Category: The Happy Academic

I might be a bit punchy after a long (albeit fine) day at school, but this passage from Dean Dad is a) funny as hell, b) a bit too true about too many academic colleagues I have, and c) one of the many reasons why I have (almost) no interest in being this sort of administrator.

I had thought about writing a post about the problems of academic meetings that seem to last too long and that seem to serve absolutely no purpose, but then I decided that writing about something boring would be boring too. In any event, while surfing around, I came across this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Chairman’s Dog” by Michael “obviously has to be a pseduonym” Beardsley. I think it’s fair to say that this is as much a piece of comedy writing as it is a typical CHE “First Person” piece, but while I am sure that many of the important details are made up, it does have a ring of “truthiness” to it.

Beardsley tells the story of how he, as a graduate student, dog and house-sat for a professor of his. When the professor’s husband arrives home and he is introduced to “Rob,” Beardsley realizes what he has gotten himself into: “A minute later I was shaking hands with the man who had warned me that the job market would be my undoing if I didn’t shape up and fly right and cautioned me when my grant was about to be cut off — none other than my department chairman.”

Anyway, it’s a nice piece of comedy. I thought the article was worth reading because it is a simplified (albeit not inaccurate) depiction of the relationships that often exist between graduate students and senior faculty, and also because some of this silly story rings a bit too true. I will spare the stories about dogs (though I know well some true stories of grad students who watched after faculty pets), but it did remind me of my own house-sitting experience way back when. It was about 14 years ago when I was a year or two out of my MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. I house-sat for a professor for a year while she went off to England. Like Beardsley’s, my family too seem impressed. And I did have a few moments kind of like this:

I took to spending afternoons in the backyard, laying my books aside for sessions in the patio’s built-in Jacuzzi. At ease, I gazed over at the smaller apartment buildings where tenure-seeking assistant profs toiled obediently at their book manuscripts, and farther below at the dingy hovels where grad students, antlike in the distance, came and went. And there I was above it, the chairman of all I surveyed.

Well, kind of. There was no Jacuzzi and I wasn’t actually in school at the time. But I did live far above my means and I had lots of parties. In fact, I met my wife at one of those parties, also an academic (with a different last name, of course).

Here I am, in the last weeks (days, really) of wrapping up my teaching for the term. I have some grading to do, there are some student revisions out there, some other teaching loose ends, and I will also have a few meetings between now and December 22 or so. I don’t have any finals to give, but it’s still a busy and hectic time. Then there are the pressures of traveling to see family. And of course I still have plenty of things I will need to get done before school starts again in the winter term, which always comes here about a week or two early.

But with all of that, the thing that I am right now most looking forward to is I won’t be going to damned MLA.

Ah, the annual Modern Language Association convention, the meat market of English studies, and, IMO, ample evidence for the contempt that the field and profession has for family, impoverished graduate students, and “lives” in general. This is because:

• MLA is always held right after Christmas, the one and only time of the year in which language-types in the Western World are more or less guaranteed a necessary break to regroup and reconnect with family and friends. I think the MLA’s position on this is “this is the only time of the year where we know everyone is free,” which is a pretty strong indicator of what the profession thinks academics ought to be doing (and not doing) with their “free” time.
• Everyone in any field that has to do with languages or “English” (and see the discussion in my preivous post to see what that word “English” is in quotes here) who are looking for a tenure-track job are expected to go to this conference to interview for jobs. Now, that’s okay for the likes of me, an already employed professor, and it is okay for the interviewers who have their ways paid by the school. But it’s just wrong to make impoverished graduate students cough up what could end up being well over a $1,000 (plane, hotel, food, etc., not to mention the standard protocol black suit) for the privledge of sitting on a bed in a hotel suite and/or a ballroom with a couple hundred other people and to talk about your dissertation and your teaching philosophy for twenty minutes. What’s worse is that for those specializing in various versions of Literature, these grad students might be enduring this expense and experience all for just a couple of interviews that don’t work out. I’ve known any number of “lit types” who literally spent several years going back to MLA and coming up empty.
• And God forbid if, while at MLA, one has a life! Oh, the many stories I have heard and how the many times I have seen for myself the stereotypical MLA scene of a crowded hotel bar, all full of people in black or rumpled herringbone jackets, drinking and talking and simultaneously looking for someone else to talk to, or, just looking for someone famous (or, relatively famous, like Stanley Fish or someone).

English can be rather ironically inhumane.

I don’t want to be a complete downer about this. As I suggested on my official and unofficial blogs last year, I had a good time at that version of MLA in Philadelphia. Annette and I had a nice hotel room (while our son was with Grandma and Grandpa), I had fun with some old friends, and the food was fantastic. And my experiences on the job market have been pretty good because, over the years, I’ve had a lot of interviews. I’m not bragging when I say that; rather, I’m pointing out the difference between the markets for someone in, say, 19th Century American Literature and someone in Composition and Rhetoric.

But I’m not going this year because my wife started a tenure-track job here this year and we’re almost certainly here for the rest of our careers– unless something strange happens, of course. And if I can help it, I hope never to go to MLA ever again, not to interview for jobs or to give a presentation or to interview job candidates.

I think there is a solution to all that is wrong with MLA, but I doubt it could ever happen: I think the MLA ought to encourage or require people to conduct phone interviews for jobs and stop interviewing potential job candidates at the conference. Stop facilitating this abusive system with things like the infamous “ballroom” interview room, and proactively encourage the use of old technologies (e.g., the phone) and new technologies (e.g., video chat, a feature that is soon going to be built in to most computers anyway– check out the new Apple iMac to see what I mean) to screen candidates.

I know that there are reasonable people who think I’m wrong about this. I have one friend/colleague here, in favor of the traditional MLA interview, who has said if it is just about saving money, why not skip the on-campus interview too and just hire people based on the CV materials they put together? This person has a point. And I also have colleagues here who did phone interviews for a particular search last year and these colleagues are convinced that not doing MLA interviews was the cause of the “bad search.” I’m not sure this point is as accurate.

Nonetheless, I still think I’m right about this. I think the advantages of phone interviews outweigh the disadvantages, and it might actually make the MLA a pleasant experience. Sure, it’d be a much smaller conference, but at least the people who were there might actually want to be there.

This past weekend, I had meant to blog about an article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “Entering the Fog” by Frank “not his real name” Midler. Midler, a “newly tenured associate professor at a large Midwestern research university,” writes about his experiences participating on one of the key faculty committees at his university, something called the curriculum-policy committee. His department chair says it is an important group; a colleague who had been on the committee before describes it as “the fog.”

With those two potentially conflicting remarks, I went to my first meeting, where I met some familiar faces (other untenured faculty members) and some unfamiliar ones. The latter, I learned, were grizzled veterans of the committee, who had represented their departments, in some cases, for 20 years. An associate dean and his crew of selected college advisers (the people who knew the regulations inside and out) came in and sat at the head of the table.

I soon realized that both of my colleagues were right about the committee. Its membership consists of one representative from each department in our College of Arts and Sciences. In some cases the representative was a department’s director of undergraduate studies; in others, an interested and experienced faculty member; and in still others (like mine), a green colleague who needed seasoning.

And it was like entering the fog. I had no idea what was going on. The advising staff and long-time committee members were bantering about policy or gossiping about colleagues (weirdly, I couldn’t tell the difference) while the associate dean was bouncing a large multicolored Super Ball with frenetic energy off the table in front of him. The ball escaped only once or twice, at which point one of the advisers would run after it.

That Super Ball story is either completely made up or it has “outted” Midler because if it is real, this dean (or somebody who knows this dean) just read about himself.

Anyway, I’m my department’s representative to faculty council right now (in the second of a three year term), and while there are some similarities between my committee and the committee Midler talks about, faculty council is considerably less foggy. We vote on things, the committee is very much run by faculty, I think that the work we do actually represents “input,” and I think that the committee is a positive example of the institution’s efforts at “shared governence.”

Still, when I first started down the tenure-track path as a Happy Academic, I was most certainly not schooled in work like this. In fact, when I started my first tenure-track job, I was surprised that this sort of work existed at all, and I continue to be surprised at the amount of time that this kind of work can occupy. When I was an undergraduate and then graduate student, I assumed that college professors taught classes and did some research and maybe went to a few meetings. After I actually became a professor, I learned that a significant portion of my job– at least a third, maybe more– in reality involves work that has little to do with my own teaching or scholarship: meetings for certain, but also responsibilities that can probably be best labled “paperwork.”

Along these lines, I was (and continue to be) surprised that there actually are faculty members who seem to put these meetings and other paperwork at the center of their careers. Without being too specific here, I will just say that, like Milder, I have a number of colleagues at the university who have been on faculty council (and similar kinds of committees) for decades. I have mixed feelings about this, sort of like I have mixed feelings about term limits in Michigan state government. On the one hand, having folks on these committees who have been on them for a long time brings experience and consistency; on the other hand, “new blood” can be a good thing.

Finally, this article makes me think a bit about this concept of “shared governance.” The Community College Dean had a post that related to this, and I think he basically has some good points. Like I said, Faculty Council is a place for the faculty to give input about the way things work around here– the “shared governance” concept. But there is a very fine line between things where faculty have real input and things where faculty are more or less required to “rubber stamp” the directives approved by administrators. Further, sometimes “shared governance” looks an awful lot like administrators trying to get faculty to do the work that administrators ought to do themselves. But that’s a slightly different story.