy to be long-lasting. I worry the academy will become less attractive to professors like myself who come from outside the national security community, and it will instead settle for an easier path, recycling people with the same perspectives that already run the DOD. We’ll lose the diverse work and educational backgrounds that made the education we provided broad and deep. This was always a temptation for the Academy, but the excellent talent from outside the DOD was its own winning argument. If the Academy does remain less attractive to those people, and the DOD actually becomes the best source of faculty, then that temptation will win to the long-term detriment of the school.

Additionally, like anywhere, the institution has some chronic frustrations. Things that should be easy (getting research money, spending money, traveling, organizing events, setting up computers or installing software, etc.) often aren’t, due to the complexities of federal laws and regulations, insufficient investment in support in navigating them, and on-campus power centers whose goals are often not aligned with midshipman learning. I’m tired of fighting those battles.

I loved working at the Naval Academy, and planned to never leave, but I’m just not as proud to work there as I once was.

The new job in Norway is in a friendly department with good people, and involves much more time for research. Support for the easy things is significantly more robust. There’s also a lot of lifestyle elements I’m looking forward to. I want to step out of the middle of the American political hurricane (and not feel like I’m working for Team Hurricane). I want the peace of not having to read smoke signals to guess how well my school administration is defending me from the national administration. I want a professional workplace that doesn’t view me (“liberal academic teaching the military”) as part of a problem. I want to deal with different frustrations at work rather than the same unchanging ones for 20 more years. I want my job to be challenging in new ways, at a school that supports its faculty. I want to reexperience the joy of being surrounded by a new interesting culture where I have a lot to learn, rather than one that is familiar at its best and increasingly hostile at its worst.

Importantly, we are also big believers in the Norwegian approach to childhood; we don’t agree with every societal decision, but we agree with the priorities that result in those policy decisions. Norwegian children have a great deal of autonomy, and there’s a lot of flexibility in how they learn. There’s also considerable outside time; there’s enough recess, and children take frequent field trips to ski trails and other places where they can be physical. Teachers are sufficiently educated, paid, and rested. All schools are phone-free. And, they can still do math and think critically when they’re done.

So, leave, right? Well, leaving and moving to Norway is pretty scary. I’m old enough that I’ll never be super good at Norwegian, and talking to neighbors and Annalise’s friends will always be a struggle. My job will pay less in Norway, and while Allison’s got a great gig to start with over there, should something happen, her ability to cash in on being an expert on Maryland healthcare law is pretty severely curtailed in the Trondheim market. We’ll be far from Annalise’s extended family. We have to get rid of and then replace essentially everything we own, because you’re not shipping a couch across the Atlantic. The American and Norwegian economies are very different, and fitting half a career of American finances into Norway is proving to be very complicated.

Workwise, I’ll miss my colleagues and the teaching environment. I’ll miss the comfort and convenience of a familiar environment where I know I’m effective. I’ll miss the opportunity to lead just as a major push in my field (artificial intelligence) ramps up.

There are so many uncertainties that a list of pros and a list of cons is wildly inadequate. Either choice will have joys and regrets. One day something seems unbearable here or irresistible in Norway, and it seems impossible to stay. The next, I ride my bike with Annalise from our great house to the library on a beautiful day, or I look at a storage closet that needs to be totally liquidated, or I have a lecture that goes particularly well, and it seems impossible to leave. In the end, for me, the decision has boiled down to three things. First, I love a Norwegian childhood and want to give that to Annalise. Second, Allison is excited about it and wants to do it. But third, in the end, I have to answer the question: Do I want to take a big swing, do something really hard, and shake everything up?

It’s not my nature to say yes to that. I like security more than novelty, and I have had (and will continue to have) a lot of sleepless nights about this. But, I keep coming back to a casual conversation I had with a friend when we first started thinking about this, where he said, “you only live once, so why should you only live one life?”

We’ve lived this life here in Annapolis. It has been great, but maybe it’s time for another one. I think I’d regret not doing the scary thing.

I often think about our relocation in the context of worldwide immigration as presented in the news. Our circumstances are vastly more secure than those faced by families moving today without wealth or institutional support, but the core impulses echo; they also seek better jobs, or a better environment for their children. I’m so nervous, but what we’re doing is so much easier. How hard it must be.

I also sometimes think of historical immigration. About 175 years ago, some of my ancestors left Vestfold, Oppland, and Telemark, joining the surge of immigrants from Norway to the US. They, too, must have been much more frightened than me, and their trip had casualties. Those left settled in what would become Portage County, Wisconsin, where they founded towns with names both wistful (Scandinavia, WI) and aspirational (New Hope, WI). They became Americans while maintaining a culture tightly tied to Norway, eventually producing my grandmother. May our move be as successful as theirs, and may Norway be as fertile for us as the Wisconsin soil was for them.