Why Are You Not Teaching

This is the first December I can remember in my professional life where I haven't been scrambling to prep for spring classes.  Some of my colleagues don't have this problem--they teach the same two (or three, four, or five) classes every semester, and they have developed systems so that those classes kind of run on autopilot.  They pull out their notes or files or whatever and don't need to do a ton of preparation for them to run smoothly.

I'm much more of a jackass about the whole thing and am usually rewriting my syllabi (sometimes even revising them wholesale at the last minute).  I add in new readings and even occasionally things I haven't read, which is super stressful but also a great way to have an interesting experience with your students where you're reading and learning along with them.

But the reason I'm not doing any of that right now is because I took on some extra work this past fall so that I could get what's called a "buy-out" from teaching this spring.  I'm doing some administrative work instead, and also ramping up some research efforts.

This is weird and hard to explain to people without sounding defensive or whiny or clueless about the privilege involved in being a professor.   Things are further complicated by the fact that I teach in a graduate program rather than in an undergraduate one (for now, anyway) and also that in the back of my mind is always this whole constellation of events, trends, and disasters happening in the swampy bog that is higher education and which feeds in to the exact reasons for why I'm not teaching in the spring even though in everyone's mind that's what we pay you for.

See?  Defensive.

You can read much more eloquent scholars than me talk about all this stuff.  But I'll just offer a few brief outlines here.

1)  Lots of people are really worried about professors who have tenure, because they have probably had a crappy old checked-out professor who was protected by tenure even though they weren't really doing their job anymore.  Sometimes that's a problem.   Nobody likes the idea of somebody getting paid for work they're not doing or doing well.

But really?  Most professors these days aren't even on the tenure-track.  We can use the Orwellian term and call them "contingent" faculty, but really they are better called "exploited" faculty.  They teach the bulk of undergraduate classes at most universities and even though they often have PhDs and loads of student loan debt they often make less than $20,000 a year, don't receive benefits, are treated as ghosts on the campus(es) where they teach.

And, for the record, tenure itself is increasingly under attack.  So it's not really a guarantee of anything anymore, in lots of places.

2)  At the same time we have seen the rise of the adjunct class of professors, we have also seen public funding of higher education decimated.  Thanks to the cries of smaller government and just a general overall devaluing of providing public goods to the public at affordable prices (and probably also quite a bit of anti-intellectualism) and maybe also because higher education has not always been as quick to change as the "market" would like, most universities without huge endowments like, say, Harvard, struggle to make ends meet.  We are constantly threatened with massive and cyclical budget cuts and reminded that our jobs are vulnerable.  Few other professions--those requiring advanced schooling, preparation, and geographic promiscuity--face such uncertainty.

3)  So universities are forced to make ends meet by a) raising tuition and b) requiring faculty to bring in what are called "research dollars."

4)  Therefore, increasingly, those who can afford to go to college a) take out crippling student loans to pay for it and b) demand a sweet "customer service" type experience, where they have sick dorm rooms outfitted with big screens and climbing walls.  Universities are thus forced to pour tons of money into pimping out the residential student experience in order to recruit students, whose dollars they need, and must further pressure faculty to secure external research dollars, in order to pay for climbing walls and lazy rivers for floating freshmen.

5)  So now you have a system where students often (but not always) want a slick customer-service-type experience, are often being taught by exploited, overworked adjunct faculty and/or the occasional cranky tenured old guy who is working way longer than he wanted to because he needs retirement money like everyone else.

6)  Then occasionally those of us who are mid-career also teach, though mostly we are spending our time on many, many committees--which often are important for the health of the university, but are also sometimes used to keep faculty busy, I think.  Mostly we spend our time trying to be "research productive."  Increasingly this means seeking funding from the federal government or private foundations or donors or businesses who will give the university a percentage of what we bring in.  It means we are trying to find ways to supplement our increasingly non-competitive salaries vis-a-vis other professions that also require extensive schooling and debt accrual.

[The thought of not being able to save or borrow enough money to send my own children to college some day gives me fits, and we are solidly middle class].

7)  And if we are in a program or a position that also requires our students to be successful--like, say, we work in a small school that values faculty-to-student contact or wants students to finish PhDs of their own--we also spend a lot of time meeting with students and countless (and I mean countless) hours advising.

8)  Finally, we always have to be aware of our "national and international reputation." This means frequently presenting at conferences, publishing papers in journals, writing books, reviewing other people's articles, books, and promotion documents, and so on.

All of this is not to say that my job isn't fantastic.  It is.  I feel lucky most days to get to do this work. It is dynamic and stimulating and I get to meet amazing people, learn fascinating things, and challenge myself to be both excellent and on the cusp of failure all the time.

But it is to say that when you ask me isn't it great to have summer off?  Or what I'm going to do with all my time now that I'm not teaching?  Or how great is it that they can't fire me now that I have tenure?

I wish I could agree with you.

Small House Love Story

When we moved from Denver last year, not only did we leave behind a tribe of amazing friends, well-paying jobs, and all the benefits of living in a mid- to large-sized city, we also left behind our big old house in the suburbs.  We had 2,400 square feet and a huge yard.  We had a two-car garage.  We had three bedrooms and both E. and I had a really good sized office space for our very own selves.  The kitchen was huge, and it extended out into an open dining space (with a actual, real, two-story tree growing up through the floor, spreading its branches out above our dining room table) and leading into a good-sized living room.

There were many great things about that house.  E. in particular still mourns that house, and while the girl's memories of it are now hazy, every once in a while they wish they had a big backyard.

But here's the thing.  When I think about that house, I feel a little sad.  And it's not sad from missing it.  I remember myself sitting in our ginormous master bedroom, looking out the sliding glass doors at the gorgeous old-growth trees in the backyard, and praying for something to change.  My job might have been well paying, but I was also miserable.  Our marriage seemed fine on the surface but underneath simmered loads of resentment and unspoken anger and secrets and fear.   I felt so goddamned lonely.

It's not that I didn't have happy moments there--I did.  And it's not that the house itself made me unhappy.  Of course it didn't.  And we were so lucky to live there, really.  I'm sure some of you think I sound like a privileged twit.  All I'm saying is that, in my mind, I associate having all that space with also having a whole lot of emptiness.

Now we live in a much smaller house, by many American standards.  I'm not sure what the actual square footage is (because real estate=sham), but I would guess the livable space here is just a little more than half what it was in the old house.   Addie's bedroom is in the basement, the bathrooms are tiny and filled with questionable tile choices (when there is tile at all), we call the cooking space the "frankenkitchen" because it's been cobbled together by whatever pieces someone found at the side of the road, and our office spaces look like this:

Eric at his wee little desk, tucked away in the corner of our wee little living room.  I asked him to sit up straight for this picture so we could capture the wee-ness of the surroundings.  Wee laptop, wee lamp, giant man.

I get the "big" office space, which is actually an entry way closet that got sealed off.    Again, we had to search for wee furniture that would fit these spaces.

The house is a hundred years old.  When you add in even a little bit of clutter, you can feel it, so you have to remain vigilant against the invasion of stuff.  It has giant holes in the back of the house where some weekend warrior closed in the back porch to give us a laundry room/bathroom but didn't think to insulate.

But when I think of this house?  I think:  happy.  Don't get me wrong; our first year here was one of the most difficult of my life.  E. and the kids took a really long time to settle in and I felt pessimistic and wracked with guilt and terrified about finances all the time.   There are days (weeks?) where we are all home together or where E. is home doing homework/working/whatever and I just want everyone the fuck out of my SPACE.  The few days where I have had the house to myself have been heavenly and I want MORE solitude.  

Here is what's great about the tight living space, though:

Closeness.  We see each other, a lot.  We have to work through conflicts, rather than fleeing to our own corners.  We cuddle and spend time together and, yes, annoy each other some.  But on the whole, I think we are much closer as a family, and have developed some much needed communication skills we didn't have before.

Yard.  We don't have a big yard.  We don't have a big yard!  We don't spend hours doing yard work on the weekends.  And we live two blocks from an awesome park.  I am personally convinced of the awesomeness of this.  The kids are warming up to it.  But I spend way more time outside than I used to because to me it feels like the whole neighborhood is our backyard.

Cleaning.  God, the cleaning.  With that big old house, there used to be so much fighting and gnashing of teeth (mine).  But here, I see light at the end of the tunnel.  The kids are finally starting to help out with chores, and between that and the fact that there is just not that much to clean, I feel like I have some small portion of my life back.

Stuff.  E. still side-eyes the bags of stuff that go out the door to the thrift store (or getting sold on Poshmark!), but I also know there is way less stuff that is coming in.  We still have a pretty loaded house (um, four Americans) but I feel a clearer sense of what we do and don't need.  We don't have a Costco membership, because we literally have no space to store sixteen rolls of paper towels.  A Costco-sized package of paper towels would be our undoing, I'm telling you.  And we only buy food that we will actually eat during the week.  That took some getting used to because in the back of my mind I am always pretty sure we are two days away from the apocalypse.  But less room to store 32 cans of sauerkraut means we don't buy it to begin with.  So, less waste.   And it also forces me to trust that we are okay even without backups for our backups.  No need to have six things of deodorant to survive the end days.

And, the best thing of all:  our location.  This has nothing to do with the house itself, I guess, but getting to live in a neighborhood where we can walk both to the foothills and downtown feels like the best part of it all.  It's essentially what we are paying for by living in this overpriced froufrou neighborhood.  Just ask the tax man.

Maybe there will come a point where I want to live out in the burbs again and have all the square feet.  I would bet E. will always want that.  But I have a soft spot for this kooky little corner house and how it symbolizes a turn from a life that felt empty and a little shallow to a life that feels much more real and connected.