On Loving, and Leaving, North Dakota Austerity measures in higher ed force hard-working professionals to look elsewhere By Sheila Liming
My life in North Dakota started and ended with books. In 2014, when I accepted a job as Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Dakota, I had very little experience with the state. So, in preparation for our relocation from Pennsylvania, my husband and I started reading, swapping books back and forth in an effort to understand the place that would now be our home. Together, we read Theodore Roosevelt’s “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,” savoring his staggeringly detailed descriptions. Then came Chuck Klosterman’s books, especially his novel “Downtown Owl,” in which a highly relatable young woman moves to North Dakota for a teaching job and dies in a blizzard. Finally, we turned to Kathleen 22
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ND United Voices
Norris’ memoir “Dakota.” Where Klosterman had warned us about snowclogged tailpipes and death by carbon monoxide, Norris warned us of the need to commit fully to life in the Dakotas. “The Plains are not forgiving,” she explains. “Anything that is shallow … will dry up and blow away.” Things changed dramatically during the six years that I spent in North Dakota and, despite all my reading, I was not prepared. I had entered UND in 2014 with a lower-than-average starting salary — not just for my discipline, but for the university itself. Colleagues in other departments who I met on the new faculty bus tour (a yearly ritual at UND) were, I knew, making as much as 30-40 percent more than me. Then came three years of system-wide budget cuts. Over that time, my department lost half of
