February 2010 Archives

Perhaps the only thing more special than experiencing a major wardrobe malfunction--as in, your adorable silk wrap blouse comes unwrapped without your knowledge--is experiencing it in front of 30 undergraduates, while you stride blithely about the room, lecturing, unaware of the silk ties dangling down like lovely fluttering tails. 

That was Wednesday.  We were doing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Alas, a mere safety pin of one's own would have done nicely.  Woolf might have expected, 80 years on, that women would have managed to not only have careers but also dress themselves.  Sigh.

Once I discovered the malfunction, I managed to finish class by pinning my elbows to my ribs, holding the slippery thing in place and faking (unconvincingly) aplomb.

I'm laughing even now, typing this.

Women readers who are also writers of personal narrative or poetry, here's a publishing opportunity for you, a collection edited by my lovely graduate intern, Jill McCabe Johnson, who's a poet herself. Jill also directs Artsmith, a nonprofit with residencies, workshops, and more up on Orcas Island.

Work has been crazy, people.  I've been serving on two search committees (very exciting), while simultaneously reading a kajillion grad apps (impressive yet demoralizing--so much talent that won't get in), while preparing, in my spare time, that dreaded annual summation of one's worth:  the Merit Review File. 

Ah, the ritual of the Merit Review File.  Listing every last professional thing one's done over the year is a recipe for madness, and trying to squish it all into a coherent narrative?  Well, human, please.  And just rereading those stacks of student evals is a test of courage.  (You want me to provide what?  I mean, I like my students, and I care about pedagogy, but the student-as-entitled-consumer model sometimes gets a little out of hand.  Oh, for those halcyon days of pipes, sherry, elbow patches, and unquestioned professorial authority to slap an unexplained grade onto work--oh, wait.  Maybe not so blissful.) 

Knowing that your senior colleagues will be judging it all--and that their judgment will translate into dollars, or the lack thereof, in your paycheck each month--makes the whole process a little nervewracking.  This year, we have to go through the motions (and get ranked) even though there's likely to be a salary freeze, which makes the whole thing seem like a exercise in wasted effort.

If you're an academic yourself, you've probably already heard this sad story of a woman, a gun, and a tenure denial in Alabama.  As a kind of snapshot of public opinion, the many comments after the story interested me; they reveal the general public's skepticism toward tenure as an institution, academics' frustration with the difficulties that sometimes plague the tenure process, conservative glee that a highly educated "elite" snapped, and liberal dismay about gun control laws--as well as surprise that a woman has now joined the job-related mass-shooting club.  I feel so sorry for the professors who were cut down, and for the families who mourn them.  (Thanks to Barb for the heads-up on the story.)

Just briefly, I want to express gratitude that my own tenure process at Wabash was so clean.  It's true that I did work at an all-male school, and it did lean right, while I lean left.  I experienced my share of nasty sexist exchanges during my ten years there.  Yet when it came to tenure and promotion, I was treated with tremendous fairness at every level of review, from my department all the way up to the president of the college.

Since then, as a participant in tenure decisions, I've always seen them handled with immense care, generosity, and scrupulous professionalism.   My experience has not included the kind of factionalism or personal vendettas that some of the New York Times readers' comments imply.   If someone does make an unprofessional comment during discussion of a file, that view gets corrected and sidelined.

With only 35% of teaching carried out by tenured professors now, you can see why the decision process would be so fraught, and why a professor like Amy Bishop would feel outraged.   It's part of larger systemic problems in academia that have, for financial reasons and driven by administrators importing a business model into the academy, shifted the bulk of teaching to underpaid, undervalued adjuncts and TAs.  (I liked the comment that said no administrator should make a higher salary than the lowest-paid instructor.)  It's wrong.  It raises the stakes.  It makes people crazy.

But it's not worth killing or dying for.  It's just a job, people.  We need to disinvest our sense of identity from our careers.  We have passions, the natural world, families, lovers, children, pets, our neighbors, the guitar, painting, singing--whatever moves us.  We're rich beyond measure.

Professional rejection hurts, and it's humiliating.  Yes.  Been there.  But the thing to do is to go home, cry, lick our wounds, get hugged by our loved ones, and get back up on the pony--or pick a different pony altogether.  

Kindness--not just to our peers but to ourselves--is always an option.