On leaning in or dropping out

Here at Ferule & Fescue, we strive to meet all your college reunion-related needs--or anxieties, irritations, and grievances, as the case may be. A long-time reader, recently back from her husband's college reunion, writes in to express her frustration with what she saw among the women of his class:

Dear Flavia,

I just attended my husband's 25th college reunion at an Ivy League university, and I'm left wondering if his classmates--women and men alike--are aware that there was a feminist movement around the time we were all born. (I did not attend this university--I went to a liberal arts college that was definitely not Ivy League. Few if any of my women classmates have left the paid workforce.) Is it just me, or is the unemployed spouse and large (3-5 children) family back with a vengeance among the economic elite? Out where we live in flyover country, most of the families who look like this are evangelical Christian homeschooler/Quiverfull types.

Maybe this is just the stage I'm at in life, but it seems like elite women who came of age in the 1970s made much more intentional decisions about their lives with respect to feminist values than women like me who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Are these elite families aware of the similarities between them and evangelical families in the way they've chosen to arrange their household economies and to allocate the labor of adults? Is the shared value of patriarchal privilege in fact a feature, not a bug, even among so-called "liberal" families?

The women and men I'm writing about are the same demographic that Sheryl Sandberg addressed in her recent book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. What, I wonder, do these elites tell their daughters about the importance of working hard in school and getting a college education? Don't they ever wonder what kind of example they're setting? Do they care? A woman at the reunion (no job, 3 kids) told me that a friend (no job, 3 kids) called her recently in tears because her daughter said to her, "Mom, if you went to such a great school, why don't you have a job?"

I'm not the type to sympathize with a surly tween, but that's not a bad question. What was the point of that college/M.A./M.S./Ph.D./M.D./J.D. degree if you're not going to use it somehow? I can't believe I've lived long enough to see my age-peers give credence to that age-old antifeminist claim that it's pointless to admit women to college/professional school or to hire them "because they're just going to get pregnant and quit. Why waste it on them, when their spot could go to a man who will use his education/opportunity?"

What's going to happen if (or when!) these women get divorced? Courts rarely if ever grant alimony any more. What's the marriage- or job market value of a middle-aged woman with little or no job experience over the past twenty years? I sure hope they're stocking a massive treasure chest full of jewelry they can cash in if need be, or even better, funneling cash into a retirement fund for themselves. In the Cayman Islands.

Why do straight women still view their work and professional lives as extras, frills, or expendable? I was discussing this with a friend of mine who is an extremely hardworking woman in a very demanding profession. She remarked that "no one likes 'work.' That's why it's called 'work!'" In other words, as Don Draper said to Peggy Olson last season in Mad Men: "That's what the money's for!" Work is not supposed to be fulfilling or fun most of the time. It's supposed to be a means to an end.

This retro-vision marriage and family arrangement looks like an incredibly shitty bargain with patriarchy to me. So what's the answer? Can't the world of work also be a crummy place for women, and more especially for mothers? Absolutely! Believe me, I write as someone who has had her share of craptastic jobs with sexist bosses and coworkers. But, I've managed to work my way into a decent position, and I have hopes that new opportunities might open up for me in the future. Even when I was in a crummy job, the cash (as they say) was good to eat, as are the health benefits, the 401 K, and the Social Security (eventually). Maybe it's my background as a scholarship kid who always assumed she'd work her whole life, but I've never seen the world of work as a faceless enemy.

How can we ever expect or hope that the world of work will work equally for women and men if women persist in dropping out and men persist in supporting them, at least so long as it suits them? Why aren't women who drop out of the paid workforce being treated for depression, or at least urged to get counseling before they go? Just imagine the social and moral panic if a large number of upper middle-class men between the ages of 30 and 55 decided that they didn't want to work. Here's a useful tip: if you have a college education and unemployment seems like a good idea, seek treatment. If you are educated for and capable of a decent job, the disinclination to work should be seen as a symptom of an underlying problem, not a lifestyle "choice."

In my experience, having a two-career family has meant that we have sacrificed some things, but we're more flexible in facing life's headwinds when they blow, as they surely will. We had to move out of state and far away from our families, and my husband's job is far from perfect right now. But these disadvantages are far outweighed by the advantages of having two jobs in the family. For example, my husband changed jobs last year, something that was made so much less complicated because we are insured by my employer. When our child was small, we could afford excellent in-home care and also save for hir education. We don't have to debate whether or not we can afford camp, music lessons, or orthodontia. We can!

Finally, we're raising hir consistently with our feminist and egalitarian values: everyone in our home works, and everyone contributes as they can to the household. Everyone helps with shopping, cooking, and cleaning up. No one's time or work is more important than anyone else's. Maybe this is what I find so disappointing: the abandonment of egalitarian as well as feminist ideals. But then, my observations here expose a weakness in Sandberg's focus on elites as the key to feminist change in the workplace. Elites are the last people to lead a revolution, as the world works pretty well for them. Elite women continue to make the shitty bargain with patriarchy for their children's sake--their sons's sake, in any case. I don't see at all how their example benefits their daughters in the long run.

I guess that's as good a bargain as they can strike, once they give up on an independent income.

Parts of my guest writer's account ring true to my experience and parts of it don't: almost none of my classmates have left the workforce entirely, and most are still working full-time. But as I'm almost a decade younger, it may just be that the things she describes haven't yet come to pass among my age peers. Certainly, it seems that if push comes to shove in the marriages of my heterosexual friends, it's pretty much always the woman's job that gets shoved.

(And here's where I should add that, like Sandberg, I don't think there's anything wrong with choosing to stay at home or with downshifting or slow-tracking for a time--but like Sandberg and my guest, I'm troubled when it happens on a larger scale and when we lose crucial voices in public life and the working world as a result.)

I'd love your thoughts, readers, about my guest's observations: is this a widespread phenomenon? And if so, do you share her disappointment. . . or do you have a different interpretation of what's going on here or what kinds of outcomes we might expect (for women, for their kids, or for individual marriages) over the long term?

On the internet, every week is old home week

As I've been trying to finish up revisions on an article, I've found myself taking an increasing number of internet breaks--the five minutes that stretch into ten that stretch into a whole afternoon gone. To be fair, I entered this particular rabbit hole with the best of intentions: I wanted to see if an acquaintance's book was out yet, so I could ILL it. But Googling him led me to his CV, and then to looking up his publications in the MLA database--and the next thing you know I was looking up practically everybody I've ever known to see what they've accomplished since the last time I checked in on them.

And, well, that takes a while.

But I'd defend this particular episode of Google- and career-stalking on these grounds: it's been forever since I last indulged in it.

My first two or three years post-degree were a different story. I felt I was keeping obsessive tabs on how everyone else in the profession was doing: not just people in my field, but acquaintances from grad school and their colleagues. It wasn't about envy or feelings of rivalry (at least not most of the time); I really felt I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing and at what rate. In grad school, there had been a pretty clear series of hoops to move through, and we moved through them at more or less the same pace. And when one of my compeers got a journal article accepted or went to a conference, I knew it.

It was different once I had a tenure-line job. For one thing, my colleagues were at different career stages, so it was harder to assess what would be an appropriate level of production for me at mine. For another, there was only one person in my subfield. And for three. . . we just didn't talk about that stuff too explicitly. We talked about teaching, departmental business, our personal lives. And while I had a mentor and a very clear T&P document, I didn't have a sense of how my department's promotion and tenure standards stacked up against other departments', or even of how much my colleagues were actually doing (as opposed to the minimum of what they and I needed to do).

So I tracked the progress of people I knew who were in my field and closer to my career stage. There was a certain woman a few years ahead of me in the profession who became my aspirational benchmark. I didn't really know her and our work wasn't especially related, but for a variety of reasons I decided that whatever she was doing (the places she was getting published, the fellowships she was receiving) were a good index of what I should be shooting for.

There were some smart things about this strategy. I was able to identify and pursue opportunities I wouldn't otherwise have known about, and keeping my ear to the ground, as it were, helped me to make better choices about where and how to spend my professional energy.

At the same time, though, it wasn't totally healthy to be constantly comparing myself to others. It's also wrongheaded to think that you can take a valid measure of anyone's scholarly or professional development--including your own--on a semesterly or yearly basis. Scholarly time doesn't work like that. Sometimes a person goes three years with no new publications because of a backlog at a press or journal, or because they're immersed in a massive book project--or because they got pregnant or married or divorced or depressed. During other periods, they might seem to be in constant motion as everything piles up on their CV at once.

Coming to this realization may be why I've stopped keeping active tabs on other people's professional lives. Sure, I know how my friends are doing--because they're my friends--and I'm eager to hear about new work by those I admire. But I no longer think that I'm learning much about what I should be doing or where I stand by comparing myself with others.

*

So what was behind this recent flurry of Google-stalking? A deep aversion to working on my article, for one, but I think I also thought that now--when most the people I know are five to eight years post-degree--some patterns would be more apparent and it would be easier to assess who's doing what. And I'm curious, in a more distant and less personal way, about what it means to be a scholar at early midcareer at this historical moment in the life of the profession: what does that path of a young(ish) scholar look like in this day and age?

But while it's easy to identify the extremes (those who have published twice as much as anyone else and those who have dramatically underperformed or overperformed whatever the conventional wisdom about their early "potential"), the signal is still pretty fuzzy.

What we need, obviously, is a longitudinal study.

I'd hazard a guess that it takes 10 or 15 years post-degree to start to see the shape of anyone's career very clearly. In the same way that it's pointless to hyperventilate about what a loooooser you are on the eve of your five- or ten-year college reunion (because seriously, no one's who they're going to be yet, and anyone who thinks they are is the boringest person alive), it's pointless to compare oneself too closely to others professionally. Just do your thing and go to the damn reunion.

So maybe we should check in on each other only every five years, as we do with our college classmates. We could even submit ridiculous self-narratives and assemble them into a handy bound volume.

No, you're right: that's what the internet is for.

New faculty woes

I've spent an unusual amount of time lately talking with recent PhDs and doctoral students new to the area, a process that's been giving me vivid flashbacks to my own first year or two on the job. Some of these people are our own recent hires, whom I'm getting to know better--but most are people who've contacted me about the possibility of renting our house next year while we're away on my sabbatical. Both sets of people, though, have reminded me how tough it is to move somewhere new, and how even getting a tenure-track job doesn't catapult one into adulthood or into career or personal stability quite as easily or immediately as one sometimes hopes and imagines.

Grad students, of course, come in all shapes and sizes, and people finish their doctorates at different ages and at different life stages. Some are already in a reasonably stable place, financially and personally, and getting a tenure-track job involves only a relatively straightforward strengthening of that position (there may be some short-term anxieties or upheavels if there's a big geographic move or if a spouse has to change jobs, but nothing that the household can't weather). But for others . . . it's harder. As long-time readers know, I had a relationship of six years implode in my first year on the job, and I went into MORE debt despite moving from the country's most expensive metropolitan area to a very affordable Rust Belt city, and from a contingent faculty position to a secure, well-paid, tenure-line job. Nothing about that period was as bad as my first several years of grad school, but it was still a more difficult experience than I was prepared for.

Most of the people I've been talking with seem more like me than not, and I wish this were something that the profession acknowledged more fully: how very hard these shifts can be. We talk a great deak about how hard and how heart-breaking it is trying to get a tenure-line job, and we talk a certain amount about how stressful it can be to be a junior professor trying to make tenure; much less frequently do we talk about how hard it can be landing at a first job that just isn't the right fit (and those conversations are always hedged about with apology and embarrassment: yes yes, we're lucky to have these problems), and I'm not sure I've ever seen a public discussion of the struggles that accompany a new job that's actually pretty good and about which one has no real complaints--but that nevertheless produces new problems or fails to solve the ones we thought it would.

I'll leave the relationship component to the side, though I'm not the only person whose move to the tenure track or to a new job precipitated a breakup or divorce--or a prolonged period of isolation and unhappy singlehood. But the money thing is huge, and compounds whatever other struggles a new faculty member may be having with her job or her personal life. Moving is expensive and complicated, and requires a major outlay of cash, especially for people who have been subsisting for years on a graduate stipend.

When I took this job, I had a final paycheque from my previous job in May. I wouldn't receive my first paycheque from RU until the end of September (and my health coverage wouldn't begin until October). I had to travel to a new city to find an apartment, put down a deposit, move, buy a car, and live for four months. . . on nothing. Since I was only coming from 400 miles away, RU covered most of the cost of my move itself--three professionals and a van--so things weren't quite as dire as they could have been. But they were dire enough. I had good credit (i.e., a high credit line and a low rate on a few too many cards) and some help from my parents, so I made it through. But seven years and a number of raises later, I'm still paying off some of that debt.

I'm in stable though not excellent financial shape these days; my car is paid off, I own a house, my consumer debt is slowly shrinking, and though taking a year at half-pay will be tough, I can do it without adding to my debt. I'm no longer in constant financial panic. But lemme tell you: running credit checks on possible renters and piecing together the kinds of gambles and bad decisions they made in grad school has given me some PTSD-style flashbacks. I want to tell some of these prospective renters, "OH MY GOD. I UNDERSTAND!" But I also want to tell them, "You're fucking delusional if you think you can afford this rent on that salary. It's going to be so, so much harder than you think."

But no one wants to hear that. All I can do is tell our own new hires, as soon as they accept the offer, when their paycheques and medical coverage will actually begin. (Strangely, this is information that no one else ever bothers to pass along.) And I can try to be a sympathetic and helpful colleague, if they have other problems they care to share. I hope they won't have problems--but experience suggests that an awful lot will.

Never that central, not really in crisis

A friend alerted me to this fascinating post arguing not only that the latest narrative of decline for the humanities is excessive and alarmist (there's no evidence that the past decade has seen a steep drop-off in the percentage of college students majoring in the humanities), but that there was never a period in American life where humanities majors accounted for more than a tiny percentage of the adult population.

Benjamin Schmidt, a graduate student at Princeton, runs the numbers and finds several things. First, the mid-to-late 1960s, when somewhere between 15 and 20% of all college students majored in the humanities, were a brief and anomalous blip: the best numbers from the previous decades suggest that about 10% of college students majored in the humanities in the 1940s and 1950s, compared with about 8% today--and of course, in the middle of the 20th century, vastly fewer Americans went to college and there were vastly fewer subjects available to major in. Second, there has never been a time when humanities majors accounted for more than about 4% of the entire adult population--compared with about 3% today.

At least as interesting as the data are Schmidt's reflections on why so many people are so invested in a narrative of decline for the humanities. He suggests that it fulfills different needs for different groups: a belief in the prior-centrality of the humanities allows (a) humanists themselves to argue that their disciplines once were and still should be at the core of both university education and public life; (b) conservative critics of the academy to claim that misguided academics in thrall to something (multiculturalism! French theory!) destroyed the humanities; (c) business-oriented pragmatists to dismiss the humanities as outdated and irrelevant to the modern world.

He points out that, in fact, the great period of recovery for humanities majors (after the crash in the 1970s) came in the late 1980s and early 1990s--"in other words, the heart of the culture wars, perhaps the only period that everyone agrees was ruinous to the humanities."

Read the post and see what you think. Here's the big question I'm left with: what would it mean for us not to believe that the humanities are in crisis? How might we teach differently, research differently, or approach broader questions of educational policy differently?

Readers?

I sing the sorrows of inbox zero

Over the past month, more than one academic friend has remarked on the never-gets-old thrill of opening her work email during the summer only to discover--nothing! No messages!! At all!!!

And, sure. That's a delightful thing. On the other hand, there are still messages one might hope or expect to find in one's work email, even during the summer. And opening up the account only to find nothing there is dispiriting. At least during the semester one can always count on something new being there, and usually a something involving capital letters and question marks and the typographic equivalent of frantic hand waving.

Even exasperating and distracting missives are, well, distracting.

What am I supposed to do, here: work?

Not as easy as A-B-C

Today's NYT has an article about how much easier it is to raise K-12 students' math scores than it is to raise their reading scores. Here's the opening:

David Javsicas, a popular seventh-grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math.

A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, "you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it," he said.

Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. "It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective," he said.

Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education, particularly in comparison with other countries. But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block.

As the article goes on to note, there are a lot of reasons for this. Math is a much more universal language, not as dependent on things like cultural context and not as intimately connected to home and family life (kids learn math in school, but they learn vocabulary, sentence structure, and the expression of complex ideas at home--and they're either introduced to books at a young age or they're not). It's not that math is easier, but at the lower levels it's more straightforward to teach or remediate in an academic setting.

But although the article mostly has implications from educational policy, testing, and teacher evaluation, it's surely relevant for those of us in higher ed, too. Those bozos in other departments who blame the English department when their students still can't write--even after a whole semester of freshman comp? Listen: writing is hard! It takes a long time to learn how to do well, especially if students enter with deficiencies. Those people who claim that the humanities are easy majors, because all students do is read books and talk about them? Not so!

As I point out to my Shakespeare students after we've spent 30 minutes looking at one speech and I can tell they're getting tired of being pushed to talk about individual words, images, or poetic devices, this is shit they do all the time without realizing it, whenever they ask a friend for an opinion about an email or text message they just received: "But what do you think it really means? Why did he use that word? Why that word?" We all know, on some level, that the words people choose and the way they arrange them mean more than their dictionary definitions convey. And the people who can best pick up on those meanings have an edge in life: they're quicker, more perceptive, and more versatile. They can tell signal from noise, they can recognize things that are implied but aren't stated explicitly. They tend to be better at moving among different worlds, tolerating ambiguity, and seeing possibilities.

Reading well is more than just comprehending a text's basic content--and even "basic content" is tough to comprehend for those without exposure to a wide range of styles and genres (a student who can read a scene from an Elizabethan play and summarize its plot is also someone who can identify the key components of a legal contract or an initial public offering). Being able to figure out how a text works, to recognize patterns and variations, to grasp primary meaning and any possible subtexts--those are major life skills. They're career sills. But they're not easily or quickly obtained ones.

When new media grows old

As of today, I've been blogging for eight years, seven of them as Flavia. Over the last couple of months I've been tagging my old posts, which also means I've been reading my old posts--but I'll spare you any reflections on them, my life, or the Things Blogging Has Done for Me.

Sometimes I think that blogging is over, as a medium--or at least that the kind of academic blogging I discovered eight years ago is over: the daily chit-chat and advice-seeking and community-building stuff has moved to Facebook and to Twitter, while many of those writing more serious reflections on the academy or politics have gone professional, joining group blogs or writing for magazines or otherwise forging links between their blogs and their careers.

These are both fine and useful developments; I don't mourn the livejournal mode of blogging, where we were all writing long posts every day about whateverthefuck. But this kind of sorting means those of us who are neither research-focused nor diaristic, who are no more interested in opinion journalism than in showy confessionalism, may feel a little at sea. I've never seriously considered not blogging, but as blogging and micro-blogging evolve into distinct forms catering to distinct audiences, I'm less sure exactly what it is that I'm doing, who my community is, or who I'm serving.

That said, I'm in no doubt about why I read the blogs I read or about the value they provide. For me, blog-reading is leisure reading: fun, informative, and somewhere on the spectrum between novels and newspapers. The blogs I want to read are idiosyncratic and personality-driven, well-written and reflective, with a strong character and voice regardless of the topics they cover. I don't want to read someone's public diary (even or especially if it's material that would better be kept private), and I don't want to read scholarly material unless I'm actually doing research or prepping for class. I like reading scholarship and I like chatting with both friends and colleagues on social media--but blogs do something different. They allow me access to a personality and an intelligence that I want to spend time with, whose mind I enjoy seeing at work, and who can craft a good paragraph.

Do I like all the bloggers I read, or think I'd enjoy spending an afternoon with them? Usually, but not always--and sometimes it's a qualified "like." I read blogs, really, for the same reason I read and study literature: to inhabit a specific intelligence and aesthetic and to learn more about the ways of being in the world.

As long as that's something that blogs can do, I guess I'll keep trying to do it.

Office of alumi counter-relations and de-development

I've written before about how cluelessly patronizing and tone-deaf I find pretty much every fund-raising appeal from my alma mater, whether delivered by letter, email, or in person (I can't even talk about the go-get-'em-tiger speeches given by my class treasurer and reunion gift officer last year, which resembled nothing so much as a branch manager's exhortation to his team to meet that month's sales targets). But every single one pisses me off.

Here's the latest:

Dear fellow alumni,

It was about this time of year that each one of us carried that last armload of books back to the Library before graduating. What did you feel as you pushed them across the desk or slid them into the book drop—relief, joy, sadness, gratitude? Well, did you know that when you give to the Alumni Fund, you can choose to give directly to the Library through the "Library Resources" bucket? The Library puts your dollars to work immediately to ensure that its resources stay up-to-date, its expert librarians can help every inquiring student, and its couches are comfortable.

No matter how you took advantage of the Library during your time at [INRU], we hope you will join us in giving back today by designating your Alumni Fund gift for Library Resources! Visit [website] today.

Boola boola,
[Alumni Fund Officers]

Now, okay: I react especially negatively to this approach because I work in higher education and my own institution's library doesn't have half the resources (whether in the form of books, databases, or comfy couches) of my alma mater. But I don't think that's the whole of it; I have a hard time imagining this appeal being effective with anyone I know, even those outside of higher ed.--plenty of whom are sentimental about their college days and prone to nostalgic reveries about Saturdays spent in those grand reading rooms or prowling the stacks.

Because however callow and heedless we may have been in our youth, and however much we may have taken INRU's resources for granted, we've all been out in the world since then. We probably all have connections to or emotional investments in at least a dozen organizations with relatively shallow pockets: our local schools, arts organizations, places of worship, homeless shelters, and so on. If I'm nostalgic about my experiences in INRU's libraries? I'm going to give to a literacy organization, or a local library, or the library at my kid's school--not to an institution with a $20 billion endowment, whose libraries are nicer than those at 99% of the world's universities.

Maybe I just don't know anyone capable of giving truly big bucks--the donors the university really wants to cultivate--and maybe such people respond differently to such appeals. But as someone intensely fond of her alma mater and capable of donating annually in the low three figures (but who does not), what I want from a fundraising appeal is, first of all, a direct acknowledgement of the university's fabulous wealth. I want an acknowledgement that there are other charities out there that I might (and do) consider worthier.

That's the most important thing, actually: the acknowledgment that decades of need-blind admissions (and extremely generous financial aid) mean a lot of graduates neither come from money nor go on to it, and that even more graduates have an uncomfortable and ambivalent relationship to INRU's wealth. Then I'd like a pitch that explains why--despite those facts--I should still give: because the recession has cut into the endowment, forced them to freeze faculty lines, imperiled the university's ability to fully fund students with family incomes below $65,000. Whatever.

Maybe they can't do that second part, because it's not true. Fine. But imagining your alumni as living in a sentimental bubble, in love with nothing so much as their alma mater and untouched by any financial pressures of their own--well, that's gross. If those people exist, I don't even want to know them, much less be taken for one.

Wanna to know why I don't give even the minimal sum that covers the cost of my alumni magazine subscription? That's why. Boola boola.

Gimmicks and gambits and bits

On the last day of classes I ran into one of my colleagues and we chatted about how things were winding down. He talked about the research presentations his students had done, and then he mentioned a particular student by name.

"You've had her before, right?"

Yes, I said, in three classes: two last semester and one this semester.

"I thought so. She's absorbed some of your teaching persona."

Now, it's one thing to know that one has a teaching persona and to be occasionally aware of dialing it up or down or modulating it for a given circumstance; it's another to think of it as something readily recognizable by others and available for appropriation.

But of course we've all constructed our teaching (and our paper-delivering and maybe even our networking-at-the-conference-bar) selves from somewhere, and usually from many somewheres: just as we pick up bits of knowledge and pedagogical tricks from our own teachers and colleagues, so do we pick up ways of embodying authority and collaboration or whatever else we do in the classroom. We choose the techniques and the modes that work with our own personalities and values, and we make them our own--but probably relatively few of us think we invented our teaching selves wholly from scratch.

As for me, I can't itemize all the parts of my teaching persona, and I'm sure I've been influenced by people I'd never suspect and in ways I don't recognize. But two of my college professors I can immediately point to as foundational.

Both of them were literature scholars, and both were young or young-seeming, though they were at different points in their careers and one was male and one was female. What they had in common, in addition to their youth, was a wacky, irreverent, and colloquial way of talking about the difficult texts they taught. I never doubted the ferocious intelligence of either, but they had a warm enthusiasm for the material that conveyed how much fun all this geeky arcana was to them. Both had a habit of paraphrasing or summarizing in hilarious shorthand ways (some of which I have preserved in notebooks or book margins to this day). And both dressed hyper-professionally, even extravagantly, perhaps to compensate for their youth and informality.

And, uh, that's me. I mean, I'm not either of those professors--not as a scholar and not as a personality. Probably no one who knew either of them and who knows me would recognize anything other than the vaguest of similarities. But I see it. The high-low approach that I associate with both professors is pretty central to my own self-presentation in the classroom, in part because it's what made me feel able to be a scholar, and to overcome my own insecurities and self-doubts. (The combination of dressing the fuck up and being relentlessly self-mocking means you can get away with a lot.)

I'm sure both those professors would be weirded out, were they to know how influential I feel their examples were for me; I'm a little weirded out to hear that one of my own students has apparently adopted some of the same mannerisms from me that I feel I learned from them. But I suppose it's a tribute, all around.

*

Do you have professors (or colleagues) whose personae you've adopted or adapted? And if so, what made the fit feel right?

Editorial intimacy

I just received my copyedited book manuscript from the publisher. It's humbling. But awesome. But also humbling.

I'm lucky to be working with a press that still does real copyediting, as many now do not--and since I used to work in academic publishing, I take a geeky pleasure in reading through the copyedits and learning the right way to cite a particular kind of source or discovering that someone caught my inconsistent capitalization of a particular term and standardized it. Though I'm surely fussier about consistency and formatting than the average writer, I know I'm not a professional. It's reassuring to have someone else scrutinizing every sentence, every usage, and every punctuation mark.

At the same time, that scrutiny involves a peculiar intimacy:

-Your copy editor knows all your darkest secrets, including exactly how often you begin a sentence with "However" or "But although." Worse, he wants you to change. Why can't he just love you the way you are?

-Your copy editor flags and rewrites any unusual turns of phrase. Some of them are genuinely better his way. But others--you think, defensively--have a better rhythm or effect as originally written.

-But you don't want to be that writer: the academic who believes herself to have a marvelous, original style and clings to her irritating tics and precious locutions.

-And when it turns out that your copy editor is someone you know and like and used to work with--a very experienced senior editor whose first query bubble is actually a sweet little note re-introducing himself and congratulating you on the book? Well, you really can't write him off as some fussbudget in a green eyeshade.

Guess it's lucky I have a blog audience on whom I can continue to inflict my worst writerly indulgences and bad habits.

Welcome to the panopticon, girls and boys

While grading papers for my two Shakespeare classes, I made a distressing discovery: 25% of them were on the same topic. They weren't just responding to the same prompt, but applying that prompt to the same rather narrow subtopic--a subtopic that was not among the handful I'd suggested.

You know what came next: I Googled it, and discovered that there are approximately a million hits for this topic. It comes up in every discussion of the relevant play and there are dozens of free essays available on the web.

It also happens to be a stupid topic. It's simultaneously obvious and really difficult to do well; if anyone had run it by me, I'd have warned him off. But because it's so obvious, and suggests only a couple of possible lines of argumentation, it's impossible to tell whether any given essay is borrowing ideas from the internet, recapitulating a half-remembered discussion from high school, or doing original (if uninspired) work. Nothing is directly plagiarized: I put in the long hours ascertaining that. But other than writing a motherfucking airtight prompt for next time, what's a girl to do?

I did the only thing I felt I could: I announced to both classes that I believed a number of their essays--giving no specifics--contained ideas derived from uncited sources. I emphasized that it was okay to get information or inspiration from elsewhere, if they were otherwise doing original work, but that they absolutely needed to credit all sources. I told them I would give them 48 hours to get me a new bibliography (and, if necessary, a new copy of their paper with any previously-omitted citations), but that otherwise their grades would be affected.

I should have been able to predict the results.

My students examined their consciences, and at least dozen emailed me confessions. One acknowledged that he hadn't cited a source for the date of the battle of Actium. Another revealed that her decision to write about women in Coriolanus had been inspired by a discussion about gender roles in her Russian Novel class--and she apologized for not crediting that professor. They were, all of them, so very sorry.

I guess guilt-tripping is never a waste.

Send help

It's the end of the semester. I've been spending a lot of time in my office. Perhaps you'd like to spend time in my office, too?



Regular blogging to resume eventually.

Self-financing

Vimala Pasupathi's recent post about her decision to take an unpaid research leave hit a nerve with me. Vim isn't the first person I've known to do such a thing, but she lays out with candor and clarity the ways that "doing more with less" at the institutional level can force faculty to do the same thing on the individual level: the more our institutions demand of us, the harder it is to carve out space for our own life and work.

Those I know who have taken or are considering taking unpaid leave--or who have sacrificed a chunk of their usual income by foregoing summer teaching or additional advisement or administrative duties--have done so not just in order to finish a scholarly project they were excited about, but also to recover from a toxic workplace, to be with a long-distance spouse, or to compensate for a nonexistent maternity leave. And I am, after a fashion, doing the same thing myself: I'm taking a year-long sabbatical, at half-pay, both to kickstart my next book project and to live with my spouse full-time for fifteen months.

This is a genuine financial sacrifice, but not the world's biggest one: among other things, I've got tenure, so I'm returning to secure employment, a stable income, and a basically healthy, happy institution that hasn't suffered much in the recent financial downtown (in fact, there's now more money available for research than when I started).

But if my sabbatical sits at the cushier end of the self-financing spectrum, it's worth recognizing that it's not entirely distinct from the kind I did when my professional position was far less stable. Indeed, self-financing may be the skill those who go through graduate school in the humanities learn best.

Here's one example: in the last two years of my PhD program, I presented at five national conferences and I paid for them almost entirely out of pocket: I believe I got $500, total, for five conferences, all of which included plane flights and hotel rooms. I remember struggling to find the money--and I shared hotel rooms and economized in various other ways--but it never occurred to me not to do it. I was almost done with my dissertation, and I needed the lines on my vita and the public exposure.

When I started a tenure-track job, I merely scaled up my sense of what I could afford to self-finance: so I got less than $1000/year for research travel? No biggie. I had a real salary! So I went to two or three conferences in one year, or spent two weeks in England working at an archive, and I regarded it as a necessary expense: I wasn't going to let being at a regional state school limit the work I could do, or restrict my opportunities.

Over the years, to eke out an extra conference or a research trip overseas, I've used frequent-flier miles, spent two weeks living in a dorm, eaten sandwiches for every meal, split hotel rooms with friends--but, above all: I've spent my own money. I never even kept track of how much I spent until I got married and got an accountant and realized, holy shit: that's thousands of dollars, every year, to finance my scholarly life. Next year, I'm "spending" more than $30,000.

I'm lucky to be able to do it, all of it. But I wonder what the breaking point is, for me or for the profession as a whole. I've always regarded my self-financing as essential, as an investment, and my position rewards that kind of thinking: all that grad school debt and lost income did in fact result in a tenure-track job; the work I've self-financed since then has been directly responsible for merit raises and indirectly responsible for my getting tenure and promotion and receiving scheduled raises along the way. But I guess it's a fucked-up system that expects--that takes it for granted--that its members will sacrifice and pay out of pocket for the work that the profession requires in order to consider them full members.

Or to put it another way, when is self-financing an investment, and when is it a scam?

This isn't a matter I'd adjudicate for anyone else; I know independent scholars and adjuncts whose work is wholly self-financed, a real contribution to their fields, and done (I presume) out of love and dedication; they can't not do the work they do. But for me, it's worth it because the profession has committed to me. If I left the profession or it left me, I would not keep doing my research.

I love my work. It provides me with a profound source of meaning and much of my current identity. It's taken years to become the scholar I am, and to be as happy as I am, and it would surely take me years to find something equally meaningful. But if someone weren't willing to pay me for it--or for some percentage of it!--I doubt I'd do it.

What's my breaking point? I really don't know. But since next year I'm getting paid half of what my institution normally thinks I'm worth, maybe that's as good a line in the sand as any: I need the profession to meet me halfway.

If this is self-selection, I'm all for it

In my current job, it's so rare to encounter entitled, snobbish, self-impressed students that when I do I find myself running to tell my colleagues about this horrifying thing that just happened.

And then I remember: oh, yeah. That's a thing. A thing I almost never have to deal with.

There's lots to love about my job, but the sheer niceness of my students--including the smartest and most talented among them--has to be reason #1.

This conference hangover might be terminal

I spent last weekend in Toronto at the conference that's finally owning the name many of us have long applied to it--but now I'm back, and I'm crashing hard.

The post-conference hangover (which is not to be confused with an actual hangover, though that also goes with the territory) is a well-known occupational hazard; to judge by my Facebook and Twitter feeds, lots of my fellow conferees are also suffering. I myself spent most of last night in tears for no reason, and it was only in the light of day that I recognized the symptoms. It's hard to jump back into workaday life after a weekend away, and it's particularly hard after three or four days of constant intellectual and social stimulation; I'm always a bit glum and my world seems pokey and disappointing for a couple of days after I return from a conference.

This time, though, I'm not just crashing from a conference high; I'm also processing the conference lows. As the association president said at her luncheon address, the SAA is, for many scholars, their "hometown": the place where they feel most at ease, most fully understood, and most warmly welcomed. It's a lovely description of why professional conferences matter, but it implies (as she went on to say) that the other places we spend our working lives are not as welcoming.

Here's some of what I heard about those other places, in the course of the conference:

-Two of my friends were denied tenure in jaw-droppingly egregious ways;

-Another is in a department that may be dissolved;

-Three more are at institutions that are imploding (one of which may actually go under);

-Other friends and acquaintances spent yet another year fruitlessly searching for tenure-track jobs;

-Still others--like me--have perfectly nice jobs that involve major personal and domestic sacrifices.

Sure, I've heard such stories for years. And everyone I know who's actually left the profession has found happy, fulfilling work (in many cases, they're happier than those who hung on). But in a year in which I achieved both tenure and a book contract, such stories feel paradoxically more personal. This is really my profession now. And it's not getting better.

When I was in grad school and on the market, I was angry about the shape of the profession--but though it felt like my problem (I was one of the exploited, one of those who might never get a tenure-track job), it wasn't really: the crisis was the responsibility of my seniors, who, if they hadn't created it, were at least ignoring and perpetuating it.

I remember asking my union organizer why the faculty were so opposed to unionization, or why they seemed to believe--in the absence of all evidence--that everyone who worked hard and kept her head down would get a job. She said that maybe it was too hard for the faculty to acknowledge that the system was broken, that it wasn't a real meritocracy, and that they themselves didn't have the power to help or protect us.

That explanation struck me with the force of real truth, and it still does now that I'm one of them. We own this shitty system. We didn't break it, but we bought it.

So while I'm sure my conference stupor will lift in a day or two, I hope it's replaced by something less like paralysis and more like outrage.