The Year of the Overserviced Junior Professor

Right between the year of the rat and the year of the dog...

OK, so those years aren't even near one another, and the academic year doesn't correspond with the Chinese year, so whatever, but...

It's my second year here and I'm already doing waaayyy too much service:

• The T&P committee,
  
• A search committee,
  
• The PhD qualifying exam committee,
  
• The College scholarship committee (which just had me holed up in a windowless room for 12 hours in the last 2 weeks, the same ones with 30 student conferences),
  
• A focus group on childcare at the university,
  
• The department faculty research prize committee
• PLUS a bunch of piddling little "being around the department" stuff that some colleagues think fulfills their obligation to service.

And I said no to one or two things, including advising the grad student association and serving on an undergrad curriculum task force, both of which I would've liked to be a part of very much.

I know I'm being whiny here, since I know many of my readers are also contributing more than their share to their department cultures. The thing is, I believe in the culture of the department, of supporting the work we do as a body of faculty. And so I will very very likely continue to do too much service, which, as long as my research productivity is solid and my teaching is sound, will earn lots of thanks you's and a few cursory "you're doing too much" nods.
So the question is: When I really really want to say yes, to be on that committee, to help shape and support the life of the department or the college, when do we say "no?" and how?

Just checking...

Wouldn't you think that in a course that covers two centuries of material, and the assignment contains the statement, "Choose 2 texts, at least one from the twentieth century" that the other text should probably also be from the class in question?

And if you wanted to choose a text not from the course (or even written within 200 years of the earliest text), wouldn't you likely clear it with the professor first?

'Cause I would. But not everyone does, I guess.

Moby Dave

I'm guessing that comparative minority of my readers also read Brookings fellow and football fan Gregg Easterbrook's column on ESPN, "Tuesday Morning Quarterback." And while, yes, most of it is snarky, superior second guessing (hence the name), the column also moves fairly far afield of the gridiron, usually into some other arena where Easterbrook can exercise his trademark know-it-all bluster.

Really, I love reading this column, because alongside ridicule of Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, and really quite sincere praise of polite sportsmanlike behavior, you get items like this:

In 1995, yours truly published a book on environmental policy called "A Moment on the Earth." Sen. John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry have just published a book on environmental policy called "This Moment on Earth." OK, titles cannot be copyrighted; anyone is free to sell a book called "Gone With the Wind." (The 2001 legal controversy regarding the book "The Wind Done Gone" concerned not the title but similarities of plot and characters; under some circumstances, plot and characters can be copyrighted.) Seriously, can Sen. Kerry claim never to have heard of my book "A Moment on the Earth"? It was, after all, a New York Times and American Library Association "Notable Book of the Year" in the same topic he's writing about. Anyway, let's assume this was an honest mistake by a United States senator and a rich woman whose names are often attached to material they have barely glanced at. Here are other works of literature being written by John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry:

"The Reasonably Good Gatsby"
"For Whom the Bell Rings"
"To Kill a Magpie"
"Much Ado About Relatively Little"
"The Bridge Over the River Kennebec"
"The DiMaggio Code"
"War and Pizza"
"Moby-Dave"

Also, John and Teresa will record a jazz track titled "Take Six" and a rock-and-roll song titled, "(I Can't Get Nothing) Satisfactory."

Flummoxed

Today was the department's annual awards luncheon, for which I was told I should be present to be recognized for the summer fellowship I was awarded a couple of weeks ago. So hey, free lunch right?

The final award of the day is the Sigma Tau Delta Outstanding Teacher Award, which is always a surprise: it's the only award not printed in the program beforehand. So imagine my shock when it was me!

Apparently, according to a faculty member at another table, my students believe I could "make a brick interesting...at 8:30 in the morning."

While I've been teaching now for almost 9 years, this is only my second year here at this institution, and so as you might imagine, I am completely floored. I've been smiling ear-to-ear for 45 minutes straight.

(Academic) Freedom and (Campus) Security

Circulating now in the miasma of the Blacksburg massacres is the writing of the student gunman, writing that was flagged by a creative writing professor as a potential warning sign. There are now a number of interviews with Lucinda Roy, head of the Creative Writing program at Tech, and now, The New York Times has a link to the text of two of the plays the gunman submitted to a workshop.

In the early days after such events, I hesitate to jump too quickly to crass questions of the "But how will this affect ME" variety. However, in the midst of and following the grieving process, I am worried about the kinds of classroom policing that this will engender. After Columbine came the scrutiny of shock rock, violent films, and first-person-shooter video games; it's not difficult, then, to imagine a scenario when "disturbing" student writing comes under the same scrutiny.

Particularly, I am concerned that student work (or indeed any artistic work) that seeks to represent violence and to explore human depravity is going to become first and foremost a signifier of pathology, and that we as readers of student writing will be asked to serve as student surveillance. Soon it will be harder and harder to say "This work comments on a sick world" and not, "This student is a sicko."

I recognize that there are any number of fine lines that will be drawn and redrawn in this discussion, but I imagine that we will need to be vigilant early and for a long time about the roles that we are asked to play in "ensuring security."

For the moment, I am trying hard to concentrate on supporting those who mourn. But I cannot help but think about the battles--about academic freedom, about secure campuses, about student creativity--whose lines are already being drawn.

In Sympathy

In moments like this, the massacre not so far away, it is difficult not to translate the madness into our own terms: I wonder what this will mean to me?

I want to resist that impulse, and grieve in small ways for those who feel the grief most acutely, and for those who can no longer feel grief.

Our institution is not far from VT, and is similar in many way, and many of my students chose this university instead of tech, and I'm guessing a fair number of VT students thought about this place, too. One of my colleagues did his MA there, and his father is still faculty there. I've talked about it in my classes, where my students know people in Blacksburg, where they silently (or not) wonder whether such a thing could happen here.

The answer of course, is yes.

But in moments when I don't have to attend to the immediate anxieties of my students, and when I can put my own aside, I try, silently, to mourn on terms that aren't my own: for the poor student whose pain caused so much more, for those whose lives he took, for their families, for their friends, for the circles and circles that ripple outward until they reach my shores.

Public Radio After Party

For Willow's birthday last evening, I took her to the recording of a fairly widely distributed public radio show that is sometimes recorded here. The headlining artist was one we both like, and the tickets were affordable.

The show started at 7:30, but it took us a bit to get out the door, so we arrived midway through one of the last few artists' sets, and settled in. The show was nice (though nothing earth-shattering), and over (as befitting a taping of a public radio program) soon after 10 pm, so we decided to go have a drink.

Now, in our town, there are generally limited bar choices: college bars predominate, and those that aren't dollar-pitcher places are themselves often over-crowded with anxious local grown-ups. So, often we find ourselves retiring to the bar at the one nice local hotel.

When we got there, the bartender asked us if we had our program tickets, and I thought he meant our actual tickets. We soon found out that this was the location of the after-party for the show.

While the headliner didn't show up, many of the smaller, more local acts did, as did the host, some crew, and some folks obviously connected to the host. It was about as raucous as you'd expect for an after-party for a public radio program. I never once had to raise my voice for Willow to hear me. It was, in fact, one of the few times I've ended up in such a scenario when I didn't feel the urge to chat up the talent. I don't know if it's a sign that I'm no longer starstruck, or that the wattage was fairly dim.