A simple thought today, before I go silent for a few days while I travel.
I still love the start of the semester, however worried or frustrated I get with where academia seems to be going.
I understand why affection for the job—the teaching, the scholarship, and yes, the institutional work—rubs salt in many wounds. The wounds of people who would have loved to have affection for the job but contingency and mismanagement prevented them. The people who had affection for the job and then found themselves in a bad institution, or in a bad department, or just increasingly unsatisfied. The people who can’t bring themselves, justifiably, to do the social labor and institutional labor that makes everything work that is still neither acknowledged nor credited nor valued by leaders in most institutions. The people who have found academia to be unwelcoming, racist, classist, sexist, heteronormative.
I know that to say: but I’m pleased to once again be teaching students, talking to colleagues, trying to keep things running, trying to maintain the values, trying to say that faculty as professionals and human beings ought to have a stake in the future of their institutions however and whenever I must? I know that to say it can make me look as if I don’t hear all the rest of it. I do. I hope I give evidence of it. I hope it is part of what I stand for when I stand. We can be better as institutions and better to one another and yet tough and fierce when we should be.
I do still believe in these places, god help me. I am still a human being whose humanity is intertwined with his work, his identity as professor, his sense that there is something in all that which is worth carrying forward into the future with pride and hope. I pray that I am smarter and wiser and more careful in how I understand myself and my work and my place every passing year and I know that sometimes prayers (even to oneself) are not answered.
So be it. There is no way but through—and the passage through a year of teaching and studying and deliberating is what I have been made for, by myself and at the hands of all the things which shape me, by my will or otherwise. It is, for me, a good life. I don’t pretend to say that as a commandment, a recommendation, or as a boast.
Image credit: Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
Academia: Back To School
Bravo
Have a good, first semester, Tim. I’m not missing it yet, but who knows?