Effing ment-al

After a long, pretty fabulous teaching day, I have returned home. I’m braising kale to make me feel virtuous about the pizza I’ll be consuming with it. Tomorrow’s classes are prepped. But I am vexed, and this is not the post I had intended to post tonight. I am that vexed.

Sitting in the “Drafts” folder of my office e-mailer is a message to my dissertation advisee. The message contains an attachment, which consists of my version of his project proposal. It’s a dozenth draft, maybe more.

I hate (and yes: I do mean “hate”) that most of this advisory relationship has been conducted via e-mail. I’ve told him repeatedly that I can’t be sure that he understands what I’m talking about, and he cannot make his intentions known unless we discuss his work in person. But because he’s never available when I am, and I’m just overcommitted this term, we seldom get to meet, and my “advising” defaults to tedious e-mail. This is not what I signed on for as a mentor, and I had signed on with great—perhaps impolitic—hesitation.

My advisee sometimes reminds me of an undergrad. For instance, when I press for clarification or more information, he just deletes the “problematic” sentence or phrase on the next draft, without any apparent awareness that the new lacuna now creates a non sequitur. The proposal is now tons better and more compelling than it was in October, but the process has been excruciating. For one thing, I’m stuck in the office well into the evening, writing comments that will be ignored half the time. I feel like a dry cleaning service for prose, except my “customer” doesn’t even bother to drop off or pick up his loose-and-baggy laundry physically.

I’m sure I’m not the only one frustrated with this arrangement, which probably feels like Chancery Court, while I seem less like a dissertation advisor than a Dickensian villain. If my advisee has ever read Dickens, there’s probably a version of his dissertation titled “Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce with Sadistic Advisors” somewhere on his hard drive.

Whatever it’s called, we absolutely need to get this sucker approved. However, I don’t see an approval happening any time soon if I continue to let the student figure stuff out for himself. I often suspect it would be a lot easier if I just wrote the damn thing myself.

So. For the latest iteration of his proposal, I have completely dispensed with the “Comments” feature on Word. No. Instead, I treated the proposal as if it were something I wrote. I cleared out all endless concatenations of throat-clearing prepositional phrases and “impressive”-sounding but unexplained, under-explained, and misused theoretical buzzwords. I’ve inverted sentences into active voice and created transitions between sentences. I’ve rearranged paragraphs. I’ve performed a colonectomy on his title, which ran to three lines (despite one-inch margins). It’s now down to one line, descriptive and allusive but not too precious.

The revision took me about twenty minutes, and it looks pretty good. I’d sign off on it. Of course, very little of my advisee’s work remains in this document; indeed, very little of the project is original to him, anyhow. But how different is that from other people’s dissertations?

On the other hand, even if it did not totally demoralize my advisee, my aggressive, wholesale revision would set a horrible precedent, which would result in my writing this student’s dissertation.

For this reason, there’s another message for him in my “Drafts” folder: a reply to the effect of “This is coming along. Let’s discuss it during my office hours this week.” During that meeting I’ll tell him everything that needs changing. In short, I’ll try to get him to produce the version attached to the other drafted message. I may fail. Indeed, I may not be cut out to mentor Ph.D.’s. The process is driving me mental, not least because concerns like this proposal become pressing.

Gentle readers, which message shall I send?

$19.99!

That’s how much my most recent free dinner with a job candidate will cost me. I am elated, since this is the least I will have ever spent on dinner with a candidate here. By comparison with last year—when I spent $98 on an otherwise unmemorable salad and some random excellent cheese, for example—I have become a financial wizard who has decreased her deficit by almost 500%. I learn fast. It is a research degree, after all.

Like many schools clawing their way to greatness, my university runs a lot of senior searches. Being single, childless, and untenured, I am one of my department’s go-to hosts for dinners with candidates, since of course I can’t possibly have anything better to do with my evenings. Even if I did, it isn’t as if I could say no and risk being perceived as less than a team player, though participating in searches doesn’t count toward service. Also, my university is public, which means a lot of byzantine formulae governing reimbursements. And because our state legislators are pious folk, my school is prohibited from paying for alcohol.

However, senior candidates are not your timorous garden-variety ABD candidate. No, senior candidates know what they want, and, among other things, they want their booze. As their gracious hostess, I’ll pay for their martinis, and I’ll like it. Nor will they be those cheapass $7 martinis, because we want to impress our candidates by bringing them to the poshest eateries Funky City has to offer. Good thing for the state that it can’t pay for alcohol. Even better, it will pay up to only $30 apiece for the candidate and the host, for a maximum reimbursement of $60. Those who meet the candidate for dinner but are not hosting don’t get reimbursed. More often than not, I’ve been in this role, which, because I met so many of my colleagues over such meals, I see as just paying it forward. It can be a lot to pay forward when, at almost all the places we book for candidate dinners, main dishes start over $30. A senior candidate will not order such items. And how tacky would it be to deny such an eminent scholar a starter or dessert?

So it should be pretty obvious how I came to spend $98 on a salad, when the state was picking up the tab. Picture it: January 2007. To help woo a gray eminence, our admin books us at a restaurant that Sallie Mae would never let me choose for myself. We are met by one of my senior colleagues. Like me, the candidate likes spicy food, which pairs delightfully with sparkling wine, so we order a bottle of blanc de blancs. For her entree, she orders some exotic fowl prepared in a vaguely Thai manner. A more attentive glance at the menu reveals there are no entrées on the menu for me, so I order the house salad with a bunch of omissions. It is one of those places. Over a fabulous cheese plate, the three of us hit it off like a house on fire. (Good thing we had that cheese plate, or else I would have had to have dinner again after I got home.) When the check arrives, I pay it. We continue chattering, and then my senior colleague exaggeratedly asks for the check. When I quietly reply that I’ve already paid it, and that we could reckon up later in the week, my colleague starts fretting about wanting to put the meal on a credit card because of “cash-flow problems.” To quiet my colleague and to prevent a bad impression (I know I would think twice about accepting an offer at a place where tenured faculty have cash-flow problems) I shrugged it off: “You can treat me next time.” Naturally, there hasn’t been a next time.

In eleven months, I have grown so much wiser—not to mention luckier—since. It was just me and the candidate, who apparently doesn’t drink. The check came in a little over $80. I won’t be reimbursed until 2008, but, as I said, I’m elated. In fact, I’m gonna party like it’s $19.99, but not until the reimbursement comes in.

So not Schadenfreude

In the course of a modern, nomadic academic career, one accumulates a set of far-flung, long-distance friends who used to be colleagues. Either that or I’m a special kind of loser who, in person but not via telephone or e-mail, has been alienating people at one non-tenure-track appointment after another. OK, just humor me.

When I’m catching up with those who still work for my former employers, the gossip tends to stream in one direction. I know whom and what they’re talking about, but JPU and la dolce vita here in Funky City are pitifully unworthy of gossip, so I talk about me me me. It’s a fair exchange. And by the way, we look just like the pictures above, even the men, except we’re more scantily clad and surrounded by elegant, book-lined walls. What? You say academia didn’t make you glamorous?

Anyway, yesterday I was delighted to get a call from a tenured buddy at a SLAC where I used to work. (Its administrators insistently compared it to Williams, so I’ll call it Notwilliams.) At Notwilliams, smug and anxious self-aggrandizement goes on as usual. Those who drank the Kool Aid are still under its influence. The rest are on the market, it seems. Same old same old. But one item of gossip has me speechless, so I’ll just have to blog about it—in silence, of course.

When I arrived at Notwilliams as a Visiting Assistant Professor with my brand-new Ph.D., one of the first people to welcome me was another VAP who had been hired as a sabbatical replacement two years earlier, but who was so beloved among the students and so useful to the department as to be retained for a third year. This colleague has been renewed every year since—until now.

Last fall, Notwilliams ran a tenure-track search in this person’s research area, but wound up hiring someone more exotic, with a degree from a much posher place and a long list of publications (most of which I find dodgy, but no one asked me). The new hire’s profile is just so much fancier. Printed up in Notwilliams’s spiffy catalogue, it will impress the wallets off the parents ponying up $45,000 per year to keep Snotleigh IV in beer. Moreover, the dizzying distinctions on the new hire’s CV will surely propel Notwilliams to greatness, maybe (gasp!) even a top ranking in U.S. News. Real Williams, watch out!

After five years of being so visible, so dependable as a VAP, my former colleague was kicked to the curb, to start over as a VAP at a much larger, substantially different kind of school. Though we socialized pretty often, I never knew this colleague at all well, but I did pick up on the exhaustion of always performing the role of Colleague You Want to Keep Around.

I could have been projecting, since Notwilliams was the most difficult place I have ever worked. I’m sure my problems had much to do with adjusting to faculty life and managing my first full-time appointment. Then there was also the precariousness of “visiting,” which produced no small amount of anxiety. However, I found the (justified) expectation among the students that faculty were there for constant hand-holding to be the most trying part of the job by far.

Could the demands of Notwilliams have accounted for my rejected former colleague’s modest publication record, irreparably damaging this person as goods in the academic marketplace? It’s impossible to say. Having served on search committees, I would have found this person’s CV an easy call: someone with a Ph.D. dated 2002, one article in a decent but niche journal, and one short online publication is far behind schedule for tenure and would pose too great a risk for us. Next!

Thing is, when I was not chosen for version 2.0 of “my” job at Notwilliams almost three years ago, well, that sucked. The interviews and the hire-me! collegiality they necessitated absorbed a disproportionate amount of time and energy. And to this day I’m not even certain they were not courtesy interviews. It was somewhat comforting that I started with a large cohort of VAPs, almost all of whom were jettisoned after one year, some not even interviewed for the longer-term appointments for which they had applied. We are scattered all over the place now, with disturbingly few on the tenure track.

For us, however, the sting was quick. We’d been there only a year. Actually, by the time our betters were hired, we’d been there only a little more than a semester. If we felt like Dead Professors Walking, we also commiserated and found strength in the cliché that success is the best revenge. I want to call my former colleague and say what is in this rambling post, to say, “There, there, everything will be alright.” But if this person told me to fuck off, I’d understand. Rejection after such a long time—after such devotion—must feel like a tenure denial or a divorce from someone who refuses to work things out and is seeing someone else, anyway. No, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do know it isn’t Schadenfreude: oh, there is plenty of Schaden, but the Freude? I’m still working on that.

A post I’m not proud of

Next week, on a day when I will be on campus for thirteen solid hours, meeting in conferences with students, teaching classes, and attending that other type of meeting, the chair of another department has thought nothing of compelling me to meet the new hire in her department. This new hire has no family in or near town and is reportedly so miserable that her work is being affected.

Of course, since we (well, I) have only just wrapped up back-to-school week, I’m a bit skeptical of how much damage the new hire’s homesickness can have done. On the other hand, I keep hearing people invoke Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and citing vague references to studies that report how students make up their minds about us in the first thirty seconds of class. Well, in that case, I can just phone it in the rest of the semester, because my first week’s classes rocked. Yeah, I’ve had the dismaying experience, too, of having a class turn on me after a rousing start. What do you think of that, Mr. Gladwell?

But, as usual, I digress. My first reaction to my senior colleague’s request—which was really a demand—was resentment, since I’d been careful to describe my schedule that day. My resentment soon resolved itself into jealousy for this new hire, whose chair is so concerned about her success as to set up a play date with a playmate who’s being run ragged by work.

As I’ve written here, my adjustment last year was surreal in its awfulness. I too didn’t know anyone in town. Hell, I didn’t even have anywhere to live when I arrived, because my apartment was being belatedly bombed for bugs, because the exterminators the management company hired didn’t do the work before I moved in, as they’d claimed. My chair and many members of my department were aware of my situation, but no one particularly cared about my adjustment. To pleasantries about how the move was going, I’d straightforwardly reply that I was living in a hotel because my apartment was so infested that termites had eaten the bottom clean off of a box of books my movers had delivered in my absence. And this was not the only horrendous detail of my move. There were variants on this response, none of them drawn-out or self-pitying. People would mutter, “Wow, that’s awful. Good luck with that.” Perhaps the problem was that I would always follow up my gruesome anecdote with humor, or go on about some exciting lesson or bit of research I was working on. Accentuate the positive, you know. Was I feigning cheerfulness too convincingly?

So I wonder, if I got through last year’s horrors, why can’t my new colleague in an unrelated department (well, I guess all departments are related, since I met the chair while working on a committee) figure it out for herself? For a moment I regretted not having bought a t-shirt that said, “Fuck you, I already have enough friends.” Never mind that I don’t wear t-shirts in public, and never mind that its sentiment is not true for me or, I’d guess, anyone. (And by the way, I didn’t buy the t-shirt because it contains a comma splice, so I certainly wouldn’t be caught dead in this one.)

I understand that I’m being childish, that moreover I feel like a neglected older child jealous of the attention being lavished on a new arrival and resentful of being obligated to look after someone who didn’t usurp me in the first place. There the analogy breaks down. I guess people who’ve been around awhile feel the same about how new hires always get paid more, get better research support, teach fewer classes, etc., just so the university can compete for decent candidates. Everyone thinks they had it harder back in the day.

At the same time, I am aware of why my colleague chose me out of all the smart, accomplished women among the junior faculty on this vast campus. I haven’t figured out how to blog about this, but I’m genuinely baffled that people here see me as some kind of rising star. Perhaps naïvely, I really never paid much attention to my reputation, and I am genuinely surprised by what I’ve heard, particularly from the people who make the decisions here, since until I get tenure I’ll remain convinced I’m a fraud.

The other reason she called on me probably has to do with the personality I’ve learned to perform. I’ve blogged about how nonsensical and inconsistent Meyers-Brigg temperament sorters have been for me. Yet the first letter of my “type” is stubbornly consistent: “I” for introvert. Out of professional necessity, I’m one of those painfully shy people that everyone thinks is an extrovert with a big, flashy personality. They don’t understand—and I think wouldn’t believe me if I told them—that I find meeting new people extremely stressful.

I dread the meeting. I dread the day. After all, how do I know that the new hire isn’t some psycho whom I’ll never shake off? On the other hand, she may be just like me, which just might be worse.

Foucault’s bundt pan, or, the logic of selling out

Like millions of academics around the world, I am scrambling to publish at least one Least Publishable Unit by summer’s end. Like most humanist academics, I’m also trying to make headway on something less Least—namely, a book manuscript.

Though I say so myself, the project I’m working on has decent prospects as a (sotto voce here) trade book. The topic is crazy accessible, the organization downright gimmicky, with primary texts ranging from contemporary fiction and film to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ equivalents of pop culture artifacts. When I started working on this project in grad school, one of my buds, who’s now professorin’ in the Rust Belt, declared it “the book that will get you tenure and sell at Barnes and Noble.”

I like to think so, but as I draft it, I must acknowledge that such a result is (like, duh) easier said than done. To play it safe, tenure-wise, I’m targeting university presses exclusively. The editors I’ve chatted up have been superbly encouraging—I puffy-heart them all—and at least one has remarked on the book’s “crossover” potential. I’m not naïve enough to be shocked that university presses are businesses that would welcome a title that sold more than few hundred copies, to people who aren’t buying on behalf of a library, but I can’t help being concerned about the potential consequences of a trade book on my immediate career.

I’m pretty certain that I would regret not pursuing this project to its gaudiest, Oprahfied (well, maybe not) potential. My next project, which I’ve been inflicting on the conference circuit, might also appeal to a wide readership, but, by comparison with the current project, is decidedly academic. And then there’s the matter of my writing style. Academese has gotten so entrenched in it that I am no longer capable of writing accessibly. For me, at any rate, the academic/trade binary is an either/or, not a both/and.

Now, no more than five people will ever read my first book, the one that my dissertation became, so I guess it has the proper sort of cultural capital. But the fact remains, I don’t have tenure, and it would be stooopid hubris to try to go up early. In any case, I do not want my chances jeopardized by even the perception of frivolity. At the moment, Jumbo Public University seems happy enough with me. The powers that be might even welcome publicity from a book that sold at Barnes and Noble. Anything to raise the school’s profile. But it’s always possible that they could tire of me and use the lite book to justify 86-ing me. Likewise, while I appreciate (and am often humbled by) the lengths to which JPU has gone in effort to do well by me, and I can imagine spending the rest of my career here, I do have a wandering eye, of which I’m not altogether guilty. If something better comes along, how portable is a trade-y book?

And in the spirit of portability, I should get ready for a day at the coffee shop, where I will grind this movie and that novel through some Foucault. Shouldn’t be too hard, since I’m likely to be surrounded by donuts, bagels, maybe even a bundt cake. Good thing the coffee shop itself doesn’t resemble a panopticon, unlike the tenure and promotion system.