Searches from the other side

That title sounds a lot more woo-woo than I meant it to. What I'm talking about is pretty pedestrian: the job search--from the committee's perspective.

I've been on search committees before, and this is in fact the second search that I've chaired. What makes this one different is that it's on the big-conference timeline and it's for a field that closely parallels my field in terms of the number and quality of applicants. I won't say what discipline we're searching for, but it's a tenure-track humanities position in a field saturated with high-quality Ph.D.s.

For a 4/4 low-endowment rural SLAC position, we received a staggering 139 applications. Of those applications, probably...well, let's be generous and say that 25 were eliminated immediately for not being in the right field (in English terms, think comp/rhet when we're hiring for literature).

That leaves 114. Of those, easily...80? 90? were perfectly fine. Good degrees, interesting-seeming research (this one is harder for me to judge, since it's not my field), solid teaching, strong recs.

We winnowed them down to 8 for phone interviews. That's 5.75% of the initial pool.

How did we get there?

Good question.

This search, more than any other I've participated in, brought home to me the issue of fit and the sheer injustice (no news here) of the hiring process. As I annotated my list of candidates, I found myself writing "Seems strong," "Seems solid," "Worth a second look" far too many times. Gradually, these changed to, "Seems strong but nothing stands out"--and that was that.

So--what stood out? Because we couldn't interview everyone with a good degree, solid research, and strong teaching; that would mean 80-odd interviews. The problem is that what stood out were things that weren't in the job description because they couldn't possibly have been in the job description.

For example:

1. Candidate A has some experience teaching in Z, and we have a part-timer in Z who might be retiring soon (and no budget to rehire).
2. Candidate B has some study-abroad administrative experience that would dovetail nicely with our program in Y.
3. Candidate C's service-learning experience would fit really well in this particular community.
4. Candidate D's research interests are close enough to those of a few of my colleagues to spark some interesting team-teaching possibilities, but not so close that they would duplicate our department's strengths.
5. Candidate E has high school teaching experience that might enable him/her to collaborate on developing a new secondary certification program at Field.

And so on.

Fortuity starts to play a role. It's not the case that each of our finalists has some specific strength like this, but these were the kinds of things that started leading me (and the rest of the committee) to single out particular applications over the others. And you--the applicant--just can't prepare for that.

What you can do, though, is highlight interesting bits of your professional life that might cause your application to stand out, too. Conducted workshops for first-generation students? Mention that in your cover letter. Don't dwell on it, in case it's not relevant, but mention it. Organized or taught on a study-abroad trip? Mention it. Engaged in service-learning? team-teaching? curriculum design? Mention it.

There is one other concrete thing that I can mention, too. If you're applying for a job at a SLAC, somehow demonstrate that you're specifically interested in SLACs. Maybe this doesn't matter much if you're applying to the really top-tier elite schools (who wouldn't want a job at Swarthmore?), but, at least at a school like mine, a research-heavy cover letter that doesn't even mention the appeal of a liberal arts college pretty much gets you kicked to the curb--simply because there are too many applicants and we have to narrow the pool somehow.

Also: If you have a tenure-track (or tenured!) position and are applying out, EXPLAIN WHY. Give some explanation of the move, ideally one that makes you look good. Simply avoiding the topic in your cover letter counts as one big red flag.

Good luck, everyone.

Friendliness

Apparently the Field College yearbook does these "superlative" awards for faculty and staff--who knew? They're mostly on things about sports team fan-hood and other stuff for which I wouldn't particularly want to be competitive, but they seem like a nice enough idea.

I know about this because I'm apparently a finalist for one of them--there's been a tie, so they're having a vote-off. I'm in the running for "Most likely to be a friend after graduation."

I surely do think that's sweet (though it must be said that my money is on the other contender.)

And you know, I don't think that my students' thinking of me as having friend potential undermines my authority. I am pretty much positive that my students respect me--and, if they don't, I don't know about it. My classes are difficult and my evaluations very good; many of my students work hard in my courses. I seldom get the sense that anyone is trying to pull one over on me; this is not to say that they never do, but I'm okay with letting the occasional con artist get away with something* if it means that, on the whole, there is trust between me and my students (as well as the peace of mind that comes with not looking for cons).

This is, by the way, a marked change from my first year or so here. I knew that a lot of my students liked me back then, but I knew that a lot didn't--and, more to the point, I felt highly embattled. I did have disrespectful students. They freaked me the hell out. And even when I didn't run into open hostility, I was highly alert to the possibility of disrespect. I think that a lot of this--and a great deal of my stress and unhappiness--came from being afraid of my students. That's a perfectly normal new-teacher feeling, I think, but it doesn't make for a sustainable career.

And now, you know, it's just a pleasure to walk around campus, especially because we're such a small school, and to have to pause every few seconds for a "Hi, Chelsea, how's it going?" or "Lou! Congratulations on the law school admission!" or "Hey, Veronica, you feeling better this week?"

It's nice. It's a community. And, in a weird way, it is precisely my position of relative power and authority (as a professor) that enables me to make all of these fond and dispassionate connections--to be friendly without judgment, as it were. I don't need to assess these people as peers; I merely need to be compassionate, and fair, and courteous, and somehow, that makes me love them.

*We're NOT talking plagiarism here--that's a different issue--and one that I do catch on occasion.

Status Update

First of all: Kalamazooers, it looks like the 8:00(ish) Friday morning MugShots meet-up is happening again. I hope to see you there!

More substantially: It's the end of the semester, or almost, and I feel inclined to do a little summarizing. So here's where I am, in the form of a numbered list.

1. Classes end tomorow. I only taught two this semester (and people, if you only teach two courses per semester, you do not ever get to complain about teaching load, especially if your classes are, as mine were, small [21 and 10]. It is a sweet, sweet deal, even when you're stupid and spread that teaching out to five days a week). One release was for Honors, which has been eating my life this month (as it's supposed to), and the other was for research/editing the manuscript. Updates on the latter below.
2. Honors: The situation that I mentioned a few days ago is en route to resolution. And otherwise everyone and everything is on track. Whew.
   
3. The book: is being indexed. Slowly. In full terror that I'm doin it rong. But it does look pretty! And I must say that I did a killer job of editing it in the last go-round, because I'm finding almost nothing to change (other than a handful of editorial errors for which I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE. So there).
4. Other research: My grand plans for drafting a proposal for The Next Big Thing did not materialize, but I was able to read some real live scholarship in the field, and I currently have two articles out for review (one a big-shot R&R, the other a small-shot solicited submission). So that's cool.
5. In my personal life...erm...things are fine? Not sure how to update this one. We have stuff in the gardens (yes, plural), due almost entirely to The Minister's machinations. Today we hunted for morels. It was a failure, but the forest was beautiful, and we got to ride his Vespa.
6. Next year: I'll be teaching a mess of stuff, including a one-hour overload in the fall (5 classes! 4 preps! I die) and mentoring 12 Honors juniors through the prospectus process, which might kill me, while serving on 4 thesis committees. As for my service load: I will be chairing curriculum and also serving on what I affectionately call the Gossip Committee (actually a task force, but that doesn't have much of a ring to it) and the Cash Cow Working Group. Protection of junior faculty from service? Not so much. And I'll be attending an overseas conference in the middle of the semester, which'll make scheduling all kinds of fun. However, I shall endeavor not to think about the fall when the summer is so tantalizingly close.
   
7. Classes end TOMORROW. In my head, they're already over. (But I still need to read for tomorrow's class....)

The semester in seven bullets. There ya go.

Sacrificing Students to the Major

This post at Dr. Crazy's has me thinking about problems of institutional culture--specifically, what happens when a significant minority of a college's faculty does not value intellectual exploration and development for its own sake. Sounds like a paradox, right? Only, at Field--and obviously elsewhere, as indicated by Crazy's post--it isn't.

Let me give you some background. We have quite a few faculty who don't have Ph.D.s--fewer than we had even just a few years ago, but still a good handful. Some of these faculty have, say, MBAs and significant work experience, and teach business or accounting; some have M.A.s in foreign languages and teach those (both our French and Spanish professors actually just have M.A.s and originally taught high school); etc. I am quite certain that many of these professors, by virtue of having had minimal reseach experience of their own, retain a kind of business model of education whereby students come to acquire a degree, and it's our job to get them to that degree as expediently as possible. Period.

And some of our faculty who do have Ph.D.s have been here for a very long time and, I suspect, grown accustomed to the minimal research expectations at the College as well as the largely pre-professional orientation of our student body, and are, perhaps, somewhat resigned. For our students, by and large, come in thinking that they need to get a degree in Education or Business and then go on to get a related job, because (I suspect) they have no idea just how many varied jobs there are out there (in fairness, neither do I) and they don't come from a background that values intellectual pursuit as a formative and exploratory thing.

I know that we're not going to radically change our student population anytime soon. And I know that job prospects are a real concern. But I can't help but think about how much our students are missing if they see college as a road to a job, and nothing more. (And how much they must suffer through most of their classes if that's how they see it!)

The other thing is that we still are a liberal arts college. Not a Swarthmore or an Oberlin or a Carleton or a Reed, but a liberal arts college (with pre-professional programs). And our mission is to provide students, whether they are in a traditional liberal arts program or a pre-professional program, with an education that gives them a liberal arts perspective: a cultural breadth, a holistic framework, a broad set of approaches to the intellectual, social, and personal situations that they will encounter throughout their lives.

Our (extensive; perhaps too extensive) gen ed program introduces them to the liberal arts. But I know how easy and tempting it is to talk to advisees about these requirements as a series of boxes to tick off--to say things like, "Great, you got your lab science out of the way"--which only adds to the sense of these courses' being arbitrary hurdles and the "breadth" component of the liberal arts curriculum as a hassle.

And then, as director of the Honors Program, I meet students who--as first-years!--have had their advisors tell them that they shouldn't bother pursuing a psych minor because they'll never have time to finish it, even though the student himself really wants to study psychology. What the hell is that? Maybe the student should major in psychology, not just minor, but how will he ever know, if his advisor discourages him from taking it because a) he might not have time to pick up a minor (to which I say, Really?) or b) it might deflect him away from his original major--which is, of course, in the advisor's department. (And dude, you can take a psych class. The idea that there's no point in taking a course if it's not going to show up on your diploma is absurd.)

There are a series of forces at work here, of course, and part of the problem is that there's been a lot of talk in recent years about eliminating "under-enrolled" majors. So we want to hang on to our students. But that shouldn't be a consideration (nor should "under-enrolled" majors be cut. Luckily, we haven't been having those conversations recently). And when it starts to look like the student's interests are being ignored for the sake of keeping a major on the books, or--less perniciously--because the advisor forgets to think of the student's intellectual trajectory as her own and instead remains bent on following the curriculum that he has been accustomed to recommending, the student suffers.

And the college suffers.

Because we, the faculty, are then telling our students not to pursue intellectual enquiry, not to take courses to seek fulfillment or satisfy curiosity or because something sounds cool. We are telling them that education is about getting a job, and a job is gotten* by completing a particular major, graduating as swiftly as possible, and maintaining a good GPA--by taking easier courses, if need be.

And yes, I am partly angry about this because I see students being talked out of completing the Honors Program, because what's the point of writing a thesis, after all? Better just to take another intro-level course to fill out your required hours to graduation.

Not all of my colleagues are like this, of course. I wouldn't even say that most of them are. And many of them have twenty or thirty-five advisees and just don't have the time to help each one find him or herself. But it's a problem of institutional culture. What can we do to address it?

*I hate the word "gotten." I used it there on purpose.

Working Weekend

I'm just back--well, I came back last night, technically--from the annual undergraduate conference to which we always take 12-20 of our majors. This year we had about 16, I think, although a few drove up on their own just for Saturday (we drove the majority up in a couple of big vans Friday night; it's only two hours away). Three of them were reading papers that they'd written for my seminar in the Fall; of these, two are currently student teaching, and it was really nice to catch up with them, since they're not on campus this semester.

This is my third trip to the conference, and it's an exhausting affair, with an early Saturday morning, a lot of stressful driving, and meals taken in dining halls and fast food restaurants. I only went to the panels where our students were presenting--for really, I do not need to hear any other papers--so I was able to spend a good chunk of Saturday afternoon reading a novel that I'll be teaching soon, and the plenary speaker (a creative non-fiction author) was excellent, but it's still an event that inevitably wears me out. There's a lot of talking. That's a big part of it. Because many of our students--and I love them for this--like talking to us. They're comfortable. They'll sit around and chat.

It is a thing that I love about Field, the way that students and faculty get along. I know my students. Even in the survey, I know many of them pretty well by now (all 22 of them or whatever it is). Yesterday I had lunch with a very quiet first-year who's in that class and now I know about her reading interests, her cat, and how she feels about cities. I had a long talk on the drive back with a junior transfer that made me much more sympathetic to her grad school aspirations and the difficulties that she'll have to overcome to get there. And I found myself, in many of these conversations, forgetting that they're the students and I'm the professor and thinking of them just as people--as friends, almost.

This is what I love about teaching here: that, while I am teaching and grading and guiding and so forth, I also get to care about and even--in a non-creepy way--love my students, love their individual humanity and their brand new thoughts and their difficulties and enthusiasms. It doesn't hurt that the culture here is overwhelmingly nice; my students are nice people, for the most part, too.

It's a good thing, this conference. It shows our students a broader world of academic discourse, it lets us get to know them better, and it gives them some nice English-major bonding time. But it does mean spending essentially an extra 24 hours on the clock. So today, I think that I will chiefly read the novel for seminar, do some laundry, and Cuddle Kitties. And go to the gym. And we have fun dinner plans.

But the R&R, and the articles I want to read, and everything else, might just have to wait for the upcoming very busy week to get done. Perhaps I can allow myself that.

I am still such a timid wimp

This week I'm calling references for a couple of our short-listed candidates for the search for which I'm the non-departmental committee member.

(That was a cumbersome sentence. I will let it stand.)

I am not a big User of Phones. Really not. In fact, my cell phone only rings about four times a month--and two of those will be from the fellow whom I call "My Captain," because when he calls, I first hear a foghorn and then a recorded message saying, "Hello, this is your captain speaking," and am offered a free trip to somewhere (I hang up before they get to the destination. Or maybe I've just forgotten). Apart from My Captain, I sometimes get a call from CVS telling me that my prescription is ready to be picked up, and occasionally my alma mater (undergrad) calls me to ask for money.

And this is my fault, really, because I never call anyone. Before TM and I lived together, I did get some more calls, but now I basically pay $50 a month for an alarm clock and time-keeper for my seminar (where there is no clock. Oh, and most of my calls come through during that seminar, too).

Annnnyway, all this is to say that I don't like calling people whom I don't know. I get very nervous. And these calls in particular made me very nervous--like, I was having flashbacks to waiting for telephone interviews a couple of years ago. Jittery and sweaty and whatnot. I had to go into TM's office and ask him to talk me down--he was so baffled by me that he couldn't say much to help, but his very bafflement did in fact help.

Of course the calls are going perfectly fine. Lovely, in fact. Everyone is happy to talk about his or her grad student/visiting colleague. They say delightful things and now I really want to meet, and then hire, both of these people. I've completed five out of my six calls.

But I was really especially nervous about calling some of the references, I think, because they're tenured faculty at Big Fancy Universities, and here I am pretending to be, like, a colleague of theirs. So the whole time we're talking, they don't know how old I am! They don't know that I'm not dressed particularly well (because my office is freezing, seriously, so yes I am wearing a bright red zippered cardigan over a dark red button-down, and yes I do have on long underwear)! They don't know that I'm not a senior person, and when I say things like, "We want our faculty to feel that they can continue to pursue their research," they don't know that I'm a junior professor who has no business saying things like that! In fact, they don't know that I have no business calling myself a professor at all, ha ha ha ha ha!

See what I did there? Yep, that's the crux of the anxiety, I think. Most days--at least in the context of Field--I have no real impostor syndrome anymore. I inhabit my role quite comfortably. But when I come into contact with certain contexts...well, let's just say that I do not radiate unflappable confidence.

The horror! A service-request bleg.

I just got an email asking me to be a representative on something for which I am, I'm convinced, the WORST possible choice--but the reasons that I'm such a bad choice aren't such that I could voice them. I.e., I find most of the people in this group incredibly annoying and I make fun of them in my head (and to TM) all the time, and I have various campus-political views that aren't in line with what many of the vocal members of this group espouse. It wouldn't be too terribly hideous, time-commitment-wise--one meeting a month--but oh, a part of me will die in every meeting, seriously. The banality! The jargon! And my nemesis will surely be a dominant speaker at every gathering.

Is there any conceivable excuse that I could give to get out of it? I mean, okay, maybe I'd a) come to tolerate the Other Side a little more or b) get the Other Side to see the Good Side's perspective and become more sensible, but agh, no, I would so so rather not be involved.

Ideas, anyone? Or am I doomed?

And another (good) thing

I just had my annual progress meeting. It went well. It went very well.

I admit that I was a little nervous. What if my chair, with whom I get along superbly, decided to call me out on my flaws? I am, after all, opinionated, vehement in meetings, and complain an awful lot. Sometimes I also wear really pilly sweaters.* But instead of pointing out such things he said that I am "terrific" and "fabulous." [Other comments have been redacted in the interests of making a pretense of humility.] It was so good that it actually made me a little bit uncomfortable, and I was glad when the meeting ended. It's weird to be evaluated to your face, even when the evaluation is good.

But, yay, I still have a job.

*ETA: I've also become a terrible gossip. Terrible! I haven't been this bad since middle school. But everyone else here is too--it's really the only way that information of any kind gets disseminated--so I shouldn't be surprised that that doesn't count against me. Yikes, though--I don't like justifying my flaws this way. I think I'm going to work on that.

I didn't even know that I was in suspense

I just checked the medieval wiki for the first time since MLA. I've already been rejected by Big Scary (which was fine and unsurprising; I am not of that league, just yet), but I was pleased to see that none of the other schools with which I interviewed have scheduled campus visits yet. I'm surprised to feel a bit of relief, a sense that I'm no longer avoiding something dreadful.

My feelings about being on the market are ambivalent. On the one hand, it would be awesome to get a reasonably well paying 2-2 or 2-3 job in a cool(er) place. On the other.... Well, yesterday I found some pictures I took of my yard this summer [see fig. 1] and that got me thinking about how it would feel to be moving away from here. It would be exciting, sure, but sad, too.

[fig. 1: yard]

I don't have deep roots here. But I do have a great boyfriend, nice colleagues--a few of whom I see socially--and some students whom I'd love to continue to know. I have a sweet little house with a garden; there are farmers' markets all around (if you don't mind driving 20-30 minutes); the harvested cornfields are sad and gray and beautiful in the winter. There's a yoga studio a half-hour away--a little far for frequent trips, but at least it's there (and I did go this morning).

No, I would not want to live here forever. I would not want this job forever: it asks an awful lot and gives so little back, either financially or in time for research and writing. But I'm a long way beyond the terrible dissatisfaction I felt at this time last year (at that point I was staring down three 20-student sections of comp, for one thing; this semester I'll only have one!).

So, yeah. Job market = a thing about which to feel ambivalent. And then a part of me thinks that my very ambivalence will score me a job--kind of like how you're supposed to fall in love when you're not looking for it, as that wearisome advice-nugget goes.

I'm also meaning to blog about other things--the MLA and its meet-up (I'll probably not get to this one, but it was great to catch up with Sisyphus, What Now, Medieval Woman, Flavia, the Rebel Lettriste, Dr. Virago, and SEK) and new year's stuff--but that'll wait. Or, in the case of the MLA, be skipped altogether. Right now I think I'd like to take a shower.

I Only Have One Thing to Say

I was in the office before dawn this morning.



The moon looked very pretty outside my window.




At least I have a window this year?




Thank God tomorrow is our [one-day] fall break.

******************

Oh, and I watched the debate, for some reason. This election season can't end soon enough. "Women's 'health'"? Um, WTF, JMcC? Yeah, women don't actually have health problems, ever--certainly not any related to pregnancy; that's just a screen thrown up by all the wacko pro-abortionists. Which is a real position, you know. I am all about giving everyone as many abortions as possible. And all the smug, sputtery fuming--it was dreadful--argh--must fight off images of squishy pale men--think of happy things, think of midterms, think of lovely Beowulf essays and papers about how Middle English came about when the Anglo-Saxons defeated the Normans, bringing with them the culture and language of Old English! In 1380! You know what else? ------Okay, I won't say what else, in case anyone from Field ever finds this blog. But it's funny: during our midterm review days I feared that I was giving away all the answers to all the questions. Turns out that two thirds of the class wasn't listening, so hey!

[John McCain effectively wiped from my consciousness. Hurrah!]

I Had A Clever Title, But I Forgot It, For I Am Tired

It is...yes. It is underway. The semester, she's rolling. Good lord. I'm tired.

Yeah, definitely not into the work schedule yet. Tomorrow we'll have been in class for a week (minus Monday, of course). So seriously. Four days? That's all I've done so far?

I am overwhelmed, friends. I'm not exactly behind yet--just teetering on the brink. How did this happen? I was so organized! so ahead of things!

At the risk of being boring, I shall give you the quick run-down of my semester:

Five classes. I'm teaching five classes (= 4 preps, and one of them only meets for 50 minutes/week, but still). So far they're all going really well, especially the senior-level majors-only seminar, which is awesome and on a topic that I love and only has 8 students in it. Comp is even going well (although we've only met twice) (remind me to tell you about the Mystic Binder one of these days). And the survey is fine, although I'm not particularly interested in it; I loved this class last year, but now? Kinda done with it. Also I'm in a terrible, terrible, feng shui-violating florescent nightmare of a basement classroom, and I hate it. The one-hour class just started today, but I think that it'll be fun and pretty lightweight. At least, that's the plan. So the classes are fine, just frequent and tiring and never-ending. The prep, the prep! It is always undone!

Advising. I've never advised before. It's not too bad, yet, only I was handed several of WriterBoy's old advisees (he's gone on to greener pastures) and a few of them have some real scheduling problems. Like, graduating seniors who haven't fulfilled the lab science requirement. Not sure what to do about that, frankly. Yikes.

Honors. As I've said, I'm directing the Honors program now. What this means at this point is that I need to meet with every one of the incoming Honors students to go over the program's requirements. This isn't horrendously taxing or anything, but it does require me to stay on top of my calendar, which used to be my strong suit, until I started teaching and the organized part of my brain fell out of my left ear.

Extra teaching. One student who needs the senior majors' class can't come to the class, for reasons too complex and detailed to describe, so I need to meet with hir every week in the afternoons and also devise a different grading rubric that matches what ze will actually be doing.

Organizations. I recalled, today, that I'm the faculty sponsor for a student organization, and I need to get on top of determining new members' eligibility and also corralling the members into meeting and whatnot. Resolved: I will not take over the student organization. Which I kinda did last year.

College-wide. We're doing this whole curriculum reform-type thing this year which requires lots of extra meetings, as well as assignments between meetings. There was some stuff that I was really supposed to review before tomorrow's meeting, but you know? I didn't, and it's unlikely that I will. Oh well. Nobody else did, either. (Except the Minister, for he is good.)

Is that all? I think that that's all.

It won't be too bad once I get into the rhythm (I hope?), but right now it's like this series of flashes of panic: Oh! Wait! I had to do --! and what about --? Have I emailed --? What classes do I have tomorrow? What time is it? Good God! What have I done?

Only 15 weeks to go! Seriously, does anybody else have a 16-week semester? Wisely, however, I have scheduled almost no readings for the week and a half after Thanksgiving. Hurrah!

This year will be better, or: The difference between my students and me

On Wednesday I begin my first official year on the tenure track at Field College. I'm in a bit of an odd situation in that last year retroactively counts as tenure-track-itude; I was, of course, VAPping here at Field, and have received a year's credit towards tenure as a result. I'm glad: I had one article come out and another one get accepted last year; I presented at a conference; I served on a search committee. (Truth be told, I think that I've already fulfilled the publication requirement for tenure; all I need to do now is go to the occasional conference to demonstrate "continued engagement in my discipline." I hope to do a wee bit more than that in the coming years, however.)

But nonetheless this is my first year as an official tenure-track Assistant Professor--my first year advising, serving on committees, fulfilling other administrative roles. I am, for example, directing the honors program. Which is weird, given my novice status, but one thing about tiny little colleges is that you can climb through the ranks awfully quickly: everyone is over-worked and happy to hand off such duties. I'll probably regret it at some point, but right now I'm excited about this particular position, as it'll give me the chance to work with some of the brightest students at the college.

My point is, though, that heading into this year feels really different from last year. Last year I was kind of a mess, I think. I was in a long-distance relationship which, while wonderful, also caused a lot of stress (the exhausting weekend trips, the uncertainty about ever being together, the feeling that everything hinged on how I did on the market); I had never before taught a course that I had designed; I hadn't the foggiest clue about what composition classes were supposed to be like; and almost everyone I met here seemed a little crazy. The entire college seemed crazy. There were a couple of reasons I felt this way: 1) I had never really been behind the scenes at a school, so I didn't know how they worked (the assessment jargon, e.g., really threw me, as did the obsessive concern with enrollment numbers and recruiting), and 2) I come from a pretty elite background--fancy private SLAC for undergrad; ivy grad school--which I'd never really thought of as elite/elitist, and I sort of assumed that all colleges and universities ran (or should run) the way that mine did. That is, that they should only accept the very best students; academics absolutely come before athletics (I still think this is true, OK); and--most importantly--all students are motivated primarily by the pure desire for Knowledge.

Yep, I've lost (most of) those illusions.

In a workshop last week, one senior art professor said something that I found really compelling. He pointed out that when he first got to Field, he had been accustomed to teaching and interacting with art students who wanted to be artists, and were therefore striving for a high level of achievement within their fields. Here, however, he discovered that most students were interested in service professions--teaching, primarily--and gradually had to adapt his teaching methods and course aims to match those students' interests--and that this had ultimately been very satisfying.

I think that I still feel that my students ought to be motivated to study literature because literature is Art--it's Culture--its study is valuable for its own sake, and because it makes us more developed human beings. I believe that that's true, of course: my inner life is infinitely richer because of my knowledge of literature, being a skilled critical reader helps me to cast a more critical eye over my world; and the wealth of ideas and experiences that it's given me glimpses of has enabled me to think very differently about my own life and how I choose to live it. I would still like to communicate that to my students. But many of them do not come from backgrounds like mine, where you never really worry about getting a job--of course you'll work, everyone works, but jobs are available and you'll get one and it's really matter of pulling yourself up out of the slough of just getting jobs and into the realm of the Meaningful. Most of my students aren't of that mindset. No, most of them aren't terribly poor (this is a private SLAC, after all, even if it's a pretty cheap private SLAC--only half of what mine cost 14 years ago!). But they want solidly middle-class jobs of the kind that a college education can give you: many of them want to be teachers or have some sort of "business" career (I assume that the business students have some concrete ideas of what they want to be; I have no idea what "business" actually means, so the scare quotes there are indicative only of my own ignorance).

I'm still trying to absorb what this difference means, and what exactly I can contribute to this student population. What I want is to galvanize these students--to shake them up, get them out of thinking about The Job and open the larger world up to them; many of them, for example, have hardly even left this state, and seem to have very little sense of alternative ways of living in the world than those to which they're accustomed. I might be able to do this, in a limited way. My best teaching persona--the one that came out in my most successful courses last year--is lively, self-deprecatingly geeky, wildly (almost goofily) enthusiastic and supportive, and even gets some laughs, and in those classes I had comments on my evaluations like, "I learned that literature is awesome!" and "Who knew I would like [subject of this course] so much?" So I retain my idealism, a bit. But I'm trying to get myself interested in learning from my students, too. It would be good for me, I think, to come to appreciate where they're coming from, as well, and to see the value in what they want to do.

It might help shake me out of my de facto elitism, at any rate.

A (Surprise!) Successful Faculty Retreat

(The promised quasi-academic post, at last!)

The Humanities Division at Field (we're too small a college to have distinct departments, so we operate as divisions) inaugurated what might be a new tradition this summer: the divisional faculty retreat. Next week we have the mandatory two-day all-faculty retreat (it was only one day last year, but apparently we have a lot of work to do this year, yippee), but early this week the Humanities folks all met for about a day and a half with the intentions of a) getting to know the new people and b) thinking deliberately about where we want to go as a division in the coming year.

I was, ostensibly, an organizer of this retreat, although I did very little (the real organizer claims that I came up with the idea, which is patently false, but nice of hir to say). I was therefore kind of nervous coming up to it: if the retreat was a failure, I thought, will my name irrevocably be associated with it? Especially by the many new people in our division? (We have three wholly new people, the Minister and I are starting our second years, and the remaining five Humanities faculty have been around for rather a long time, so the division on the whole is pretty new to the college.) Luckily, however, it went surprisingly well. Nonetheless I disavowed all responsibility for the planning and whatnot; I was involved in coming up with the schedule and planned one of the sessions, but, as at least 40% of the division also played that role, I don't think that I can take any special credit.

So. I thought I'd run through my thoughts about why this retreat was successful, since my impression is that faculty retreats in general can be perceived as kind of a waste of time, and I don't recall being particularly impressed by the one I attended last year. I wrote a post about it at the time, I think, but I'm too lazy to link, so you can look in the August '07 archives if you're desperately interested.

Anyway, here's what we did, broadly speaking: We started with a couple of getting-to-know-you activities (along the lines of what you'd do on the first day of a comp class, for example), then had a long session about what the humanities is/are. In fact, that "is/are" was crucial to the session: "Humanities" means both an accumulation of disciplines (the "are") and a particular approach, or set of approaches, to knowledge. This session, which wound up going over its designated two-and-a-half hours, was broken up into sections where we discussed questions as a group (What is the focus of each of our disciplines? What do our disciplines have in common? What sets us apart from other divisions, e.g. Social Sciences? etc.) and sections in which we met with the faculty from our own disciplines (e.g. English) to discuss how our disciplines contribute towards the mission of the humanities. Now, we didn't come up with any kind of answers to the first set of questions; one thing that I found interesting was how the conversation kept getting derailed into what the humanities aren't. This often involved wild, probably inaccurate generalizations about other divisions (Scientists know exactly what they want to find before they start researching! Social scientists think there's one right answer to every question!), but, despite the regrettable un-scholarliness of such claims, the fact that we had such a hard time defining what it is that we do was pretty thought-provoking. So when we got into our groups by discipline, we had some clearer questions to address: What do we want our students to take away from our majors? Why do we think that what we study is important, and how can we best convey that to our students? And so forth.

Maybe the best thing about this session was that it got us all talking to each other about something other than problems in the classroom, administrative screw-ups, or what we did over the weekend. We were talking about, you know, abstract ideas. And why we value our own work. That's important, and something I don't remember really doing since my campus interview.

Then we had some pragmatic sessions on, say, syllabus construction and dealing with the unexpected situations that can arise during teaching. The latter was my special purview, and I came up with what I hoped was kind of a fun way of addressing it: everyone wrote down on index cards an unexpected/difficult/silly situation that he or she had faced (or feared facing) in the classroom, but wrote it as a "What would you do if..." question; we shuffled the cards, and then everyone took one and had to answer it off the cuff. Then the person to whom the situation had occurred discussed what he/she had done. It was a pretty lighthearted session--the last one before dinner, so I assumed that we would be tired, and was right--but I think that it went okay.

Anyway! This was an overnight retreat at the guest house on campus--even though most of us live within a half-mile of campus. Well. The overnighting gave us the opportunity for a postprandial talent show (preceded by rather a shocking quantity of wine). I was not alone, I believe, in having some misgivings about the talent show, but it was surprisingly nice. There was music, a Tai Chi demonstration, poetry reading, the display of a crocheted afghan. I, incapable of baring myself to my colleagues, read an excerpt from the romance novel my friends and I wrote in high school; there was also a display of bad academic verse.

The next day we resumed with more pragmatic sessions: advising, required vs. recommended events, the current climate on campus and issues that new people should be aware of. We wrapped up with quite a nice lunch and some more WINE.

So, what made this successful? First, I think, was the simple fact that there were so few of us. Also, as members of the same division, we were able to discuss some very concrete things that we'd like to do together and even to take some steps towards getting them going--like setting up a web page for the division (that would include detailed course descriptions, my hobbyhorse), emphasizing environmental sustainability and social justice in our classes, and sharing syllabi. The abundance of wine probably helped, too. But also, my immediate colleagues are by and large a great bunch of people whom I like very much. They certainly have their...idiosyncrasies, but after all, that's part of the charm of the professoriate. So it was a good couple of days. I feel decidedly less reluctant to start up the semester--although I'd still rather skip the next two-day retreat, as I don't expect it to be quite so pleasant.

Exposure

Two things this last week have left me feeling very exposed. I need to process this and move on, so here goes.

1. My fear was realized: students have seen me naked. Yes. I do not kid. Remember how I swim sometimes? I've been swimming a lot more this semester, which has produced some lovely new muscles and reinstated my former shoulder definition--originally the result of lots of sun salutations, they'd started to fade away in the yoga desert that is Field Town. The swimming is great; I like it more and more. I'm even okay with the fact that all of the lifeguards are students in my classes. The downside is the locker room, which is basically one not-so-large room with a row of lockers dividing it in half. In theory, one could obtain moderate privacy by ducking behind the dividing lockers; in practice, the door to the gym hallway opens off of one-half of the locker room, so you don't want to be stripping down over there. Oh no. In fact, that door is often propped open (???????). Basically, therefore, there's a narrow little gully where everyone has to get dressed.

Normally this is no problem because no one ever uses the pool except for a couple of very old people who just sort of float there while I cruise on by (yes, I'm getting a swimming ego. Please forgive). But on Thursday when I went in there after my swim I heard voices...I entered...the entire women's softball team was gathered around my locker (not deliberately, of course, but simply by virtue of being in the tiny locker gully). I don't know any of them, luckily, and I don't think that they even identified me as a faculty member. Nonetheless. I took as long as I could putting in my contacts and doing other non-naked things, then very quickly got my bathing suit half off and put on my bra. Then I sort of stood there with my swimsuit around my waist and my towel around my waist too and pretended to rearrange my clothes or something for a while. But they weren't going anywhere, these women, and the longer I waited the more ridiculous I felt. So finally I just did it--I completed the change--they weren't paying any attention to me but still, it was not where I wanted to be. Naked with a bunch of fully-clothed undergrads.* I am not a modest person, normally--I used to be an artist's model and my college dorm had co-ed open showers--but you know. Power dynamics, boundaries. Whatever. And naturally the instant I was dressed they all took off, so another 30-second wait probably would have bought me privacy. Alas.

*I just reread that--it would not have been better if they had not been fully clothed. Just to clarify.

2. More seriously, I spoke up in a meeting last week. And I said something critical. I cannot, of course, blog at all about the particulars of this meeting, but it was confidential and no records were kept of whom said what. And people were saying much more critical things than I was; I knew that the majority was behind me, and for various political reasons it was sort of important that I speak. But this was the first time I'd said anything substantive in one of these meetings, and it was scary. More scary were the multitude of congratulations on my "courage" that I have received since. You know that thing about junior faculty shutting their mouths for a while? I guess I'm not doing that anymore, and even though there weren't records made of the meeting I've obviously made an impression on everyone who was there--including, I assume, those who had an opposing position. I'm not worried about my job, exactly, but in a place this small people really talk a lot (I know so much, so much more than I should, already), and discretion isn't exactly...what people...do. You know? I don't know. My fears are nebulous and I don't think that anything bad will happen. But it seems likely that, even if the substance of my criticism doesn't get back to the higher powers, my position will be known. Which is kind of scary, 'cause I'd played it pretty close to the chest up until then.

*********************************************

So yeah. Nudity and academic politics. That's my world.

Actually, my world is pretty fabulous right now. The trees are just on the cusp of bursting into bloom; they've reached that cheerful puffball stage. Classes end on Wednesday and really we're not doing much of anything else in any of them. The days are lengthening. My personal life is enjoying various positive developments. A bird is attacking a squirrel outside my window. The Minister** is bringing me some organic produce. What more could I want?

**It's time some of my colleagues/friends here acquire pseudonyms: here's the first.

Goodness

(Time to bump the maudlin down from Position 1, I say.)

Thing I am happy about.

1. Although it's currently 41 degrees out and rainy with no foreseeable improvement in the near future, and although the leaves have not yet begun their unfurl, there are little flowers here and there, the grass is noticeably greener, and the birdsong these last few weeks has been phenomenal. I have, on my own, learned to identify the warble of the cardinal, and I am infallible in my cardinallocation. Having lived in urbanish environments for so long, I hadn't realized just how happy birds' singing makes me. The coinage "cardinallocation" is also pleasing.
2. School ends in just under 2 weeks. What with peer workshop days and a library resource day, I only have 11 preps to go. And two of those won't really count because they'll be for the last day of class, when we don't have to do much of anything, and 2 more will be negligible because of course evaluations. So there are really only 7 discrete preps to go.
3. I'm teaching some truly awesome courses next year. One is the senior capstone seminar and I get to do whatever I want, so I'm doing some serious medievalist shit which will be awesome, according to me. I don't know how the students will feel, but since they're all senior majors and I know most of them and they're mostly quite good (and they mostly like me, I think), they'll deal and should be fun to work with. The other awesome course is a one-credit honors seminar--it only meets for 50 minutes/week and shouldn't be too taxing--on a topic that I've sort of fantasized about teaching for a long time. So while this means that technically I'll be teaching 5 classes in the fall, I think that I'm okay with it.
   
4. I'm being semi-groomed to take on an administrative-type post next year which would give me a course release. Plus it would be interesting and pretty great on the CV. It might not happen, since I'm so ridiculously new to the college and it's ultimately up to the dean, but apparently no one else wants this position (or any other position--the senior folks here are seriously overworked), so it might happen.
5. I've been reading the application packets for the search committee that I'm on, and the process is fascinating. It's a creative writing search, which helps--I get to read a lot of wonderful short stories and poems without having to think about how I'll teach them. I'm a little worried about getting the search wrapped up before my anticipated Fleeing the Scene date; however, I'm choosing to be optimistic.
6. And finally.... I'm moving! At the end of May! Into the Smallest House in the World! Yes--it's a house! A tiny little guest house. Approx. 650 square feet. TINY. But I thought it would go well with the Smallest College in the World (okay, not the smallest, but pretty damn small) and Tiny Field Town. It's all about miniaturization. What's great, though, is that it has a basement and a garage and a yard. And it is quite seriously adorable and hobbit-house-like (I will post pictures when I move, I promise!) Also, I will be driving all of my furniture and books and things out here in May, and it'll be great to have all my stuff again. I miss my stuff. Lately I've been thinking about my books--for some reason, I keep getting flashes of yearnings to pick up my Proust again; I'm about 5.5 volumes into a beautiful old edition that I've been reading on and off for years--and this makes me acutely conscious of how much I love having my little library around me. I also love setting up new living spaces; I'm quite good at making them nice and homey, if I say so myself.
   
7. Oh, and the Summer Trip of Mystery is still in the works, but I'm not ready to talk about it yet.

That's that. Now: Off to grade!

Being a Professor is Weird

I'm really not used to this--I mean, this whole new way of relating to people, where I'm the professor and they're the students, and therefore I don't seem to exist as a normal person but am instead some object of fascination. It's strange as hell. In the classroom and during office hours, or even around campus, that strangeness is somewhat contained: they think my self-deprecating jokes are funnier than they are; they're sometimes skittish or shaky in meetings that I can't even fathom as intimidating. But I can remember feeling that way as a student, so these behaviors don't strike me as terribly odd.

However. Twenty-six hours with a pack of undergrads, a good deal of which was spent in a large, noisy, and overcrowded van, has impressed upon me just how weird this new position is.

There were three faculty members on the trip, including me. And my god! We were so in demand! We'd go one way, and like obedient ducklings six or seven students would trot into line behind us. We'd slow down to let them get ahead, and they would lurk around a corner to leap out and surprise us. (Not all of them behaved this way, obviously, but a good--and consistent!--handful did.) Every lame joke we made--or anything that we said that could be perceived as non-professorial, for that matter--met with incredulity and laughter. Things that I mentioned in a quiet, conversational voice to a colleague at dinner were overheard and noisily commented on by people three tables away. It's weird, I tell you! Weird!!!

Oh, and I have a nickname now. Perhaps because of the way I sign my emails, I have become (the equivalent of) H-mihi, where "H" is my first initial and "mihi" is my (actually monosyllabic) last name (accent on the "H"). Admittedly this isn't much of a nickname, but realistically it's about as far as they could go within the bounds of the titled decorum that constitutes the professorial address at Field College.

I am simply not used to getting this much attention from people I don't know particularly well. Yes, the ego likes it a little bit. But it's also kind of freaky. And honestly? I do like my space, now and again. Twenty-six hours was a long time.

I'm glad I went, though. It was a good chance to get to know some of our majors better and it brought me a little bit deeper into something that I'm trying to cultivate right now, which is an actual investment in this place. I need to start getting invested, and I think that I am. I've even come up with some things that I want to change around here--though I suppose that I need to make sure that I don't overstep my untenured bounds! Luckily, my departmental colleagues are eminently reasonable people who also happen to be delighted to pass of a little of the responsibility for this place onto someone else--they've had a lot to carry for an awfully long time.

Was It Always This Easy?

Something has...happened. The refrain around here has been "I hesitate to blog about this," and I could repeat that in this post, too, but for entirely different reasons. Whereas before I didn't want to divulge too much about my personal "situation," now I'm afraid of jinxing it. Or embarrassing myself with corniness. Whatever--suck it up, heu!

So I was feeling really awful last week, and for most of the week before that. Really, really awful. Teaching on the verge of tears awful. (That was only one day, thank god.) Not awful all the time; I felt okay sometimes, but there was this terrible fragility and that awful feeling that my future had been emptied out, lost, rendered meaningless. It took work, serious work, for me to feel okay enough to function. Then I had that realization on Saturday, that my life isn't in that mythical fantasy apartment in Brooklyn or whatever the hell I imagine it to be, but is this thing, right here. And that night I went out with some colleagues and had a wonderful time--I was looking at them, and the restaurant, and the band, and feeling what I might describe (if I didn't fear flakiness) as a transcendent joy--these were good people, this was fun, life was good.

Here's what's weird. I haven't really lost that feeling. It's Wednesday, and I have been so happy for the last--what is it--five days? I honestly can't remember when I've ever felt this happy before. I mean, I've been happy in recent memory--joyful, even; I'm usually a pretty happy person--but there's something about this happiness that makes it different. The thing about it is that it isn't based on anything. There isn't some circumstance that has made me happy. It's precisely that lack of specific, external circumstance that's important. The circumstances are just circumstances, and my circumstances now aren't all that fabulous (same busy job in same middle of nowhere, same long distance relationship, same distance from friends and family, same--well, technically different, but essentially same--stack of grading to do), but that just doesn't matter. And honestly I no longer feel that my situation is so bad.

And as a result, I'm suddenly much friendlier. I'm not bitching all the time. I'm talking to my colleagues, and honestly I like a bunch of my colleagues. A lot. And they'll be my colleagues next year, and I can keep being friends with them.

But that's not the point. It's not that I've found some light in my situation, it's that I've quit fighting against my life.

A Buddhist teacher I knew years ago once gave me an image to understand the idea of letting go--and I'm sure this isn't original, but it's apt: Imagine that you're hanging off a cliff, clutching a small branch. You're terrified of falling and so you cling to that branch with all your might, struggling to pull yourself back up. This goes on for a long long time, until you're simply too exhausted to hold on anymore--and you let go--and discover that you were only an inch or two off the ground the whole time. Yeah. That's what this feels like.

Of course I've thought about that a lot before, and I think that I understood what it meant. But thinking it and feeling it are different things. I don't think that I ever felt it before--not in a sustained way, not through the ordinariness of showers and meetings and work and dishes. This is new.

Unfortunately, I can't really talk about it without resorting to horrible platitudes and words that I hate--like "breakthrough"--but something good has happened, and all of a sudden my life seems vast and spacious again, and I feel wonderfully free from so much of the anger and fear that I've been carrying around for quite a long time. Maybe the two weeks of emotional wreckage has done me good. I fully expect to get over this delight and return to my usual belligerence within a couple of weeks. But with luck, I'll remember how this has felt, and even when I'm not feeling it, I might know that it's possible.

If nothing else, I'll have this post to remind me.

A Thought

Here's the thing.

This right here is my life. For better or for worse, this is. Not that thing that I want my life to be--that isn't it right now, and maybe it won't ever be.

So maybe I need to stop trying to do something about my situation and try, instead, to do something with my situation. If that makes any sense. All of this is not to say--at all--that I'm resigned to living the rest of my life in exactly this way, and I'm certainly going to be working my ass off to get some more publications and whatnot so that I'll have more options down the line (two years on the market and I still believe that sheer hard work will give you options in academe--hope springs eternal, evidently).

Here's the thing: I've been so intensely focused on what I hope to be doing later--as in, years from now--that the reality of the present and the immediate future have been kind of frightening. In a way, I haven't let myself accept that I'm living here. Maybe that's just an inherent problem with the VAP thing: you can't--and shouldn't--commit to where you are, you spend the whole year trying to figure out what you'll do next (and where you'll do it), and all of your energy is focused on how to get yourself a new job. Ironically, then, landing a t-t job at the VAP school can be a little distressing. I've been completely focused on getting out of here, and now I'm staying here. (There are other issues, of course, but this is a big one.) I haven't really made any effort to settle in here because a) I didn't want to and b) I didn't think that there was any point.

But I've been having a pretty good weekend. I'm getting some work done (on the book manuscript!!!!) and thinking tentatively about doing something this summer that I've wanted to do for a really long time. I've also discovered the therapeutic value of helping a friend clean his basement, and I have dinner plans. In fact, I've been a lot more aggressive this week about scheduling social activities (even things like cleaning basements) than I have been all year, and have found that I sort of have friends here, in a way. (One of them, who was in my situation--a VAP applying for a t-t job--just got the offer and will be here next year, hooray!) The knowledge that my situation isn't going to change anytime soon is therefore a little less scary than it has been.

So: here's to reality. For now.

(I'm sorry that I'm being resorting so heavily to abstractions in these posts. I'm just not altogether comfortable being more concrete. Besides, most of you have probably figured out what the situation is; it's not like it's really that obscure!)

A Hard Time

I'm still going through kind of a hard time. I still don't want to blog about it in any kind of detail--I might never blog about it in any kind of detail; you're not missing much--but I do feel like I need to just...I don't know...blog about it vaguely? Because I'm not feeling so great over here.

Basically, there are personal issues that shall remain nameless. These personal issues might resolve in a perfectly good way, the way in which I'd imagined all along they would resolve. But they might not. It's that "might not" that's a new development, and that has left me much more ragged and wrecked than I would have expected it to. And bound up with it all is my total ambivalence about this job, and all the unhappiness about being here that I've been trying to suppress for the last couple of months. I'd started to do a pretty good job of convincing myself that being here next year won't be so bad, and that there's productive, meaningful work that I do actually care about, and etc etc. And really, the job itself isn't the problem, I don't think. It's my life here that's the problem. Confronted with the possibility that the (personal) future I'd projected for myself might never materialize, I'm left feeling like--well, like I don't know what the point of what I'm doing is. At all.

I know that that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But I've been walking around feeling like I've been scooped out, and it's really scary. In the last year, I've had to give up (temporarily, I hope) a number of things that have been meaningful and important to me, and now it looks like I might have to give up some much bigger meaningful and important things. What I'm left with is my career, and--guess what!--it turns out that my career simply isn't enough. That, as much as I want to do well in this career, it loses all importance when it's put next to the things that I may have to give up as a result of it. But hey, the career is what I've got, and...not much else.

Okay, yes, this sounds highly melodramatic. And of course I'll find other non-career things to fill up the other parts of my life, eventually. (Maybe. I mean, I look at the female professors that I had in grad school, and I don't necessarily see lives that I want, but whatever--one must hope.) It's just...hard to go through this, even if it is temporary, and even if everything might turn out okay and I'm getting all worked up over nearly nothing. But I'm lonely, and sad, and I don't know what to do with myself over this wonderfully long weekend when I'd planned to get a whole lot of work done, but find that really I don't feel much in the mood for anything.



I need it to be summer so that I can get the hell out of this town.

Why I Am Drinking a Beer at 5:15, Even Though I Have to Go Back to Campus Tonight and Have A Lot of Grading to Do

1. Today I got a "rejection that is not a rejection" from Dream U. Goodbye, Dream. There will be others.

(May I also interject here a request to search committees? When you reject a person, reject her. None of this "Our search is completed! I'll bet your search is going well, too!" nonsense. Seriously. Dream U was absolutely splendiferous in all aspects of the process saving this one, so I'm really not too bothered by it and I think it just comes from an exaggerated anxiety about upsetting people--a misplaced courtesy, in fact--but it's not the first such letter I've received and I don't relish having to reread rejection letters two or even three times to figure out what the hell they're saying to me. It doesn't cushion the blow.)

2. People were crying in this afternoon's faculty meeting. Crying. Obviously I can't and won't talk about why--and honestly I haven't been here long enough to know what the real deal is--but suffice to say that there is Drama. And I will be accepting the Field offer in the next two days, so. The Drama will soon be mine.

3. In the last three days, I wrote up extensive comments on 47 drafts (10 to go!) and conferred with 18 students (2 to go!). So there's cause for celebration + lobotomy.

4. Hey! I have a job! It's almost official! So, in spite of everything, I get to have a small mid-week celebration. Right?