A moment of calm

 I've gotten through the first weeks of the semester meetings and wrapping up a search committee, and there are a few weeks until advising starts, so I'm at a bit of a lull. The spring semester is always hard, with all the starting up and wrapping up, the recruiting of the new students events on top of everything else. So I'm trying to take care of a bit of time to be chill. Only did about 90 minutes of work this weekend. It's now late Sunday night and I'm trying to convince myself that it will be fine if I let things go until the morning. 

In other news, I listen to pedagogy podcasts driving to work and when I have to go to the store and stuff, and I enjoyed this one this week. 

I learned about the 3 characteristics of burnout:

• Overwhelming exhaustion
• Feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job
• A sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment

I sat in the WalMart parking lot, having just put my groceries in the car, having finished this one and realized it was a check. check. check. 

Interestingly, the solution is apparently not time away from work. It's adjusting the priority that work has in your life. 

I think this is truly hard for most academics. We do sometimes absurd amounts of work for comparatively small concrete reward, so something like cognitive dissonance makes us convince ourselves that it's important and we like it. Then when we don't like it, we feel guilty. 

But really, if I walked away, New U or any U would just quickly replace me and not think twice about it. So doing some rebalancing really does seem like it is in order. 

Campus life isn't what it used to be

 I'm pretty lucky for a proffie. My school required vaccines and we've had a mask rule in place most of the time. Sadly, many folks dgaf. 

The guy in the office next to me has students in his office a lot and invites them to take off their masks. 

Other students sit around the buildings maskless, on the grounds that because a beverage is in their vicinity, they are "actively drinking" and therefore they don't have to wear one. 

Someone at home in my family has co-morbidities for COVID and it drives me around. the. bend. to see otherwise smart people who seem to have no ability at all to understand what an airborne virus means. The giant sanitizing wipes container in every classroom is not that useful when Johnny can't keep his nose in his mask and Janie has to gulp water every minute or she will dehydrate. 

So I haven't been spending more time at work than I have to. 

Then today, got a note from the dean about how faculty needed to be spending more time on campus and holding meetings and office hours in person, because we are an in-person campus. 

This on top of all of us taking many "for the team" in terms of extra work and yet still being asked to take on frequent new initiatives that admin wants made me wonder if I can retire early. Like, really early. I looked it up and the answer is no. 

But you can't fault a girl for trying. 

The students are broken

 For all the bright, shiny "new normal" talk that is permeating academia, we are aggressively ignoring the fact that the kids are not ok. Bun is now in high school (long-time readers might remember their birth), so I had something of an advantage over my colleagues of seeing the public school experience up close last year. The entire grade was done from my dining room. And we were lucky - Spouse teaches pretty much all giant lecture-sized classes that did not fit in the rooms on his campus with distancing, so he was on line all year as well, so at least someone was home. Spouse was in front of his green screen in the basement and Bun in the black box in the dining room. To say education sucked mightily last year would be a tremendous understatement. Never have I been so grateful to not be a public school teacher because they were in the mother of all lose-lose situations. 

The combination of how school went last year and the reality that we are still living in a global pandemic took every kind of toll on learners imaginable, and deciding that distancing didn't matter and masks are keen did not, in itself, undo the damage of a lost year and a half. 

My students were already not great at interpersonal interaction. The year in the black box seems to have changed their idea of what education is supposed to be. I had a class of first-years this fall that was the worst of my career by quite a bit. They were just a mass of anxiety and disengagement that made them unwilling to engage with the live class they were in at all. It's not that they are bad kids or incapable. They aren't. But they are broken. The 40-ish hours I had with them are definitely not enough to repair all the damage. At Bun's high school, things are still broken. Truly heroic things are being asked of the staff, as the legislature in New State has decided a whimsically incoherent policy wherein all instruction is to be perfectly normal and you are just as accountable according to the Department of Education and people can't come to school if they are positive according to the Department of Health and we have yet to manufacture a department of creating new competent people to meet both of those goals. Our new product we get in college will continue to be damaged. I think we will continue to ignore this fact. 

Is this burnout

 Probably. 

The pivot continues

 Saturday before our semester started Monday, I got a phone call telling me I would need to teach an additional class this semester. I feel like in academia, we are really in a free fall at this point. I have so many colleagues who had to take last-minute leaves this semester because the pressures of teaching have become incompatible with health or with taking care of your family. At the same time, we are getting battered with new initiatives, some driven by upcoming accreditations and some by administrators who want to stepping stone out of here and have a story about their impact on the place. 

This is not the time for new initiatives. We are barely surviving at this point. Being asked to pivot again and again is not good for anyone. 

I think I'm rebooting

 So, it's been really hard over the last couple of years to keep my mouth shut about what I see going on in academia. NewU is a pretty good place to work, but I've really been struggling with things I see going on that have, in a lot of cases, made it impossible for younger mothers to do this job. Like a lot of bloggers, I moved a lot of my efforts to social media over the recent past, but I started feeling like for folks who know me at work, a stream of complaining wasn't something they needed to see, so I ended up breaking online connections with pretty much everyone I know IRL. 

Then, a week ago, my Mom died unexpectedly. I've gained more responsibilities. I'm an only child, ands things like taking a sabbatical abroad aren't really possible now, since I need to be available for my dad. And I've lost an ear. My Mom definitely thought that I mostly only worked when I was in front of students and didn't understand a lot of other stuff about academia, but she was always sympathetic, and I don't really have that any more. 

So I'm going to try restarting this for a while, mostly as a place to put my thoughts. I don't really have readers any more, so probably it's shouting in the void, but I need a void right now. Because things are broken. 

Teaching in 2020

 I have every emotion going back to class tomorrow. It's mostly anger. A little regret. A good bit of fear. So much sadness. Oh, and also guilt. Let's start with that one. 

I have a job and it pays me money. For now. I am grateful for that. My job is also trying to kill me. That makes me angry, but then I feel guilty for being angry. Here are two areas. 

1. I don't work in a grocery store. People who do get crap wages, work hard and have no choice but to be in contact with the public. Therefore, since I only have 400 minutes a week with undergraduates, it's not really that bad. Guilty. 

2. Administration had to work hard all summer to create what, honestly, I believe is going to be a disaster for colleges. But they worked hard. I also worked hard all summer, unpaid, to try to make the most adaptable version of my courses. But I shouldn't devalue the heavy lift admins had. Guilty. 

Ugh, what a mess. 

Tomorrow, I spend 200 minutes face-to-face with young adults with undeveloped impulse control in a windowless basement computer lab that is small enough that with the 6-foot distance, one of them will have their back to me. 

How's your semester going?

Same song, next verse. A little bit louder and a little bit worse.

I've been in academia for more than 20 years now and have never had a sabbatical. I just found out today that I've been turned down, yet again.

I have so very many feelings about this and I am honestly not sure what the morality of it is.

I know I am super salty about out it - so much so that I give you this minimal effort image to illustrate my trying to have enough fingers on which to count this. 

ON THE ONE HAND I am so fortunate to work in a profession that has access to things like sabbaticals. Very few people in the world have this kind of ability. I should seriously stop whining and be grateful for how good I have it. 

ON THE OTHER HAND I am so fracking tired. So. Tired. What good does access to sabbaticals do if I can't get one. For about two years now, I have been literally averaging six hours of sleep a night so that I can do more research. This is not sustainable. It is not. 

ON THE OTHER HAND Maybe I deserve it. I wrote a great proposal last year to get some training to allow me to actually have the knowledge to teach my classes in a field that is itself emerging and that didn't exist when I was trained. Denied. This year, I wrote a more research-focused proposal, but honestly, I tried to guess what type of proposal was more likely to get funded instead of what I want to do. Still denied. 

ON THE OTHER HAND The policies and timing for sabbaticals is fracking ridiculous. Like you have to propose something you are going to do 18 months from now. I don't work in a field where you can plan that far in advance. You can't. So maybe my proposals stink because they are too vague. I don't know if this is a tractable problem. 

ON THE OTHER HAND The silverbacks in the department get sabbaticals. My chair is getting his third since I came to NewU next year. He didn't produce anything from his first, did from his second. The third is an automatic kind of one that I will never get, as I can't go up for full professor. 

What I DO know is that despite a few expressions of "I'm shocked!" from some of the more powerful faculty in the department, no one will do anything about it. And this is not sustainable. And I don't know what I should do, beside feel upset and guilty about feeling upset. 

The perverse incentives of academia

Have you written a book before? I'm trying and it is about as bad as I feared it would be. I love the topic, and that's keeping me going, but it is such a slog. Fortunately, it's due Dec. 1, so I at least know it will end.

Otherwise, it's been an interesting Fall semester, but not in the good sense. Lots o preps, back-to-back-to-back 3 days a week and two of them writing intensive keeps Mommy/Prof a busy lady. One of the most interesting challenging is keeping energy up. I definitely tend to the hangry side, so I have to bring snacks and run to my office real quick to shove something in my face.

The only one with a worse schedule is Spouse. He's literally got an 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. with nothing in-between one day, and an evening class two other days a week, so I don't see him a lot.

My latest big think on academic incentives, which I believe are f-ed up in a serious way.

Since the re-org of my unit, I am now in 4 departments with 4 different bosses that all their own meetings and some committee work for 3 of them, etc. And it's a lot of work that feels like complete BS - like "write a mission statement for your new department." I think it's telling that I wasn't the only lady faculty to repeatedly decline the blessing of working with the new dean in the new structure. All of the unit chairs are middle-aged white guys. And in my most core department, there are literally two women and 13 white guys. The last meeting we had devolved into a dominance contest between several of them and our only POC not only getting shut down, but having to listen to each one who wanted to deliver their sermonette on why they (our POC) were wrong. It was awful, and the new chair was one of the sermonette givers. I went to him afterwards and explained why this was not ok and about how having a brown face in your department is not just so your dept. photo looks good, but because we have the benefit of diverse perspectives and perhaps, just perhaps, we should listen to them. So I probably will get the mini-raise again next year.

This has been frustrating me a great deal. I will never be able to go up for full, for reasons. So the only incentives the university can offer me are reassigned time and raises. I've gotten the mini-raise for the last 4 years (below the increase in the cost of living because you have to have "merit" to get above it, and apparently I don't). I applied for a sabbatical - for a GOOD reason* - and got turned down. We have less reassigned time to give now, as so much of it is taken by our booming administrative class. We also have less raise money because they make more by virtue of their jobs. So I feel like I am doing a solid job at the stuff I was hired to do (teaching, research, service) and yet I am losing out. So why am I working so hard?

*One of my new departments is a very tech-intertwined field that literally did not exist when I was trained, so I applied for the sabbatical so I could do a grad certificate in that field. You know, so I could actually know what I am teaching in a deep way. 

What makes you wonder if you should have taken up that administration offer

Big changes in people here at NewU and we have a new president, a new provost and all new deans. The changes aren't reflective of anything bad - just had a bunch of people kind of age out, all at once. The only immediate problem is the new dean for my unit, whom I deeply dislike.

He didn't have a lot of administrative experience - had been chair of a large department at a bigger school than NewU - and I was almost completely uninvolved with the search. I was not on the committee and every chance to see candidates or give input was when I had other service obligations I had to go to. I don't know what the committee was thinking, but I am unimpressed.

Among other things, New Dean didn't get the message that it's a good idea to understand your people and your programs before you start tearing things up. In his first year, we've gone from a large program with 5 people in various administrative positions to a constellation of small programs with 10. Same number of students, same number of majors offered. It's insane. He also regularly misspells faculty names in communication, is actively destroying a program we just started 3 years ago and have hired junior faculty into and has overspent our budget on travel to the point that we can't offer classes that we should because there isn't money to pay faculty to teach them.

I was offered a chance to be one of the minor administrators. Repeatedly. I knew it would make me crazy dealing with the personality and the dysfunction to the point that it would affect my ability to be there for my family so I said no. Repeatedly.

I am mostly quiet about things, as I know I am one of those people who can be slow to embrace change, so perhaps it's me and everything isn't that bad. But I am not looking forward to this year, where we are now supposed to do curriculum revision across a substantially more complicated organization led by inexperienced people.

Wow, it's been a minute

Wondering at the moment if malaise is a normal part of post-tenure life.

I've heard that successful post-tenure academics have a couple of paths: administration or really getting embedded in research. NewU has been pushing hard to get me on the administrative path, but I am holding out, mostly because I think I'd deeply hate it. Like, a lot. No. No. I don't want to run a major campus-wide program. Nope. Don't want to be a department chair, thanks. At some point I'd snap and tell a student they are being ridiculous or a parent that their student lacks the maturity to success. Not good. You really, really don't want me to do this.

I think the general malaise and uncertainty of living in the US at the moment may be getting to me. But work is definitely a low spot. We've got a lot of changes at NewU, and in my unit in particular, with a new dean after 13 years or something (old one was there when I got here) and he is making tons of changes I strongly disagree with - like to the point that I think they are immoral. Students are getting on my nerves more than they should, to the point that I dread going to class. Oddly, it's usually fine when I am there. They are good kids, and they are usually engaged and trying hard. Nothing wrong with that. But I've started expecting the worst and then being pleasantly surprised. My research is doing pretty well. Got my first book-length thingie (I'm just an editor, so not all THAT major) coming out next month, and three more in the pile. But that's the only career-type thing I'm really excited about. I tried applying for a sabbatical for next year to try to clear things out of my head, but denied. Which sucks, so much.

So, malaise.

Yeah. 

Research and summer

I have a Twitter list of funny academic parody accounts, one of which posted something about how doing your research in the summer is academic freedom. (Because it isn't. Because it's a parody).

ANYWAY, because some projects ended up getting delayed by someone getting really sick and others ended dropping and being the "this data will literally only exist this summer" type, I find myself working on parts of 5 book projects that are all due at various times between now and Sept. 15. 

Most of them are edited books, which is good, but also bad, because for some reason, my colleagues think the editing includes stuff like fixing all their references, as this one publisher really doesn't provide copy editing. This is a real issue for me, as I find myself GREATLY resenting ignoring my kids and spending the summer inside in order to fix their crappy work, including stuff like being 40% over the word limit for the chapters. 

Then the other one with the "only this summer" data is a cool project, but also I think needs to be published as a trade book. All of these projects are my first on the full work side of book publishing. I've done chapters before,  but I think by now I've got the academic book model down. Trade books are a whole new world. I queried an agent and she wanted to see a full proposal (wrote back that same day, which amazed me), but now I don't really know what happens besides me waiting. The whole thing is exciting, but also weird. 

So that's my summer. How's yours?

Now I am mid-career

I hit the 3-year, post-tenure mark this year, and I am starting to get a lot of questions about when I am going to go up for full professor. I don't plan on it for a variety of reasons. The most important one, that I don't share, is that I think it would cause Spouse pain if I did. He finally got back up to the rank he left at PrettyGood this year, and so we are the same. And that's a good thing. Reasons I share are that, mostly, the incentives aren't structured to make it worthwhile. It's a little bit of extra $, but not that much. It also opens the boss level of service obligations, and to be honest, most of those suck, so I'm really not interested.

This was a bad year - insanely busy and I just did my own year on the P&T committee, which is not. at. all. fun. I'll be putting up a few posts about that this summer. I do have some really exciting research going down, so that's a highlight. 

Well THAT'S never happened before.

So there's a big professional conference in my field, and every year, I submit at least two things, counting on at least one to get accepted so I can go. This year, submitted two and both rejected. I can use my travel money to just go, but I'm not going to - going to try something new where I can maybe learn some different things. So this will be the first time in about 15 years. 

Hello, from the other side

So I was messing around with Google Analytics and realized that some people do still visit this blog, even though I haven't updated it in ages. Most of you seem to get here through searches for "tenure", so I thought I would say a little bit about professional life after tenure.

I think it is pretty normal to have a post-tenure depression or slump or blues or something. I really haven't.

In a lot of ways, things are pretty similar. I am teaching classes, doing research, some committee work, etc. Psychologically, things are way different mostly because the stakes feel so much lower. If I have a bad run in a class, ok. If I try something new and the students don't like it, ok. It was kind of amusing at my performance review this year because I had a new prep outside my field and the group-designed syllabus made the class kind of a disaster. It wasn't a horrible, but at my very teaching-focused institution, it wasn't great either.  My chair was all concerned and acting like I should be too, but I really feel like I had to try it, I can learn from what didn't go well, and life goes on. Things are a lot more mellow with tenure.

I haven't had that same feeling about research yet. I like to go to the annual conference in my field, and I would feel like a loser to go and not present something so thus far I've been keeping the research productivity about the same.

But here's the neat thing: being over the hurdle of tenure means I get to think more about what I want to do, not what will get me the most tenure-important results the fastest. I just got a contract to work on a couple of edited books - a project that will take a couple of years, but that's ok. The area in which I am actually most interested in working can be kind of a process to get the data, but I feel like I have that time now.

I had heard that you get a lot more service when you get tenure, and I guess I am having a lot more stuff come up as possibilities, but if I think it will make me crazy, I just say no and so far that is working.

I am not planning on going up for full professor, and I think that takes a lot of the pressure off.

So all in all, things are pretty good. Thanks for checking in. 

Tenure impacts and the two-body problem

So Spouse and I have both been in academia for about 24 years. It started when I quit my job in industry to follow him to grad school. I wasn't enrolled, and because his school was quite good, but in the middle of nowhere, I ended up working as a secretary at the school for several years until I decided maybe I'd do a grad degree myself and got an assistantship so I could do it full-time.

Spouse finished before me, and took a job at a school where we thought there might be a job for me eventually. I was a lecturer for a long time and Spouse got tenure. Eventually I moved to the tenure track, and we lived happily ever after.

Except we didn't.

As I have blogged here, my failing at tenure at PrettyGood changed just about everything in our lives. The kids are better off in New State, school-wise, although having one parent or the other on the tenure track for nearly her whole childhood has been less than optimal for Offspring. Academia is a cruel mistress when it comes to one's family, where your response to student concerns had best supercede your response to your family's needs in order to keep your job during the big up-or-out that is a hurdle to job security.

I'm better off at New School for the most part. Working on the far side of a sizeable commute kind of sucks and NewSchool has a bit of a Stepford quality that's not great.

Spouse is worse off. Spouse had to give up tenure to make that possible, and it's something he probably will not get back, given the nature of his position here. And that is hard for him every day.

So is it possible to solve the two-body problem? Kind of, but not completely. And, solving it at the same time seems very challenging, indeed.

This probably doesn't make sense without a picture, but

Who has two thumbs and tenure?

This MommyProf.

How one prepares oneself

The tenure decision, round 2, should be out on Friday. Secret pull asides in the hall, smoke signals, bat signals and the like all seem pretty positive. I'm living under the highly annoying oath of silence designed to limit culpability for the individuals involved in the process, all the while maximizing stress for me. If I get tenure, stay in academia and get to run my own university, things would be different. I am trying to not make long-term plans, though. First I have to get through Friday.

I've prepared by

• Reading several articles on dealing with tenure denial
• Re-reading all of my own old posts tagged "tenure"
• Having repeated nightmares involving me having tasks to do but being lost in a weird airport/shopping mall hybrid with variations including discovering Donald Trump is a politically liberal woman (best. nightmare. ever.)
• Composing "suck it PrettyGood" type social media posts. With photos!
• Deciding that those are ungracious and unnecessary
• Getting a LinkedIn Pro account and poking my weak ties in the industrial side of basketweaving
• Checking local academic job listings (there are none)
• Thinking about the hardest parts of all of this. This will be a subject of a subsequent blog post.

I'll have more soon, I promise

I get my tenure decision in 2 weeks, I think, and after that I can probably say more.

In the meantime, I have been at NewSchool for 5 years now, which is kind of hard to believe. They have a service recognition program that is a little different from PrettyGood. At PrettyGood, they had a nice lunch and the president shook your hand and everyone got the same little geegaw with the university logo on it. But it was nice to see all of the real long-timers, often staff who had been there for 35 or 40 years.

At NewSchool, it's more corporate. You get a link to a catalog where you select your own premium. Spouse had the same thing when he worked in industry. It is weird, weird stuff like a toaster or measuring cups or a cordless drill.

I want to call up HR and tell them to put the $15 in the scholarship fund, but I'm untenured, so that would be both obnoxious and unwise.

Does your uni recognize length of service?

Oh, brother

What a wild semester this has been.

Spouse's job is completely off the chain this semester. He teaches several very large classes (more than 100), and in a good week, prep is awful. This semester, he has a new prep for one of those in something he hasn't though much about since grad school and it is eating him alive. Many, many nights with falling asleep in his chair at 10:30 and waking up at 3 to catch up on more work.

Not a good scene.

Interestingly, though, Spouse's school has a job in my field, and my school has a job in his. So we're applying.