Because I am a hedonist, I am having both trail mix and a mango smoothie for breakfast.  Because I am alarmingly Amish, I have been up since 4:30 this morning, working 150% harder than most folk despite a calendar that states quite plainly that it’s vacation o’clock.  And because I am a rebel, I have decided to shrug off the hegemony of Daylight Savings Time as well.  I don’t need The Man to keep me down with his punitive sense of time-as-currency.  I do just fine oppressing myself.

With a single exception (the framework of an independent study qua teaching assistantship, which I can’t formulate and finalize in the absence of my books, which have not yet arrived, and the absence of my teaching assistant, who is presumably vacationing like a reasonable human), I have essentially wrapped up the business of 2009.  I’ll almost certainly manufacture a few new obligations in the next several days, but for the time being I am square with Fate.  I’m inclined to start scripting the spring, since anticipatory scripting is kind of my thing, but I reckon that I ought to postpone writing about it until some portion of the penciling is complete.  Instead, although one of the past year’s resolutions involved resisting the urge to dwell on the past overmuch, I thought I’d offer a bit of an existential  retrospective.  So sit back, Dear Reader, and let me tell you a little bit about the Bald Man circa 2009.

In big picture terms, I reckon the most significant achievement of the year involved nothing more than re-centering my sense of self.  That sounds foolish and New Aged, I know, and if I were standing behind me right now I’d probably slap myself upside the head for committing it to pixels.  Given how fragmented I was feeling in the early fall, however, I’d reckon that particular kind of recalibration as no mean feat.  My trip home over Labor Day weekend obliged me to revisit my ideas of family, both literally and figuratively, and in the aftermath it took me a bit of reflection and adjustment to settle in to a new state of affairs–one I’d inhabited for quite some time, admittedly, but never so explicitly or self-consciously.  The upshot, at bottom, is none too surprising:  The Bald Man Family Playset now comes with only one piece–the Bald Man himself.  That might conceivably change someday, of course, but only as a product of choice, not of inherited obligation.  While a certain sense of loss attended the realization that none of the homefolks who once knew me really knows me anymore, that what once was home has ceased to be home and never will be again, a stronger sense of freedom followed.  I don’t often regard the world with candy-colored optimism, but establishing a new relationship to the past has radically recast my view of the future.  I may still botch the business of living spectacularly, but I can walk that tightrope over a net of my own making, at a height of my own choosing.  From where I stand now, I’d hate to do things any other way.

Professionally, of course, this has been a significant stretch as well.  I spent much of the summer packaging my tenure application, and after a few months of choppy water the shore is in sight.  We have a tiered process of evaluation here at CMU–the personnel committee makes a recommendation based on a candidate’s credentials, and that recommendation is followed by a review at the College level and then another review by the Provost–and I’ve crested those breakers en route to a final determination by the Board of Trustees in mid-February.  I’ve still got miles to go before I sleep (next up on the docket is the application for early promotion, which involves a set of higher hurdles and more persnickety parameters), but the knowledge that I’ve covered much of the requisite distance is a source of satisfaction in its own right.

The balance of the summer was spent finalizing the text of my first verse collection; astute readers might recall that I returned to this theme about eighty times over the course of the past few months.  I would never venture to guess how it will fare in the wider world–I’ve spent too much time feeding it, clothing it, and teaching it to spend many more moments judging it–but I can tell you that I’ve kept a copy beside my desk since September and I regard it with more than a little pleasure.  I think any creative endeavor, from the vantage point of its author, can only refer to one standard:  does it do what it was meant to do?  Whether or not readers glean that meaning isn’t up to me, of course–I am wily in the ways of the intentional fallacy, after all–but I feel comfortable saying that the verse works, at least from my own paternal perspective.

Teaching this year proceeded in much the same way.  I took quite a few risks, and I gained ground on some fronts while losing it on others.  I’m doing my best not to become the fabled Yellowed Notes Professor, the one who earns tenure and thenceforth teaches from the same eldern lessons until he dies,  but it’s always a little heady to embrace change if that change asks me to sidle away from those things that I do well.  I tried some new tricks this year, and I’m generally pleased with both the results themselves as well as my sharpened sense of how I might refine my use of a few new techniques and tools.  Next fall might find me lapsing back to the olde standby strategies, but the spring will see me attempt another series of seasonable risks.

As for life at large?  Well, it goes as it goes.  I’m not quite a workaholic, but the partition between my work and my daily ways is pretty permeable.  I did set a pair of personal goals for the year before the summer began, and I met them:  I lost some weight and I’ve managed to keep the level on the scale steady for several months, and I also took three interpersonal chances–ventures that obliged me to step outside myself to a meaningful degree.  One critical aspect of the Zen of Tenure (or of verse collections, or of teaching) is learning to abstract the commitment from its consequence.  If I made a good faith effort to reach beyond the extent of the conventionally Wandlessian, then I can be well satisfied, no matter the upshot.  I’ve met some new folks this year, made some new friends, established some new patterns and pathways I might someday pursue.  With a little luck I might find a fellow traveler in the midst of my meanderings, but I think it’s enough to mosey with both eyes open, steering toward the sun.

And I’m off to do a bit more work before I hit the gym.  Next time around we’ll take a look ahead and rejigger the Zen for 2010.

Today I’ll confess to one of the more heinous crimes I’ve committed since I started blogging many moons ago:  interventionist censorship.  Since I’ve been a semi-public presence for close to two years, I’ve generally tried to abide by the rules of civil exchange:  I keep it relatively clean and seemly, but I don’t ask readers to adhere to the same policies and practices that condition my discourse.  The spam filter catches curse words for me now and again, though I don’t seriously object to them, and a few posters have asked me to delete responses for them when second thoughts have trumped the first.  I always happily oblige.  This morning, however, I killed a response before it ever saw the light of day.  Let this expiate!

The writer in question, you see, recognized a certain similitude in our professional situations.   He also might have assumed that I am a Catholic confessor–an understandable error, to be sure.  In any case, the respondent tore the tops off the wee boxes in a variety pack of anger, angst, and anxiety, using one of my older posts as a point of departure for a  prurient professorial purge.  I would normally welcome such candid (and obviously needful) ventilation, but my own habitual circumspection prompted me to do a bit of legwork to make sure that the poster (who sported what struck me as a potentially telling nom de net) was as anonymous as he imagined.  A bit of furtive searching brought me to a message board, and that message board to a university e-mail address, and that address to a name.  It seemed at that point best to address the spirit but not the letter of the message.

I reckon it’s best to dodge the devils in the details, so let’s summarize thus:  Bjorn (let us call him Bjorn in adherence with Wandlessian convention) lives in a small, rural town about 300 miles from the nearest major metro; he is a single feller in the midst of a gaggle of coupled colleagues, and he is subject to all the temptations and tribulations that sequestered flesh is heir to.  I’ve written to Bjorn directly to see if I can offer him a bit of collegial commiseration, but I think the concerns he raises are ones I can take a responsible stab at in a public forum.  Let’s sally forth and see what happens.

I’ll begin with the obvious:  dating can be difficult.  I think this is true at just about all times and in just about all climes, contingent of course on the dispositions of the parties in question.  Academics are, in many ways, just like real people.  Some are gregarious, outgoing, and comfortable in most social situations, while others are more reticent, more reserved, and less socially adventurous.  Each brings his or her own set of aptitudes and attitudes pertaining to relationships to the table, and strategy, sensibility, skill, and serendipity yield all the usual outcomes, amorous and otherwise.  Pardon the salty implications–you all know by now how risque I can be.

Dating can be doubly difficult for single profs in college towns, gender notwithstanding.  One is likely to encounter some of the town and gown dynamics that can make conventional social settings less congenial; one is likely to find local places of business, commerce, and worship supersaturated with students and recent graduates; one is likely to find pockets of potential partners relatively small and sometimes scattered.  Moreover, one is likely to find the local grapevine extensive and well-tended.  I dated a local woman here during my first year, for example, and before long I learned that she was acquainted with three of my new colleagues.  A few more spotted us out and about in the vicinity, as did several of my students.  These sightings led to all the usual inquiries.  I’m not much inclined to mind such things–I’m as curious as the next cat, after all–but I did find it a bit surprising (if not sobering) when tales of local lotharios and lothariettes later made it my way unsought. What distressed Bjorn the most, I think, was just such a perceived lack of privacy.  In his case, he also felt some pressure to partner up in order to plug into the couples culture  of his department.  That process may seem especially tricksy if one feels one’s personal life has become/is becoming a semi-public property.

Under such circumstances, casual dating can seem decidedly less casual.  All dating involves a bit of venture capital, but when one’s prospective partners include colleagues, university staff, and even students (and let’s take for granted, per my prior post on the subject, that the professor in question has found a kindred spirit and is not just attempting to sleep her way through a class roster) one may become more reluctant to incur the expense.  High schoolish though it may seem, it can also be difficult (and sometimes embarrassing) to ascertain the availability and interest of a person who piques the curiosity.  Even surreptitious inquiries can ultimately subject the inquirer to uncomfortable public scrutiny, not to mention the occasional confrontation with the head cheerleader and/or star quarterback.  (I’ve seen enough of the John Hughes oeuvre to know how things work.)  Add in to the mix the strong coupling conventions that characterize college life at all levels, especially in non-urban settings, and you may find a perfect storm of professorial precaution.

More problematic still can be the dynamics that emerge when youngish, eligible folks are thrust into proximity.  It is not uncommon for transplanted profs to feel the need to connect with their colleagues and cohorts on any terms, which can lead to some of the consequences described above as well as all the contextual confusion one might imagine.  At another school a very earnest single man who avidly sought out activity partners soon earned a reputation as a a playa, even though (by all firsthand accounts that came my way) the guy just wanted racquetball partners and an excuse to go out to dinner without feeling awkward.  A friend at a southeastern college recently described a comparable concern:   a woman reduced to earnest serial dating, hoping to find a guy (any guy, according to my homegirl) who was willing to settle in for the long haul, said settlement predicated on a shared professional fate more than a groovy kind of love.  I’m deeply sympathetic to that impulse, since I know how often academics feel obliged to table personal plans as they make tradeoffs for employment, tenure, and promotion (sift through those links I left the other day and you’ll find a bit of research that notes a strong pattern for women in the sciences), but I’m also secretly a Romanticist trapped in the body of a Foucauldian.  I hate to think of relationships as concessions to context, although the Enlightenment side of my brain says that’s not the worst fate that might await fellers like Bjorn or the Bald Man.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the will to matchmaking, which occupies a peculiar place on the brink of hope and fear for youngish faculty folk.  One of my colleagues (perhaps as a consequence of Christmas party potables) made it her mission to find me a gal, and Bjorn finds himself eagerly awaiting and dreading every departmental social function, where he is all but assured a “chance” introduction engineered by one of his well-intentioned friends.  As most dabblers in the dating scene can attest, such matches represent a rainbow of fruit flavors:  they reveal the sensibilities of the matchmakers as much as the (imagined) predilections of the partners-to-be, and as such they tend to involve chance amplified by pressure.  One can also consider a variety of online dating services, too, which seemingly solves for one set of variables while introducing another.  I tend to mistrust the teleology of such services, and Bjorn’s experience with them seems to bear out some of my suspicions.  I’m olde-fashioned enough to want to encounter folks on their own terms, as they are, which can be challenging to do when motives are already known, even if they tend in the same direction.  Besides, I’m too prone to stylized, self-absorbed snark to compose a respectable ad.

At bottom (he says in summary, realizing that there’s precious little to be summed at this juncture), letters like Bjorn’s call to mind some of the auxiliary issues that complicate the acculturation of youngish faculty folk.  As I worked through this post I was exceedingly conscious of (and somewhat resistant to) a will to generalize, since almost every university represents a collection of cultural concerns unto itself.  Adapting to that culture–discovering both the formal rules and the local norms that can change the shape of relationships–takes time and trial, and it may drive the best of us to seek solace in the blogs of strangers.

As the length of yesterday’s post may suggest, the Bald Man has wrapped yet another semester here at the homestead.  When December rolls around the Bald Man brings the diligence, and he also refers to himself in the third person with alarming frequency.

This semester I was aided and abetted by early exam sessions (two exams to administer on the first day, essays to collect on the second) and a relatively small number of finicky wrinkles, but even so I concluded sooner than most in similar shoes.  Another reader has asked for some remarks about weathering the deluge that comes at semester’s end, so I thought I’d venture some notions.

As always, take the following bits and bobs with the usual saline supplement.  I’m no ninja–as I mentioned long, long ago, I have some terrible obsessive-compulsive tics that make my grading process more labor-intensive than it needs to be–but I’ve developed a handful of practices that help me push the paper.

1.  Wrangle your stragglers.  The thorniest work at semester’s end tends to revolve around those folks who have one or more projects outstanding.  They may have promised documents that will excuse a late submission, they may have apprised you of their plans to accept some penalty for a missed deadline, or you simply may have holes in your grading spread sheets.  Any which way, I always try to reel those folks in during the week prior to exams.  I’ll usually send out a general circular that clarifies end-of-term policies (more on that below), and then I’ll scan through my records and see if there are any conspicuous omissions I can attend to.  If there are, the students in question get short, businesslike letters, just enough prose to goad them into motion.  I freely concede that this approach is both practical and tactical.  Students tend to either a) handle the missing business straightaway if they can or b) pretend that the possibility of missing work is news to them, often to the point of ignoring your message so they can make their appeals in person.  In either case the prefatory paperwork on your part takes care of the former concerns and gives you documentation you can use when you tackle the latter.

2.  Put a circular to work.  To manage (and ideally minimize) the remainder of your business, send out a general notice that covers most of the questions that invariably attend the completion of any course.  I try to let students know where and when we’ll meet for the final exam session, when I’ll post grades, how to calculate their grades themselves, and how to contact me if they suspect a grading anomaly after the fact.  I also let them know that I’ll hold on to their essays and exams for pickup in the spring.  My version of the circular never contains anything I find especially surprising, but I try to make the last leg of the semester entirely mystery-free.  I’ve never managed to cover all of the bases–students will find wrinkles, real or imagined–but I’m pretty sure that I spare myself a dozen e-mails each year by addressing the common concerns that crop up.

3.  Screen your e-mail.  I reckon that most folks do this routinely, but if you like an empty inbox as much as I do, you may feel compelled to tackle messages as they arrive.  I tend to observe two practices that save me quite a bit of time.  First, I have files set aside that address some of the concerns that always arise:  why I won’t offer extra credit opportunities to a single student, for example, or why it’s not possible for me to change the date of the final.  A little strategic cutting and pasting saves me a world of worry.  Second, when it comes to more heated e-mails, I always observe a waiting period (the same period I ask students to observe before they approach me regarding exams and essays I just handed back).  I generally don’t need much time to cool down (and I’ve borne the brunt of some fairly colorful insults, threats, and accusations in the past), but I find that students sometimes do.  I would venture to guess that about 67% of the fiery messages I’ve received from students during my teaching career were followed by more measured assessments of sundry situations in the subsequent 24 hours.  Students can often talk themselves down from a ledge more effectively and expeditiously than we can, and giving them that chance costs me little.

4.  Norm and storm.   As most folks know, I have a serious professorial problem:  when I grade essays of any kind, I read them three times.  Someday when I’m feeling candid I’ll link the practice to past trauma, but suffice it to say that I read seriously or I don’t read at all.  The first read-through, however, is of a very different order than the other two (after which I assign marginal comments and grading notes, respectively):  I simply use it to get a sense of the general complexion of the assignment set and to identify any outliers in the batch.  This norming has been a great help to me, if only because it isolates those oddities that can gum up the gears.   When I teach the survey of British literature, for example, I’ll often get peculiar papers that don’t bear an especially strong resemblance to the structure implied by the assignment rubric.  While some represent an effort to get by with little work, many simply involve serious engagement of an unexpected order.  When I come across such critters, I set them aside.  That allows me to churn through the majority of the work with the same evaluative measures in mind, and only then do I turn to those efforts that deserve to be handled differently.

5.  Nibbles and bits.  At the end of the semester it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks at hand.  To wit:  on the last day of class in the survey I received 50 essays of four or more pages; the week before that, I received 40 essays of five or more pages; my senior seminar added 25 professional digests (of eight or more pages apiece) followed by 25 capstone essays (of nine or more pages).  That’s around 800 pages of reading, and it excludes the final exams that appeared in the interim.  Thinking about the work in aggregate terms can lead to nothing but wailing despair.  That’s why I chunk things down into digestible bits, which is par for the course when it comes to achieving most goals.  When a batch of 40 essays comes in on Monday night, I’ll try to read in sets of eight–enough so that I can be systematic in the application of my evaluative expectations but not so much that the last essays in the string suffer from my desire to get the business of grading behind me.  Since I adhere to this practice all semester long, I seldom find myself too far behind the eight ball.  I might have more grading than I’d like, but knocking it out day to day and week to week instead of letting it amount to a monstrous mound of menace tends to help me keep my head clear.  Some like to get the misery out of their systems in a single sitting; me, I like my suffering in steady, regular doses.

6.  Finally, stick to the script.  English professors are, for the most part, human, and we are obliged to wrangle with subjective considerations more often than most.  I remember keenly my earliest days as a teacher of record, when at semester’s end I would agonize over those judgment calls that always seemed to arise.  To round up or not to round up?  Should I revisit a student’s class participation grade?  Should I take into account the fact that a sickly student came to class with a priest to read her the last rites, just in case?  Once upon a time such considerations weighed heavily on my approach, but I’ve since found comfort in foresight.  If I’m going to agonize, I agonize only once:  I determine all class participation points on the day the semester ends and do not change them; based on the level of discourse in the class at large I’ll decide at the same time how high I’m willing to round, if at all;  I’ll lay out policies and procedures during the last week to accommodate students with illnesses or unavoidable conflicts.  I still have to mess with some subjective situations (those outliers I describe above), but at least this way I don’t need to fret about making imaginary cases for the student who needs .6 points for a B- versus the student who needs 1.4 points for an A.

*****

As promised, I come with only counsel, not revelation.  If you’ve got your own tips and tricks for weathering the work at semester’s end, please feel welcome to drop them down in the comments below.  In the meantime, best of luck to those who’ve still got that long march before them.  As for me, I’ll begin the work of gearing down into holiday mode.

]]> http://williamhwandless.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/staging-the-endgame/feed/ 0 williamhwandless http://williamhwandless.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/the-academic-job-market-english-search-advice-part-xiii/ http://williamhwandless.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/the-academic-job-market-english-search-advice-part-xiii/#comments Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:30:13 +0000 williamhwandless http://williamhwandless.wordpress.com/?p=460 ]]>

Here we are again.  Many moons have passed since last I visited this turf, but in the interest of addressing a few questions that have trickled my way in the intervening months, I thought I’d venture another dual-purpose post.  Two queries, as it turns out, are far more common than all the others:   How does one decide when it’s time to leave academic aspirations behind?  And how does one who already has a zesty tenure-track gig go about conducting a surreptitious search?  As you might surmise, I have no definitive answers to offer–I have an academic job, and I’ve never furtively searched for another–but I hope I can offer some useful perspective on two questions that I think are tellingly intertwined.

I’ve done a bit of casual browsing over the past week or two, ever since a correspondent inquired about when it seemed best to throw in the towel on the tenure-track search.  Keyword combinations to that effect also steer quite a few visitors here, and plunking in those same keywords will lead you to a number of resources.  A bunch of links tend generally toward the blog of Sisyphus o’er yonder, and one of her more recent posts bears directly on the question of cutting one’s losses and embarking on a new adventure (thanks to Fie for the pointed pointer). One of the blog respondents also points readers toward a valuable blog called Leaving Academia, and searchers may wish to hie themselves thither when they feel the jig is up.  The territory is unsurprisingly pretty well mapped, if only (alas) because so many aspiring tenure-trackers have been obliged to chart it.

Since you’ve probably come here for my pence and sensibilities, let me try to be plainspoken and focused in a two-centsical way.  I was one of the lucky ones:  I earned my degree, spent a year as a VAP at my doctoral institution, and then landed a tenure-track job on my way out the door.  I spent two years at one school, stepped over to another for a year to rejigger my credentials, and then found my way here, to Central Michigan University, where I’m currently a candidate for early tenure.  The process of getting here, which follows almost perfectly the two steps forward/one step back methodology recommended by Paula Abdul, took me three years; for many folks, that represents an awful long wait.

I had, as regular readers know, a number of advantages.  I have no significant other and no kids; no one depends on me but me (and Bank of America, which owns my student loans).  I have no strong geographical attachments, so a job anywhere in the country would have been welcome.  I had really fine advising, and I had correspondingly modest expectations.  I was also braced for the wait.  I searched my soul (such as it is) long ago, and I determined that I was fitted for a handful of professions, most of which converge on the writing life.  As a result, I never developed an exit strategy, if only because I feared it would heighten the pith and pitch of my occupational anxiety.  I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if making such a commitment was intrepid or foolhardy, but those who know me well know that mine is a totalizing personality:  single-mindedness is my curse and my virtue.

From canvassing some of my peeps who are still searching, however, I would guess that the jobless population is a little more responsive to conditions on the ground.  Most have proceeded along one of two routes.  They have either a) set in advance a time line for their searches, determining with certainty the length of the commitment they were willing to make, or b) settled down in the region they prefer (with an employed spouse or supportive family), taken on enough academic work to keep them afloat (and to maintain a university affiliation and access to all the resources and advantages appertaining thereunto), and made a commitment to keep searching so long as there are jobs in the vicinity.  Members of the former set tend to give up the ghost at either a personal landmark (a predetermined birthday, more often than not) or at four years, as Sisyphus anticipates.  The sample size of searchers I’m drawing from is not ginormous, but mayhap those numbers and prospects will give you a star to steer by.

Here’s one educated guess I will venture, at least:  if you are surfing the web in the hopes that some well-intentioned stranger has scratched a line in the dirt, you’ve probably already got such a number in mind.  You’ll find plenty of precedents and alternatives out there, but the figure that’s meaningful for you and yours is one that only you can set.

The academic job market has always been unkind, and the general economic downturn hasn’t made it any more huggable.  More folks are staying in school to earn advanced degrees, and more universities are approaching hiring with circumspection and hesitancy.  Part of the reason I’ve yoked these two queries together today is that I think new job seekers may not be fully aware of the complexity of the competition:  there is already a glut of newly-minted doctors of philosophy beating the bushes, and right behind them is a set of seasoned hunters on horseback, ready to give chase.

How does one conduct a second search, secretly or otherwise?  I couldn’t really say with certainty.  I think it is worth noting, however, that there are a gaggle of such searchers out there.  As is the case with any field, many folks approach academia with entry-level, starter-job sensibilities in mind:  they believe they may need to serve a tour of duty in the trenches before climbing through the ranks.  The variables are many–some profs have a clear, concrete sense of what it means to be at a 1a or 1b, a 2/2 or 3/3; others would be happy to swap a 3/3 load in the Midwest for a 4/4 load in NYC, and almost all job hunters have some similarly concrete, individualistic idea of what it means to “advance”–and so the contours of competition are difficult to predict.  Trying to calculate how many folks are vying for any given gig is utterly pointless:  once you take into account ABDs; new doctorates; searchers who’ve been on the market for two, three, or four years; established assistant professors who might view such a job as an upgrade; and the stray senior scholars who are willing to make a lateral (or downward) move for personal or professional reasons, you learn to table the guesswork.  The good news is that different institutions view candidate credentials differently:  the ABD applicant might imagine such open competition with despair, but some schools will value (and even prefer) precisely what that candidate brings to the table.   The second search is no easier than the first, I reckon, precisely because the pool is so wide and so deep.  Also, it’s shaped like a kidney.  Who knew?

Rather than rambling on about the complexities of the job search, let me boil down the little I’ve learned into a list for those who are planning a second search from the security of a tenure-track perch. As always, consider this content advisory and anecdotal:  there are no guarantees on the job market, and some employers will be unhappy to learn that you’re giving serious thought to kicking them to the kerb.

1.  Remember–it’s a small world, after all.  You might be savvy and sneaky, but it’s worth keeping in mind that academic folks know lots of academic folks.  Most mind their own business, but some will respond in all the usual human ways when they are surprised to see your application in the pile.  I can cite at least one confirmed case in which a job search ended in a visit to the department chair’s office, and what began as a casual exploration of alternatives on the part of a job seeker unexpectedly turned into a much more earnest search for gainful employment.  The same holds true inside departments as well–a misplaced confidence, the usual activity of the local grapevine, or one untimely “reply all” can spill all the beans you’ve tried to keep to yourself.  I can’t say for sure how much secrecy is actually needed (see below), but you should probably take into account the prospect of legitimate risk.  Few institutions will throw a new hire out on her ear for having the audacity to size up greener pastures, but such an awareness may affect her professional prospects if the search does not pan out.  (NB:  I will go on record noting that, in general, surreptitious searching is exceedingly easy.  I am, however, a worst-case scenario sort of fellow, and I think it’s wise to prepare for the ugliest turns and reversals.)

2.  Dial in to the grapevine.  Despite the cautionary tone of the first item, I should also note that many schools know full well that they serve as way stations for the upwardly-mobile academic.  They may be fully aware of their standing and frankly exploit it:  what better way to avoid all the snarls of tenure, promotion, and retention than to concede to the reality of a migrant work force?  A friend of mine down south (he says, noting that south of here is everywhere) confided in a departmental ally and learned that the whole department frankly expected her to move on before long.  The chair even wound up writing her a glowing letter of recommendation, which went a long way toward helping her secure a foothold in the next professional tier.  Like the turn of events described above, I would guess that this is the exception rather than the rule, but it doesn’t take long to develop some sense of professional perspective in a new place.  A year or three at any school will help you get a sense of how a department conducts itself, especially in terms of the influx and egress of academic talent.  That knowledge may help you gauge your own conduct and approach the search.

3.  Serve some time.  Even if your home department concedes to the inevitability of heavy turnover, hiring departments will still want applicants to stick around for a spell. I’ve spoken with members of various hiring committees and some folks who made the attempt to start the upward climb during their first year and received the same report:  starting a search for a new job before you’ve even settled into the rhythm of your current position tends to undercut any case you might make.  From both the inside and the outside, it appears perfectly clear that you viewed the gig as a stepping stone: you can’t really make the case that the job was a poor fit if you arrive in late August and are sending out applications in early October.  Accordingly, expect to spend at least a full year on the job; that seems to be viewed as a sort of professional minimum.  Even a short stay proves to personnel peeps that you gave the gig a chance, and so long as they can perceive a plain difference between the job you’re leaving and the one you seek, they’re likely to give you a fair hearing.

4.  Prepare your alibi.  For precisely that reason, make sure you’ve got a severance narrative at the ready.  It should come as no surprise to learn that the usual interview question (“what makes you so interested in Ukulele University?”) will come with a necessary entail for those who are leaving an established tenure-track gig:  “what makes you prefer Ukulele University over Clavichord College?”  That’s a question you’ll need to handle with special sensitivity, since it reflects a doubled institutional awareness and offers hiring committees a telling index of your professional priorities.  You may well want nothing more than a better salary or a lighter teaching load, but most personnel folk will not find such a case especially compelling.  There are a few hundred ways to respond, so make sure the one you choose is attuned to institutional circumstances rather than academic machinations.

5.  Finally, leg it out.  I’ve mentioned briefly in another post my (uninformed, purely speculative) sense of leveraged salary negotiations, so I’ll leave that subject be.  But as a kindly, genial bit of grandfatherly Bald Man advice, don’t you frickin’ dare bag it on your students and your colleagues on your way out the door.  Just thinking about such self-serving sliminess makes the squiggly veins at my temples twitch.

If you are so fortunate as to parlay a couple of good years at one school into a fancier gig at another, please keep in mind that the school you’ve left does not cease to exist the moment you’ve signed your new contract.  I’m not here to lecture you on professional ethics, but I think in the excitement of the change it’s not surprising that ambitious academics sometimes forget that they are leaving things behind.  I’m still a young’un in professorial years, but I’ve already seen the aftermath of clumsy and thoughtless departures:  students scrambling to find folks who will write them letters of recommendation in the absence of their favorite former faculty member, advisees trying to adjust majors and minors in the absence of the folks who signed their forms, administrative staff avidly hunting down missing paperwork that at last report passed through the departed’s hands.  People forget stuff; it happens.  Blowing off the messages of former students or the reasonable solicitations of former colleagues, however,  is inexcusable.  I’m among the least sentimental folks you might ever meet, but I look back on most of my former colleagues with fondness and some of them with reverence.  Some were polite, many were kind, and all were professional–they deserve at least that much from me.  They’ll deserve at least that much from you.

As a closing note (and to clarify the subject of this fifth item’s title), don’t simply mail in that last semester once you know you’ve got a new gig on the horizon.  I’d urge you to exploit that freedom–I can’t think of many things more salutary from a pedagogical perspective than a professor with the wherewithal to teach freely, with all of the usual anxieties allayed–but not to view that time as a pointless prelude to the bigger and better things you have in store.

By the time you  reach that point you’ve probably spent more than a decade working doggedly to earn the privileges of professorship.  It would be a shame to shortchange students sitting where you once sat just because you’ve earned the kind of chance that they’re still learning to earn.

I probably oughtn’t be blogging–after three false starts you would think I’d have learned my lesson–but this evening I’ll get 40 essays, thus beginning the headlong sprint to semester’s end.  I haven’t much to say, but I’ll say it anyway.

The good news is that I’m about as well positioned as one can be going into the closing ten-day stretch.  We conducted department-wide program review this fall, and I think my portion of the project is well and truly squared away.  I kept ahead of the curve as far as the submission of my verse collection goes, and I’m more or less squared away until mid-January.  I’d like to think I’ve been a decent advisor this fall as well, doing my best to offer clear feedback, timely assistance, and help in forms both conspicuous and invisible.   I didn’t get as much writing done as I might have liked, but that’s a tune most faculty folk are singing right about now.

All told, I reckon I have cause for modest satisfaction.  That’s probably why I want to change every frickin’ thing about the way I live my life.

If you were the one reader with uncanny timing who caught my Saturday post, you probably caught the drift of my self-inflicted bitterness.  Sometimes it’s healthy to pop that particular cork, but it may be best not to record said poppery for posterity.  Suffice it to say that I had a little too much time for introspection over the holiday and I was not altogether happy with what I saw in the funhouse mirror.  I can recognize more darkness and distortion than usual in retrospect, but the image is one I oughtn’t forget or neglect, although I’m tellingly inclined to try.

I’m not much inclined, however, to devote much space to my navel-gazery, hence my reluctance to post in the first place.  As with all inward revolutions, there’s much to be done and not much to be said.  Moreover, the doing involves edging and inching, assuming I want to make changes that stick.  Chronicling all the modest adjustments I might make sounds exhausting, never mind how boring I imagine it would be to read.

So there you go:  a chronicle of an existential crisis and corresponding action plan as described by a high-functioning introvert.  The classics never get old.

Best of luck to those readers who are heading into the home stretch of their respective semesters.  May your reading, writing, testing, and grading be manageable, if not merry.

Today we brace up for the short week, the most magical, meddlesome week of them all.  We’re down to the last two weeks of class at CMU, and this one will probably involve the last substantive lesson plans I’ll need to script before the end-o’-semester sprint begins.  It’s tough for students to conjure up enthusiasm during abbreviated weeks, and harder still for them to muster new momentum when we’ve got one week left to go.  Nevertheless, I’m going to summon all the zazz I can to carry me through the next three days.  I feel the semester has gone exceedingly well thus far, and I’m not about to slacken my pace now.

Semester’s end is when I most appreciate my approach to teaching; this is because I am a bit of a sociopath, a bit of a fascist.  I angle for transparency from the very start of each academic session, and the semester accordingly sends me few surprises for which I do not have a ready response.  Students, alas, may not feel quite so chipper about such pedagogical prospects as the holidays arrive.

Once upon a time I would get frustrated by the end of the semester.  No matter how emphatically I stressed policies and procedures, some folks always approached them as if they were legalese, as if the loophole was the letter of the law.  In some ways such cases are compelling–it’s always a little exciting to see argumentative passion, even when it comes in the form of grade debates or deadline negotiations–but most of the time they end in resentment.   I am of the opinion that fairness is a constant, a quantity that doesn’t change between September and December.  Some folks find themselves inclined to differ, however, no matter the warning signs that line the road they travel.

I feel for my colleagues who agonize over those eventualities that invariably arrive at semester’s end:  the students who request extra credit assignments, the students who want a crack at just one more revision, the students who realize that math has turned against them.  I feel for those students, too, but not so much that I’m ever willing to upend their peers by yanking our shared standards out from under them.  That’s a kind of subjective relativism I’ve never been able to stomach, and I always lead off every class by letting the students know that I’m a systematic thinker, that I’ll address every concern that emerges unilaterally, not idiosyncratically.  If I do my job right–and, despite all indications to the contrary, I often do–the system does not admit the possibility of the individual fix.

Am I keen to see students folded and spindled in the gears of the machine?  Heck, no.  I hate to see it happen, and any student who tries to save herself will get my best help.  At the same time, however, my pedagogy rests on the bedrock of what I feel is the most–if not sole–meaningful, practical principle for anyone who wishes to learn anything:  self-determination.  Some folks will take advantage of avenues that allow them to excel, and I’ll do everything I reasonably can to ease and speed their progress.  Some folks, alas, won’t make it to the end of that street in the course of sixteen weeks, and it would be brutally unjust–to their peers and the students themselves–to change the distance they need to cover.

A more compassionate teacher might find ways to mend or move them, to repair the damage caused by idling or reckless driving, but I would rather wait by the finish line to help those folks who’ve powered their way to the end.

Sorry, Foucauldians:  you’ll learn nothing powerful/knowledgeable from me.  Go buy the book.

Today I find myself possessed of that rarest of professorial commodities:  free time in mid-November.  As I’ve mentioned in the past few posts, obligations rain down hot and heavy past the mid-semester mark.  In addition to all the usual work of reading, grading, and class preparation–all of which become more challenging in the second half, as students become more disenchanted and/or more desperate and require additional attention and energy–I’ve found my days gummed up with the business of governance.  The English Department is in the midst of its triennial program review, and my committee responsibilities have multiplied like pre-moistened Mogwai.  I pride myself on foresight, so the onrush of obligations seldom catches me flat-footed; even so, it can be hard to remain abreast of all the developments that a semester might bring to bear.

The past several days have been grindstone-intensive:  on Saturday I graded 45 exams, on Sunday I graded 20 senior capstone essays, and the past three days have been devoted exclusively to program review, which is something of a mystery to all parties concerned.  I was entrusted with compiling and interpreting assessment data for our baccalaureate concentration in creative writing, a task that involved more mystery and imagination than I care to admit.  Natheless, after a timely consult with the chair of the department (who was handling the same questions at the M.A. level), I was able to churn on through and file away the papers yesterday.  For good measure I spent last evening reading Chabon’s The Final Solution, which I teach next week.  When it comes to getting stuff done, I’m something of a show-off.

What’s somewhat interesting to me (at least this morning, as the caffeine starts to kick in) is the sacrifices academics  and students make–the corners we feel obliged to cut–as we head into the last leg.  One of my colleagues recently lamented the necessity of skipping her morning yoga class so that she could tackle the last of her grading; another posted on Facebook that she would be foregoing trips to the gym until she had the chance to wade through a batch of essays.  On Friday mornings I normally meet with an extra-shiny student to talk shop about an ongoing project, but she’s fallen into something of a slump, almost certainly a consequence of her attempt to juggle several writing-intensive classes and grad school applications.  Still another student has a project proposal for a spring independent study pending, a proposal she’s set aside in order to wrangle paperwork that will allow her to teach abroad next fall.  There’s a reason we get so frazzled at semester’s end, a reason we need the time off that mercifully arrives during the holiday and summer seasons.  Academic obligations have a way of sprawling, of occupying every minute we’re willing to give them, and once we’ve set the bar for our best attempt we tend to slough off the superfluities in our lives:  the acts and habits that bring us pleasure or contentment as we limp toward December.  They seem like weight we can’t afford to carry.

In the past I’ve accepted the inevitability of the same pattern, but this semester I’m committed to fighting that practical gravity as much as I can.  Admittedly, my R&R probably isn’t very restful or recreative when judged by human standards, but I still save space to indulge in my therapeutic nerdery.  More importantly, I’ve worked determinedly to take the critical second step:  resisting the guilt and regret that attends such “wasted” time.  Most teachers find themselves squeezed between a self-inflicted Scylla and Charybdis:  some experience guilt for falling short of self-imposed standards (trying to return all work to students within seven days, for instance), while some simply surrender to the inevitability of failure and stop trying to meet the deadlines they set in happier times.   What’s doubly tragic, however, is that both groups forsake their sources of pleasure and contentment along the way, the former in the attempt to create the time they feel they need, the latter because that sense of failure fouls their enjoyment with a corollary shame.  Pushing past that part of the process represents a real challenge, especially if one is prone (as I often am) to an exaggerated sense of accountability.

We’ll see if I feel the same way at semester’s end, but right now the choices I’ve made feel positively (if inversely)  Rochesterian:  the time I’ve taken to gratify my appetites, such as they are, has generally kept me perky and productive when it comes time to tuck in to those stacks of books and essays.

Am I looking forward to the holiday break?  Sure and begorrah.  But I feel much less apprehensive about the condition I’ll be in when it arrives than I normally do at this time of year.

Today, brevity, as anything that smacks of non-essential recreation must be knocked out before 7:45am.  It’s going to be that kind of weekend.

Zombies, seriocomically enough, occur in my dream life as an exceedingly versatile, recurrent symbol.  Once upon a time they figured primarily in terms of insatiable predation:  they would descend upon me in the usual droves, and it didn’t require much interpretive work to appreciate after the fact what the menace most certainly meant.  Sometimes the zombies served as stand-ins for folks who wanted things of me that I was loath to yield, and sometimes they embodied the piles of paper I needed to push.  In general terms they represented too much of a muchness, swarms and hordes of shambling abstractions hemming me in or closing upon me.  My dream life consisted largely of  fighting and flight, the exhausting–and always futile–effort to resist or escape.

What’s fascinating to me nowadays about my periodic visits to Zombieland  is a finicky shift in focus:  rather than zeroing in exclusively on the descent of the undead, I find myself more often than not enjoying the benefits of a divided mind, one that monitors the menace but also tends to question how I found myself in dire circumstantial straits.  Last night, for instance, I was part of a group of four survivors flying through the streets of a beachside resort town.  I was keeping an eye out for defensible positions along the boardwalk as well as spots where we might change direction to elude pursuit as our undead friends assembled and began to give chase, but the group I was with–foolishly, I knew–turned toward the shore itself.  Not only were we bogged down in the sand in plain sight of our pursuers, we were also headed directly for a raised platform beneath an outcropping of rock; in accordance with the usual dream logic, that outcropping became the underside of an overpass, and the beach itself became a barren expanse of sand.  What was certain, in any case, is that we were purposely, determinedly going to corner ourselves.  I knew the move could only be a prelude to our doom, but our progress made me powerless to oppose it.

There’s no time to assign blame when you’re furiously defending the edges of your chosen refuge, but even as I was kicking and shoving the clambering corpses from the lip of the platform, watching their numbers swell on the sand, I was mostly thinking about my companions, about my decision to go along with them, about the prospects of escape if I spotted an opening wide enough to strike out on my own.  Self-sacrifice is never less appealing than when it promises to get you eaten.

Dreams are always useful, the crucible in which we get to test our intentions and sensibilities under pressure and duress.  I just wish that dreams like these could last long enough for me to see the consequence of the choices I might otherwise make, the courses of action I might otherwise take.

At the moment I should be fleshing out a book order for my Spring 2010 session of Popular Culture in America, but instead I am blogging.  This is because I have my priorities straight.

The past few weeks have been unduly frustrating, and I think I have identified the primary reason why:  other people, as it turns out, are not very much like me.  While such manifest difference ought to be reckoned a win for all parties involved–even my tolerance for me has its limits–I cannot help but wish at times that the folks I know were just a smidgen more Wandlessian when it counts.  I have many, many, many faults (some theorists would contend that I have all of them, and I would be hard pressed to refute them), but one thing cannot be denied:  the Bald Man gets stuff done.

I am not opposed to committees, procedures, debates, and negotiations, but when the time comes to act, one ought to act. Moreover, I also believe only one rule ought to apply in those two most common cases of commission:  doing what one says one will do, and doing what one ought to do.  These are not mysteries of expression or discretion; one does not need a focus group or decision tree to sanction or second a promise.  Even mathematicians, most of whom are lunatics, would agree that obligation = obligation, duty =  duty.  I’m nutty for semiotics, and I’m down with the arbitrariness of signification, but I believe a certain pragmatism ought to come into play when we tell a colleague or a student that we’ll handle some bit of needful business (or when some bit of needful-if-unwelcome business is thrust upon us).  Performative utterance trumps the tricksiest linguistic legerdemain.

The coming spring will ring in a number of changes for me on both personal and professional fronts.  At the level of university service I’ll be faced with nearly total turnover:  I am currently involved in the work of  five separate committees, and my membership in four will lapse at semester’s end.  My decision to sign on for a second tour (or to pick up other work in other places) will depend on whether or not I can reconcile my sense of duty with my constitutional ruthlessness, a strong will to work that doesn’t brook delays or deferrals especially well.

Potentially tenured, possibly promoted, and freed from the constraints of committee?  If you asked me to make my May decisions today, I don’t know that my essential self would make you feel too welcome.

One of the worst things a teacher can do at October’s end, in my learned opinion, is look at the calendar.  Nothing good can ever come of it.

The past week was an odd one.  In defiance of science I’ve been harboring a nice, steady fever of about 101, yet without any pesky symptoms to tell me what might be going down.   I didn’t let it interfere with my days and ways to any meaningful degree (I did avoid taking part in more social interaction than usual, which is not saying much), but the prevalence of illness in the vicinity nixed a number of normal functions.  That allowed me to take Friday off and take in a movie, and the coming week promises to be comparably idle, with only Wednesday and Friday meetings added to my usual work.  When November arrives, however, it looks like an all-out sprint from the first to the thirtieth, which should find me (and most everyone associated with CMU) limping into December, assuming the swine flu doesn’t fell us all beforehand.

What’s fairly fascinating about the current state of affairs, however, is just how far it extends beyond my usual ken.  The weekend found me designing an Honors course for Fall 2010, for example, a study of cultural duality that will oblige me to trespass on a wide variety of disciplinary territories.  It should be a hoot and a half, and I’ve already designed some really engaging activities to get students thinking critically about doubles and doppelgangers, but I feel like a bit of a poacher in prepping my plans.  In the coming weeks I’ll also be taking part in the English Department’s program review, an assessment of the curriculum we need to perform every three years.  Although I’m a true blue Brit-lit guy, I’ve been entrusted with reviewing the assessment portion of our undergraduate concentration in creative writing.  There’s  only one person in our entire department who’s actually equipped to comment meaningfully on the ways assessment has changed in our creative writing division over the past few years, but since he’s tackling the M.A. program, I reckon I’m the best they could get in a pinch.

Moreover, what promised to be a staid spring has become increasingly complex in the past couple of weeks.  I really enjoy and value teaching in a variety of contexts, but January will find me–our 18th-century British fiction specialist–taking up Studies in American Popular Culture and Masterpieces of Ancient Literature.  Both can be brought into my wheelhouse with a little imagination…but new constraints make those adjustments a little tricksy.  I would normally use an organizing theme in the pop culture course that veers toward the Gothic, but the early edition of the class roster features quite a few students who’ve already taken my Stephen King course and my senior seminar (which has a month-long Gothic component); ergo, I’ll have to reach down deep into my bag of tricks to give them something new.  I picked up the Masterpieces class to fill the gap left by our Classicist, who retired in the spring; I’ve got a respectable grounding in the Greeks and Romans thanks to the reading needed to address Neoclassicism, and a traditional olde skool focus seemed like an equitable way to organize the course.  In a nifty twist, however, one of my seniors (who plans to go on to doctoral school, possibly in Classics) asked to sign on as a teaching assistant, so I’m accordingly intent on designing a course in collaboration with her, one that will address her personal and pre-professional interests.  Rather than leaning on the Homers and Virgils of the world as I’d planned, I’m now taking a long look-see at The Tale of Genji, The Bhagavad Gita, and other texts well outside my normal range.  I’ve got a course release in the spring, but something tells me much of that “free time” is already committed.

In the short term I reckon I probably ought to attend to the business of tomorrow, but the next couple of months will either find me becoming very knowledgeable about many things or else retreating to my grotto, waiting for next autumn to come.