Anger (Is Not A Good) Management (Style): A Meditation On The American Way Of Rage

Well, If LeBron James wasn't sure it was a good idea to leave Ohio, he knows it now, doesn't he? Historians, what does this picture remind you of?

I started thinking about why Americans feel entitled to their anger early this morning. At around 5:20 I turned right onto a road I normally take to go to my rowing club. As I approached a bridge leading to a major intersection, I saw that my lane was blocked with orange cones, and a sign that said "Road Work" was on the left hand sidewalk. I couldn't see over the bridge because it was arched, and there was no one there to tell me what to do. Proceeding slowly and with caution, I drove to the peak of the bridge in the oncoming lane (often what one is asked to do, at the direction of a worker designated to help) and saw that the intersection was completely blocked by people resurfacing the road I needed to cross.

At that moment, a DOT worker ran toward me, screaming angrily. When he reached my car, I rolled down my window to ask for instructions as to where I could cross and he yelled: "What's wrong with you?! Are you stupid? Get the hell out of here! You don't belong here!"

Frightened, but mainly interested in getting out of there, I raised my voice to interrupt him and said: "How can I get to the other side? Which bridge should I take?" Then followed a torrent of abuse, and no instructions. I asked again, more forcefully, and he replied:

"I don't care what you do, you c**t," he yelled. (If I am confusing you with my ampersands, think female body part used as an epithet.) As I began to back slowly down the bridge, hoping that no one would turn the corner and slam into my car, I will admit that almost involuntarily my middle finger separated itself from its betters in the universal gesture of contempt, at which point he screamed "C**T!" repeatedly until I was out of sight.

I mention this story because anger has been in the news a lot lately. It's something we are all encouraged to have nowadays, as if rage, like Adderall, increases our capacity for civilized problem-solving. Tea Party activists, for example, are united as a national movement by absolutely nothing but their anger, which journalists talk about as if it were a national resource. Some report on it in the midst of their own fits of mindless rage, while the more serious ones discuss Tea Party anger in hushed, admiring tones as if anger were a radical philosophical position rather than -- to point to more personal contexts for understanding rage -- symptoms of depression and paranoia. As Bob Bennett, the Utah Senator defeated by a Tea Party activist, said on the News Hour Wednesday night, honoring anger alone is like worshipping nihilism. "The concern I have about the anger that we're seeing that's being fed by talk show hosts and others," Bennett said about the anger vote, is that "it will be like a wave that comes in and smashes on the beach and destroys everything there, and then recedes back into the ocean, and leaves nothing behind it but empty sand....Anger is not a sound strategy for governing [and] once you are in office, you have to have some solutions."

Bennett has a good point here, and it reminds me why I admire some conservatives who I disagree with profoundly. It reminds me that the problem with anger -- displayed in the political arena -- is that it is often a way of diverting attention from the fact that you don't know how to solve a problem, and are offering a show of hyper-masculine belligerence in its place.

Take, for example, the DOT worker's abusive behavior. A better example, to return to the burning jersey picture, is the outrage being expressed over LeBron James as he leaves the Cleveland Cavaliers for Miami. Why on God's green earth should James have stayed in Cleveland longer than seven years? Why should he have had to earn his way out with a championship for a city that hasn't won a championship of any kind since 1964? I mean no disrespect to the city of Cleveland (I'm from Philadelphia, after all), but the man isn't actually an industry; and basketball is a mere sideshow to the actual political story of why Cleveland has been on its economic uppers since the 1970s. Although the city estimates that James generates $150 million a year in tourist dollars, I would really love to see where those numbers come from, and know why Cleveland doesn't have a better plan than basketball for bringing that money in. If LeBron James' career had been ended by an injury tomorrow, the money would have been gone too: wouldn't it have been better to invest in a high-tech sector than in a sports star? How much would Cleveland love a LeBron whose career was over? Would Cleveland think that it "owned" a white basketball star in this way, and that he should be so grateful to them that he would put their desires before his own?

And I hate to ask this, but don't a lot of people leave Ohio (nice as it is) to seek their fortunes elsewhere?

But it's the anger that seems to be the story here, since apparently LeBron James was responsible for Cleveland and can be justifiably treated as if he had left a wife and six children stranded at an SRO in Toledo. Why? Because the fans have a right to be angry! The Indiana, Pennsylvania Gazette agreed this morning that Cleveland "got played" by James; Cavs fans are publicly defacing LeBron posters and burning their souvenir jerseys in the street. One Cleveland sportscaster announced that James would "enter the hall of shame" along with Art Modell, the football owner who took his team to Baltimore without even announcing it (now it becomes clear why that was not such a bad choice.) The Cav's majority owner, Dan Gilbert, published an idiotic open letter to fans where, among other things, he calls James' departure "shameful" and a "cowardly betrayal." See Paul Harvey's analysis of the letter at Religion In American History.

You might ask, What about the circus that always overwhelms actual competition in professional sports -- isn't it a silly and unnecessary waste of time and money? The answer is yes. It isn't bricks and mortar, or high-wage jobs, that are being supported by superstar athletes. It isn't schools or hospitals. What is supported is a fantasy that the spiritual and economic well-being of working people (as opposed to say, the well-being of Nike, the team owner or the NBA) is related to the success of an athletic franchise. The idea that LeBron James has wronged the entire city of Cleveland belongs in the same category as the misimpression that Tiger Woods betrayed his fans and his sponsors as much as he betrayed his wife and children when he had (what sounds like nasty, impersonal sex) with dozens of women.

Anger is too much with us nowadays: it's become an easy alternative to thought, planning and the hard work that goes into creating tangible successes around things that matter. Worse, in a country where there doesn't seem to be a right to work, to a good education, to health care, to protection from corporate negligence, to family planning services or to food, "our anger" seems to be the only thing to which everyone seems to agree we have a right, and an obligation to perform, as a daily act of citizenship.

A Letter To the Academic Proletariat

Many well-wishers wrote in to sympathize with the hazards I encountered mailing recommendations to Ph.D. programs: thank you, I am better. Nothing was broken, and the bruises are fading.

But the pain is only beginning elsewhere. The thought that I was sending more unlucky holders of the B.A. down the chute to the slaughterhouse of graduate school raised this question for frustrated job-seeker and blogging comrade Sisyphus. "Do you ever feel like you shouldn't be sending students on to grad school and contributing to the whole PhD ponzi scheme?" asks this industrious young scholar, who applied for over 60 jobs this year, fifty of which have fallen to budget-cutting. "Esp. when there are all these dire predictions about even undergrad degrees becoming priced out of affordability for the middle class? I'm trying to get an academic job right now and bad as this year is compared to other years, people keep telling me it will just get worse [from] here on out."

I guess my first response is no, I don't feel bad about it, because all education is useful even when you can't extract profit from a degree in the way you originally planned to do so. And my advice is to stay away from these doom-and-gloom types who tell you your life is over without suggesting any viable alternative, particularly if they are members of your dissertation committee. They are only bringing you down at a time you need optimism more than ever.

But back to the question of our mission as educators, which is really what you are asking about, my dear Sisyphus. On Monday, (Not So) New President addressed the value of an undergraduate liberal arts education and its role in creating an innovative, flexible, critically-minded citizenry. "A liberal education remains a resource years after graduation because it helps us to address problems and potential in our lives with passion, commitment and a sense of possibility," he argues. "A liberal education teaches freedom by example, through the experience of free research, thinking and expression; and ideally, it inspires us to carry this example, this experience of meaningful freedom, from campus to community." In this vision, undergraduates become cultural and political workers who fan out into industry, finance, education, community organizations, and all kinds of labor to renew the nation. It isn't just places like Zenith who articulate the value of what they do (because they must, really, it is such a great financial sacrifice for many of our students to come to expensive private schools.) Look on the web pages of most colleges, public and private, and there will be some carefully crafted rationale for the larger social value of an undergraduate degree in fields the chattering classes view as useless: philosophy, literature, classics, women's studies. Individual departments, and professional associations, often feel the need to rethink the answer to questions like: "Why Study History?"

In other words, the liberal arts education is not a trade school, but it prepares students to undertake many trades all the same.

So what happened to graduate schools? When did they become trade schools that prepared students for one thing, and one thing only, teaching college and university? Tragically, perhaps, although colleges and universities have had several periods of dramatic expansion since the 1880's, that has not been the norm: college teaching, I think it is fair to say, is in a prolonged period of stasis interrupted by repeated declensions. Recently, this is because education does not hew easily to neoliberal market models in which an industry only grows through supporting itself and reaping profits for investors. I think it is not insignificant that the university job market flat-lined and then began to shrink in the 1970s, at around the same time when public transportation and the Post Office, two essential public services, were forced to compete in the free market. And then, government more or less abandoned -- then gutted -- higher education in the 1980s as part of a multi-faceted Republican strategy for disempowering young people who had effectively organized as college and university students to promote social and political change after 1945.

That was the end of your job market and the birth of your voluminous adjunct market: the first year I went on the market, 1990, there were three jobs in my field advertised in the American Historical Association's Perspectives. Three. And yes, I taught adjunct for two years before landing a job at Zenith.

I think that it is also worth saying the vast majority of Ph.D. programs do prepare their students for other useful work in the world outside the university, but a handful do not and should probably be held accountable for it by their professional associations -- either that, or the professional associations need to be held accountable for their lack of leadership on this issue. Among this handful of fields that hand out a tin cup with the hood are history and literature; not unreasonably, it is the jobless holding these advanced degrees who have the most to say about their immiseration. And so I feel compelled to answer the question as posed by Sisyphus, who must continue to find some way to feed that darling kitty on her profile page next year.

1. Yes, sometimes I do feel that I should not be sending them on to graduate school, given the bad market. Like your local rabbi, I refuse them three times before accepting them to the faith. And yet, I find that without the help of many History or Lit departments rethinking their role in the world at all, many of my students have made some practical choices. Some are applying to history programs that combine the Ph.D. with a J.D.; others are applying to history and American Studies programs that offer a certificate in public history, museum studies or archives. Some students have used the history or American Studies degree as a leg up into a social science, public health (very popular these days) or a social work degree. In other words, while some of these young people will go on to teach, others will become public intellectuals of one kinds or another.

But I do wonder: how is it that this conversation about the terrible job market has been unfolding for over two decades, and cohort after cohort of graduate students find out to their great surprise after enrolling that there are no jobs? It's never been a secret. But it is something you ignore because you want to be a scholar. Hang onto that, because it is an important thing to know about yourself whatever happens next.

2. Ponzi schemes are utterly fraudulent; graduate school is not. Because the Ph.D. cannot automatically be converted into a cash job reproducing knowledge as a professor doesn't mean that you were cheated of those years. I think one of the toughest things about a bad market is that some people will get jobs, and other, equally qualified, people will not. And frankly, this will be the first time any of you will have failed. That it isn't your fault doesn't lessen the sting and self-doubt that will linger. What is somewhat fraudulent, I would argue, is the failure of graduate schools to adjust your expectations prior to you going on the market, and the lack of responsibility many universities feel for your unemployability while they continue to churn out fresh cohorts of you with equally narrow training and expectations. This is something undergraduate institutions would never get away with: if you leave a private college with a B.A. but without the credentials or skills to get a job, it will be because you successfully evaded an army of well-paid professionals whose only job is to help you do that.

3. Who are these people who are telling you it will get worse? Having all but (by my calculations) 8% of the jobs in your field pulled from the market is pretty bad, in my book, and no, I don't think it will get worse. I think it will get better. Remember that when a job is established, or re-filled, it is budgeted on the understanding that X amount of endowment is available to fund it and/or on projections from the next budget year, and everything is pretty volatile right now. But that doesn't mean things will be good soon enough for you, I'm afraid: you know as well as I do that the half-life of any person on the market is limited. Yet, this is what could change: that beginning at the top -- the Harvards, the Yales, the Princetons, the Michigans -- graduate departments admit that their own hiring processes are discriminatory, and that they discard wonderful applications from people whose only flaw is that they have been on the market for several years. That then might jolt loose a conversation among undergraduate institutions about why we more or less discard applications from people who have never held a tenure-track job, or who have failed to get tenure somewhere else, but whose scholarly record is actually good enough to get them tenure at our institutions had they entered at a conventional time.

Obviously, Sisyphus, this is a complex problem, and I have hardly begun to answer your question. But perhaps my readers will finish the job for me? And don't forget -- you are an amazing writer. All of your readers know that: that is not an unmarketable skill.

Breakthroughs in Education Department

My partner N pointed me to this article in today's New York Times about a new charter school in the Bronx where one of the innovations is: teachers will be paid well. The idea is that you could get high quality teachers to commit to teaching secondary school by paying them as though they were intellectuals who did valuable work.

Jeez, why didn't I think of that? Teachers should be paid professionals, rather than robots reciting a set curriculum. Or recent college graduates looking to do a little social service before law school. Or grown-up lawyers who have made their bundle and think that teaching is going to be a snap after thirty years of doing wills and trusts. Each of these solutions, regardless of what their individual merits might be, relies on paying teachers as little a school district can get away with.

"The school," writes reporter Elissa Gootman,

"which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success."

Now, I would just like to say that these teachers will be making twice the salary of a beginning assistant professor, and more than many (most?) full professors at private colleges and universities. It's 25% more than my base salary, and I have been a history professor for eighteen years. Of course, secondary school teachers work harder than I do too: ten months a year, five days a week, and more or less dawn to dusk. (Well, actually, that is exactly how hard I am working this year -- but I don't have to spend all that time with twelve year olds, a job for which I am not temperamentally suited. So I will take the pay cut, thank you.) And the energy that secondary school teachers have left over for other kinds of professional development -- conferences, writing -- is miniscule. So for this reason alone they should be paid as much or more than college teachers.

But I think this raises another point too, which is what we have not been willing to think about as a path to resolving the job crisis in the humanities more generally and in some of the social sciences: giving up the status distinction between different kinds of educational careers. Why shouldn't people with Ph.D.'s be teaching at the secondary level and be respected for it? Answer: because many of us in so-called higher education regard such teaching as low status work that returns few benefits. So instead we complain endlessly about the quality of students entering college today, and help new Ph.D.'s who don't get jobs put together tenuous strategies for staying on the job market as long as they can reasonably afford to do so. Those who do not make it into a tenure-track job move around the country for one year positions, put together brutal adjunct teaching loads, and so on. Then, when that stops working for them, these intelligent, outgoing people who really wanted to be teachers go to law school. What if teaching high school or middle school were actually regarded as high status work that did not close the door to a university job in the future? I'm thinking.

A very high salary that rewards the quality intellectuals who are already teaching in public school, and that draws more quality intellectuals who have been educated to teach ideas rather than tests -- would be one step towards thinking about education as a continuum, and dismantling the professional "tracking" system that stigmatizes community college and secondary school teachers as second-rank or failed scholars.

College on $50 a Day: It's a Great Way to Fly

In "The Skies Are Alive With Fees", the New York Times' Joe Sharkey writes about Irish airline Ryanair's cutthroat pricing system. Boasting fares as low as $30 round trip on some European routes, Ryanair is also "the world champion among airlines in generating extra cash by charging customers fees for services and products that most airlines include in the ticket price: checked bags, beverages and — for a time before the idea was dropped amid public outcry — even using a wheelchair." What is called in business-speak "differential pricing," I believe, is not unknown to American travelers. Recently United offered me the opportunity to pay $25 extra for more leg room; there are special travel categories where travelers who pay more are checked in faster; and instead of the cute meals in little plastic dishes we used to get before 9/11, as Sharkey points out, flight attendants sell snack boxes that are full of all kinds of things only David Sedaris would eat.

Sounds undemocratic, doesn't it?

But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. This is a concept worth thinking about at the corporate university. Given rising tuition, faculty salaries that are barely keeping pace with inflation, and the inevitable accusations that some faculty work harder than others -- how about differential pricing for college students? Is it not true that some students do not ever feel the need to go to office hours? Is it not true that some faculty advise many students while others advise none? Is it not true that some faculty come in one day a week and others are on campus three to five days a week? Differential pricing could resolve all of these issues by creating a base price for college, and then giving undergraduates the opportunity to pay more for the frills. Those fees could then go directly to the faculty members providing the various services, thus permitting those faculty doing the most work to get paid for it.

The benefit to the budget-conscious student would be clear, since we know that many students' college experience is more about their friends and co-curricular experiences than any contact with faculty. How many generations of budding scholars have said romantically, "I learned so much more from conversations in the dining hall than I ever did in class?" Well, let's use this insight, and the Ryanair business model, to produce the leaner, meaner university. At Differentially Priced U. faculty attention would be a commodity, separated out from meals, dormitory, student fees, and whatnot, that students would pay for as needed. Not going to graduate school? Why pay for letters of recommendation you won't be using? Never go to office hours? Why should your tuition go to pay faculty to sit in their offices so other students can get help? Don't really give a damn about the comments on your papers? Well, why pay for them? Have the paper read quickly and processed for a grade, at the low-low price already included in your tuition.

You can see what I mean: this is a brilliant idea. And the reason this is a perfect system for students is that faculty who never attend their own office hours, don't put comments on papers anyway, and can't be trusted to write a letter of recommendation because they don't know your name -- won't get paid for it. Those who do know your name and can write for you will get paid. This also makes it the perfect system for popular faculty besieged by requests for letters of recommendation, whose only reward for teaching well is more students, and who complain that they are overwhelmed by grading and advising while other colleagues, who blow their students off, are home writing articles and getting more merit pay as a result.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Welcome to Relationships 101, New Professors

Hello New Professors!

Welcome to XU. Right now, your life is a rush of new knowledge, for which graduate school prepared you not at all. Sure, there are some experiences you have already had, like having to get a campus map in your head while you were unpacking and finishing your syllabus. (Actually -- have your belongings arrived yet, or are are you balancing your lap top on your bicycle rack while sitting cross-legged on the floor? That's what I thought.)

And there are other things you know -- you have at least been a section leader at CU, or perhaps you have even run your own seminar, so you have some idea of what will happen on the first day of class. You are vowing to memorize all your students' names in the first week, and you have even written a number of lectures in advance before things get crazy. Perhaps you have been assigned a mentor, having just escaped your graduate mentor -- but what critical pieces of information have you not been given? Read on.

Your department Administrative Assistant and any other office staff are your lifeline to success. This is perhaps the most important thing I could tell you. You think it is your chair who runs the world? Ha. Your chair doesn't even want to be chair, most likely, and since graduate school has never taught administrative skills, half of us who are chairs leave as much of the technical side of running the department in the hands of the office staff as we can. Go in and introduce yourself to the staff, learn their names and remember them. Moreover, never be too busy to inquire after their well-being. Why? Well, other than the fact that it is polite, your office staff can do things for you that you can't do for yourself and, given the longevity of employment among clerical workers, they have relationships with staff around the university who can also help you. Do you have an unsuitable classroom? Guess what? So do ten other people. Your AA can most likely call the single person in the registrar's office who can get you the room you need while the requests of others are kicked to the curb.

Never yell at a member of your, or anyone else's office staff. Ever, ever, ever. And if you do, apologize, even if you were technically in the right and had a good reason to be angry. Flowers will do; candy is better.

Choose your friends, don't let your friends choose you. This was standard advice given to most children in the 1950s and 60s as they started new schools. Even though being chosen by others seems to be the dominant cultural mode, I still think it is relevant to the situation of new faculty to ally themselves to others while keeping their eyes wide open. Here's the scenario to really watch out for:



Before you were hired, you were one of many candidates in the beauty pageant and somehow you became Miss America. The tap dancing, the dieting, the implants, the hot rollers -- it all paid off. But why, exactly, did the judges choose you? "Merit!" you chirp. OK -- I'm not going to say you aren't meritorious, but really, many other people in the search were too, and the process by which you were hired cannot, and should not, be imagined as a scientific deliberation in which it became clear to all that you were, objectively speaking, Graduate Student of the Year. I'm just telling you this because it gets you ready for the big letdown when.....some senior person shimmies up to you and tells you -- confidentially, of course -- that s/he was your really big supporter in the hiring meeting, and that you really need to watch out for Dr. Grumpo, who is a big right-winger and a sexual harasser besides, and hated your work. You are, of course, crestfallen, and ready to grab at the ally who has mysteriously appeared at hand to comfort you. What do you do dear? Do you say, "REALLY???!?" and go out to lunch to hear this new "friend" (who is trying to tie you down as a departmental ally) recount the awful details? You do not. You smile warmly and say, "Thank you so much for your support. I really look forward to working with you," and you just sashay right back into your office and make a dress out of the blinds for good measure. Then, if you are feeling really self-confident, take some time to drop into Grumpo's office (prudently leaving the door open, of course) and see for yourself what this person is like.

Never betray another untenured person. And don't assume someone is a natural ally just because s/he is untenured. If you do something that harms the interests of another untenured person, no matter how unconscious or innocent it was, a lot of people will view you as a snake, and not just your peers. On the other hand, it takes a while to figure out who among your peers can really be trusted to watch your back, because some of them may actually be snakes and not innocent, powerless untenured people at all. Imagining that faculty rank parallels the class formation process, because it too is an effect of oppression, is horribly misguided. If you need any further proof of this, remember that if the class formation process actually had occurred in the United States the way Marx had imagined that it would, historians like David Roediger and Robin Kelley would not have the distinguished careers that they do.

Don't distrust someone just because s/he is tenured. I do not mean to belittle the grave concerns that many untenured people have about tenured folk making unfounded, or founded, judgements about them. But there are a great many people whose advice can be trusted, and this is how you can tell: they don't tell you what to do. They give you the information you need to make your own decision. They don't assume that your experience with a particular person will replicate theirs; they acknowledge that you will want to make your own relationships with others, that your interests might differ from theirs and that the two of you can respect and like each other despite your differences. They don't make core assumptions about you because you are gay/of color/a woman/a man/ white/southern/from the Ivy League/from England. They don't look straight at your brown/queer face and tell you that they don't "see race" or that a good family friend "is gay." OK, so what if some of these things do happen -- is this tenured person untrustworthy? Not necessarily. People who have structural power over you will occasionally make you uncomfortable, and you need to put that information in your personal data bank along with other information, gathered over time. But perform some sort of internal calculus to determine at any given moment whether this is someone who you will be able to rely upon, and for what. Someone who initially makes a negative impression on you may actually be a good colleague, or a good colleague for you, who just fumbled a first impression out of ignorance or their own discomfort. It's not up to you to deal with this, but don't make life harder for yourself by developing grudges that blind you to a person's more congenial qualities.

Do distrust someone who tells you to your face that your intellectual interests are unimportant or wrong. This person wishes you no good, and wants you to go away. Stay away from her, and cultivate a bright, empty smile for hallway encounters.

Whenever someone does something for you, say "Thank you." Saying "thank you" is perhaps one of the most underrated academic skills I know. You are not automatically owed service by anyone. No one -- I repeat, no one -- works for you, New Professor. The class dean works for the dean of the college. The departmental secretary works for the administrative assistant, who works for the chair. There are probably a hundred people who make your work possible, and it is their job to do that, but it is not their job to tolerate rudeness or serve without recognition. Look for an opportunity to pay people back: would it kill you, on the way out to get lunch, to ask the office staff if they need anything -- and to refuse payment for that $1.25 can of Coke? No it would not. Or how about this: a senior colleague has just read your article - ask if you can take her to lunch. The senior person might even say no (recognizing that your salary is a fraction of his), but although this sounds trite -- it is the thought that counts.

Do not have sex with anyone you work with this year. Wait until next year, when people know other things about you.



Never be afraid to ask a question, or ask for help. This is the only way you will learn how your institution works. And despite all the teaching centers that are now in vogue in higher ed, it is the only way you will learn how to teach. Saying to a colleague, "Can you look at my syllabus?" is a good example. This has two advantages: one is that a person who has taught the same demographic of students for years can give you good advice, rather than your students giving it to you in a cruder form at the end of the term. But the other is that it gives people confidence that you care about teaching those students well, as opposed to the students you had at selective CU, or the ones you didn't get a chance to teach when someone else got the job at Zenith. In addition to getting sound advice, here's the Bonus Track: the next time you are being reviewed, this colleague will step in and say, "Yes, we had a good talk about that class, and from what I understand...." In other words, you can counter that sense of not having a role in your own destiny by actually engaging in dialogue with senior faculty who will listen to you and take that information to their peers.

Why, is that the moving truck pulling up outside your empty apartment? Time to go! There's lots more I could say but I, um, have to go -- finish my syllabus. Good luck, New Professors, and don't forget to let your colleagues in the blogosphere know how you are doing.