by Peter Temes

WHEN I LEFT academe, I often thought about the title of Milan Kundera's book Life Is Elsewhere. Like many scholars, I had the feeling that intellectual life was terribly thin outside colleges and universities.

My earliest experiences in the 9-to-5 world didn't help much. In my first nonacademic job, as a marketing clerk at a newsletter publishing company, I was surprised to hear bright colleagues begin each day with long conversations about what had been on television the night before. My boss once asked me - in what he must have thought was a withering tone, meant to encourage a little less critical thought on my part--whether professors argue all the time. "Actually, yes," I replied, thinking that here at last was the beginning of an interesting conversation. "In fact, I taught argument at Harvard." A few paragraphs later, I noticed an angry look on my boss's face, and I soon began reading the want ads with a renewed vigor.

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