Sympathy for teh Basement Cat: I has it.

Like some middle-aged dude with fading tattoos on my sagging, dough-like nether regions, I’ve been trying to get the band back together. Well, not quite. What I’ve actually done is send out an email to a group of my former undergrads, now strewn about the nation’s grad programs, great and, uh, not so great (and I’m not talking about elitist gossip reputation rankings). I’m personally on a hiatus from the conference circuit, but the sorta-recently resurrected Calls for Papers (CFP) list is busting out all over with tantalizing conferences and special issues devoted to books and authors I’ve taught to some really astonishing young people—young scholars.

In graduate classes, I have students blog their responses to the reading and subscribe to their classmates’ blogs using a RSS reader. Since each student’s work culminates in a seminar paper that responds to a CFP that I strongly encourage them to send in for real, I also require them to subscribe to the CFP list’s RSS feeds for the specializations my class involves. And no, I don’t go all geezer-like on them about the good old days when CFP was a listserv, and announcements would drop in my e-mailbox. My grad students are also pretty good about getting off my lawn without my yelling at them to do so.

(source: icanhascheezburger.com)

Most of my former undergrads are, however, not my grad students. Despite my hellfire-and-brimstone diatribes about grad school and the job market—complete with a followup email that contains a link to the Chronicle’s forums for the distraught and disgruntled—and my disabusing them of their notions about how “nice” their professors’ lives seem to be, they persisted, I happily wrote references, and they enrolled in grad school. They don’t complain about how hard the work is, how poor they are, how unlike undergrad grad school is. They had been copiously warned, and they know better. Besides, professors do have nice lives. It’s just that, like anyone else’s life, our lives also involve a lot of things that are not nice. And those tend to be not nice in the extreme.

Anyway, by pelting former students with announcements for conferences, anthologies, fellowships, and so on, I’m trying to give them an advantage. It is very likely that I’m guilty of the pre-pre-professionalization Flavia provocatively described last month. As much as this worries me, the students I’m referring to have already come to the Dark Side, where I can’t be sure their current departments are looking out for them. One of my former students, for instance, sent his applications in late when his father died after a long illness; despite my and my colleagues’ protests, this student enrolled in a program that is not funding him in the first year. I wish such young people had taken less precarious paths.

A person can live a life of the mind outside of the academy. In fact, the professionals I know outside the academy seem to have more time and leisure to do so. They’ll go to a play or a gallery exhibit, then read about and debate with people like me what informed these these clever, cultured things. Plus they earn more. My non-academic friends, acquaintances, and siblings are not the rule, I know. My former undergrads also know this, and they think they are seeking something more meaningful, such as the ability someday to spam their future former undergrads, tempting them with opportunities for not-fame and not-fortune. Thus says the pot to the kettle, Pleased to meet you. . .