To find that I was by the sea gazing with tranquility

So some more features of the job, largely things that keep making me think I'm being warned off: for one, I'd be taking a pay cut to work there, although that's compensated largely by the pension plan they provide. I am saving nicely and I've got about the in-case-of savings cushion that I like now, but I haven't started a real retirement savings plan and need to do that. My living expenses are pretty cheap, and the risk of steady moves encourage not weighing oneself down with frivolities like, oh, twenty 20-kg boxes of books, so having money going effectively directly to savings would be pretty much what I'd do regardless.

It's not a tenure-track position, although what is anymore; but it's also a one-year renewable contract because their contract itself is renewed annually. It's been stable for decades, but they don't ever have the reasonable assurance of perpetuity that, like, Onondaga Community College might command, nor the chance for two- or three-year contracts. I wouldn't be expected to do any research or writing, at least not as a demand for continued employment --- which they present as pretty much a given, at least as long as the employee wants to keep going --- and as all the courses would be basic introductory material I could expect to need little preparation time and so would have the chance to do my own research and writing. Classes would be rather heavily focused to standardized syllabuses, including region-wide standard final exams (a practical necessity, as students can't be expected to take subsequent classes from the same instructor and have to be brought to about the same proficiency regardless of where they take the class), reducing my workload but also reducing the amount that any course is mine.

And even then there's drawbacks. They'd have base libraries, but not any sort of academic library, although I'd be able to request books from the home university through interlibrary loan. So I could probably get references material as I needed it, albeit with enormous shipping delays, and I'd be unable to rely on the serendipity that makes university libraries such a joy to me.

A lot of the sides of this are making me feel instinctively that ``this isn't right for you''. I suppose that suggests my answer already, but I don't know how much to trust my instincts.

Trivia: William Moulton Marston, of lie detector and Wonder Woman fame, was hired by Universal Pictures head Carle Laemmle in 1929 ``to apply psychology to all departments of the motion picture concern'', in no small part to present movies in ways safe against potential censorship hazards and controversies. He did not last out a year in the position. Source: The Lie Detectors: The History Of An American Obsession, Ken Alder.

Currently Reading: The Great Hedge of India: The Search For The Living Barrier That Divided A People, Roy Moxham. ... You know, when it gets down to the level of interacting with the common people, the British Empire spent a lot of energy being jerks.