Summertime/working vicariously

Richard Hugo writes somewhere about the compressed academic year, how the years and even the hours are abbreviated, and how time moves so quickly through them. I'm at the point where I've waved goodbye to enough semesters to already be imagining the first day of the next one, much as a cool day in spring mirrors its cousin in the other equinox.

The irony of the calendar is that what I teach and what I do are almost exactly inverted. From August to May I do a lot of writing, but all of it is rushed and fragmented. Memos, emails, reports, applications, reviews, syllabi, comments on papers, minutes, recommendations, presentations, and more email. None of it develops any narrative line or builds to shared or linked visible product. It's these days (aggravated by lots of unfinished business in other departments of my daily life) that make me wonder if I'm really a writer at all. There is no scholarship, or very little; there is no blogging, letter-writing, memoir writing, writing of poetry, essays, or arguments. It's as if the frontal cortex were entirely given over to striated and anxious detail management. There's no narrative, and definitely no lyric. I get worried when the heart of what I am paid to do starts to feel like the work I used to do in a fast-food restaurant. When "customers per hour" is the criterion we measure ourselves by, then I might as well be the manager of a Wendy's. The fact that I'd probably get paid better for that sort of work is unnerving--but it just goes to show that work in higher education is expected to compensate us with other, less tangible rewards, such as the ability to wrestle with ideas and watch kids learn. So when that part is taken out, as it seems increasingly to be, then Wendy's starts looking like a smart option.

I love my job, but the center of it isn't coherent. The things I try to engender in my students--a sense of play, of curiosity, of competence through practice, revision, wonder, doubt and all the rest of the thinking asanas--are the very things I check at the door when the semester begins (well, by the time the first papers come in). I end up teaching "about" things I'm not myself actually experiencing. My lectures on rhetoric and writing during the semester become--at least to me--somewhat abstract, something I recall for my students, not something I embody. Of course I have my students reflect on their own writing. They practice reading closely. They take risks. But I only understand this vicariously. I feel that I'm being paid for having a degree, for managing the status quo, not for being a writer or scholar. Thus this tends to encourage posturing. It encourages asserting one's authority, though authentic authority comes more from modeling and immediate action than knowing stuff.

I'm hardly the first to notice this incoherence, and if I were to blame my college (or all academic institutions), I again wouldn't be the first. That's not needed, though. Those hoarse diatribes of how "the college is being run like a business!" really leaves me cold. The college IS a business. I want it to be solvent--hell, I want it to be rolling in money so that we can do all sort of good and interesting things.

That is not going to happen in SUNY Cortland, however. We are a small rural state school that survives on the margins. If the Ivy Leagues were Manhattan, we wouldn't be even in the suburbs. We'd be in rural Nebraska. We tend not to plan for the future because we're so preoccupied with surviving, and the latest budget issues have made it worse. Now there really ain't nothing to get by on. Our "funding stream" is taxes.  College is a state business built on a certain imaginary destination my state students will pay handsomely to achieve: "success." In my way of seeing it, "success" means often a) getting married, ideally to a person who looks good enough to be on TV b) getting a good job (read: a job that makes me more money than I know what to do with) c) buying a house and starting a family with my money and hot spouse.  Life of the mind, a sense of history, good work (not just well-paid work, but meaningful work done well) -- those things are not the values that organize my students or the campus.  When I feel their tug I feel anachronistic at best and stupid at worst.

What's assumed in all of this, of course, is that a, b, and c will cause happiness. That's a stretch (I assume most of our students don't look at their parents as models for happiness, for their parents, from what I hear, are often not such happy people). My sense is that "success" means not being one of "them," the poor, the have nots. "Success" is defined by an invisible and unspoken absent term, the lower class. No one is sure what that is or where those people are, but they sure seem to be a scary lot.  One of their few identifying characteristics is assumed to be poor grammar, which is why we worry about grammar at all in college.  But that is the subject of another post.

I am often a middle-level bureaucrat and my best energies go to supporting some very abstract entities called "the department" or "the college" or at its most grandiose, "higher education in the United States." I do not often feel as if I am participating in supporting, influencing, or developing these entities. Mostly, I feel like an "administrative assistant." I have an advanced degree, but spend more of my time collating than reading; more time deleting email than preparing lectures, more time in meetings than I spend with students.

This is ironic. Not evil, not oppressive, but ironic. I got into this business because I was fascinated with the ways you could say things and the way that ideas fit together and the way people make ideas over time. The best way to be immersed in these things this is to teach writing (and to write). I'm happy as a clam in the classroom, though I find it exhausting. I love to write and read for the same reasons.

How does this change?  I try to change it 1) by doing less in my college, less administration.  I put my energies into the classroom.  2) I try to create places with my colleagues to talk about our values (we recently (2010) had a great discussion of The Shallows by Nicolas Carr, and many said it was the FIRST TIME in their stint at Cortland that they had had an intellectual discussion on campus with their peers and 3) I try to do a good job and say not control things out of my control and 4) I keep myself sane by writing.

Or, better said, I try to stay sane when I'm not writing.