Bad Student: I Was an Undergrad Snowflake

(We're finally watching Bad Teacher because it's now available on PPV; it seems fitting that I write this particular post while Cameron Diaz plays a deplorable human being, let alone teacher, in the background.)

There was an interesting discussion over at Prof Hacker about venting about students using social media. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I, from time to time, make negative observations about my students. They are general and they never discuss grades. What I often am looking for are some words of encouragement and support, as well as a place to sort through my often conflicted feelings about how things are going in my class. And, more often than not, these tweets (and the responses to them) turn into blog posts (like the most recent one on plagiarism). I don't tweet anything that I wouldn't tell my students in class. 

But, as I wrote in the comments of the Prof Hacker post, 

I think that when we express some of our frustration about our students online, for me on Twitter, I think it shows us as human, who get frustrated and discouraged, just like our students. I also think that an angry tweet about, say, catching a plagiarizer serves as an immediate reminder that a) yes we will catch you and b) it will not be good.

Our classes don't always go as planned. Sometimes it can open up a conversation about what went wrong and why from both our perspective as well as the students. Also, I think some students need to know that certain behaviors are unacceptable from them, and that that is a "universal" sentiment, expressed through tweets and RT from lots and lots of professors on Twitter. 

I know that if I had seen behavior that I recognized as my own tweeted out by one of my profs, I'd have actually reconsidered my own attitude and actions. See, I was an undergraduate snowflake. In fact, I was probably the worst kind; the kind that still got really good grades, despite a) rarely attending class and b) putting little effort into the assignments. I left just about every single paper until the last minute, handing work in late, and just generally not caring about my classes very much.

(There were a few exceptions, of course.)

I kept behaving badly because I got away with it. No one called me out on my crap, at all. I know now that I must have driven my professors absolutely crazy. Either that, or they didn't care (and really, maybe they didn't). If there was a way that I could have known that they did, indeed, care and that my behavior (and, to be fair, the behavior of many of my classmates) was unacceptable, I probably would have changed it. It wasn't until I realized myself, through a mixture of professional quasi-failures and hitting an academic wall during my MA, that really, being a snowflake may have been fun for me, but it was totally unfair to my professors.

(In writing this, I am beginning to totally understand Worst Professor Ever's attitude towards teaching.)

My professors were human and professionals. They deserved better treatment than what I gave to them.

Peer-Driven Learning: Plagiarism, Motivation, and Acceptance

I've written already that I need to work on accepting the strengths and limitations of each of my peer-driven learning classes. But this week has really tested my patience, my resolve, and my faith that this change in approach is really a good thing. 

My...less-enthusiastic class has been struggling. Their first paper was due on Monday. I realized during the drafting process that one of the reasons this class hasn't embraced the peer-driven concept is because they are insecure/unsure writers. The first day that they were supposed to have brought drafts to class for peer-review, only three did. And this was after I forced them to go to the library to do research for their paper. Instead of sending them away, I was able to quickly find an available computer lab and take them their to actually write their draft (those three who brought a draft did the peer-review work by themselves). Turns out, the majority of the students did in fact have a draft but were too afraid to let anyone read it. I was able to work with each of them through their various issues and they came away from the class with a bit more confidence and a workable draft (or at least a better sense of how to get there).

I am a little ashamed to admit that I was feeling pretty proud of myself after that class. I was able to help the students rather give the knee-jerk reaction of simply dismissing them and their apparent lack of motivation. Sometimes, a good teacher needs to discern what the students want or need, even in a peer-driven setting. And I also knew that the direction we had initially set in the class probably needed to change. On Monday, when the entire class was there to hand in their essays, I announced that on Wednesday we would re-evaluate how we approach the rest of the semester. Did we still want to all work on the same topic, or would individual groups like to work individual topics of their choice? Did we still want to do group work? Did we still want to do projects? Be here on Wednesday if you want a say in the direction of the second-half of the semester.

A little less than half the class bothered to show up.  Now, I will give the less-than-half of the class that did show up credit. They came full of ideas and prepared to defend them. We sat down in a small circle and came up with a second-half plan (which closely resembles what the other class is doing right now). But, we are going to waste Monday's class forming groups for the other students who weren't there. 

And then, today, when I was grading their papers, I came across one of the most blatant case of plagiarism of my career. The student found a conference presentation on poverty and education online. It was even a Word document, so all the student did was take the first few pages of the presentation, double-space it, and stick her name on the top. The language was so obviously beyond the student's level, that it was the giveaway I needed. A simple Google search turned up the paper immediately. 

I don't know what to do. I make the course peer-driven, empower the students to make their own decisions about the direction of the education, and I still can't get better than 45% attendance. I told the students that if they didn't show up that others would make the decision for them. This saddens me, not just for the success of the class, but for the future of democracy; the students don't seem to care if someone else decides their future for them. And, I know all of the reasons why students plagiarize, but thought that I had managed to remove all of them. 

I don't know what else to do but accept that some students aren't motivated. Or that there are many, many factors that I can't control. Then, why continue with peer-driven learning? Why put up with the stress and the added work if more than half the students don't even care one way or the other what they learn or how? 

Even writing that, I know why. 

It's just this week has been really, really hard. I'm still working on acceptance. 

Work-Life Balance: Some New Rules

In case it wasn't clear from my last post, our family has been having some work-life balance issues. I was incredible moved by how the post seemed to resonate with many other academic couples/parents. It's a constant process of negotiation, re-evaluation, and compromise for many of us. I'm not sure if it reassures me to know that our family is not alone in our struggles or saddens and angers me to know that there so many of us sacrificing so much for an academic job. 

The point of this post is to outline some of the ways I am trying to achieve some sort of a balance in my professional life and family. It's especially challenging because I am not on the tenure-track while my husband is. His conference trips are fully funded, mine are not. He has a list a mile long of administrative responsibilities, I don't. How can you achieve balance, when one member of the academic couple clearly has a number of advantages (funding) and disadvantages (administrative responsibilities)?

The first thing I did was to jump on the first chance I had to increase my amount of travel/professional development funds. I agreed to mentor high school English teachers who are teaching in our dual-credit program in exchange for a generous amount of money for professional development. There is obviously a trade-off - the increased responsibilities add to my workload, but now I can go to a conference and not worry about if we can afford it or now. Last year, I had to cancel going to a THATcamp that I was really looking forward to because we couldn't afford it. This year, I have my own funds to tap into. 

And, I am not rushing home anymore if I don't have to. I'm not showing up the day of my presentation and leaving as soon as I can after it's over. I'm staying until the bitter end. I'm reconnecting with old colleagues and classmates, and hopefully meeting and creating new connections with people I only know virtually (or not at all). My kids are old enough (and my husband more than capable) of running this household for five days while I'm gone. If we are serious about one day finding a tenure-track job for me, then I have to do these things.

But that's my professional life. At home, I am almost forcibly scheduling time for all of us to spend together. We have a four-day weekend this weekend (Fall Break!) and while both my husband and I have a pile of grading to do in order to get our mid-term grades in on time, I'm making sure we take a day-trip together, without work intruding on us. Plus, more date nights for me and my husband. 

I'm trying to focus on the things I can change, including my own behavior and reactions. I know this sounds all very zen (and painfully obvious), but I have to give myself a break and give my husband a break. I have to remember to make the most of the time we do all have together, and the time we have apart. I'm going to keep blogging, because it's something I do for me. I guess I'm frustrated because I began this semester hoping we'd do better this time achieving a sort of a balance. 

It's always a work in progress. 

Our Two-Headed Problem: A Letter to my Daughter

"Mommy, why does Daddy always have to go back to work after dinner and miss my bedtime? I want him to have a different job so he can be home."

This week, my husband, who is also an academic but who, unlike me, is on the tenure-track, was besieged by professional responsibilities: candidate dinners, night grad classes, faculty senate meetings, social gatherings that represent important opportunities to network and appear like a good member of the "community." To make up for the lost time, he woke up earlier than usual to go into work and prepare for class. Many weekends every semester, he is also away at conferences.

My daughter, who is four, was getting fed up, which lead to the quote above.

I want to tell her how lucky she is that her daddy has the job that he has, given the academic job market, heck the general job market. That not being an academic does not guarantee better hours; one of her classmate's dad is always on the road for his non-academic job. Another one of our friends is overseas in Afghanistan, leaving behind a wife and son only a little younger that she is. That daddy is home more nights than he is away is a gift we can give to her.

I want to tell her that all of the extra work that he does is, in part, because he has won external funding, increasing his work-load, but also increasing our take-home pay. That mommy and daddy are up to our eyeballs in debt because of all of the extra schooling we did to get where we are, and those bills have come due. All of our small luxuries (like going to McDonald's) come from mommy and daddy working hard to make sure he gets tenure and I get renewed year after year. 

I also want to tell her that her father and I have made every decision we could to try and maximize the amount of time we can spend together. I gave up a tenure-track job so our family could stay together. We live a block from campus so we don't waste time in the car driving to and from work. We could move to a bigger city, but we would sacrifice at least two hours a day in drive time. I know many, many other academics (and non-academics) who sacrifice even more than that. 

But I also want to tell her that, in that moment, I wished we both had different jobs. Jobs that didn't pay my husband twice as much as I am making, even though we have the same qualifications and essentially the same job. I wished we didn't have a job that requires us to work 60-80 hours a week just to fulfill the minimum requirements. I wish that my work wasn't what is pushed aside in the name of the quest for tenure. I wish I wasn't stuck with the entirety of the "second shift" of cooking and cleaning. I wish I wasn't also left all alone all those nights (and mornings) that my husband has to go back to work. I wish weekends could be weekends rather than a negotiation of who gets to go to their office to catch up and which four hours we'll get to spend all together as a family. 

But I also want to be a good role model for her, show that I don't resent my situation, or that I am settling. I don't want to raise the proverbial "snowflake" and shelter her from the harsh realities (which really aren't that harsh). But, I also need her, at that moment, to go to bed and get some much-needed sleep. I am overwhelmed in that moment by anger, shame, and fear, none of it directed at her, but all of it so powerful that I almost start to cry in front of her. 

"I know you miss your Daddy. I miss him, too. And every night isn't like this, you know that. And, you know that Mommy and Daddy work hard to make sure you and your brother have everything that you need. We both love you very much. Daddy will come up and give you a kiss goodnight when he comes home."

I come up later to find her curled up with a picture of her and her father, asleep. I go back downstairs to try and work on my own teaching prep, my own grading, my own research, alone. I am grateful for everything we have: our health, our house, our jobs, our family and friends. I just wish I had a little more time to enjoy it, together.

Addendum: After I finished writing this, I was completely emotionally drained. My two-year-old son woke up early from his nap and we were able to spend an hour together, snuggling in his bed, reading together. Sometimes all it takes is just an hour. I still stand by this post, but today I feel a lot better than yesterday. 

Now You See It: Backward Thinking on Where Education Innovation Should Take Place

I'm in the process of re-reading Cathy Davidson's excellent book, Now You See It (here's my initial review). My Freshman Writing classes are done with Fahrenheit 451, and we're moving on to a more optimistic view of the future. This is (obviously) the first time I'm teaching this book, and it's going to be a challenge to come up with assignments both large and small to engage the students with the work. Not because it's a difficult book to engage with, but because it's new, and as Cathy Davidson points out, the new is hard.  

So much of the book resonates with me because I've actively sought jarring and unfamiliar experiences: I decided to not to attend an English university in my hometown on Montreal, instead choosing attend a smaller French university; I headed North and West to do my PhD; my first tenure-track job was at an HBCU (and as to why that's "strange," take a look at my picture). Even now, this Canadian city girl is in the middle of Appalachia. Every single one of these choices has forced me to confront my preconceptions and, as Cathy Davidson (and obviously others) points out, this disruption is essential to learning: "Learning is the constant disruption of an old pattern, a breakthrough that substitutes something new for something old. And then the process starts again" (5). 

(This, by the way, is going to be the "free write" discussion question I post to my students before we start any class discussion; how many of them have experienced that as a part of their education?)

I've always been restless. I need to feel like I'm moving forward, challenging myself, really learning. As much as I enjoyed my undergraduate experience, I knew that any job I took, any job that I was trained for, would bore me to tears, and that I hadn't really been challenged intellectually. Grad school, it seemed, held the promise of greater intellectual stimulation. But I am forever grateful for the Université de Sherbrooke for providing me with such a wonderful environment in which to learn. 

Sherbrooke started as a service city for a large and fertile farming area in south-eastern Quebec. The university itself, founded in 1954, in still one of the youngest free-standing universities in the province. All things considered, there was no reason why the university could or should evolve into one of the most innovative and dynamic universities in Canada. But it did. It's medical school, in 1987, moved to Problem-Based Learning, and now is cited as an example for other schools to follow. It's engineering school also works largely on a problem-based program. It always seemed strange to me that Sherbrooke was ranked in the "Medical-Doctoral" category (medical school notwithstanding) because the focus was so squarely on the undergraduate experience. 

My program was no exception. I was studying "professional writing" in English (yes, I went to a French university to study English). Our program was small, professionally oriented, but also one that responded not only to the needs of the job market, but also the needs of the students. We learned HTML and web design back in the mid-1990s. In an English program! I edited our small student newspaper, oversaw the birth of the online version (no longer available), and had lots of informal opportunities for translation. When a large group of students (from my year and others who were ahead of us) were voicing their displeasure about the program, I organized a meeting between the faculty and students to discuss the direction of the program. We were writing publicly in many of our classes before we even knew that's what we were doing.

I was lucky. While I was being "trained" so to speak for a profession (to be fair, multiple professions: journalist-editor-translator-web writer-technical writer), it was in an environment where we were free, in fact, encouraged to create our own jobs, our own profession. It was never hidden from us that, while jobs were almost a guarantee (this was during the tech boom), self-employment and being a freelancer was an attractive option. We were connected with alumni who had successfully gone off on their own. We were, as a small English program in a large French university, a community who worked together, took care of one another, and helped each other succeed. I loved that. 

I compare my undergraduate institution with the one that I am currently teaching at. The experience for my students couldn't be more different. And yet, this is a place where education should be on the cutting edge of innovation. The programs that most of our students major in (education, nursing, vet tech, engineering tech) are perfect for Problem-Based Learning and a more collaborative style. But, in a cruel irony, these are the programs that are most rigidly standardized and controlled by external (and internal) accrediting bodies. And in most of our other programs, we prepare students for urban, white collar jobs that just don't exist in our region. 

One expects cities to be the centers of innovation, but I think we need to look to rural colleges and schools for new ways to teach and learn. Scratch that, we need to liberate rural colleges and schools in order for them to better serve their students, providing for them an education that they can use in their communities, to improve their communities. But, we don't, in part because we assume that rural students are "less than" their urban (and urbane) counterparts. Those who can, leave. Those who stay...

This is, Cathy Davidson would say, an assumption that needs disrupting. Innovative, relevant, and enriching education can happen anywhere. Sherbrooke proves that. I want my students to prove that, too.

Efficiency =/= Innovation =/= Quality

I'm going off my blogging schedule. This might turn into a longer, more developed post for uvenus or elsewhere, but I need to write this and put this out there right now. While I'm angry. And reeling. 

Today on Inside Higher Ed, there was yet another post about disrupting higher education. Earlier today, I ran into a colleague who had spent the morning in another department, collaborating. "It's the theme of my semester" she exclaimed excitedly. I sighed. I would love to be more collaborative, more innovative in my teaching. But, I don't have the time. 

Professors are currently being (excuse my language) shit on for being luddites, inefficient, and unwilling to change. I represent the most "efficient" part of higher education; the non-TT instructor who teaches a lot of sections of a large course (not as large as some, but still pretty big considering I'm supposed to be teaching writing). I have limited professional development opportunities/funding (which is better than none at all, which is what many people in my position have access to). I teach five classes. 

I'm efficient. I've figured out how to efficiently grade 100-150 papers, multiple times a semester. That also means that I have to sacrifice quality. This is, obviously, a dangerous thing to admit. We're told we need to be more collaborative. But, when? All the free time that I have when I'm not teaching, preparing to teach, or grading? I've innovated one of my classes this semester, and I have to admit, my other classes have suffered as a result; they are more standard, more "canned" than I would like. Why? Because I don't have as much time to devote to them. But I'm efficient (even if the technology isn't). I'm just not very innovative and I know the quality isn't what it could be.

I want to use technology, but when I do, I find that it fails because the institution doesn't invest in the support needed to help me and my students. Pens and paper never fail. Last week, I couldn't do an activity with the students because the computers in the lab didn't have FlashPlayer (seriously) and wouldn't let anyone install it. "Innovation" is thrown about as a buzz word, and there are software packages being purchased and then "introduced" to us every day. But when do we have the time to learn about them and integrate them into our classes? For example, we upgraded to a new Blackboard version this year. When was it available? A week before the semester started. 

This semester, I haven't had time to breathe. If this semester has taught me anything, it's don't try to change what works because it's exhausting, thankless, and ultimately difficult to measure (which is of course what everyone wants). The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But, what if you decide to change what works? I was a good teacher before, why am I reinventing the wheel? There are few incentives, but also few rewards for changing how we teach. There's no time to slow down and think. 

I want to cry. I'm the model that apparently everyone in higher education wants to recreated: large classes, lots of section, canned delivery. Why? Why do we want to do that? I don't even want to do that. I don't want to be the model that higher education re-creates en masse, like McDonald's. Trillions served the same unhealthy meal, the same way. Sure, we all get to eat for cheap, but at what cost? 

What the hell are education reformers thinking? Innovation is expensive and time consuming. You fail more often than you succeed. But in this world, there is no room for failure. Efficiency is only good if quality doesn't decline. But what if the quality isn't where it could be? We're stuck in a death spiral when it comes to talking about education reform. I'm sick of it. So should you. 

Bad Female Academic: Admitting I'm Wrong

As someone who writes about literature (and pop-culture!), I know the value of re-reading (and re-reading and re-reading again). I've always been this way; any book or tv episode or movie that I love are often revisited time and time again. Sometimes it's because they provide comfort or familiarity during a time of crisis or volatility (hello, Muppet Movie, Star Wars, or Almost Famous!) or because they are so rich that they demand more than one kick at the can. But even now, I can still be surprised by what I have missed in works that I thought I was thoroughly familiar with.

I was re-reading (and re-reading) Nalo Hopkinson's short story collection Skin Folk for an essay I'm writing (the postcolonial body, in case anyone was interested). Anyway, in one story, "A Habit of Waste," the protagonist (a young woman of Afro-Caribbean descent living in Toronto) is revealed to have bought a new body, a thin white one. I highly recommend this story for anyone interested in the intersection of race, gender, and postcoloniality, and the story became the central part of my analysis for the whole collection.

As I was writing the essay (after having read the story at least fifty times), I noticed something I hadn't picked up before in all my other readings: the body that the protagonist buys is called a "Diana" type. Why had I not ever seen this before? Diana? Princess Diana? The remnants of the monarchy? The fairy-tale princess? In a story involving not one, but two Commonwealth countries in a postcolonial setting? Really? How did I not see this before? Suddenly, I was researching the image of Princess Di, how she is interpreted, etc (there was a Journal of British Studies issue devoted to her, among the hundreds of other peer-reviewed articles dealing with her image, legacy, etc). And now I had a whole new avenue to write about in this essay (which meant I had to sacrifice some of the other things I had planned to write about).

This week, in my FYC class, we are talking about the great dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. I wrote my MA thesis on dystopias, so I've been reading (and rereading) this book for over ten years. I've taught it in various classes at least ten times. And this week, during our discussion about the book and why the world Bradbury creates I realized something I never had before; Bradbury wasn't just making a point about books and education (the three things we need are things that have depth, time to think about them, and the right to act on what we've learned), but it is also about how society has fragmented, with people cut off from each other. Montag finds the strength to act when he connects first with Clarisse, then with Faber, and finally with Granger and the band of nomads. How had I not seen this before?

Of course, I didn't call attention to my revelation, simply including it as part of the discussion. Maybe I should have. Anyone who teaches knows that it's almost impossible to get students to read, let alone re-read anything we assign. The worst is when students ask me if they have to read something because they read it in high school already. I think I was afraid to say, hey, I just noticed this, because it might appear like I wasn't prepared or I didn't know what I was talking about. I could have let me students see my own learning process, a process that didn't end...ever. So many students, heck, people now decide on something (for whatever reason) and desperately cling to those conclusions. I need to remember to show my students that I am open to noticing and learning new things, that I am often wrong and that's ok.

As a young, non-tenure-track female faculty member, I often feel the pressure to make sure that my authority and expertise are unquestionable. But, they aren't. I'm often wrong, and I am open to learning from my mistakes, open to sudden epiphanies, open to changing my mind. That I was afraid to share those moments with my students when they happen isn't something I am proud of. This is one area where I need to work on being the baddest Bed Female Academic I can be. 

Bad Female Academic: My Bawdy Body

I'm currently working on an essay about how Nalo Hopkinson uses the (postcolonial, black, queer) body in her short story collection, Skin Folk. The female bodies in particular in her works, both short stories and novels, are very physical; they are pregnant, nursing, menstruating, eating, going though menopause, coming, and they come in all shapes and sizes, lovingly described. This element of her work has always resonated with me. In my research for my current paper, I came across the book Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing from Rodopi. One of the essays deals with the difference between "female" and femininity:

If femininity represents the socially acceptable, aesthetic side of 'woman-ness', then femaleness exposes its socially unacceptable, abject underside, the undesirable leftovers of existence. Thus, while abjection deals in the undeniably physical - the messiness of the body's materiality - so aesthetics traditionally shuns the corporeal in favour of the polished, pretty veneer of femininity. (267)

The essay uses Kristeva and goes through the ways women's (particularly girls on the cusp of or going through puberty) are policed. Good girls are sugar, spice, and all things nice (but, not allowed to be seen eating those sweet things). We smell good, we look good, we are clean and fresh.

I've never had a problem with being "female" so to speak. As a tomboy or growing up as "one of the boys," I never felt ashamed of the messiness of being female; it was just something that happened, like the messiness of being a male. Growing up with the boys and their locker room talk just meant, to me, that bodies and bodily functions weren't anything to hide.

Of course, I quickly learned how wrong I was and what the double standard was for me and my female body versus males and their bodies. But being feminine just didn't fit with my personality or my body. I loved to eat, which I could do when I swam almost 30 hours a week. One might be tempted to discuss eating as a substitute for...something I was missing growing up, but for me eating was a simple pleasure that I would not give up simply because it was "un-lady-like" to stuff my face with the boys after a long practice.

Things got especially difficult once I hit puberty and it became clear that I was, despite my best efforts, not one of the boys. I didn't and don't possess a boyish, athletic body. My femaleness became obvious, in fact, it became hard to ignore. It is one thing to be pretty and feminine (think Betty Draper on Mad Men), it is another when your sexuality is on display (think Joan Holloway on Mad Men). I'm a Joan. As the show observes, it is difficult for "Joan" to be taken seriously, and I learned that many, many times over.

Joan Holloway

Betty Draper

I am and will be forever grateful for my best friend at university. She and I shared many similarities (tomboys, Joan-esque figures, former athletes, distaste/discomfort with being "feminine"). We spent five years together as friends and later roommates, figuring out the balance between our female bodies and the feminine expectations of the world around us. I can still remember the times we got "dressed up" when we went out, putting on skirts or dresses and make-up. We were lucky that we grew up in a time when the predominant style was grunge, and thus we could wear baggy cargo pants and oversized plaid shirts, hiding those parts of our messy female selves while still rejecting the feminine rules we didn't want any part of. 

As we got older and moved on, we had to embrace at least some of the rules, particularly if we wanted to partially fit in at our chosen professions (she is a successful communications account manager). But we also figured out that we could be female and feminine, and largely true to ourselves. I miss her immensely because she was someone with whom I could be myself: messy, bawdy, crude, and honest. There was never any pressure to be anything other than who we were, no female pressure to conform, to be more feminine, less female. 

I still love crude, raunchy humor. I have to remember to watch myself, that I don't say too much about bodily functions, because I know that it's not "proper." But I still eat ravenously and unapologetically. And I won't hide the fact that I'm a Joan. I'm still more female than feminine. I hadn't thought of that when choosing the title for this series, but I'm glad I did. 

It is (still) all about the Money: Another Review of Higher Education?

I reviewed the book Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus last year (see here for the final review and a list of the other reviews; it was a six-part series). I recently received the updated paperback version that has some additional material, including a new afterward. Much of my criticisms of the original book still stand, but it hard for me not to recommend a book that says the following:

What do we think should happen in college? We want people to use their minds as they never have before, thinking about the realities and issues that strain their mental powers. They should be urged to be imaginative and inquiring, to take risks without having to worry about their transcripts or alienating their teachers. To quote a friend, colleges should be making their undergraduates more interesting people. Higher education is an ongoing conversation, created for students poised at adulthood, which can and will continue throughout their lives. (6-7)

These are some of the things I aspire to do in my classes, and so I think that while their hearts are in the right place, I still have some issues with the authors' arguments. For one thing, everything that is wrong with higher education is a microcosm (or, if you'd like me to get all literary on you, a synecdoche) of what is wrong with society as a whole at the moment: greed, exponential growth, exploited underclass, bubbles about to burst, blind faith, etc. Our students (and their parents) come in not wanting an education but a job and the security that comes with it. So we provide it. The government keeps providing loans, so we take them, both students and institutions. There is a disconnect between those in administration, those who are professors, and those who are off the tenure-track. Perhaps disconnect is the wrong word: massive craters of empty space is a more apt metaphor.

But I want to get back to a question I asked the first time around: How Much is a Professor Worth? Comparing salaries of professors is really difficult to do; depending on where you live, what you study, and the nature of the institution, salaries will vary wildly. So to celebrate the professor living in rural Oregon and their (comparatively) paltry salaries is a bit unfair to those professors who have to try and make a living in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, or any other high-priced center. But it also doesn't take into consideration the economic realities of professors today.

The authors rightly call for the end of adjunct exploitation, as well as the end of student loans as we know them. But, unfortunately, an entire generation of PhDs (and, one would think, the next generation coming through the ranks) have been punished economically by this system. Not only are we facing our loans (and the accrued interest), but we are also facing years of private debt accumulated over the years of low-paying adjunct work. To tell a new professor, you aren't worth it, is a further insult, not to mention ignoring the very real fact that the (apparently) inflated salary is not enough to meet the student loan demands, career demands, and life demands.

We are not coming from schools where tuition could once be easily financed through summer jobs, nor from generous graduate programs that allowed you to live and work on your PhD. And most of us aren't coming from economic circumstances where we have been supported financially by family. We come drowning in debt. And, as inflated as the salaries seem to the outside world, I'd like to introduce them to how much red ink is also peeking from behind.

I write this piece from experience. We are (thankfully, gratefully) a two-income household, both in higher education. My husband has a tenure-track position, while I am an instructor. Our combined salaries are really great-looking on paper. And yet, monthly, we wonder how we are going to make our student loan payments, our credit card payments, pay for our kids' preschool, and have anything left over for savings. If something were to happen to one of us, like so many other families, we'd have nothing to fall back on, no cushion to catch us.

You might be tempted to throw an accusation at us that we lived beyond our means, and that this is all our own fault, but we believed in the myth of meritocracy and that all would be well once the Boomers retired. Student loans are the gateway drug to credit card debt as grad students: we take on these debt because we have been told over and over that it is "worth it" and will be rewarded with the job of our dreams at the end of it.

The authors call on all of us to see ourselves as public servants. And that's fine, but more and more of the best and the brightest are leaving higher education because they can't afford not to. Until the whole system is changed, this is a reality that just isn't going to go away; it's only going to get worse.

Bad Female Academic: Shameless Self-Promotion

My blog recently hit 50,000 pageviews:

And, I accumulated over 2,000 followers on Twitter:

Some of my followers on Twitter asked me how I got to these benchmarks, and I have one answer: Shameless Self-Promotion. Good Female Academics are mild and quiet and work away at their jobs, hoping to get noticed, but well aware that any attempt at blowing their own horn will be met with derision and dismissal. Bad Female Academics put themselves out there. Repeatedly and persistently.

Don't believe me? Read the comments on this recent post on self-promotion for women in academia or this recent piece in the Times of Higher Education on self-promotion. It is unseemly and beneath academics to promote themselves in such a fashion, and even more so for a woman in academia. We might be mistaken as ambitious or loud. Or self-confident.

When I was about 12 or 13, I remember standing in the school's bathroom with my best friend as she ran through the list of things she wanted to change about herself. Then she asked me what I wanted to change about myself, the things I didn't like. I shrugged my shoulders and said that there wasn't anything I wanted to change. She looked at me and spat out, "Well, that's awfully arrogant, isn't it?" 

This is the message we're sent as girls and as women. To believe in ourselves is arrogant, unfounded, untrue. It takes an immense amount of confidence to put yourself out there, to promote yourself, to tweet your writing, to submit your name and your work for judgement and recognition. I believe that my work and my writing is good enough, maybe even great. And if it's rejected, I take the critique, integrate it, and send it out again. I blog as myself because if I want the recognition and respect, it has to be as myself.

My advice for reaching these milestones is just simply to take chances, to put yourself out there. Follow those people who you admire, engage them in conversation, tweet and retweet your work and theirs. Bring it their attention. Post your work in the comments of relevant blogs or articles. Look for both traditional and non-traditional opportunities, from going to conference in your field to submitting more traditional op-eds to stuff that really out there (I'm applying to SXSW this year!).

To use an absolutely sexist and negative term, be willing to whore yourself. How is that for a loaded expression when it comes to self-promotion?

Above all, be patient and be persistent. Be relevant and be accessible. Be open and have thick skin. Don't give up. Find a supportive network of people who will push you and encourage you and be honest with you. But above all, don't let that voice inside of you win.

It's my birthday today (August 14th). In the spirit of honestly, I'm 34. My world in nowhere near where I thought it would be, but I wouldn't change it for anything. I took a lot of chances, none of them I regret. I put myself out there and I don't regret it at all. I want to thank all of your for helping me be the best Bad Female Academic I can be.

No, a better one. Because shameless self-promotion isn't about just you; it's about being better because of the people you've reached.  

Bad Female Academic: Not Interested in Passing

(See what I did there? That's the second post in a row where I've come up with a clever title with two possible meanings, both in the traditional academic sense and in the socio-economic sense. Anyone? Anyone? Alright, I'll get on with it.)

When Dr. Crazy was talking about gender and class, she brought up the concept of "passing", or being able to move up and fit into a different socio-economic class. Women, especially, have been practicing this since, well, since there were marked differences between different groups of people implying an hierarchy.* I think if this Bad Female Academic series has shown anything, it's that I am not very good at passing myself off as a "traditional" academic.

But writing this series has forced me to look back at my personal history both inside and outside academia, and I've come to the conclusion that I have never really been interested in passing, and in fact now seem to be actively seeking out situations where it would be impossible for me to pass. 

Let me explain, and bear with me if we take a short voyage into my non-academic past.

In elementary school, I was the only girl in my class who didn't at least try to figure skate or do ballet. This was an offense punishable by being mean-girled for all of elementary school. I swam. I never hid the fact that I swam, nor was I interested in giving up swimming in order to "fit in." In high school, too, I wore my hideous swimming jacket as a badge of pride, marking my difference from the rest of the group. It was also in high school when my parents got divorced and I was suddenly thrust into a different economic reality, a reality that was much different from that of my friends. Swimming, while a welcome escape for me, was also a place where I didn't quite fit in, as I was one of the youngest and only girls. 

After a particularly difficult two years at a private CEGEP, where I decided that I couldn't join the socio-economic elite I was going to school with, nor did I have any desire to beat them, so I wore sweatpants for two years, I left to go to a French university. I knew I wouldn't, couldn't pass as a French person, but I didn't care. The impossibility of passing was liberating. 

After my PhD (where I probably tried too hard to pass, failed miserably, and was miserable), after getting married, after adjuncting while pregnant, I got my tenure-track job. At an HBCU. Once again, while pregnant. There was no hope of passing, in fact it would have been insulting and ignorant to even try. But I liked that. I had realized that letting go of the pressure, the desire, the desperation, to be something I wasn't, I learned more, was more open, and a better teacher. I wasn't wrapped up in whatever I needed or thought I needed to do, so I could focus on what my students needed me to be. 

Think about that for a second. If we just stopped worrying so much about what our colleagues or administrators or "the elite" want us to be, maybe we can be better teachers and researcher, actually attuned to what they need from us, and what we need from ourselves. 

Now, I am an instructor in the South. My accent marks me as different. And that's perfectly fine by me. Maybe by being myself, I can teach my students (and my children) that it's ok to be yourself and to be different. 

*I don't use the term "passing" without realizing that it is a problematic term; I've worked at an HBCU and I study Black writers, so I am well aware of the history of "passing" for African-Americans in the US. And even the fact that I have the choice to be able to pass marks me as being a more privilege position. And my apparent rejection of that privilege is also not unproblematic. I don't see what I do as "slumming it" but instead a conscious effort to do things differently. 

There are no words today, only action

I was all set to write a post about how we remain obsessed with the Ivies and those top, elite colleges, to our own detriment. And I'm not just talking about how families will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get little Jimmy and Suzy into Yale or Duke, but how we, in academia and the media, keep pushing these colleges as the standard, for better or for worse. Three items:

• In Forbes, Why Trying To Learn Clear Writing in College is Like Trying to Learn Sobriety in a Bar. College, of course, is limited to Brown, elite MBA programs, UCLA, and...that's it.
• In the Chronicle, Academic English is Not a Club I Want to Join (sorry if the link doesn't work or is behind a paywall). A little more variety, but still, big, public, elite, R1 institutions.
• In Slate, the response to William Pannaker's essay, a laundry list of self-important success stories from Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, and the Ohio State. 

Nothing from a regional state school (or community college). Nothing from a PhD from a less than elite program. Nothing about the variety of experiences that are found in higher education, from how English is taught to the experience of the workforce therein. 

And then, I read about an adjunct professor in community college who killed himself. 71 years old, history of depression, and all I can think is, did he not get help because he didn't have health insurance? And I remember reading about another adjunct who worked through his cancer treatments because he couldn't afford not to. He passed away from the cancer (sorry, no link; I saw it on facebook, in a private note, and I don't have permission to share). And how some are trying to create an Adjunct Emergency Fund. And. And. And. And.

So, I'm sorry if your experience at Brown and with elite MBA students isn't all that you imagined it would be; most of us are teaching our "mediocre" and "non-elite" students how to write quite well, thank you very much. And, I'm sorry I'm not the kind of role model you're looking for in English. Or, maybe I am, but you can't be bothered to meet me. Finally, I'm so, so happy that you're academic fairy tale has come true. Doesn't mean that it has for most people.

Ivory tower, indeed. 

For the rest of us, it's real life, and it's about time others started realizing that. Although, most people reading this blog already do realize it. Preaching to the choir. Now, it's up to us to actually DO something about it. I wrote this. I'll keep writing this. 

I need to figure out what else it is I can do. Because these words that I write, while reaching an audience, can only do so much. 

The Academic Elite: Who Are These People, Really?

So, class has been on everyone's brain lately. Not the kind of class that is about to start in less then three weeks (I really need to get on that), but the kind of class that involves money, social mobility, and how to properly "fit" into higher education. I want to start with a little bit of a roundup of recent posts that are either explicitly or implicitly about class issues. If I'm missing any, please let us all know in the comment. 

• I ask, in response to Pannapacker's original Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go post, Who Will be Our Future Professors? I explicitly address the issues of diversity in higher education given Pannapacker's advice.
• Mary Churchill and Mike Brown debate How Our Educational Values Reveal Attitudes About Class and Social Class and Critical Education. So much of what Mary has written has helped refined my own understanding of race, class, and gender attitudes in higher education, as well as sharpening my resolve to stop being silent about it. 
• Over at Speculative Diction, Melonie Fullick writes about how important it is that graduate students (and aspiring faculty) know their value, pointing out how much money and sweat equity a student puts into building a career in academia, and how challenging that is for students coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
• After Pannapacker hit the big-time in Slate, some hand-wringing about how successful and aware working-class PhDs are and how wrong Pannapacker is. And then, how those critics of Pannapacker don't take the issue of gender into consideration. 
• Worst Professor Ever shares her view on class issues in higher education, and then my own Bad Female Academic take on the whole thing (written before the whole Pannapacker in Slate thing blew up)
• Over at ProfHacker, they're asking about "fit" within academia.
• James B. Jones shared this book with me, Reflections from the Wrong Side of the Tracks. Yet to read it, but I'm really interested. 
• Kathryn Allan, over at her blog, also comments on class issues, which don't seem to be all that dissimilar in Canada: Refusing Polite Conversation.
• Finally, the essay that, for me, started it all. A professor at Dartmouth asks, At What Cost? Her story resonated with me because she's successful, but drowning in debt. Is this my future? 

Obviously, this isn't all that has been written on class issues in higher education, but these seem to have all come to head, right now, online and in real life, at least for me. Thinking about my graduate and teaching career, I have one question that nags at me:

Who in the heck are these people who are forcing and enforcing a very clear and distinct set of class values on us? Seriously? Who are they?

Because it's not the majority of people that I've met on my path to where I am right now. Maybe it's because I've never attended an "elite" institution, either as a student or a professor. Maybe it's because I self-selected the people I hang around with, naturally drawn to those with similar backgrounds to my own (my husband, for example, who is also an academic, is from the same socio-economic background as I am). Or maybe, like so much of what we believe about higher education, it's all just a massive ruse that we've been blindly perpetuating.

I still remember being put in my place when I was an MA student by one of my professors. I was commenting on a novel we were reading, saying that it was written for "them" and not for ordinary people (or something like that). She took great offense to that, outlining all of the ways she was not one of them, in terms of her background. It was the first time I really took a step back and looked at the people in front of me and around me. Now, we did have a professor who was a stereotypical professor, in terms of both his class and attitude, but it was only one. And, I don't remember one of my peers in the program who came from anything higher than lower-middle-class.

It was the same for my PhD. There was, again, one professor who was clearly "one of those professors" (he came from a very wealthy and influential family, apparently, and my colleague of mine was horrified when I revealed, no, sorry, never heard of them), but the rest of the professors were largely from working-class and immigrant families, as were my colleagues in the program. I've taught at four different universities in two countries and three states, and I have to say that the majority of my colleagues come form backgrounds similar to my own.

So why then does this obsession with class markers persist? Did we all get into higher education so we could be snobs? Really? And why do we keep requiring that aspiring academics perform tasks that we know they can't afford? Go to conferences, work for peanuts, receive little institutional support both before and after the tenure-track job. Take on more and more debt, shop at the right stores, live in the right neighborhood, go to the right shows, the right conferences, etc.

We're suffering in semi-silence. I can't believe that, despite all of these voices speaking out, we can't change higher education, if not structurally, then at least culturally. I refuse to meet certain cultural markers. I'm not good at "passing" (as Dr. Crazy writes about) and, judging by the comments and traffic my blog post has received, I'm not the only one who is either incapable, unwilling, or just plain burnt out about the whole thing.

I am serious, though. Where is this pressure coming from? Because, from where I'm sitting, there are more of "us" than there are of "them."

Bad Female Academic: Am I In the Wrong Class?

Throughout my examination of the pressures female academics face to conform in order to “make it”, and how I (attempt to) resist or break, or simply just don’t fit those expectations, it’s become increasingly clear that a lot of the issues surrounding being a Bad Female Academic isn’t just about policing gender, but it is about class (socio-economic) expectations. When I admit that I am loud or that I like to get dirty, I am essentially signaling a lower-class upbringing.

This is important when discussing the ever-nebulous issue of “fit” when it comes to hiring and tenure decisions. During one of my on-campus interviews, one of the faculty who was taking me around campus revealed that she had attended school in Southern California near where I was currently living. We got talking about living in SoCal; the traffic, the weather, our favorite beaches, local news, going to the Getty Museum, and the like. I made the mistake, however, of revealing that I listened to KROQ, a rock-alternative station. Their morning show, in particular, isn’t known to be very progressive when it comes to issues of sexism (they have an annual Miss Double-D-cember contest), racism, and homophobia. But, to me, they are hysterical, don’t take themselves too seriously, and often take-down the self-importance of Hollywood/L.A. And, I really like the music.

Obviously, the correct answer was that I listen to NPR or a classical music station. Even if I had lied and said that, it would soon become clear that I didn’t, in fact, listen to these stations when I would be unable to offer comment on that morning’s feature story. Honestly, I hate talk radio. I appreciate classical music, but need something a little more…invigorating to start my day. I grew up in a house filled with popular and rock music. We listened to music in the mornings, peppered through with the news (sports scores were essential) and funny bits done by the DJs. I’m not sure how much of it has to do with class, but there are certainly assumptions to be made because of my favorite kind of music and what I like to listen to on the radio.

But it’s not just what kind of radio I enjoy listening to. These expectations start to permeate every decision I make, especially as a mother.  I let my kids watch TV, even indulging in my daughter’s love of Disney Princesses.  I don’t have a nanny, but instead send them to preschool, and not one that is a Montessori. These are all revelations that slowly by surely leak out as I become more and more integrated in the community. Where one shops, what kind of food or clothes one buys, it all reflects a certain class expectation.

For example, I shop at Wal-Mart. This, in many academic circles, is a sin punishable by death, or at least a good shunning. But here’s the problem. I can’t afford not to shop at Wal-Mart. For groceries and basic necessities for the kids, it’s the most affordable option available. I would love to be able to afford to drive an hour to shop at Whole Foods, or the organic co-op, but I can’t. The student loan debts my husband and I have from our educations are taking huge chunks from our income.

Here is where class really comes into play. Those of us who had to go into a great deal of debt to get their PhDs often can’t afford to play the game of being a good “fit” or embodying the non-academic values of higher education. I want to take my kids to the symphony or the ballet, I want to sign them up for culturally enriching opportunities, and not just because of the societal pressure of my job, but I can’t afford to. And that inability to pay can be interpreted as refusing to teach my own children the proper “values,” thus calling into question my “fit” in an academic setting.  We are also often the same people who came from a lower class to begin with, meaning that all of those “free” symbols of class that come naturally to some aren’t obvious, comfortable, or authentic for us.

When we talk about diversity in academia and what it means to be a “good” academic, we can’t forget the economic privilege that exists for those who have long set the rules as to what it means to be a Good Academic.

(Worst Professor Ever and I must share a brain, or at least be on the same wavelength; while I was writing this post, she published "You Stay Classy, Ivory Tower!" I encourage you to read her very similar reactions to the class expectations of higher education. I think the more voices we have talking about this very real issue, the better.)

City Living versus Country Livin'

(I know, it's late, and a bit off topic compared to what I've been writing about lately. It's Friday, it's my anniversary, and this was lying around on my hard drive.)

I live in the country. Technically, I live “in town”, but when the town in question is only about 6000 people and in the middle of a National Forrest, I think I can safely say that I live in a rural area. We are an hour from any real city, but even the cities we are close to aren’t large urban areas. To say that living here has been an adjustment for me is an understatement.

I grew up in the suburbs of Montreal. Downtown was only a bus and metro ride away. We had sports teams, museums, a symphony, concerts, shopping, restaurants, ethnic neighborhoods, everything. I’ve also recently lived in Southern California, with everything that involves. I loved having relatively easy access to just about anything and everything I could ever want.

And by relatively easy, I mean, willing to put up with the traffic to get there.

There are certainly advantages to living in a rural area. Real estate is much more affordable; the house and lot we just bought would be unattainable for us in any urban area. We live only a short walk from campus, meaning we only own one car and use it sparingly. Parenting isn’t a full-contact sport here. There is no competition as to who has the best stroller, whose child has the latest and greatest cognitive development toys, and who got into which (obscenely priced) preschool. I don’t have to worry about over-scheduling my kids because there is only a limited amount of things I can sign them up for.

Which is a disadvantage as well. My kids both love dancing, but there aren’t any classes offered for their age group, unless I am willing to drive an hour each way.  Perhaps a parent more dedicated than myself would make that drive, but two hours (and the gas) are a luxury we can’t really afford right now. I miss having options for just about everything: food, shopping, entertainment. While at a recent conference in Toronto, my mouth watered as I walked passed restaurant after restaurant, offering cuisine I just don’t have access to anymore and seeing posters for events I know my family (or just me) would adore.

Finding things for us to do here is also a lot more work. I am used to being able to just simply look online for schedules, directions, pricing, and other information. Here, most local businesses don’t have a website, and the city website is equally unhelpful and usually out-of-date. Here, if you want to know what’s going on, you have to buy the local paper and make friends with the locals. Not that that’s a bad thing, just something that I am still trying to adapt to.

We feel pretty fortunate, however, to be living (and working!) where we are. There were no waiting lists or tests or sky-high registration fees to get my kids into the best preschool here in town, which they both adore. The schools here are good, and, although not tremendously diverse ethnically (the entire state we live in isn’t very diverse), there is a great deal of socio-economic diversity.  It’s been hard to “break in” to the social circles here (we are city folk, after all), but we’re making inroads and starting to feel like a part of the community.

It hasn’t been an easy transition, but I can see the changes in myself when I do travel to the city for one reason or another (mostly conferences). I feel more at home when able to ride on public transit, more comfortable around people speaking different languages, more excited by all of the opportunities, cultural and otherwise, that the big city offers. But I also recoil at the site of the giant, impersonal high-rise condo that seem to be springing up everywhere and disgusted at the price. I am more grateful for the slower pace here, grateful for the fact that my kids can be kids here, and I can be myself as a mother. This place may not have been our first choice, but it’s now home and home for now.

Grad School for All?

Worst Professor Ever alerted me to this New York Times article about how the Master's degree is the new Bachelor's degree. I posted my response on her facebook page:

I have to say I was more than a little flatter that William Pannapacker (aka Thomas H. Benton from the Chronicle) liked my response. And WorstProf wrote an absolutely hysterical Onion-esque response: "Education Secretary to Today's Youth: Stop Getting So Many Fucking Degrees." I do want to expand on my facebook comment, because it does reflect on how the economics of the universities are getting more and more screwed up.

I've written before about the economic realities of getting PhD, especially in the humanities. But what about from the other side, from the perspective of the universities that are increasingly offering MA programs. Faculty, particularly at public universities, are seeing their salaries if not get cut, then certainly decrease in purchasing power. One way to appease faculty is to create graduate programs; it's like a perk! Smaller classes! Better students! More prestige! Never mind that it's actually more work to recruit and retain these students, not to mention mentor and supervise them. From the university's perspective, they're getting the faculty to do more work for less money. And, the added prestige of graduate programs. Win-win.

Actually, it's a win-win-win. Grad students are cash-cows. You can charge more for grad programs (even though they aren't hiring any more faculty, or paying the current faculty more) and they'll pay. Plus, you can then use the grad students a cheap labor, working on campus, for professors, and maybe even teaching some of those pesky intro classes that no one else wants to. And did I mention the prestige? Rankings love grad programs. 

But does the student really win? It keeps them out of the work force longer, usually will end up putting them further into debt, and makes them over-qualified for many of the jobs they may want. And, for the most part, this will benefit the same students who are benefitting from a BA anyway; the wealthy and upper-middle-class. Applying for graduate school is perhaps even more difficult and complex than applying for university. And even more expensive. To get into the best graduate programs, you have to not only be outstanding, but also know the right people. It's a big circle jerk, and those who benefit are those who have always been a part of it. 

And do the professors really win? Soon, College Misery will be devoted not to the under-qualified and entitled undergrads, but to the under-qualified and entitled grad students that the college accepts because of the money and prestige. The MA will be the new BA, insofar as students will feel entitled to their degree on the basis of having a) been accepted and b) paid for it. The best and the brightest will continue to go to the "best" schools, while everyone else will move from one mediocre program to another. You'll be able to say that you supervise grad students, but at what cost? 

To reiterate, I hate it. We're fooling ourselves within the academy into thinking that what we are doing is in the name of social justice and equality, when really we're just providing excuses to governments and corporations to compress salaries, benefits, and cheapen our students' educations, not to mention out own value as academics. 

Bad Female Academic: Slightly Progressive Parenting

My daughter was physically precocious when she was little; she was crawling before she was six months, walking by the time she was ten months old. She also loved to climb and would scale the jungle gyms at the park meant for children much, much older than she. It also meant that I had to be on the lookout for a tiny person who didn't understand that it wasn't a good idea to crawl right off the edge of the highest point of the structure. She dug for bugs, rolled in mud (well, sand, as she loves the beach), and generally challenged herself to any and all physical challenges. 

Imagine my surprise the day we were in the store and she lost her mind over a princess shirt. 

This wasn't a Disney Princess shirt; it was pink and sparkly and had a picture of a girl with a crown on it. I had no idea that she even knew what I princess was. She didn't go to school, and at this point didn't really have very many friends who could teach her about princesses. We were very careful about what she watched on TV, and while I own a lot of the Disney Princess movies, she had never shown any interest in them. But that day, something took over my daughter, and she became obsessed by all things princess. She was barely two years old.

My son, on the other hand, can't pick up a stick without turning it into a weapon. He hunts dragons, kills bad guys, and imagines he is a super-hero. He dreams of owning a dump truck and a motorcycle. 

My last post about being myself, I mentioned that it was hard for me to allow my daughter, in fact, both my children, to be themselves. As a professor (ok, instructor) in the humanities, and a feminist, it grates on my nerves that my daughter is all about pink and sparkles and princesses. I worry about my son's "aggressive" behavior, but at the same time, try not to come down to hard on either of them. They are being themselves. It would be hypocritical of me to punish my daughter simply because she enjoys different things than I did, just like it would be to punish my son for liking (ironically) the same things I did when I was little (seriously, I dreamed of becoming a part of G.I. Joe). 

Being an academic, I am supposed to know better. If it wasn't hard enough to be a mother in academia, it's hard to be a mother who isn't perfectly progressive in every way. A recent post, How to Remain Sane Among Alpha Moms, really struck a cord with me because it reminded me of so many academic women, both mothers and non-mothers, who judge the parenting of their colleagues, judgements that bleed over into decisions of whether or not to hire or award tenure. I let my daughter play princess and my son play superhero. I let them watch movies and TV shows...from Disney. 

But my daughter also imagines herself as a superhero and wants her own motorcycle. She still loves to climb and is much more physically adventurous than my son. My son calls all of his stuffed animals his "babies" and is always taking really good care of them because they are "sick." I try to embrace all of the facets of their personality, the ones that are engendered and the ones that appear transgressive. I want them both to be whatever they want to be. If that's a "pilot and a mom" (as my daughter says), then so be it. 

The Mysteries of the Administrative Structure

In light of the recent firestorm over the new book: The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, I'm posting this today. See the discussion going on at Inside Higher Ed.

This post originally appeared on So Educated. 

"How will the Emperor maintain control without the beaurocracy?"

"The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line"

"What of the Rebellion?"

In higher education, we are currently in the midst of an elaborate game of whose-to-blame. When the economy was booming, faculty didn't seem to care what the administration was doing, even as the number of contingent faculty rose while the amount of tenure-track lines decreased. Grad students were funded, technology was being put in place, and shiny new buildings were attracting the best and brightest students and faculty. But now that the economy has tanked and cuts are being handed out left, right, and center, the faculty are rising up with fingers pointing at the administrators for all that ills higher education. Administrators (and some members of the public) are quick to lay blame on "lazy" and over-indulged faculty for their high salaries and low productive output.

Let's be honest; we're all to blame. Administrators and faculty. We, as faculty, have remained purposefully ignorant of the inner-workings of our institutions. We stare in the face of the bureaucracy and shrug our shoulders in a collective act of defeat. What can we do, we ask? It's too big, it's too powerful, and we're just a lowly professor. And professors show little to no interest in becoming a part of the administrative structure in order to change it. Administrators are increasingly professional bureaucrats, not academics. The two worlds are existing simultaneously within the same institution with seemingly very different missions and priorities.

But when we say we blame administrators, do we really know who we are blaming? Our chairs? Our deans? Our president? What about the mountains of layers of administrative structure in between? Do we know how budget decisions are made within the institution? Do we understand the process, or just the results? We grumble at the shrinking budget numbers and lines, but do know how to change them?

Professors are increasingly losing their voice in how their institutions are run. Faculty members who have unionized are finding that their institution punishes them by removing them further from the administrative table. And while the few professors who are left rightly complain about the amount of administrative tasks/committee meetings they are expected to participate in, I wonder if it isn't just busy work that has little to no impact on the big picture and just gives the illusion of participatory governance, hence my example above from Star Wars. What if some overly-ambitious university president or board decides that it is cheaper and more expedient to eliminate much of the bureaucracy, meaning meetings and committees? Fear would, in fact, keep the professors in line, much like it already does, fear and ignorance.

But what of the Rebellion, that tiny band of idealists who manage to take down the all-powerful Empire? So far, there doesn't seem to be any real effort or ability for faculty (all faculty, on and off the tenure-track) to come together and form some sort of concerted effort to rebel against what we perceive as the dismantling of higher education. We cannot organize ourselves to counter from without, and we steadfastly refuse to change it from within. So we remain fragmented, hopeless, and ignorant.

Ironic, isn't it.

Bad Female Academic: Being Myself

Ben Folds, who is probably my all-time favorite musician, has a song from his first album (with Ben Folds Five), "Best Imitation of Myself." The song opens with the following verse: 

I feel like a quote out of context
Withholding the rest
So I can be for you what you want to see
I got the gesture and sound
Got the timing down
It's uncanny, yeah, you think it was me
Do you think I should take a class
To lose my southern accent
Did I make me up, or make the face till it stuck
I do the best imitation of myself

That seems like a pretty good description of how we try to be as academics, especially women. We mould our research interests into a project that pleases our supervisor. We then contort ourselves in cover letter after cover letter in an attempt to fit what we divine a department is looking for from a brief job description. If we're lucky, we dress in identical power suits (and, apparently, we'd best make sure they're suits that match), and we try to fit ourselves, our research, our goals, and our values, to a hotel room of people in 30 minutes or less. Or we try to read the myriad of faceless voices at the other end of the phone in order to convince them to fly us out for a campus interview. Then, if we do get a campus interview, we spend up to three days, from the moment we get on the plane to the moment we're finally safely back home, playing the role of ideal future colleague. If, by some miracle, we get hired, it dawns on us that we have to at least try to keep being that person who was interviewed. We also have to bend ourselves according to the wind and will of the department, faculty, and institution in the quest for tenure.

I'm exhausted just writing about it. But if you're not convinced, here is a little Twitter conversation that took place in regards to a piece in the Chronicle on how inter-faculty conflict is your fault:

I think that sums it up quite nicely, don't you think?

The most liberating thing that has ever happened to me was giving up my tenure-track job and ending up as "just" an instructor. I am now free to do whatever research interests me, rather than what I think will lead to tenure. As I am now place-bound, I'm not stressed about the job market or trying to be what I think people want to see. Even living in a small town has its advantages; there's no hiding here (there's also little competition for my job). For the first time in a long time, I'm truly free to be myself.

But this quasi-rebellious streak isn't new. I've always made contrary choices (I prefer thinking of them as the road less traveled) when it comes to my education, in large part because I was searching for a place where I could be myself. I chose my dissertation supervisor because she allowed me to do the research and work that I wanted to do. Career-wise, that may not have been the wisest choice in the short-term, but what it did do was allow me to develop confidence in my ideas and my abilities. Miraculously, my first experiences teaching were ones that freed and empowered me to develop my courses myself; they trusted me, and I was able to be myself and discover my strengths in the classroom.

But my dirtiest secret is how I "won" my tenure-track job. I figured that the hiring cycle had finished. I had dozens of phone interviews, three on-campus interviews, and no job offer. We had just moved to larger place, my husband had just started receiving benefits from his job, and I found out I was expecting again. Because I had been working at my current teaching position for three years, I was eligible for a small, paid, maternity leave. When I got the call for a telephone interview, I just figured it would turn out like all the other phone interviews I had done. But it didn't matter because I had the next academic year figured out. So I didn't sweat the phone interview, and I answered every question as myself instead of trying to give them the answer they wanted. Imagine my surprise when I got the job.

Writing this blog, writing for the University of Venus, doing these Bad Female Academic posts have brought me so much joy. If anything, it's really reinforced the idea that who I am, who I really am, is okay. In fact, it's better than okay. It's fantastic. Even if we're living in a time of supposed extreme narcissism and unearned self-confidence, somewhere along the way, women (and especially women in academia) are told over and over again that being self-confident and self-assured in who we really are is unattractive, undesirable, and needs to be broken. To a large extent, writing these posts (and the response they've received) has helped "fix" me back into who I know I am.

One of the biggest challenges, however, is trying to pass that lesson along to my daughter. Especially when who she is is so different from who I am.