Tag: post-ac

academic twitter

On By professorneverIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Yesterday, I saw someone had tweeted “I love academic twitter!” This got me thinking about the various twitter communities we belong to, and the way we can reinvent ourselves in them—or play different roles in them—as much as they play different roles for us.

I have two twitter accounts. One is my @professornever account which I’ve used to connect with other academics, postacs, and writers. The other is my @smallhousedeb account. I’ve hardly used it in the last year (so I’m sure my followers are dropping like flies), but the account follows twitter liberals from the UniteBlue movement, leftist news organizations, and people interested in locavorianism (I guess that’s a word now), yoga, meditation, cycling, and other stuff I think is cool.

My @smallhousedeb (SHD) account is a very different animal than my @professornever (PN) account. The former is full of people networking and socializing around politics and personal interests. There is a lot of reciprocity, humor and snark. The latter is full of people who are connected by profession. There is a palpable self-consciousness on academic twitter. You can feel the weight of administrators, colleagues, and students listening in. How ironic since tenure is supposed to set you free!

As a result of this professional stiffness, there are a lot of conventions on SHD that don’t appear to exist on PN, primarily around the idea of reciprocity: #FF (Follow Friday), where people recommend other accounts to follow on Fridays. Tweets that say: TYFF (Thank you for follow), TY for RT (thank you for retweet), TY for fave. There is also an imperative that you RT what you fave. Oftentimes, these niceties generate more conversation around a given topic—and in their small way cultivate a sense of community and belonging.

The biggest difference between my PN and my SHD accounts, however, is the FollowBack (FB). In my SHD world, the objective is to network, share ideas with like minds and build up your account. If someone follows you, you FB. If you don’t, they unfollow you—and they use tracking software like JustUnfollow to find you! Those exempt from the expected FB include institutions, journalists, and celebrities.

The FB happens much less often in my PN world.

My first day on PN, I searched for humanities academics and followed about 30 that appeared to have similar interests to mine. I have to admit, I was excited just reading their profiles: people studying American literature, childhood, cultural studies—all things that had been dear to my academic self. The one thing that’s still hard about postac life is losing that community of like-minded intellectuals. Maybe I could connect with these people and talk about books! Then I went off to tutor for the day. When I got back, I logged onto PN, eager to see the activity on my account.

Two people had followed me back.

So I learned quickly that it is much harder to get FBs on PN. I’m sure there are a number of reasons, but I imagine at least one must be competitive spillover from academic culture in general. My experience in academe was that everybody wants to be a thought-leader, not a follower. In my heady academic days, that included me. And what easier place to see a manifestation of your thought-leaderness than by watching your follower-count sky-rocket on twitter—especially if your following-count is low. But if all academics on twitter want to be followed without following back, then…you get the picture.

Of course, I could be wrong about all that and the problem was just that no one wanted to follow me!

And to be clear, lots of friendly interesting affiliated and unaffiliated academics have ended up following me. And I appreciate that! But I don’t know that I’d call the community I’m in “academic twitter.”

But it is definitely something different from SHD. In writing this, I realize how much more buttoned up I am on PN than I ever was on SHD. No snark. Not a lot of politics. No convivial TY for RT messages. And a lot less humor. That sounds god-awful boring.

But it’s not. It’s as if I have two rooms I can walk into, depending on my mood and what I feel like talking about. And while the PN account sounds like less fun than SHD, it’s the one I’ve spent most of my time on in the past year or so.

What I ended up finding through PN, which I never anticipated, was a community of adjuncts and scholars still fighting the good fight over adjunct labor—with many making the decision to leave. I started PN (the blog and the twitter account) expecting to talk about literature while throwing a few plugs in about my memoir, but I’ve ended up talking about my status as a long-time post-ac—a term I didn’t even know existed before I started the PN blog.

This has been a huge value to me even though the fact I left academe so long ago makes me somewhat of an outsider for this crowd too. But I have been grateful to be privy to the experiences of others who have decided to leave their academic lives because I never had that shared experience when I left. Without social media, I lost touch with my old grad school friends—I only know of two who got jobs. Our isolation from one another bred shame and silence. Watching the events of #NAWD over twitter yesterday showed how social media can generate the opposite of that. Which was pretty darn cool to see.

So I guess I’d qualify that tweet I saw the other day (can’t remember who said it!**). I don’t know that I can say I love “academic twitter” so much as I love twitter in general—for its power to bring people together, and for its versatility.

I just wish it wasn’t so addicting!

(If you want to read about my initial twitter addiction, here’s a silly post from several years ago called twitter haze about how twitter took over my life when I first joined. I’m (usually) much more under control about it now!

**It was Jennifer Polk from @fromPhDtoLife. And of course she loves it – she is always so positive about everything – and she’s great with a FB too!

the perfect job: life after academe

On By professorneverIn Uncategorized14 Comments

If you’re leaving academe feeling despair because you’ve missed out on the “perfect job,” never fear. Of course you know this, but I’ll tell you anyway: there is no perfect job. Even today’s professoriate suffers a variety of hardships: bigger classes, fewer raises, increased pressure to publish, a customer-oriented culture that emphasizes entertainment over education, and the biggie for me: the moral quandary of working side-by-side with an ever-growing force of underpaid contingent laborers.

Still. Perfect job or not, leaving academe is hard. Figuring out next steps can be even more daunting.

More than likely, the job you do right after quitting academe will not be the one you want to do forever (mine wasn’t). Perhaps you take it because you have to pay the bills now. Or perhaps it’s the only thing that comes along. Or perhaps it falls into your lap and you don’t know what else to do (me).

Whatever the reason, just remember first, that nothing is permanent and second, that your work doesn’t define you. The culture of academe suggests the opposite, heaping judgment on those who work outside the academy, but once you get away, the echo of those voices will quiet.

Looking back, I can see that each of my jobs has brought together a different balance of the same four things: financial need, ability, interest and time. As these factors have changed over the years, so has my work.

Here’s what that has looked like:

After graduating from college with a B.B.A in marketing, I needed to make enough money to buy a car and move out of my parents’ house. I also wanted to show just how high a woman could climb on the corporate ladder: to the top. Then I discovered the mind-numbing tedium of corporate life. With so little invested in the purpose of my work, I found the days soul-suckingly empty.

After four years in an otherwise good job (great boss, good pay, challenging tasks), I couldn’t take the boredom anymore. In pursuit of something more creative and less bound by the mandate I spend eight consecutive hours behind a desk, I quit and enrolled in an M.A. program. I thought perhaps I’d get a writing job, or teach. While in school, I supplemented my husband’s income by working a variety of jobs: part-time nanny, full-time office manager, full-time marketing assistant. Instead of the upward mobility I’d originally sought, these jobs offered a low-stress 40-hour week that left me with time and energy for my studies.

During the M.A., academic work seduced me into striving for a professorship. Where money had been a driving factor behind my corporate job, in academia I saw an opportunity to do intellectual and creative work, earn respectable pay, and work varied hours. Also, where corporations promise upward mobility and increased salaries, universities promise prestige. I can’t say I wasn’t enticed by that.

By the time I started the Ph.D., I had a 6-week old baby. I quit the office manager job to attend graduate school full-time and stay home with my son. After a year, I got funding and worked as a TA making $12,500/year. Because we could scrape by with that and my husband’s salary, I was lucky to graduate with minimal debt.

When I graduated, my kids were 7 and 3. I was exhausted, and we were broke. Of course, the only job I could get was an adjunct job paying $2,500/class. I took it because I felt I had to teach while on the market for a tenure track job. As a parent, childcare becomes a major work priority. Since the adjunct pay was so low, I couldn’t afford to hire a childcare provider, so I only taught one class per semester.

After three failed years on the market, I decided to quit for several reasons: 1) The adjunct work was unsustainable: I couldn’t parent, publish, present, network, write job letters and teach all at the same time—especially without funds for childcare; 2) I saw quitting as a form of protest. I did not want to be part of the adjunct problem. 3) Between parenting and academe, I’d had no life for years. I was tired; 4) Both of my kids had special education needs that required extra attention and patience, but all my time with them felt stressed and rushed; 5) Our growing family had gotten more expensive—I needed to make more money.

Also, my daughter became ill about this time, requiring I be more available at home. After so many years of putting career before family, my priorities changed again. I turned the tables and put career last, becoming a tutor for students with dyslexia.

One year, I taught college students about intertextuality in African American literature. The next I taught 7-year-olds how to spell “cat.” On the university’s prestige-o-meter, I’d fallen far. But I didn’t have time to care.

Tutoring was a flexible job that paid me the most money for the least amount of time. With just a 10 hour work week, I earned $2,000 per month. That’s almost as much as I made in an entire semester teaching one class at the university. When I upped my hours to 14 per week, I made over $30,000 per year for part-time hours.

Even better, I was deeply invested in my students and in literacy (a subject not unconnected to my training in literature). I was good at it. I worked in and out of my home, made my own schedule, and had no additional grading/prepping. For a time, the work was intellectual. I attended conferences, learned about the brain, opened my eyes about education in a way that all my own formal education had ironically never done. I didn’t expect it to hold me forever, but in the moment, it was the perfect job.

This brings me to last year. As of then, I’d been tutoring for nearly a decade. My daughter was much healthier and on the brink of middle school. The memoir I’d been writing off and on for years still languished on the back burner. Despite a good hourly wage, my part-time hours limited my overall income while cost of living had increased dramatically. Intellectually, I knew tutoring full-time would be tedious, so I decided it was time to refocus on my career.

Figuring out my next step over the past year has been another difficult transition. After much soul-searching, I finally decided that, in addition to the need to increase my income, my main priority is still: time.

When I started out in business, I was very ambitious. I never set out to get rich, but I did set out to make something very respectable of myself: the status of a corporate executive, the prestige of a university professor.

But tutoring young people in this most basic skill of literacy has humbled me. I didn’t get famous or rich. I didn’t make a bold feminist statement about women and work. I didn’t impress anyone with my credentials. Instead, I made a fair wage while truly changing the lives of my students in great leaps and bounds. And while I did that, I settled into a simpler life.

Between my work in special education and my daughter’s food allergies/sensitivities, I’ve learned a lot about the ills of processed food and big agriculture. Consequently, we are locavores. Since I make my own schedule, I can shop at farmers’ markets, cook fresh food, put my hands in the dirt of my garden, avoid traffic and save gas by riding my bike for short errands like the grocery store and the bank. I can meditate after lunch—sometimes. There is a rhythm to this life that I can only call spiritual. A nine-to-five schedule would disrupt that. It’s not that I don’t want to work a 40-hour week, it’s just that I want to pick which eight hours of the day to work (I work best late at night). This need goes all the way back to my dissatisfaction with my first corporate job, so I feel like it’s important to listen to it—if I can.

Consequently, in this next leg of my work life, I’ve decided to supplement my tutoring by increasing the freelance writer/editor work I’ve been doing in bits and pieces for years. If I can do that from home, I can manage my own time. So far, I have several regular clients, so it looks very promising.

I remember one of my advisors discussing her past work as a “copyeditor.” She practically spat the words when she said them. I shared her judgment at the time. How ridiculous that seems to me now. My intellectual life lives on not only in my continued interest in literature, but in my interest in food, the environment, education and the brain—and in the kind of writing/editing I’m qualified to do. It’s my life that defines me, not my job. As a “copyeditor” (no spitting), I hope to fit my job around my life and interests, which at 47, have grown more important to me than professional status or prestige.

That is the plan, for now.

My point in detailing this zigzagging career path is to show how career aspirations and employment needs/opportunities can change over time. While some of these transitions have been extremely difficult for me, all of my jobs have enhanced my understanding of myself and the world around me. All have been steps to the next thing.

If the transition from academe finds you adjuncting, waitressing, pushing papers in a job you hate, or if you’re otherwise unhappily employed, know it is just one step on the path—not an endpoint. While there may be no overall perfect job, the one that pays the bills today, or keeps you from sitting home feeling lost, may be the perfect job for now.

So, if you’re on this post-ac path with me, the best advice I can give is to forget the judgments of academe, do what makes sense for you now, and see where it leads.

post-ac in a book club?

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I read an excellent book last week: The First Rule of Swimming by Courtney Angela Brkic.

The novel tells the story of a postwar Croatian family scarred by war, the terrors of Yugoslav Communism, and the familial rending of emigration. I loved it for its haunted characters, for the way its vacillating narrative flattens the space between past and present, for its sense of place on Rosmarina, an imaginary island so visceral that it becomes its own character, and for its study of an intergenerational community that, like the island itself, glistens and sustains, even as it oppresses.

I can thank a friend and her book club that I read this novel at all. By coincidence, I’d seen it weeks before in the bookstore where I didn’t pick it up because the jacket whispered “romance novel” in an unfortunate misrepresentation of the richness inside.

I have never been a member of a book club. In fact, I remember ridiculing such clubs as a graduate student. While I’m embarrassed to admit that now, I’m not surprised I fell into academe’s elitism as a young student eager to prove my intellectual worth. Eventually, those feelings dissipated and the teacher emerged. As a teacher, especially of learning disabled readers, I value any group that encourages people to gather in pursuit of their literary interests.

But does that make a neighborhood book club a good home for an ex-literature scholar like myself?

So far, I haven’t thought so. If I were making my living through literature – as a writer, a critic or a professor – and I interacted regularly with a professional literary community, then perhaps it would be fun to also read literature more casually with a group of friends, family members, or neighbors. But as an ex-academic, the prospect of a neighborhood club as my only outlet for discussing literary interests has always sounded demoralizing.

Consequently, I’ve drifted for years somewhere between communities of casual and professional readers–alienated from one group by training and the other by lack of affiliation.

It’s not all so terrible as it sounds. As I’ve discussed in how I lost and found my love of literature and independent scholar? not so much, until this year, time and energy for significant amounts of literary or scholarly reading have eluded me anyway.

For this one day, however, I sat in as a guest in the unfamiliar territory of a book club because my friend had invited our writing group to come and meet the author. It was a privilege to speak with the lovely Brkic and hear about the heritage and family that inspired her novel. I also enjoyed the group’s discussion of characters Magdalena and Jadranka, two sisters working through very different relationships to their Croatian community both at home and abroad.

Afterward, I found myself thinking about exile and community, and I couldn’t help but let my thoughts wander to my own exile as a literature Ph.D., made more keen by my participation in the group that night. In the loosest sense, post-acs make up a diaspora of our own: scholars scattered to the wind, isolated from each other and alienated from our academic roots in the university.

That’s a little dramatic I suppose, and hardly the wrenching struggle that Brkic describes, but still it’s an interesting way of thinking about post-acs because it suggests we should connect with one another to preserve and cultivate our common interests.

In the spirit of fostering that kind of community, I’d love to hear comments from others who have read The First Rule of Swimming (and I encourage you to read it!) or other works, fictional or not, about postwar Croatia and its diaspora. I for one intend to read the author’s memoir, The Stone Fields as a follow-up to a novel that peaked my interest about a culture and history I know so little about.

the art of complaining: an adjunct’s dilemma

On By professorneverIn Uncategorized6 Comments

I am a terrible complainer.

But I should clarify.

I rock when I’m ranting around the house about my kids’ messy rooms, fraudulent insurance companies or environmental desecration. But the complaints of an adjunct? This is a different and more difficult thing to do. If you hope to persuade your audience of an injustice that you have personally suffered, you’ll be better off if you can make them trust you, empathize with you…like you. Otherwise, they just might blame you.

Before starting my memoir in 2004, I read Ghosts in the Classroom, a collection of essays about adjuncting published in 2001. I thought it was an important book, giving voice to a subject that, at the time, was shrouded in silence.

Still, taken together, the essays wore me out. I didn’t doubt the stories of hardship and loss. I empathized with the writers, and I wanted the message to get out, but despite that, I found the barrage of negative experiences overwhelming. I knew better than to blame the writers for their predicaments, but I wondered, would readers outside the academy be so generous?

How do you tell a miserable story without making your reader miserable? Without inviting blame?

I saw this as the challenge of my memoir–a problem I set out to avoid from the beginning. To do so, I decided I would tell the story of the whole person, not just the adjunct. I would pack the hard knot of my adjunct misery in a box padded with personal and palatable things like motherhood, marriage and my passion for graduate school.

By making myself real, I would illuminate the university’s exploitative labor practices without sounding like a whiner.

While I’m confessing silly little fantasies, I should admit I also told myself that I would keep a positive face while adjuncting–that I would view it as a temporary situation to be observed and commented upon, but not internalized.

You know where this is going.

I didn’t get through the opening paragraphs before face-planting on each of those ambitions.

The thing is, I couldn’t see it. Over the years, the writing and editing of this book has occurred in isolation, in the narrow spaces that opened between tutoring, parenting and grant writing. That changed when I got into a writing group this past year.

And the crux of the feedback is: I’m a lowdown dirty rotten complainer. A griper. A whiner to the Nth degree.

How the heck did that happen?

These are my long-held first paragraphs, the ones I just cut. I wrote them in my communal office during my first day on the adjunct-job nine long years ago:

“Here I sit, in my office. My first teaching gig since the Ph.D. and I can’t silence the voice in my head: “don’t be cynical, don’t be cynical, don’t be cynical.” Rather than come across as bitter and negative, I feel compelled to wow people with my resilience. How deep did I dig to find that wellspring of optimism? Impressive, isn’t it, how I can make good from the bad; how I am professionally and personally gratified by the essence of teaching, how I can rise above the pettiness of my employment status? But a coffee stain lies splattered in a sheet down the wall next to my desk. It’s brownish, amorphous and large. Maybe it’s not coffee? I note other, darker droplets that resemble blood. Not blood, I’m sure, but even so, when I look at them, I feel a thickness in my throat. Revolted, I turn away, but they lure me back like a crumpled car on the side of a highway.

I could clean the stain off the wall—obviously. But I think of this as more of an experiment than a job—I’m not really employed here, am I? I fathom myself an observer—an anthropologist of sort—curious about this culture of part-time work that has grown like unwelcome algae in the Petri dish of academia. My research questions: how long will that stain remain on the wall? Do the custodians ever come in here? Will an over-zealous co-worker scrub it off in the enthusiasm of his or her first day? Or will it just fade away like the occupants of this office?

My eye follows the brown trail down below my table and the voice in my head makes way for bitter words like irony, hypocrisy, exploitation…cynicism. And there it is. What a goddamned disappointment that is.”

The crazy thing is that I was surprised when my writers’ group asked me why I was so bitter on the first day.

“Bitter?” I said. “Which part was bitter?” I thought I’d started off like a firecracker.

Then I reread it through their eyes and it looked quite different to me. Way more negative than I ever intended.

I had a few days of crisis after this revelation. Workshopping a memoir is a funny thing because critique of the writing can so easily feel like critique of the writer. We’re not talking about made up characters here. We’re talking about a real person with real feelings, and as the case may have it, real bitterness.

Was I just a negative and miserable old curmudgeon, dissing my work before I gave it a chance? And was this my persona in general? Complaining about my kids’ slovenliness? The dog smell in the carpet? Fracking? The Tea Party? The botched roll-out of Healthcare.gov? Was it all just me?

Time to take a step back.

I separated myself from the critique, but in saving myself, I couldn’t save the writing, which on closer inspection had enough whine coming out off it to make my dog howl.

I considered the advice of my writing group. They wanted to remove all of my lovely and bitter turns of phrase, all of my biting criticisms, all of my damning judgments. Things like: “I knew the university would treat me badly. What I didn’t know, was that I would begin to treat it badly.” I had cherished that line. (And how clever for me to figure out a way to share it with you here).

While I saw their points, I felt frustrated by my original question: How do you tell a story like this without alienating the reader? I could feel my neck getting hot as we discussed it around our computers because some of this felt like the old totalitarian pressures of grad school that dictated we take everything with a smile. No one said it out loud but as a graduate student I knew: never let them see you sweat. No doubt this pressure lay at the root of my feeling that I should “wow people with my resilience” as an adjunct.

I had to remind myself that my writing group didn’t want to silence the story, they just wanted me to tell it in a way that didn’t make readers hate me.

I needed to complain and be likable at the same time.

Part of the problem is my personality. I don’t have flair. One of the “characters” in my book answered almost every one of our adjunct dilemmas with a laugh and a flippant “fuck that!” which only made me like her more. Why couldn’t I be brazen and shocking and charming?

Instead, I’m so…serious? reserved?

Whatever it is, I can’t change that shock-value complaints don’t work for me. I’ll never be that person who makes you laugh with the F-word, so I have to find another way. As I floundered around, one member of my writing group said, “get rid of all the value judgments! Just tell your story and let the reader decide.”

That is some brilliant advice.

Readers don’t want to be told how to feel about something, they want to be inspired to draw their own conclusions.

So I’m back at the drawing board. So far, I’ve excised all of the opinions, ruminations and condemnations from the first quarter of the book. I cut everything from that opening section but the story of the coffee stain, which I rewrote.

I feel liberated, like I’m uncovering something shiny from under a heavy pile of dead leaves.

How ironic that after years of teaching my students to “show don’t tell,” I’m finally figuring out how to do it myself.

let the train run: on quitting and regret

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Are you a post-ac waiting to happen?

I have to admit, I don’t envy anyone standing on that precipice. The decision to abandon academe remains the most difficult of my life–one marked by distress over the years spent, grief for the future lost, and resentment for the few who succeeded.

So many questions: had I wasted ten years of my life? Had I tried hard enough? Would another year make a difference? If I left, how would I reinvent myself? What would happen to my scholarship? My intellect? Me?

All of those questions haunted me, but only one question terrified me:

What if I changed my mind?

At any time, if I choose, I can add or drop students from my tutor schedule, give up vegetarianism, repaint my house, divorce my husband. I can even pursue the business marketing career for which I trained twenty-five years ago.

But I cannot return to the ivory tower.

Quitting academe was like jumping off a fast train. I fretted that as it careened into the distance without me, I would realize my mistake. With my research molding and my connections dissolving, I would wonder, “can a person catch a fast train on foot?”

If the idea of banishment from your life’s work has you paralyzed somewhere deep in the library stacks, I can offer you this one bit of comfort:

I have never felt like chasing after that train.

Not once.

And I am not someone who has settled easily into a new career.

My decision to quit came at a time when my kids needed me more than I’d anticipated. To better contend with the challenges of ADHD, dyslexia and specialized diets, I decided to work as a tutor. It paid well and it allowed me to be more available at home.

After years of sacrificing family for work, I didn’t mind turning the table for a time. I knew that I wouldn’t tutor forever. I knew my children would grow, and I would want more.

Now, with the kids clamoring up to the edge of the nest, it’s time to reinvent myself again.

Of course I get occasional pangs for the academic life I could have led. But those are different from the deep and unsettling regret I feared.

The thing about “changing my mind” that I never considered during all those agonizing months of indecision: I can’t sit around wishing I’d kept something I never had. In other words, going back would mean returning to a job search, not a job.

I have no delusions that more time on the market would have brought success. I quit in 2006, a time when my rejection letters claimed I’d competed with 400 other applicants for the job in question. From what I hear, things only declined after that.

By the time I left the market, I had grown weary of the futile sacrifice of family and self. I could no longer see the logic of working for pennies. I had begun to reject the idea I should feel small despite my many accomplishments.

Since escaping those dilemmas, I have never second guessed myself. After all, who ever looked under the sharp edge of a boot heel and asked, “How can I squeeze myself back under that thing?”

So, if you have found yourself in a similar place, I can tell you, don’t be afraid to get out from under, make the leap, and let the train run.

independent scholar? not so much

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Over the last winter holidays, my son and husband went to Florida for a soccer tournament. I stayed home with Olivia, enjoying a week of rare quiet. The weather, with its curtains of grey, asked us to stay inside. My students, happy for a holiday break from tutoring, asked me to stay home. And Olivia, having just turned 12, asked me to give her some space.

By chance, I had just bought a book, The Renewal of Cultural Studies, edited by Paul Smith. It caught my eye first because the contributors include two of my former professors, but the subject also intrigued me. It addresses the apparent need for Cultural Studies scholars to regroup: to better walk the tightrope that would define the underlying assumptions of their discipline without succumbing to the rigidity of those assumptions. I wonder if a self-consciousness about that conundrum, set out so early in the work, isn’t itself the definition of how to do cultural studies, but regardless, for me, the work promised a review of the current state of the field. I was curious. What had transpired without me?

When I left the academy seven years ago, I did it with the intention of continuing my research. I thought maybe I’d even be an “independent scholar.” I wonder if we all tell ourselves we’ll do this, or if some people walk away with the intention of never looking back, never ever cracking another academic book. I thought I’d regularly browse the CHE; I’d subscribe to a few choice journals; I’d read selected texts.

Nada.

Well, I do read the Chronicle, but I admit there was a chunk of time where I couldn’t even manage that. I threw myself instead into researching dyslexia, ADHD, and anxiety so that I could better assist my kids as well as my students. I spent hours in the kitchen learning how to cook gluten/dairy/egg-free from scratch for Olivia. I found myself again writing into the wee hours of the morning, this time racing to meet grant (instead of academic) deadlines.

Depending on my mood, reading scholarly work felt laborious, frivolous, luxurious, or even ridiculous. I didn’t have time for any of that. Without the professional imperatives to publish or teach, I couldn’t make that kind of reading a priority.

What really surprised me, however: when I did try to engage with things academic, I found the reading to be painful and isolating. I had been trained to weigh in, either as a student, as a teacher, or as a writer. Without a classroom, a reading group, or a research project, I had no where in which to express myself.

I discovered that I had been silenced.

Yes, technically I could have written papers for journals and conferences, but realistically, for a mother of school-aged kids with two unrelated part-time jobs, that wasn’t happening. For all intents and purposes, I had lost my academic voice. The voices of others, ringing out in classrooms, in journals and in books, simply reminded me of that. Their ideas prompted questions I couldn’t ask, reactions I couldn’t offer, revelations I couldn’t share.

I couldn’t take it.

So I turned my back, happier to pretend those voices didn’t exist.

I don’t know what prompted me to do it, but I started poking around on the internet last fall to see if anything new and interesting popped out at me. That’s how I came across The Renewal. Soon after purchasing it, the circumstances randomly arose which gave me the time and quiet I needed to actually read it.

I sat, just as I always used to, curled in the corner of my couch with a cup of tea, and cracked the binding. I didn’t expect to have a voice anymore. I didn’t expect to weigh in. Instead, I read with the distance of the curious, a thing afforded me, I suppose, by the years that had passed.

I admit, however, that I cringed when I got to the chapter written by graduate students. I could so easily imagine their glee at the coup–their names would appear in an anthology! But really, my envy dissipated quickly into a sort of sickening feeling for them. Perhaps they will become professors who benefit from fair and satisfying working conditions. Perhaps they already have. Regardless, that’s not the case for most grad students, and I know all too well how quickly the victory of publication, which feels so momentous when it happens, can dissolve into irrelevance on a hypercompetitive job market.

So yes, I am still capable of these unhealthy feelings, but my gratitude that the JIL doesn’t concern me anymore ultimately won out. I shut the door on the weird combination of envy and pity that stood, arms folded, on my stoop and simply read their piece and others with a burning interest I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I didn’t get to hash over the essays with anyone. In fact, I didn’t even finish the book. The holiday passed, Steve and Gareth came home, schedules took over. Although The Renewal sits hopefully on my nightstand, it’s not the book I choose when I stumble into bed at midnight after helping Gareth with geometry homework or reading with Olivia for an English project due the next day.

No, I don’t choose it. But you know what? I don’t shelve it either.

I am no longer an academic. I have never been an independent scholar. But I am still an intellectual. I just live in the real world where these scholarly endeavors that can light me up so consistently, feel oh so much like a privilege I still cannot afford.

what’s in a title?

On By professorneverIn Uncategorized11 Comments

Since I quit adjuncting seven too-short years ago, I haven’t had much need for a title. I’ve worked as a grant writer and as a tutor, primarily as the latter. My tutoring business grew quickly through word of mouth, so I found myself already barring the door and screening my calls before I ever had a chance to set up a website or offer anyone a resume.

As I’ve begun to develop an online presence in recent years, however, I’ve had more and more need to describe myself in writing, especially as various websites and publications have requested short bios.

Even though a bio can be an important means of introducing yourself, it’s not the same as a resume. Meaning, it’s not the best place to list your various degrees. Bios can be brief, direct, quippy, and clever; they rarely trespass on the verbose.

When people want the short version of a story, they want the short version of a story. Meanwhile, that’s not something I’ve ever excelled at. It’s taken me 80,000 words to describe what happened to me in the university. In one hundred words or less, how do I say that I came alive in the language of literature, that literary and cultural theory gave me the vocabulary I needed to make sense of my own thoughts, that I have a gift for teaching that the university helped me develop, that I excelled in my classes, published my research, and earned high marks from my students, but that the university is corporate and greedy and misguided about education, and that I gathered all my courage to leave what I loved because I didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole with it?

I told you. Nary a quip in sight.

Further complicating this story is the fact that most people outside the tower know very little about the university’s infatuation with contract labor. All of us ex-academics, we are like wounded war veterans milling among a populace that is oblivious to the war. In bios and on resumes, I am supposed to make myself sound as amazing as possible. But how can I tell my story of heroism when no one knows of the fight? Without that context, my status as an outcast phd can carry negative and inaccurate implications. Did I fail? Did I get fired? What kind of crazy would quit after all that work?

I used to think these possible interpretations by others were what kept me from advertising my credentials openly. Now I think the root of my denial lies perhaps in my own answers to those questions. Deep feelings of shame embedded by the university suggested to me that by quitting, I had proven that I was crazy and I had failed. It took me almost a year of writing before I mentioned my academic past on my other blog, small house, big picture. Even then, my profile only alluded to my research in a vague and dismissive way. For over a year, I didn’t mention my adjunct work at all.

Now that I have a greater need to describe myself in writing, I have come to see that I cannot erase ten years of professional development if I want to accurately represent my training as a researcher, writer, teacher, and intellectual. Consequently, I began to account for those experiences by describing myself as a “former college-level English instructor.”

That doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

Other professionals have nice tight words like “attorney” to sum up their academic and professional endeavors. With that one word, a lawyer communicates the pursuit and completion of an advanced degree as well as the implication of gainful employment.

“Professor” is the word that can do this for me.

Except it can’t.

Or can it?

For years, I have taken for granted that I cannot use the word “professor” to describe my university teaching. Even in conversations I have avoided the word. Instead, I’ve said things like: “I used to teach English in college.”

Imagine if a lawyer said, “I used to represent people in court” instead of “I was an attorney.”

Ridiculous.

Of course, all this silliness comes from the university and it’s refusal to call me “professor.” Instead, it asked me to answer to “instructor,” “adjunct,” “part-time staffer,” or “term employee.” At the time, I understood that these words and phrases marginalized me–that they diminished my work in an effort to justify my poor working conditions.

What I didn’t understand was how much I had internalized that marginalization. What I didn’t know was that almost a decade later, I’d find myself first avoiding the fact that I’d ever earned a phd, then ultimately stumbling over “college-level English instructor” in my not so quippy bios.

It’s not just the awkwardness of phrase or the evidence of internalized shame that needs to be addressed here. By so obviously avoiding “professor,” the phrasing diminishes my role, wrongly suggesting to mainstream professionals that I do not have the credentials of a professor–that I did not do the job of a professor. It takes more than the quip out of the quip, it takes the phd out of it too.

Ironically, as a matter of protest, I refused to go by “professor” when I worked as an adjunct. Students wanted me to be a “professor”–whatever that meant to them. I wanted them to know they paid for one and didn’t get one (at least not a university sanctioned one).

I don’t know why it took so long, perhaps because the indoctrination is deep, and because I left it to ferment untouched for so long, but it finally dawned on me to quit dancing around this word. I changed my ready-made bio, as well as my About page over at small house to read, “former adjunct professor.” I don’t know or care if that’s acceptable in the academy or not. My inclusion of the word “adjunct” is enough to keep me honest, and I need this word “professor” to communicate my education and experience to professionals in the mainstream. In the tweet-sized language of today, it tells them that I earned an advanced degree and taught college students as a qualified expert in my field. It also avoids the confusion conferred by words like “instructor,” “term” “staff,” and “adjunct” while returning the dignity they took away.

For me, it puts one more little piece of the thing to rest.

a reckoning at the library

On By professorneverIn Uncategorized2 Comments

In an effort to save both trees in the forest and space in the house, I’ve been trying to borrow instead of buy my books. Unfortunately, the public library doesn’t always cut it, so I decided to renew my visitor library card at our local university. It’s a pretty familiar place. I earned my MA from this school and eventually worked there as an adjunct after the phd.

As an esteemed alumnus, I get a discount on the card. That’s a fair trade, right? A 50% discount ($50 annual savings) for me, in exchange for the thousands I spent taking their graduate classes–which, in turn, prepared me to teach GenEd English classes at a 75% discount for them. I wonder how many years of visiting-library-card-savings I’ll have to accumulate before I break even?

But really, I’m not here to gripe. It’s all about the library today. When I go in there, I remember why the university held me captive for so long. I can smell the ideas that linger on the shelves; I can hear them scratching at the dust that gathers like fleas about their necks. They’re waiting for me to come and collect them, I know it.

Of course, the time came during the phd when the library began to feel like a dungeon–a place where I sat hopeless, shackled, and plain old missing so many beautiful spring days. The sun beckoning on the back of my neck, the breeze wafting just so, the blue sky singing, and I’d disappear through those doors under the weight of some drummed up deadline. Why did I take it all so seriously!?

When I walk into the library now, it feels fresh and promising again, the way it did in my early graduate school days. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that I can ride up on my bike, drop off my books, and ride blissfully off into the dazzle. No deadlines. No obligations.

Well…there was one small obligation today. After I renewed my visitor’s account a few weeks ago, the librarian discovered a fine left over from my last account. She informed me of this today. It seems I owe late fees on the books I borrowed during the final weeks of dissertation writing…nine years ago! For a minute my heart stopped. How many thousands would I owe now? I prepared to run, lamenting my decision to lock up my bike.

Shockingly, the total came to only $25. That couldn’t be right, could it? Of course, I didn’t argue. I figured I would count it toward the years of “free” teaching I did for them.

I took out my wallet to pay, then thought to ask: “Could you tell me: what were the books?”

She printed out the list. And there they were, as if time hadn’t passed: Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pictures of Innocence by Anne Higonnet, and Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin.

Michael Rogin. Once a name I muttered regularly through gritted teeth in my sleep, and I wouldn’t have remembered he existed if you’d asked me yesterday. I had used these books while finishing my introduction and conclusion (two chapters that I wrote at the same time – a great little trick if you’re still dissertating!).

Looking at the names now–so foreign, so familiar–I couldn’t figure out what I felt. Nothing? Nostalgia? Sadness? Anger? And how surreal to be standing here paying this fine so many years later. What would I have said if you’d told me when I dropped those books victoriously into the return bin that it would be nine years before I would return to this place that had been my home, my prison?

I think it would have been a devastating piece of news. In those weeks after my defense, I don’t think my feet ever touched the ground. I knew the job prospects were grim, but I let myself enjoy it anyway. I celebrated not only because I’d finished, but also because I really cared about my research on the trope of childhood innocence in American literature. Things had come together so well in the final weeks, and I believed I had written something that truly contributed to both American literary scholarship and to perceptions of national identity in the–

blah blah blah blah…

Yes, I really did feel those things, and maybe they were even true, or would have been if I’d contintued my career. But I didn’t, and perhaps nine years is enough time to come to terms with that, to recognize that things have turned out for the better. Perhaps nine years is enough time to be able to pay the fine with little more than a laugh, an eye roll, and the gumption to call it even.

Which leaves me alone in those stacks, so stuffed to brimming with words and theories and stories, to explore them at will, freed by the gift of nothing owed.

it wasn’t a conference (thank goodness), it was ‘Listen to Your Mother’

On By professorneverIn Uncategorized4 Comments

I love the idea of an academic conference: like-minded folks gathered to feed off one another’s knowledge and enthusiasm. Great!

But the reality of it? Not so much.

In my first experience, I presented with a panel of fellow-students from a rhetoric class. Our session occurred on Friday afternoon, before the keynote. Three people attended. Had I really paid all that money for registration fees, lodging, and travel so that I could stand at a lonely podium and listen to the sound of my voice travel unfettered over the cheap and dirty carpet of an unpopulated hotel meeting-room?

I marveled at how nervous I’d been for what turned out to be an exercise in the ridiculous. To rub salt in the wound, a professor of mine presented my ideas as her own in a different session the next day. I listened in stunned silence as her lying cheating voice rang out over the thrumming of my heart.

She didn’t look at me once.

I made three additional conference presentations in my esteemed career. The others were better attended, but still, I’d say I never had more than 30-40 people in a session. Regardless, I’m not sure that it matters. Academic presentations, with their poor delivery and dense verbiage, don’t really aim to inform. Where are the visual aids and the eye contact? Where are the PowerPoints people?

The academy cheapens conferences by emphasizing quantity over quality. Like the imperative to publish, the imperative to present funnels scholars into the conference circuit like Sneetches lined up for a turn in the star-on machine. They come, in large part, to get their bellies stamped.

I actually have no complaint about the jargon, or the theory, or the nit-picky citations of the scholarly work I did. I loved all that stuff. The problem isn’t the work itself, it’s the perpetual isolation of the scholar–the fact that this work so rarely gets translated to the mainstream. The imperative to publish and present keeps scholars from participating in less formal venues.  It also creates a glut of scholarly work–more than the scholars themselves could ever consume.

So who’s it all for?

Certainly not the public. Ironically, unfair university hiring practices could help to blur these hard-drawn lines between academics and the mainstream. As universities shed new Ph.Ds. like so many flakes of old skin, they force intellectuals out into the real world where they have no choice but to mingle and work–in numbers. That is interesting!

Of course, I’m one of those folks.

I’m happy to say I haven’t given a conference presentation in something close to ten years, but I did get up in front of an audience to make a very different kind of presentation this past weekend. I read a four-minute piece called the boys next door in the DC production of a show called, Listen to Your Mother. It recounts a conversation I had with my teen son about rape culture, college parties, and friendship.

I didn’t need a bibliography or the Chicago Manual of Style to pull it off. I didn’t use any jargon. I didn’t cite Foucault, Derrida or even Freud in the telling. But I’ll say that even with years of scholarly untraining in the art of public speaking, I did make eye-contact, and I did invoke my audience (no PowerPoint, however!). I wish I could say I was spectacular, but before long, a video will emerge. I’m afraid it will tell its own story, whatever that may be.

Despite having rejected so much else about academia, however, you can bet that when formulating my ideas about this piece, I drew on the things I learned in graduate school. Theories about discipline, the gaze, the unconscious, and a healthy understanding of oppressive binaries such as good/bad, male/female, virgin/whore and agent/object.

I hope that doesn’t surprise you. Although university life serves up its fair share of humiliations, the departure doesn’t happen like a layoff. The provost doesn’t force you to leave your files locked in cabinets while he/she escorts you out of the building like a criminal. You get to take the knowledge with you!  In fact, you can’t help but do so, right?

Nearly 300 people attended this year’s Listen to Your Mother Show. That means I addressed more people in those few minutes than I did in all four of my conference presentations combined (and I’m pretty sure we could throw in my scholarly readership as well). Not only did I get to share my ideas with this much broader audience, but I also had the chance to learn from them and my fellow cast members.

Motherhood has long been the thorn in the side of feminism–the thing we have forever struggled to reconcile with our ideals of equality and independence. We can theorize, expound, and pontificate about this dilemma at feminist theory conferences and in feminist journals, but that won’t be enough. We’d also be wise to round out our research and “listen to [our] mother[s].”

I felt so privileged to share the stage with a group of people brought together, not by our varying degrees or professional credentials, but by our desire to share our thoughts about motherhood (thoughts that are surely also informed by our varying degrees and professional credentials). From stories of what happens to the body of a childbearing or breastfeeding woman, to what happens to the heart and soul of a parent who loses a child, to struggles with the race and gender stereotypes our kids face, to the recognition of the humanity, vulnerability and power of our own mothers, to struggles with anxiety, the “empty nest,” the shape of the family, and the gender of the “mom,” to the downright hilarity of the mundane, this show brought not just the joy and pain of motherhood to life, but the very philosophical and intellectual aspects of parenting fully into light.

If we want mothers to enjoy equity, respect and independence in our society, then our first step should be to truly understand what motherhood means.  “Giving Mother’s Day a microphone,” as Listen to Your Mother aims to do, takes a big step in that direction, and I was so honored to be part of it (and not cloistered in a conference room somewhere reading monotonously for 25 whole pages to nobody but a blank wall!).

Listen to Your Mother shows occur in cities across the country every spring.  Check out their main page for a show near you!  

you just miss the sex

On By professorneverIn Uncategorized8 Comments

I’m always the last to know.  I attribute it in part to my introvertedness.  I don’t get out enough.  I don’t network.  I don’t (or didn’t) blog enough.  Actually, I’ve been blogging for about a year and a half, just not here.

Since I last graced the threshold of a classroom (as an adjunct) in 2006, I’ve been almost completely cut off from university life.  Looking back, that seems rather a traumatic occurence.   At the risk of sounding like an old lady remembering the days before the telephone, I have to say: “We didn’t have blogs back in my day.”–at least not the easy user-friendly kind that any old fart can start.

It took me until 2011 before I started a blog of any kind, and it’s taken until now for me to think about writing a blog about life after academia.  Doing so prompted me to poke around for similar websites and I’ll tell you: if I thought I had an original idea, I was wrong!

I’m sorry to see so many people suffering their way out of the academy as I did, but I have to say I’m also happy to see a support community forming–something I desperately needed when my academic friends (caught similarly without tenure after graduation) scattered to the wind like dogwood petals just past their bloom.

The forty-eight hours I’ve spent perusing these websites has helped me to better understand the juncture I’ve come to, including this professor never project I’ve begun.  Most of the blogs I’ve looked at so far are written by people who only recently abandoned their academic lives (with or without degrees).  They focus primarily on the transition: how to leave, how to get a different job, and how to survive the vast array of feelings associated with those challenges.

It seems obvious, but reading about their experiences has helped me to see that I’m in a very different place.  Ironically, I think the start of this blog marks the end rather than the beginning of that transition for me.  You see, Professor Never is the title of the memoir I’ve written about my journey from corporate ladder climber to adjunct professor.  I’ve preoccupied myself with this endeavor off-and-on since I graduated (which is way too long, but that’s what kids and work will do to a writing project).

Today, the book still needs editing, and I still need an agent.  Nevertheless, I’m ready to move on–to stop writing about the process of becoming “professor never” and start writing from the perspective of simply being “professor never.”

Many of the blogs I’ve looked at so far started around 2011 then petered off, probably becoming less relevant as the authors (hopefully) found jobs and became less preoccupied with their past academic quandaries.  For those who have kept writing, I found an interesting thread.  Many are employed in “good jobs”–making decent enough money, not feeling overworked or otherwise exploited, and not regretting their choice.

They don’t complain.

I think, however, that I detect an undercurrent of boredom in many of them.  I get that.  I can feel that same specter creeping in around the molding of my own door.  When you first start working, the novelty of relatively fair pay amazes you.  The free time that embraces you like an old friend on weeknights and weekends dumbfounds you.  When the December holidays arrive for the first time without paper deadlines, grading deadlines, or the shadow of the MLA Convention darkening the winter cheer, you think you’ve really hit pay dirt.

In many ways, you have.

Eventually, however, the tread wears thin on a job that fails to satisfy your intellectual needs.  It doesn’t mean you want back in the ivory tower.  In fact, when you think about your old lover, the university, you remember him as a selfish and abusive prick.

So no, in your boredom, you don’t miss the lover.  You just miss the sex.  And the beauty of that?  You can get it elsewhere: at the library or on the internet, for free, and without a dossier to boot.