Road Tripping

I am just back from two days in Big City, where N and I are starting to experiment with what it means to cultivate our life there without the apartment. She has found two bed and breakfasts that are clean, convenient and affordable, at least one of which I suspect is illegal. The one we stayed in last night was particularly interesting, as it was five blocks away from our old apartment and in a part of the neighborhood that was grossly unsafe when I was in graduate school but is now not only livable but also too expensive for us ever to live there again except in the unlikely event that Fox Searchlight Pictures decides to option my next book. One permanent effect of having lived in Big City for twenty-plus years is that I am always checking rents and real estate prices everywhere I go: it now costs $2500 a month minimum to rent a one-bedroom in this neighborhood, close to $700K minimum to buy one. When I first moved there in 1983, my rent was $200 for a two bedroom with eat-in kitchen. And you could buy drugs right outside the front door!

However, things have changed, as they have in cities all over the Northeast, and the only drug dealers who now rule in this part of Big City are the psychopharmacologists. I suspect that the owners of this building -- actually two buildings cobbled together -- are around my age and originally inhabited these properties as a squat, or as shells purchased from the city for a pittance. It has the look of something renovated over the course of decades in, shall we say, a thrifty way. It also looks like an old-law tenement: doesn't have the weird dumb-bell shape that builders adopted after 1890 to conform to reformed city regulations that required each apartment to have windows. This is where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: we walked in the door and I thought, Firetrap! As a historian of the modern United States, visions of the Triangle factory are never far from my mind when I enter converted nineteenth century spaces in Big City, and I always spend the first few minutes looking for at least two ways to get out. My verdict: if the building had gone up we would have been toast. But aside from that it was great. The space which contained our room was a huge, opened-up storefront (the second building), with what looked like large packing boxes (the private sleeping lofts) on stilts down one wall and the rest of the space devoted to the sculpture career that I think the B&B supports. It looked a little like one of those Thai villages built on a flood plain, but inside. Tres funky, but surprisingly clean, furnished with IKEA and, given the fact that the others staying there that night were twenty-something men from Australia, surprisingly quiet. So it was very nice & we had fun being home in the place we lived for decades, together and apart. And I only thought once or twice, Why am I sticking to my guns about being a tenured professor in Zenith, dealing with picky, cranky senior colleagues and over-privileged students, when I could probably find a well-paid administrative job in Big City and never mark a paper or sit on a tenure case again? Could I still write books and have an intellectual life as an administrator? Or would I turn into a "suit," a hideous simulacrum of me, slashing people's budgets, trumpeting new standards for others to meet, and whining about "the faculty" behind their backs as though they were unreasonable children who were too selfish to understand that Expanding the Physical Plant and Marketing Our Image is more important than salaries, pensions and benefits?

At any rate, now I am home for a hot twenty-four hours before charging off to Dixietown for a week of research. There is a lot to do, since I always leave home on a trip, no matter how short, as if I might not return for years -- if at all -- and everything must be Just So before departure tomorrow morning at 5 A.M. Imagine how exhausting commuting must have been for me! Aside from getting together all the stuff I will need for the archives, I must: pick up my dry cleaning; make sure I have the telephone numbers for the colleagues I am seeing down there and send them emails to remind them we are having dinner; put the new registration sticker on the car; pay the bills; re-do my Netflix queue; do the laundry; finish the bookcases; back up my hard drive; plant the tulip bulbs I bought six weeks ago; pick up my study; do the laundry; go to the bank; schedule a cab; pay the bills (did I say this?); call the dog sitter; call my mother; and make sure I don't leave without something vital, say, the electric plug for my computer, or a pair of good shoes I can wear to a restaurant. Oh yeah, and I am supposed to give a talk while I am down there and while I have a clue what I am going to say, I haven't prepared it, even though my hosts called me last week to ask if I need audiovisual support. Oops. But that's why God made plane travel, right? That and reading the papers you are supposed to comment on at the conference, that were supposed to arrive weeks before, but which actually arrived last night.

I love research trips, really I do, and I actually love giving talks too, because in my mind writing history doesn't count unless I can get it to more people than would ordinarily bother to pick up my book or the journals in which I have published. But research is probably the most fun part of my job. First of all, it is a lot of work compressed into a small amount of time and second, because the point is doing things that prepare me ot write, it precludes the vexing task of actually writing. Hurrah! So writing avoidance can be transformed into something resembling virtue that will actually, in the end, lead to writing. Writing cannot occur without research unless you are really sought after for your opinions about history, or your view as a historian on current events, like Simon Schama or Tony Judt. And I also love reading other people's mail, something I have to remind myself forcefully not to do when the opportunity presents. Archival research is the only context in which going through someone else's stuff is work and not -- well, snooping. And the documents don't have old banana peels soaking through them, they are arranged in lovely clean folders by well-trained librarians who want nothing better than to bring you more of them!

And did I mention the Quality Inn? And the rental car? And eating out every night on Zenith's tab? Fabulous. Just fabulous.

A Woman's Place is in the House

Ok, I just needed to say that: if you are a feminist who has tenure or is even older, you used to own that tee shirt. Yes, in order to win the Democrats had to float more conservative candidates, but look at it this way: our new speaker represents the Castro district in San Francisco! Yes, I am just as worried about the future of a woman's right to choose as I was yesterday -- but THANK YOU South Dakota, thank you Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood (daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards), thank you, you brave organizers who knocked on doors to stop a referendum that would have put Roe on the line in the Supreme Court, and was intended to do so, since you can't get an abortion in South Dakota anyway. And all those anti-gay marriage referendums are pointless and nasty -- but what about the minimum wage referendums that got passed all over the country that are pinned to the rate of inflation? Yeah, baby! This is critical for two reasons. First, it is the only thing that has been done for working people in this country in years -- those people who have three or four jobs per family, and still have to join the military to pay for college or a trade school. Second, it means that the business class may begin to hold the party in charge accountable for ruinous fiscal policies that drive up the cost of living, a move that could alter the political landscape significantly.

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In other news, my partner read my blog yesterday, which is only because I told her about it just the day before. The good part is that, although she does not like blogging as a form (this may be related to coming from a very literary family, but I think is more related to questions of privacy), she likes the blog and she still likes me. The bad news is, she doesn't really want to be in it and didn't like the pseudonym I had chosen, so I needed to go back and do some editing, and also explain to the few of you who know me what has changed and why, thus risking putting her in the blog again. But ars gratia artis, as they say out in California.

Permission to blog about others is a tricky and interesting question, because actually no one in my blog has given me permission to write about them, but as I pointed out to N, a great many of our friends do write and publish about their families. And if and when Extravaganza finds out, I am confident he will be thrilled, as he aspires to be a superstar and he understands already that good publicity is critical to his career. But back to my conversation with the love of my life: we agreed to some changes. One which you will note is that I changed the pseudonym to an initial. We picked N, a letter of the alphabet that is in the middle, and relatively uncontroversial and uncoded as, for example, a letter like "X" might be (would you want to be described by the love of your life as X? Not.) She also doesn't want to be called an academic, despite the Ph.D., and we agreed on "teacher" which is true, and also reflects her real modesty about her intelligence and what I think is the great work she does in the world.


But as to her presence in the blog, this is a real personal, ethical and artistic dilemma. My initial reaction was that I didn't want to blog as though I was single (as in unpartnered, unmarried) because one of the things that was tricky about commuting all those years is that in a variety of contexts people treated me as though I was single. I disliked this increasingly, and when it appeared we were going to live together, I looked forward to ironing out this irritation. Back in the day, when I corrected people's misapprehension about my relationship status, I usually had to do it in terms that were less about us and who we were than about what my audience already understood about conventional relationships. And this meant, in turn, that I often had to describe my intimate life to people in ways I found intrusive, burdensome and inaccurate if not incorrect -- why we commuted, how we did it, that we didn't consider our bond to be "the same as" being married (an explanation I usually had to provide, not to conservatives who were "defending" marriage, but to liberals demonstrating their ecumenicism about the institution and about me.) But that we WERE deeply committed. In other words it was a big drag, and usually an unintended invasion of MY privacy. And I suspect it was less of a drag for N all these years, because I was living in Zenith, a place where LGBTQ people are not exactly invisible, but not exactly movemement-oriented or diverse either, and she lived in the highly urban and diverse Big City, traditional home to many kinds of queer folk, ranging from married to free love types. So even though I know this is not going to be a huge issue in the blogosphere, I wanted to start off on the right foot.

But the other dilemma is a real one for abstract and practical reasons. The practical is that N doesn't think this blog will remain anonymous for long, that I have utterly blown my cover and that anyone with half a brain can use the information I have provided to discover my real identity if they try (I would say my characteristic typos are a likelier clue for those who know me.) I didn't tell her that I already blew my cover with Dr. Virago when I tested my Gmail account, because she doesn't know Dr. Virago, and Virago has better things to do than out me (love the apes, Dr. V.) But I also think this would presume that anyone cares who I am, and that I can restrain myself from being egotistical enough to urge my friends and allies at Zenith to read my blog. This last is dicey, given that I am well-known for enjoying the payoff of a quick laugh and not paying enough attention to the consequences of my snarky and perverse behavior. I admit this is a personal flaw and a vulnerability, but it is also probably a good test of character to not make such a spectacle of myself until I consciously decide to NOT be anonymous.

But there are other reasons I am glad that N raised this issue. The ethical question is, what are your obligations to those you write about, aside from doing it honestly and restraining yourself from being out of control critical or making judgements that are likely to wound others? This is something N thinks about all the time, as she is a social scientist of sorts, and a radical person in a research world that is often very exploitative. As a historian, I haven't thought about it much at all until recently because all the people I wrote about were dead. I realize that this isn't a good excuse, but the chances of a nasty phone call or being shunned are smaller when you write about the dead, you must admit. However, my current research is about people who are by and large alive, as well as still really pissed off at each other, and I think this blog question overlaps with the ethical questions and risks attendant to doing that kind of recent history. And what is blogging as a literary form, anyway? Is it memoir, current history, news, gossip, critique, commentary, all of the above? Each of these genres has different, although overlapping, conventions. Which ones help me navigate? At what point do my own thoughts and experiences borrow, or steal, the thoughts and experirences of others? When do they cease to be mine alone?

So I have to think strategically as I sort these things out. One thought I did have is that I have noticed a modern genre of gay male writing -- Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris and Bob Morris -- where the writer is kind of an abject, insecure sissy and the "boyfriend" is always self-assured, masculine, nurturing, confident, and slightly condescending about the author's insecurities (not that there's anything wrong with that!) But I have wondered -- why the pattern? Is it because making fun of themselves then insulates authors from worrying that the Significant Other will object to his/her representation in the essays as the inevitable foil for what must be a more complex, interior narrative articulated by the protagonist? Yo, English professors -- chime in here.

Ok, enough, enough. I managed to bring this blog back to intellectual issues for a hot second. Now it's your turn.

Hey Joe, I Thought That You Were Dead

Today is election day, and N and I are going to go down and vote together for what I think may be the second time in our lives. I mean, we both vote a lot, but not together, since for years we were registered in different places. I love voting, but for the last decade or so, election day has been a source of great anxiety, because I always feel like things like civil rights, women's right to choose and peace are hanging in the balance. N and I live in one of those states where three congressional districts could flip to the Dems, and maybe a Senate seat (although I don't think so.) The only critical ballot we will cast will be for the Senate, since our progressive Congressperson will win in a landslide (s/he didn't even bother to put up signs until day before yesterday, and has spent all of hir time stumping for others.) Our airhead Republican governor should win in a landslide too, but s/he is probably the only Republican candidate at the state level who will. So I will spend tonight gripped by PBS's election coverage, with another eye on the computer to see what races CNN is calling.

Do you think I can write at the same time? (Just kidding!)

Since all politics is local, I have other news to report. The faculty at Zenith is very grumpy right now because of our low, low pay and diminishing benefits. We have also suffered under somewhat autocratic leadership for the last few years, and then those people, sensing that they had failed to implement their draconian programs with much effectiveness - or perhaps responding to the fact that others had sensed it - resigned abruptly, and were replaced by flacks drawn from the Zenith faculty and administration who are trying to pick the pieces up. So there are multiple searches going on, there is basically no leadership, and meanwhile life is supposed to go on as usual. On top of all this, one of my colleagues discovered that the Provost had been altering the faculty regulations without telling anyone, and according to the rules, the faculty is supposed to approve altering its own regulations. In other words, when a new book came out, some things would just be different. How did my colleague, let's call her Dr. Victorian, know this? Because she trusts no one and compared the new pages, word for word, with the old pages. And, as it usually turns out, she is right more than half the time that you should trust no one.

One of the things that had been changed is that Zenith no longer pays its share of TIAA while we are on unpaid leave. And those of us on unpaid leave had never been notified of this fact.

Now, as it turns out the Provost did all sorts of ugly things, some of them only a week before s/he left town, but that is another story that may or may not get told another day. But in response to these things, and to the fact that the committee system seems to be strangling under administration-sponsored busy work and faculty apathy, we have formed a rump group, which gets more people to its meetings than any faculty meeting ever did. The excellent Dr. Victorian is on the steering committee (having never served on any major committee, because like many women she is considered TOO DIFFICULT by the reasonable people who run things), and she brought in an AAUP organizer, and as it turns out, there are fifteen of us who are already AAUP members (including your Dr. Radical) and you only need seven to form a chapter. So we are going to do it (I think maybe my speech about the free lawyers who helped me during my recent Unfortunate Events helped. Academics love things that are free -- free books, free plane rides to conferences, free legal advice.....). But even without that, it was an exciting meeting because finally I think we are going to do something. And just like Professor Bill W tells his alcoholic friends: Yo Peeps, the first step is to admit that you are powerless as an individual.

The great thing about an AAUP chapter is that it functions like a union, which we are not allowed to have, because of the Yeshiva decision. Or rather, we can have one, but we can't be certified by the government and so if we act as a union they can fire our butts. Whereas the AAUP, when the university does something screwy like cutting our benefits without telling us, comes in and shames them publicly, which places like Zenith fear far more than a job action, since in the latter case, our Very Privileged students and their Helicopter Parents will get into the action and accuse us of not taking care of our responsibilities as educators. Remember the GESO strike at Yale, where the TA's withheld grades for a week or two? You would have thought the next generation of lawyers had been banished to beauty school. So this is to be avoided at all costs. On the other hand, having former university presidents and provosts come in to shake down your own administration sounds like a very satisfying scenario indeed. It also addresses the doubts of many of my colleagues who seem to think that "professionals" don't need unions, and that if you join the United Auto Workers (like Miss B has) you will actually BE an auto worker, or people will think you are, and maybe send your job to Tennessee or Mexico.

So as you can see, it is only Tuesday, and my life as a citizen is starting with a bang. Oh, and by the way, if the Dems do not win this election? Do not mourn. Organize.

A Good Start

Well, yay. I got home from a shopping trip to Ikea with N and found that I had been visited by Dr. Virago, Combat Philosopher and New Kid on the Hallway. Also an email from the good doctor. I felt a little like Sally Field at the Oscars twenty years ago, after she won her second statuette for "Places in the Heart" - "You-you LIKE me! You like me! You really like me!" Actually that would be a little over the top, when all I am trying to do it fit in, but you get the picture. My fellow bloggers are a lot more restrained than I am, and they gave me a warm welcome and some helpful advice. So back at ya, colleagues: tomorrow I'll learn how to link, and then I'll really be on my way. You'll be proud.

So guess why I was at Ikea? Bookshelves, of course. I keep the majority of my books in my capacious office in one of the lovely Federal buildings at Zenith University, but N works for an urban university where six or seven people share an office. And these are the people who really have permanent jobs. The contingent faculty meet their students in coffee shops or on stoops. I dunno where they keep their stuff. Probably shopping carts stolen from Ikea.

Anyway, since we sold our fabulous urban apartment last February and N moved here to live with me full time after many years of living in some kind of peripatetic sin, her books have been in boxes in the living room (which hasn't really functioned as a living room because of the boxes of books.) We had elaborate built-ins installed, which were finally completed last week and we realized instantly that there was nowhere near enough room. So off to Ikea, where for a fraction of the price we paid the carpenter we can finish the job. This is a good thing, since when Extravaganza came over last week I said, "Have you noticed the living room is starting to come together?"

He said, "Have you NOTICED that I haven't said anything about those ugly boxes piled up in front of the window for six months?"

Oh well.

At any rate, Sunday is the worst time to go to Ikea in terms of crowds, but the best for people watching, since very large families go and bring all their collateral relatives and it all feels very Global. I always end up steering the cart, which, as we moved through the market place section became filled with all the lovely little things you forgot you needed until you saw them. "Oooh! A travel coffee cup! Mine broke last week!" "Six tea lights for $3.00? A steal!" "Aren't we out of orange cocktail napkins?" But also because of this I am constantly losing Miss B, who is famous for cutting through the crowd in a way guaranteed to lose all but the most dedicated stalker. Her best move today was shooting through a space between two elderly people on wheeled walkers. Tiki Barber couldn't have done better.

As we were loading the large, flat packages of Billy shelves onto the second cart I obtained in the Warehouse, N said, as she always does, "Do you think this will all fit in the car?" Because I had now added a large fluffy green plant (19.99) and a decorative pot, and a lamp to replace the one that only turns off when you pull the chain horizontally. "Of course!" I said, as I always do. Because everyone knows that God (and I mean this interfaithfully and atheistically, people) loves Ikea and extends Her special blessings to those who shop there. Then we stood in line for about 45 minutes, which was fine because you can buy hot dogs for .50 and ice cream for a dollar, and we had a lovely snack the likes of which we would never eat at home because I believe firmly in Organic and Free Range foods.

And it did all fit. So now, as extra incentive not to write this week, I have five book cases to assemble and level, two end tables to put together, so that all of N's books, now in tottery piles on the living room floor, can be alphabetized and shelved. How fabulous is that?

Blowin' In The Wind: Reflections On The First Week of Blogging

In the past week, I got determined and went out and looked at other people's blogs. Why, you might ask, did I think I was the only person who had the bright idea of blogging about the academy? Sheesh. I have come upon fabulous blogs: they range from the serious (zapping David Horowitz, sharing ideas about teaching and publishing, getting through your dissertation/job search/new job) to blogs that are reaching real highs when it comes to ironic commentary on the State of the Profession. Every day I now check Quod She (the famous Dr. Virago), A Ianqui in the Village (currently trying to figure out a difficult commuting situation that might result from her partner accepting a dream job), and my current favorite, Ferule and Fescue. Will I always do this? And how dare I claim the name Tenured Radical, when Michael Berube is out there blogging away as Professor B?

I mean, of course I am late to the game. I am late to every game. I just learned about blogging at all because a woman, who is related to me by -- well, given the state of gay marriage, shall we say "partnership"? -- started a blog about her family. I started reading it obsessively because she was writing about people I knew, and I wanted to know what her latest news was and about who. Members of our extended family fall into two categories: those who read and those who don't, and I sense a vague suspicion of modern forms of communicaiton among those who don't. So I don't tell them about me so they won't worry, you know what I mean? The most avid readers are me and my 13 year-old nephew Extravaganza, who has his own blog, where he hopes kids he knows will write with love dilemmas. Through this method, he hopes to learn all the secrets of the eighth grade, and ultimately attain power over everyone. One thing led to another after Extravaganza announced his blog on a family-wide email. I found myself looking at templates, and suddenly I thought, you know, what if instead of writing lies (not that there's anything wrong with them!) or collecting the love secrets of the history department at Zenith University (eeeee-yew) I wrote about -- the Truth? I could be a Hypocrisy Buster!


Now isn't this silly? But the good news is that since then I have also been reading other academic blogs, and have gotten my head right straight. I am working on a better mission statement than the one I started with. In the meantime, I have discovered a new community of intellectuals who don't work with me at Zenith, and who aren't going to read my scholarship to decide whether I'm smart enough to live. Because I'm done with that since my promotion to full professor, if I have not made this clear in previous posts.

I have learned so much. I have discovered new conventions of naming, and ways to reveal myself while cleverly concealing my identity. It's so much better than internet chat rooms, which are very superficial. As far as I can tell, people log on and say "hi" and "bye" a lot - or they tell you with an acronym that they just got up to get something from the refrigerator and walk the dog and pee, but they are BACK NOW. My feeling is that they are all in their twenties and either in the military or working the night shift. Or maybe they are FBI agents trolling for pedophiles. But on blogs, I can fully engage! I have new heroes like Ianqui, Super G, Dr. Virago, Professor B, Historianness -- I've had to trim my reading list to make sure I start writing before eleven in the morning. And to preserve my anonymity, but try to seduce people into actually getting in touch and reading my blog, I have established a new Gmail account (it's tenured.radical@gmail.com) which you can get to via my profile -- but oh gosh, I just told you the address, didn't I?

The other way I try to get to people is by commenting on their blogs. Which is not too hard, except no one except Dr. Virago and Professor B seems to be my age, so I have to work really hard not to sound like a windbag. Only one person has commented back and added my link, but it's early yet.

I've also thought that at the next conference I go to I could get cards printed up with my blog address, and leave them in the toilets, on chairs, at cashbars, and so on. That would be so Not Done, I think it would please me enormously. I have always been a Not Done sort of person, because the beauty of it, is if you are going to do what is Not Done you have to have a perfect sense of what IS Done.

If I thought Extravaganza could keep a secret, I would take him with me to the conference so he could distribute cards in the men's room too. But I can't, because he is too busy keeping the eighth grade under control and he trades in information as I do.

Question: Do I Really Work?

Well, it's the weekend, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about leisure. Whenever people get to know me, and they start to get it that I really am an academic, then the comments start. They fall into two categories: one is the Romance of Teaching, and the other is that most of my life is consumed by a search for ways to fill my time, since I don't really work.

The Romance of Teaching will hold for another day. Let's tackle the question of work.

It is true that what people most envy about my life (and my partner N, since she is a college teacher too) is time off. There are 10-12 weeks in the summer that we have off; the mid-semester break, the winter break (about 4 weeks, depending on how you count it), and my favorite, Spring Break, which at my school is two weeks long, because it takes the baseball team that long to play its southern travel schedule. At some schools, there is a mini-semester during winter break, when a faculty member doesn't always have to teach, but sometimes does. Thank god we do not have that at my Olde Neue Englande College. Oh yes, then I also forgot that we don't go to school every day, most of us, and we don't have to be there at a certain time, and we don't have to stay until a certain time unless there is something specific we have to do. And then there is sabbatical, which for me happens about every three -four years, when I get a year off to work on whatever book I happen to be writing.

This is one true thing (as Hemingway would say) about the conditions of my labor. Now the other part is that if you are REALLY doing your job, you spend a lot of time working at home. A lot. There are lectures to write, journals to read and a field to keep up with, seminars to strategize, books to review, and my least favorite, papers to grade. Then, aside from duties to students, there are meetings to go to: faculty meetings, committee meetings, hiring meetings, tenure meetings, meetings in office hours, curriculum meetings, department meetings, major recruitment meetings, senior honors work meetings, blah, blah, blah. And then, some of those meetings you really have to prepare for: write memos, strategize presentations, read scholarship.

Then there is your own scholarship, which may or may not be a compulsion, but it is true that the only way to get ahead in this world is to publish scholarly articles, for which we are paid nothing (actually nothing! my accountant hates this) -- often for two years of steady labor on a forty page piece -- or to publish books, for which most of us are paid very little. Some people, it is rumored, have to actually kick in money to a press to get their book published. This latter category of people is growing: it used to be only Romanian medieval literary scholars, and now that category has enlarged to include, say, historians of Victorian Britain, which is actually a topic with some audience. So the reason you write is not to make money, but a) out of genuine love for writing and scholarship; b) to get promoted at your own job, or get a raise at the end of the year; c) to get a more prestigious job; and d) all of the above.

So here's the PROBLEM with the idea that college teachers have so much freedom -- that there is no clear beginning and end to your work except that which is dictated by your work ethic, your sense of responsibility, your level of anxiety and your sense of personal ambition. Hence, while some of us work not at all (because, of course, if you have tenure, you can f**k off endlessly and no one ever does anything to make you be responsible to your sudents or your colleagues), most of us consider that a pathetic way to live. And then often your work is unpredictable: a class that you have taught a million times before suddenly explodes into political struggle; a student goes into meltdown or plagiarizes a paper and you find yourself meeting with deans twice a day for a week; a tenure case goes sour, and all of a sudden you are trying to save someone's entire career.

And we have no real freedom, most of us, to get decent raises either by working hard at our own institutions or by getting another job: the academic market is one of the least competitive there is. In return for working all the time, very few of us make what is considered, in the world of ambitious and/or educated people, a good salary. At my instituion, the average raise last year was about 3%, and there are no bonuses. I haven't hit 100K yet, and I have 11 years of formal education and sixteen years on The Job. I recently read in the student newspaper that our highest paid faculty member makes 235K, and she's almost 70, I bet, and has probably raised over $100 milliion for the university. In other professions -- medicine, say, even with managed care, this is chump change for a well-educated person who has done a lot to improve the position of the company as a whole. And then, here's the kicker: the combination of tenure and the fact that education is massively underfunded means that there is such a huge reserve army of labor for the number of jobs available, that probably 89% of us feel lucky to have a job at all doing what we are trained to do, and not swotting up for the LSATs. If you aren't in a field where there is public sector employment (any of the sciences, economics, sociology, psychology) you are truly, utterly screwed in terms of job mobility, and thus, ever putting your university in a position to have to compete for your services. The irony of college teaching is the farther up the scale you go, the fewer jobs are available -- since why would you hire an English prof at the level of full professor when you can get a new Ph.D. for half the price? You wouldn't. And they don't.

Teaching Evaluations (Written After An Unpleasant Meeting)

One of the peculiar features of college teaching now is the teaching evaluation. At the end of the semester, students get a chance to rate various aspects of the class, and at my school there are spaces for them to write more subjective comments (anything from real comments on the teaching to "great boots!"). I would like to note that the majority of students take this activity seriously as a contibution to the teaching endeavor, maybe even more seriously than they should. For a time I worked in an urban public college where the students routinely refused to fill out the evaluations because they were sure no one cared. At my school, the students often come from places where they were SURE that everything they said mattered, so they knuckle down to the task and take it very seriously. Like their SAT's.

That having been said, everyone who doesn't have his or her head in a bag knows that:

a) students collaborate. Thus you see the same phrases and ideas pop up in fifteen or twenty evaluations, because the students have all agreed ahead of time to write the same thing. They do this for people they like and people they dislike.

b) students project their own feelings about the professor on the professor; i.e., accusing the prof of having developed a personal grudge that caused the student to have a crappy experience, get a bad grade, acquire low self-esteem. I also think this is a way of students who don't feel they got enough attention developing a relationship (i.e, You Hate Me) that they couldn't figure out how to have after the fact.

c) you can sometimes teach really badly and get great evaluations. The reverse is also true. People who get great evaluations will not admit this. People who get terrible evaluations insist on it.

The latest pain is a website called RateMyProf.com, where students can log on and write really nasty things that the other students can see: other students don't see the university's evaluations. So this is advertised as a way of spreading useful information that students need. Ok, go look at your colleagues' evaluations and roar with laughter over one of your enemies being described as "senile," "doddering," "shouldn't be in the classroom." Of course this is based on nine students when the guy taught 100 or so last year. But whatever, it's a hoot, right? Then look at your own. Sure, you'll recognize a couple as being the person you recognize having taught that class. But mainly, students have to go so out of their way to evaluate you on a website. Often it is only the ones who really hate your guts who bother to post, or students who are out of control angry in general, or working for David Horowitz. Hell, for all you know, it's your own colleagues, And the students, at least, probably do it when they are stoned. The good news is that you can ask the people who run the website that a posting be reviewed if it is "erronious" or "libelous." My guess is "libelous" is the word most likely to succeed in a permanent take-down, but I won't know for sure for few days.

Of course, if you are a full professor, as I am, with tenure, as I have, students can evaluate you, but you know what? No one, I mean no one, gives a damn.

This is either something to look forward to or a reason to relax and get your sense of humor back, depending on how you are positioned.

(Yet Another) Academic Blogger

I have a lot of doubts about blogging, but I think that it is about time that there was a space out there for academics to rap with each other about what we think the university ought to be used for and what we are doing in it.

For those of you who aren't academics -- this is called Tenured Radical because long ago, when the new right decided to undermine the intellectual foundations of the nation, one of the big charges made by radical neocons was that universities were full of "tenured radicals" who were indoctrinating the youth of America. The not so big secret, of course, is that universities and their faculties are far from radical, and that tenure is one of the features of university life that makes academics cautious at best, conservative at least. We need to change that.

Those of you who aren't academics will also want to know what tenure is: well, let's save that for a later post, as I am just setting this blog up. But in short it means -- after going through a terrible process, where everyone judges you, at the end of it, if you succeed, you have a job for life. For life. Really. Even the United Auto Workers can't give anyone that anymore. Unless they close the whole damn school (which has happened) or a president is willing to take a sanction from the professional body (which has happened) you have a job for your whole damn life.

Now you would think that would make people happy, wouldn't you? Or at least cause them to want to have some influence. But if you keep reading this blog, you will get some insight into the mysteries of the system, and what kind of people folks turn into if they don't keep ironic distance.

That's why I'm blogging. Ironic distance. That's why you should comment, ask questions, get the discussion rocking. Because frankly, boys and girls, being an academic isn't as much fun as it used to be, and I think we need to do something to change that.