Gratitude

Heading over river, through woods. While I'm cursing traffic on the interstates and by-roads of this great nation, I leave you with this article from yesterday's Times on the health benefits of conscious gratitude. So let's try it: I'm happy there aren't more morons on the road! And hey, it's pissing rain, but at least it's not snow!

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Those interested in metonymy must explain why metonymy is required

Speaking of veterans, this just in:

The Department of Defense is now funding the study of metaphors. The full description is here (h/t G-Fav), but in brief, the DoD is interested in "exploit[ing] the use of metaphorical language to gain insights into underlying cultural beliefs"; i.e., to figure out what it means when a particular nation or political faction uses one kind of metaphor rather than another. Is life a journey, or a playscript?

The report includes this sweetly wonky explanation of what metaphors are:

Metaphors have been known since Aristotle (Poetics) as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (e.g., The world is a stage). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reflect cultural beliefs.

Metaphors shape how people think about complex topics and can influence beliefs...Metaphors are associated with affect; affect influences behavior. This association has been confirmed through neuro-science experiments.

(There's also a great description of metonymy, and later the stern warning, "Metonymy will be in addition to metaphors. Those interested in metonymy must explain why metonymy is required.")

The project's goal is to "automat[e] the discovery, framing and categorization of linguistic metaphors in large amounts of textual data in multiple languages"--in other words, to push a whole lotta text through a whole lotta computers--but since I'm skeptical that figurative language conforms to any pattern that can be modeled, I see huge potential here for us: when the computerized model fails, the Defense Department will be forced to hire a platoon of humanities PhDs.

Win-win!

"After surviving firefights, sitting on a college campus with someone who doesn’t like me is the least of my worries"

Today's New York Times has a great article on Columbia's aggressive recruitment of military veterans for undergraduate study. Columbia now has more than 200 veterans enrolled, while its closest Ivy competitor, Cornell, has approximately 50. (We won't speak about the shamefully low figure enrolled at my own alma mater.)

I've thought a fair amount about veterans in the classroom over the years, for a number of reasons: I come from a military family; my former long-term partner teaches at one of the service academies (as he did for five of our six years together); and I've taught quite a few veterans myself at RU. But although there's a lot to say about this article, what most strikes me is the way it seems to align with the argument I made a while back about the limited kinds of diversity one can expect at elite colleges: it's not surprising to me that Columbia, which is located in a big city and already has a robust undergraduate program aimed at nontraditional students, and Cornell, which has the largest undergraduate population of the Ivies, are doing the best job recruiting students who are a bit older and have significant non-academic life experience.

As I wrote in that earlier post, elite colleges that are devoted to a residential model--and especially smaller elite colleges, located in smaller communities--seem to have a harder time imagining what it would mean to add older students (or married students or students with meaningfully different academic backgrounds) into the mix.

But there's no reason for this to be true. Although the student population at RU could certainly be more cohesive, quite a lot of our students, including transfer students or those who have taken several years off, elect to live on or right near campus, as a part of the academic community, and it's not uncommon for students to forge friendships with other students who are a number of years older. Surely elite colleges could preserve their academic standards, maintain a sense of communal identity, and diversify their student bodies in new and important ways--with veterans for starters, but perhaps also with other older or returning students--if they tried. Kudos to Columbia for showing them how.

Acceptance

In early January, I start checking the time of sunrise and sunset every day, taking pleasure in each additional minute of daylight (and usually declaring to multiple people, multiple times a week, "Tomorrow will be two minutes and eight seconds longer!" or "We've gained six more minutes of daylight since Monday!"). I'm also fond of telling my friends in Boston and New York that the sun sets in Cha-Cha City 20-30 minutes later, year round. It's a way of getting through.

But as soon as we pass the summer solstice, I stop checking. And when it's fully dark by 9 p.m. I start noting morosely that it's all downhill from there. Throughout the early fall I grumble, taking the shortening days--every single one of them--very personally. Winter's coming.

Now that we've set the clocks back, though, I'm okay with it. It's dark early and it's dark long, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm grateful for the warm, sunny days we'll still get through the end of this month, and I'm grateful for weekend days spent outside, when the dark comes on more slowly. We drink cider and whiskey and red wine, eat stews and nuts and root vegetables, and we light fires in the fireplace and have people over. I'll see my college friends at the football game this weekend, family for Thanksgiving the week after that, and the end of the semester is in sight.

It'll be okay, for a while. But talk to me again in February.

Hope for the humanities? (part 2 of 2)

The big asterisk to my generally positive attitude about my institution's commitment to the humanities has to do with our foreign language department and requirements. Briefly, they're a joke. Like many institutions, mine is falling all over itself to proclaim its dedication to "global study," and to declare that it prepares its students for a "global workplace"--while doing nothing to increase the actual study of foreign languages or build its foreign language department. Spanish is the only remotely healthy program we seem to have, and I suspect that's a reflection not of any actual strategy on the part of the institution, but simply of the number of students who took the language in high school and who, of their own initiative, have decided to go further. Student demand has occasionally brought in an Arabic or Japanese instructor for a few semesters, which is nice, but there's no possibility of studying those languages past the beginner level. (Other than Spanish, the only language with tenure-line faculty, and hence some literature offerings, is French. But the most popular language courses on campus seem to be those for American Sign Language.)

I suspect there may be internal, departmental reasons that the foreign languages haven't been getting hires, but I also think it's the downside of student demand: for reasons that we in English and History aren't totally in control of, students want to major in our subjects, and that sets off a virtuous cycle in which more and better faculty get hired, which in turn attracts more and better majors. Students don't want to major in the foreign languages (and not enough make studying a foreign language a priority), so tenure-line faculty don't get hired, the programs languish, and the institution actually cuts the required number of semesters of foreign language study...thus decreasing the likelihood that students will get far enough to want to do more.

The lack of commitment to the foreign languages is an active concern in my department and in the history department, but as yet we haven't done much except complain among ourselves and urge individual students to take another year or two of a foreign language. But long term, I think we have to try to use our relative weight to put some pressure on the administration; we're neither going to attract the best students nor make our students into the best scholars they can be without a somewhat better foreign language department--and what's the point of being a robust department, anyway, if we can't help out other allied departments?

*

My smaller asterisk to my previous post involves my concern about what "raising our standards" does to the institution's mission. Our entering students are genuinely getting better every year, and the college is gradually transforming itself into a more traditional, more residential, liberal-arts-focused institution. The townhouses, the branding, the community ethos, etc., are all part of that effort. As a faculty member, it's hard not to be excited by a lot of this, especially since it hasn't been a case of "excellence without money": fundraising and alumni giving are way up, and faculty are pretty well-paid, with opportunities for merit raises in addition to cost-of-living raises every year. Who wouldn't want more smart students in the classroom? And who doesn't dare to hope that we might someday see course releases--or even a slight reduction in our teaching load--for faculty who are active scholars?

Well, no one doesn't want those things. And God knows, we'd all love to have our college recognized, statewide, for the strength of its humanities programs rather than having that be a pleasant surprise for the students (and faculty) who wind up here. But I worry a bit about the kind of smug self-satisfaction that I mentioned in my previous post in conjunction with the religious college up the road. One thing I love about RU students is how nice they are, how basically eager and hardworking and unpretentious; they're all here to get an education, and though the nature of that desire differs--some students just want a degree while others are intellectually ravenous--in no case is it about the cachet of the institution, or their own specialness for being here. (Our students seem happy to be affiliated with RU, and there's pleasure when one alumnus meets another alumnus, but it's not a self-congratulatory thing.)

And I wonder, sometimes, what the tipping point is: as we keep branding, and recruiting out-of-state students, and talking up our academics, will we lose some of what makes this institution so appealing? Will we lose the academically marginal students who are nevertheless full of eagerness and potential--only to wind up with a whole bunch of grade-grubbing, good-but-not-great students?

Maybe that's a foolish worry. But I think of all the spoiled, uncurious kids at middling colleges and universities, and it seems possible that for many institutions an increase in prestige--even specifically academic prestige--is accompanied by a decrease in intellectual vigor, especially in the undergraduate classroom.

Hope for the humanities (part 1 of 2)

Historiann has put out the call for bloggers to respond to Tony Grafton's review of and reflections on the shitload--I believe that's the technical, historiographic term--of recent books on the crisis in higher education. Grafton argues that although there's no one single or simple explanation for higher ed's problems, there is a problem, which is the gradual divorcing of the college experience from real intellectual development: students go to college for the professional credential and the social experience, and colleges are increasingly complicit in allowing or encouraging them to "look for entertainment and easy grades."

But because most studies of the crisis in higher ed lump very different kinds of schools together, and generalize to the point that no clear picture of any college student's experience can be gleaned, Grafton ends his essay expressing a desire for more precise and particular descriptions of the state of higher education at a variety of different institutions--and it's this desire that Historiann has been marshaling bloggers to answer.

Both Notorious Ph.D. and Dr. Crazy have already responded, giving the perspective from their rather different public institutions, so I'll now give mine from mine. And I gotta say that, despite the problems that my institution faces and the things I'm displeased with (which will be the topic of my second blog post on this subject), I'm pretty impressed with the intellectual climate and the support for the humanities at my institution--non-elite though it may be.

I teach a 3/3 load at a public, comprehensive college with an undergraduate population of about 7,000 and another 1,000-1,500 graduate students. And in some ways, our college could be said to be among those that are focusing increasing energy and resources on improving our students' social lives: we're building an enormous special complex somehow devoted to student life (it's not a student center, and it's not a gym, and indeed no one has adequately described to me what it is); we've built a whole bunch of student townhouses as an addition/alternative to our dormitory housing; and there's been an increasing, exasperating emphasis on "branding" our college in various ways: new slogans, logos, advertisements, alumni networks, fundraising initiatives; you name it.

But the thing is, when a college with a significant commuter population and a significant community-college transfer population works to increase its students' sense of collective identity and to improve their residential experience (a surprising number of our community college transfer students elect to live in the dorms), those things aren't necessarily working against a commitment to the intellectual life.

Because here's the other truth: of those 7,000 undergrads? English now has 600 majors, and history has about the same. We're the two biggest majors on campus, and still growing. The bad job market has been good for us in those two departments, and we've hired great faculty. Our chief academic officer--a scientist by training--has consistently touted our two departments as the strength of the college, and the first new academic building to be built on our campus in decades will be a showcase for the humanities.

For our students, then, creating a social life--encouraging them to live on campus, to participate in social and extra-curricular activities--goes along with fostering an atmosphere of shared intellectual engagement. (I wouldn't go so far as to say that binge drinking on the weekends is a part of this community-building! But more moderate forms of non-academic recreation arguably could be.)

Because I'll tell you what: those 1,200-odd English and history majors aren't majoring in our subjects because of a belief in the ennobling or civilizing virtues of the humanities, or even, in some cases, because they're voracious readers or innately curious or whatever else is alleged to bring students to the humanities. A large percentage of our majors have selected English or history because they want teaching jobs--which is partly to say, they want stable, unionized, middle-class jobs. (In my state, unlike many of its neighbors, students can't major in "education"; even students who want to teach kindergarten have to major in an actual academic subject.)

But however they wind up in our majors, the sheer number of them means we keep hiring. And that, in turns, means they're being challenged by an increasingly strong cadre of teachers and scholars--which attracts better majors and makes many of the weaker ones better, too. And while it can be challenging to teach to a range of different ability levels in the same classroom, I believe I've seen the ways that a shared ethos and identity, a sense that being an English major (or being an RU student) is a thing, and that those other people in the classroom are potentially your people, makes students more engaged and interested in rising to the level of their peers and to the level of their instructors' expectations.

So, okay: many things are pretty good at my institution. The question is, are the phenomena that are responsible for the general health of the humanities at my non-elite institution replicable elsewhere?

I think they are, with a few caveats.

First, the humanities will never attract majors--and this is increasingly true, I think, even at elite schools--by blather about how these subjects allow us to think the greatest thoughts, engage with the greatest ideas, etc. Students may be compelled by those arguments once they are humanities majors, but it's not the way to attract first-generation college students or convince their parents. The humanities really need to sell themselves as a smart professional move. In my state, the teachers unions, like all the civil service unions, are still very powerful, so that's a draw. But we need to make a much more powerful and explicit case for the utility of a humanities major for careers in business and other professional fields (and not just by talking vaguely about "critical thinking skills"; our students are concerned about the bottom line, and that's not a failing on their part, but one we have to be able to address directly).

Second, administrators need to have the vision to recognize that the humanities are, at most schools, well-established, time-tested, and cheap to operate. It doesn't cost much to hire really good faculty in these areas, and then boast about the fact. Regional and poorer schools need to stop chasing after the next new thing, building expensive bio-tech centers (or whatever) from scratch because those things seem sexy and forward-looking, and build on their existing strengths. No, not every English or history department is great. But you can buy a strong English department a lot faster and cheaper than you can buy a strong computer science department. Ideally, if they got on board, the administration would help to publicly promote the notion that a humanities education builds an educated workforce and citizenry.

Third, frankly? I think regional public institutions may be structurally positioned to support a healthier undergraduate intellectual life than some of their peers--which isn't to say that they are healthier, by and large, but I think they have often-overlooked advantages. Let's start with teaching: at my institution, anyway, graduate students do not teach, and although we have as many adjuncts as we have full-time faculty, they teach composition almost exclusively; a 3/3 load means that our 20 tenure-line faculty--plus a handful of full-time lecturers--actually can teach 600 majors a semester, in discussion-sized classes. This is not possible at R1 state schools with lighter teaching loads, a larger student body, and faculty who are often wooed with explicit promises of course releases, time off for research, and teaching obligations that are limited to grad students and advanced undergrads.

Then there's the money. Even when state schools are hurting for money (and I'll admit that my state system is relatively healthy and that my institution has been conservative in its cuts, so I'm probably blither about those things than most public-university faculty), regional private institutions are often in equally bad financial straits. Moreover, they have a harder time attracting smarter-but-poorer students; have to justify their high price-tag; and can be prone to unhealthy levels of self-satisfaction (a friend who teaches at a private religious college up the road reports that her students are under the belief that, since School X is the most expensive college in the area, it must therefore be really prestigious).

And finally, there's the lack of big-time athletics. Yes, we have jocks, and yes, some of them got recruited with lower scores than their peers. That can be a drag. But the athletes aren't expecting to go on to careers as professional athletes, which means they know they need a college degree, and the relationship between the coaching staff and the faculty is pretty respectful (I've been asked about a student-athlete's anticipated course grade, but merely because the coach needed to know who would be stating the next season and the kid would be benched if his GPA was too low; there was no pressure involved). And we avoid all the ancillary negatives of being part of a big athletic conference: no mayhem on game day, no raging fans, etc.

*

Obviously, I'm not saying that there aren't problems in higher ed; I'm not even saying that there aren't problems at my institution; I'll get to those, and to my concerns about the sustainability of what I've just outlined above, in a couple of days. But I do believe that there's a strong future for the humanities--even and maybe especially in non-elite colleges and universities--if we discard some of our outdated ideas about what motivates a humanities major and what he or she looks like.

Team teaching: mid-semester thoughts

So I took very seriously all the comments that suggested that team teaching works best when the co-teachers trade off discussion-leading responsibilities or otherwise ensure that it's always clear who's in charge at a given moment. My co-teacher, apparently, got much the same advice from the people he'd consulted with.

And for our first few weeks, we did that. We conferred by phone the day before, talked stuff through on the drive to campus, and roughly divided up teaching responsibilities: sometimes one of us would lead virtually an entire class, sometimes the period would be more evenly divided, but while one of us was leading discussion the other would respectfully remain silent or speak only after raising a hand and being called on. Those classes all went well.

But then. . . we decided we just didn't care, or that we didn't have the time to do extensive pre-class prepping, or that we had compatible enough interests and teaching styles to just play it by ear

And it's been even better this way: we take 5-10 minutes to discuss a few things we'd like to do, and a possible order, and then we get in the classroom and just go, switching on and off as we feel like it, redirecting conversation, helping each other out, and inserting tangential observations as they seem useful.

A friend with much more co-teaching experience puts it like this: having a co-teacher is like having a roommate: no matter how much you may like a person, until you live with them, you have no idea if you can live with them.

It's not perfect. We tend to have slightly longer and slightly more awkward transitions than in a normal class, since before moving on we'll usually pause to make sure the other person doesn't still have something left to say; it's also harder to scrap or invent stuff on the fly.

And though our students are lively and engaged, we don't totally have a handle on how they experience our blended class, or how they feel about the fact that we'll get into conversations with each other in the middle of discussion, or correct each other, or interrupt to exclaim, "oh! that's so cool! I've always wondered about that!"

But, eh. We're having a good time. And I hope that our students see us learning from each other, and enjoying learning from each other--and that that makes up for the class's occasional awkwardnesses.

Back soon

Off to NYC for a mini-honeymoon: three nights, three plays, two museums, one extravagant meal. Priorities!

Getting It Published, part one billion

(Previous installments here, here, here, here and here.)

So, that was fast: I got my second outside reader's report last week--just five weeks after the editor announced they were soliciting a second review. The editor also included the new report from my first reader, which the press had told me was positive, but had wanted to hold onto until both were in.

The good news is that the first review is really, really good. Warm and enthusiastic, complimentary about the revisions I'd made between the first and second version, and with very precise but incredibly useful suggestions for further tinkering (stuff like, "in paragraph three you say X, but you don't set up X until paragraph ten; put that information sooner").

The bad news is that the second review is not good. Pretty strongly not-good, but also pretty obviously written by someone who has different interests and quite possibly a different subfield of specialization than I do.

The less-bad news is that my editor has urged me to revise in order to address "at least some of" Reviewer Two's comments, which I suspect means the press recognizes the limited utility of the second review.

And I can do that. There's still useful stuff in the review, and even if all I'm doing is shoring up my defenses and showing I'm not ignorant of possible counterclaims, those are valuable additions.

Whether I can convince Reviewer Two with my revisions, though, is another story.

Life in a northern town

I don't think I ever had specific fantasies about what the life of a professor would look like. When I was in grad school, I wasn't sure enough that I was going to get a job--and although I hoped I would, I guess I figured that I couldn't afford to imagine its specifics, lest I be disappointed.

But spending a Sunday afternoon reading on the sofa, in front of a roaring fire, is probably someone's professorial fantasy. The reality isn't half bad either--though I suspect that, in the fantasy, the reading isn't mediocre student writing.

Excitement is exhausting

I think it's accurate to say that this has been the most intellectually exciting semester I've spent at RU, with "at RU" being the key descriptor: there have been other semesters in which I've had my mind blown at conferences or in which I've made great progress on my scholarship. But although I've always valued my colleagues and students, for the most part my work environment is merely pleasurable: I have nice conversations with my colleagues; I feel happy about new curricular initiatives; I have a few new thoughts about an old text sparked by a great classroom discussion.

And I'm not discounting the value of everyday pleasure. I'm lucky to be so content. But here's what I've got going on this semester that has raised me above that baseline:

-I'm directing a senior Honors thesis on John Donne. (I've never directed an undergraduate thesis, since only the Honors students do them.) -I'm directing an M.A. thesis on Renaissance drama. (I've never directed an M.A. thesis, since until recently I hadn't taught M.A. classes.) -I'm in my third year as advisor to our Oxford study-abroad program, and it seems to be gaining real buzz among our majors. -I'm team-teaching a genuinely incredible class, with a great co-teacher, and I'm learning a ridiculous amount from him--and he seems to feel the same way about me. Next year, we're planning on swapping classes for a semester, with me teaching Bible as Literature and him teaching Shakespeare. -We have, so far, brought in three kick-ass speakers for our reading/lecture series, gathered together other local scholars to help fête them, and gotten a nice turn-out for their events. A fourth speaker is coming in a month, and a big headliner of a senior scholar has agreed to come in the spring.

To be honest, it's all been rather exhausting, especially the last two bullet points. In addition to the sheer amount of labor involved, my colleague and I have had to cobble together funding from a dozen different sources and do a bit of politicking to get some of the stuff we need. Nevertheless, in the end everyone has been generous and helpful, and I've met some amazing local people. (Wait, RU just hired a Classical archeologist? Wait, there's a guy at the local div school with a degree from RADA who does postmodern theology? What?)

These are nice experiences to have as I'm on the verge of tenure and considering what it would mean to be here for the long term, but they've also helped me to realize that creating a community of scholars is work, and would be work wherever I went: I think I kinda assumed that at big research schools stuff just happened, or was already in place and required no real maintenance: reading groups, scholarly colloquia, works-in-progress seminars. And it's true that bigger institutions have, in addition to more faculty, more readily-available bucks and administrative staff to handle the minutiae of buying plane tickets and booking hotel reservations. But someone's always doing the work to organize--and indeed it can feel like work simply trying to find the time to attend or participate regularly.

And a little effort can go a long way. Over the course of my four undergraduate years at Instant Name Recognition U, a billion famous people came to campus: writers, artists, politicians. There were multiple theatrical performances and concerts every weekend. But I'm sure I never averaged more than two readings, talks, or performances per semester (including a cappella "jams"), and I can't recall ever being encouraged to attend such events by my professors. Maybe they felt they didn't need to. But I almost always tried to do stuff that was tied to my classes--attending optional movie screenings, for example, or visiting the art gallery to check out the actual paintings after a professor had shown us slides--and I suspect I'd have made time for a lot more events if someone I respected had said to me, "hey, you should go to this thing! I think you'd really like it!"

So it's important to me to make sure that our students at RU know about the events that are happening on campus, and get a nudge to attend them. The BFD poet and scholar (and reader of this blog!) whom we had on campus yesterday didn't just give a reading for our series or for the benefit of our 400-level students. She hung out with the young English majors in my Introduction to Literary Studies class and talked passionately about poetry for 45 minutes--how she writes, why she writes, what poetry does, and why it's worth spending time with. My students were obviously, visibly in love with her from about minute two, and couldn't stop asking her questions. A third of the class showed up for her reading that night, many of whom I suspect have never been to a public reading before.

Still, organizing this kind of shit takes work, and though I'm a conscientious person I'm not a high-energy or efficient one. I whine and complain and wish I could get eight hours of sleep a night and also have time to fuck around on the internet and just default on all my stupid meetings and those emails awaiting reply. But if this is what it takes to make my students the kind of students I want to teach, my institution the kind of place I want to work, and--oh, yeah--myself the kind of scholar and teacher I want to be, I guess I have to suck it up.

The neurotypical and the less-so

A few weeks back Tenured Radical had an important post on the ways that colleges and their faculty are (and are not) prepared for students who are on the autism spectrum. Right now, this may be a phenomenon that those of us at public colleges have the most familiarity with; in any case, I've taught an average of one student a year whom I'd identify as being on the high-functioning end of the autism/Aspergers spectrum.

But as I mentioned in my comment at TR's, I haven't generally had any more trouble with these students than I might have with a neurotypical student who for one reason or another needed extra attention or had to be gently-but-firmly told how discussion worked in our classroom. The kids on the spectrum whom I've taught are often among my smartest and most participatory students, and though they sometimes sit in the front row and blurt out answers without raising their hands, or want to monopolize conversation, or get audibly upset when they feel reproved or ignored, I've mostly learned how to deal with those things. Because honestly? In every class I have at least a couple of students, neurotypical or otherwise, who are works-in-progress or diamonds-in-the-rough or whatever metaphor you prefer for students who have equally extreme strengths and weaknesses. Autism-spectrum students present a specific set of challenges, sure, but from a teacher's perspective I wouldn't say they're more serious challenges than those presented by students who are manic-depressive, or going through problems at home, or who are just reallyreallyreally high strung.

The PROBLEM with spectrum-y students--or at least the students I've had--is therefore not the students themselves. It's the other students in the class.

By and large, the other students do not like the students on the spectrum. They sigh, roll their eyes, grumble, and make faces indicating how annoying, weird, or troublesome they find them. Once, I had a (very bright and otherwise very nice) student grab me after class to ask whether there wasn't something I could "do about" the front-row blurter. "You're handling her very well," she said. "I know it's not your fault. But she's really distracting the rest of us."

These students seem not to understand that the person they perceive as annoying is genuinely wired differently; instead, they experience her as arrogant, nonresponsive, or deliberately rude. And since disabilities are a confidential matter, there's no way for me to fully communicate why they should cut their classmate some slack or even reach out and try to get to know her.

So I'm asking the rest of you: have you experienced this problem? And if so, what have you done about it?

53 and pregnant

Because of that whole wedding + tenure thing I'm behind in my reading, but I just got around to Lisa Miller's "Parents of a Certain Age" from New York magazine a couple of weeks back. It's a troubling article, and one I haven't seen discussed around my usual haunts on the internet.

Miller's article examines the apparently growing phenomenon of older parents: women (and men, too, but it's the women who come in for most of the scrutiny) who are starting families in their late 40s and even 50s. The article's major flaw is that it talks about all older-parents-with-young-children as if they're in the same category, and they're decidedly not; one couple she profiles adopted children from Guatemala and Vietnam when they were in their mid-fifties--after raising biological children of their own. But most of the parents she's looking at are first-time parents who seem determined to have children semi-naturally, i.e., with the woman going through labor, even if the eggs are not her own and even if she has had to be medically brought out of menopause in order to get pregnant in the first place.

Now, first-time parents whose ages hover around 40 are commonplace in academia, and if Cosimo and I have kids we'll surely join their number (given that he's already in his early 40s and I'll be 37 in February and the child-having discussion is definitively tabled until we're in the same place full-time). Contrary to the seven billion articles that get written about declining fertility and how if you wait too long, you'll be sorry!, I don't think that pushing parenthood back is a sad state of affairs, either for individual women or for Women As a Whole. People who put off pregnancy are, I assume, making a conscious decision and understand the trade-offs, and those who want kids can always have children in their lives even if they can't conceive: they can adopt, they can be foster parents, they can serve as doting aunts or uncles or second parents to kids in their neighborhood or whatever. There will always be children desperate for adult love and support.

But although I absolutely do not think that it is selfish or narcissistic to decide in one's 40s or even 50s that one wants to be a parent (or at any rate, it's no more likely to be a sign of narcissicism than wanting children in one's 20s or 30s is), I confess that I don't get the desire to have one's own biological children at all costs (I understand it as a strong preference, sure, but not as a need)--and I definitely do not understand the desire to go through pregnancy for its own sake. So I see a real difference between people in their late forties/fifties who either are lucky to get pregnant naturally, or who adopt, and those people who, because it makes them feel young and bogusly fertile and more like "real" mothers, go to great expense and incur quite extreme health risks in order to carry a child--a child not necessarily sharing any of their genetic material--to term.

Maybe I'm just lazy and risk averse? But if I were to decide, around age 45, that I had the energy to chase small children around for the next decade or two, you'd better believe I wouldn't be putting myself through an exhausting and dangerous nine months of pregnancy first.

Sitting at the grown-up table

It turns out that I don't have much to say about the process of going up for promotion and tenure. Partly this is because it got subsumed in the larger craziness that was my September of wedding-planning, house-furnishing, team-teaching, and lecture-series-organizing, and partly it's because RU does a five-year review, too, which means I already had the vast majority of my materials assembled, three-hole-punched, and organized into neatly tabbed and labeled binders.

But it's also that RU has a pretty transparent and humane promotion system. I don't know that I'll get tenure, and of course I'll have nagging doubts until I get the final letter from the president or the chancellor or whoever sits at the end of the long series of approvals my file has to go through. But I've more than met the standards for tenure, and in my time in the department seven or eight people have gone up, all of them successfully.

Moreover, the tenured Flavia just isn't going to be greatly different from the Flavia of today. I experienced joining the tenure track as a radical shift in my self-identity, and one that it took a while for me to come to terms with--as the early years of this blog indicate. But we have such a young department and such a mutually supportive one that I've never felt that being untenured made me a kid, waiting to be invited to the grown-up table; I was already chairing a major committee in my third year on the job.

But I'm looking forward to what it might mean to have a bigger, official stake in my institution and in my community. RU is a healthy institution, and one that is genuinely committed to the humanities (English and History are the college's two biggest majors, have the strongest faculty, and together we're getting the first new academic building to be built on campus in decades--how many institutions can say that?). Our students are an interesting mix, and it's my impression that the best students we get are better every year than they were the year before. Being tenured at RU would mean really committing to this city and this region, its students and its workforce--and as someone who just bought a goddamn house here, I've already started thinking in those terms.

I don't know that I'll be at RU forever. If Cosimo can't get a job in the area, we'll start looking for places that might want both of us. But I'm comfortable committing to RU and this region--if RU wants to commit to me!--for a goodly while to come.

Wedding snapshots

So the whole wedding thing happened: parental and sibling meet & greet, rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, Sunday brunch at our place. And it was awesome. Somehow, although I'd thought through every damn detail with an eye toward its being fun, running smoothly, etc., I never paused to imagine my own pleasure. That is, there were things I thought would suck, and things I thought would be cool, but I was always imagining the events from the perspective of a guest. Turns out? When you design exactly the wedding you'd like to attend, it's really fun for you to attend it!

Herewith a few observations:

-The idea that weddings require gifts is deep-seated. We got gifts from people we've never met (my brother's girlfriend's parents), people we know only slightly (the parents of friends), and a whole bunch of people we love but couldn't invite. Maybe this shouldn't have astonished me, but it did.

-On the other hand, we got some sweet gifts. And lots of bucks.

-Advocates for same-sex marriage are right in wanting in on this--not the gifts per se, but whatever it is that causes people to feel a unique stake in relationships that are publicly validated and celebrated. (But the gifts are awesome too. Waterford crystal, yo!)

-The wedding coordinator provided by the church was horrible: exactly the opposite of everyone else who works for the church--including the priest--in her reflexive wedding orthodoxy. She acted like our procession (best man/best lady, Cosimo's parents, my parents, us) was the weirdest and most confusing thing in the world; she didn't know how to handle seating arrangements when there wasn't a parade of attendants, and she couldn't imagine how the priest could possibly introduce us to the congregation without using the formula "Mr. and Mrs. Cosimo de Medici."

-Fortunately, that was nearly our only encounter with that kind of attitude.


-The downside of doing everything yourself: you have to do everything yourself. And you wind up owning 12 white tablecloths and 14 pots of chrysanthemums.

-Wedding cannoli are infinitely superior to wedding cake.

-Happiness is having friends who, when you make a 4-hour dance mix (just in case!), stay, dancing, until the goddamn last song.

-Also, friends who bust out their break dancing moves. And aren't afraid of the air guitar.

-In fact, let's just say that happiness = friends who feel like family and family who feel like friends. And a weekend spent expanding both circles is extra-special awesome.

-I promised I'd give the price tag, so here it is: $6,200, for literally everything involved in a church ceremony and a luncheon reception for 75 people--all the way down to ring-sizing and postage and printing costs.

-It was a great weekend and it was exactly the wedding we wanted, but it's over and that's fine. There's life after wedding planning, and thank goodness.