On John Adams, Cylons, and Ex-Hippies

I just finished watching the last disc of the HBO mini series John Adams, the one that was pretty universally panned, and I totally cried for the last hour of it. Flat out bawled like a baby, especially the part where John Adams (Paul Giamatti, in terrible age-forward makeup, complete with age spots that move after every scene) and Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane, who completely steals every scene he is in, and still manages to look attractive, even with ridiculous aging makeup) start to write each other just before they both die--on the same day. It was so sappy, and yet, I managed to well up a bit, just thinking about old white men and the death of revoluntionary dreams.

I can't believe that I haven't posted, or that I failed to celebrate this blog's 5th (!) birthday. I used to be so idealistic and regular about posting, and now that I actually have things to say, I find that I actually post less. I blame it on graduate school, that all-encompassing behemoth that is slowly sucking out my soul and leaving me with constant neck and back aches. Fast forward to my own aging scene, set in a Cylon-esque future where my fingers have been turned into a keyboard and my brain is wired directly into the education research databases. That takes the whole "publish or perish" thing to a whole new sci-fi level. Can you tell I've been watching BSG? And if you don't know what BSG is, you aren't living. Or are you?

The best part about grad school is the freedom to devote time to ideas, and the worst part of it is the amplified, high stakes "you've no one but yourself to blame" rhetoric that seems to keep said "ideas" from truly taking form. It's an awful Catch-22 of late nights, nearly missed deadlines, and obsessiveness that I sometimes find stimulating; lately, I've been experiencing the confluence of large ideas and nowhere to go with them via hospital IVs, hives, and a sea of $10 drug copays.

A few weeks ago I managed to crank out a 15-page book review in the span of one week. This was my first, first-authored piece, and I was terrified of submitting it, but knew that I had no choice in the matter. The positive is that the book review was accepted for publication (Yay!), the negative is that the experience of living through that week did such a whammy on my immune system that I developed a staph infection that was severe enough to require spending two nights in the hospital with a 102-degree temperature and an I.V. antibiotic. While in the hospital, I managed to destroy my cell phone, miss two key assignment deadlines, and get myself so far behind on my own research projects that I think my advisor is starting to hate me.

To top it all off, my body decided it was allergic to one of the antibiotics, but it chose to have this reaction after I had finished two weeks on the drug, so now I am on an antihistamine regimen that, quite frankly, frightens me (5 benydryl, 1 claritin, 1 zyrtec, and 2 [forget what it's called] each day). I've been so zonked out from these drugs and self-conscious about my body's utter disregard for decency (hives+rash=not really wanting to leave the house) that I've managed to get myself even further behind on my research and classes.

It's currently spring break, and I've thus far spent all of it alternating between crying over John Adams and hunching over my computer, staring at blank Word documents that are not writing themselves. I know perfectly why I can't write, but as each day passes, the problem is becoming more complicated and difficult to manage. Instead I read, serf the databases, and manage to think myself down a rabbit hole that is becoming so big and flippin' theoretical that I scarcely make sense when I talk. The other day, I put on two different colored socks, and I left the house wearing a shirt with a stain down the front.

This is exactly how the stereotype of the crazy, absentminded professor came into being. The elbow patches are needed because the obsessive academic spends all of her time with her elbows propped up next to a keyboard. The patches probably serve the double purpose of keeping long-sleeves from showing holes and helping ease elbows away from a callused existence.

The one bright spot is that I am currently taking a methodology course which is creative, challenging, theoretical, and taught by a K-12 art education professor. My professor is probably in his mid-late fifties, has white hair and a goatee, and wears an earring. He only recently finished his PhD (at Stanford), and is all about bringin' some NoCal counterculture to the very conservative school of education where I am enrolled. About three weeks into the semester, he tried to poach me from the higher ed admin program. He can't imagine me studying policy, and I guess that I can see why. In his class, I get to put on my creative writing, art-loving, nerdy-joke-making, literary theory consuming, English major persona. I make my art education classmates look bad cuz the stuff that I submit to the class' webpage and for my assignments is often so "out there" that only the professor "gets" it. Imagine--a classroom space where I get to deconstruct (and then reconstruct from the pieces) higher education policy by way of Bhaktin. I can't imagine a happier place to be...

Then there's the rest of my classes. Uggg. Compared to my methodology course, everything else is a complete snoozefest of "been there, done that" policy regurgitations that make my skin crawl. If you ever wanted to know why no one in education policy leadership seems to have any creativity or vision, it's probably because of the grad school courses we take (and the material we're then forced to memorize and re-hash in our dissertation lit. reviews). All of those staid ideas are presented as "current" thinking, and then, to top it all off, the field itself is so conservative and afraid of "not getting funded" that it self-edits and self-regulates itself into discourses that often date back to the first Clinton administration. It's enough to make me wonder sometimes if my art education, ex-hippie professor sees something about me that I am too afraid to acknowledge for myself--that secretly I am in education only because I know that there are slightly more faculty positions available in this field than there are in the arts or humanities.

And with that glimpse into my state of being, I will close. I won't even get into how my assistantship funding got halved for next year (thanks, Gov!), or how I am basically prostituting myself out to make sure that I have enough assistantship funding for next year (have fingers, will stuff envelopes). Yeah, I'll save that for another posting. Maybe one for June.

October and November: What Was Left Unsaid

The Christmas tree is up, the advent calendar is on day eight, I've taken a stab at some holiday cookie making, each day seems to bring with it an inch of snow, and I've finished all of my courses and assignments for the semester. Life couldn't be better.

Loyal readers, I deeply apologize for the sorry state of this blog. The following are a few short descriptions of what I neglected to post for you all to read:

I Am Woman, Hear Me ...Wait, What Did You Just Say?

I started the semester with the intention of doing a Ph.D. program with a specialized concentration (the equivalent of a master's degree, only without writing a separate master's thesis) in women's studies. Many of you will recall from a previous posting the culture shock I experienced in my initial contact with a Ph.D.-level women's studies course. Apparently when I left women's studies, sometime in the mid- to late 90s, we were still actively working to eradicate oppression and sexism. Shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, women's studies took what I have learned is called the "discursive turn," meaning that the academic thinking in the women's movement left battling real-life problems and began theorizing the concepts of women, oppression, and sexism. It was as though I had never been in a women's studies classroom, or as if I had never cared about feminist issues, and as the weeks wore on, I found myself more and more distraught because I was felt silenced and marginalized in a course that was theorizing silence and marginalization. I wrote the following passage in one of my Moleskine journals directly following one particularly frustrating class period:

I have begun referring to my Tuesday afternoon feminist theory class as my “Weekly Exercise in Humiliation” because it is a course that I am finding exceedingly challenging, and not purely for the standard academic reasons. Sure, I’m struggling with the readings, the assignments, and the overall course content, but what I’m finding the most “humiliating” is my inability to navigate the discursive space of the class discussions. At first I thought it was an issue of word choice, as the discussions of the class have required that I get good use out of my interactive Oxford English Dictionary. The solution to the problem, as I conceived it, was simply to learn more words by way of the electronic dictionary’s disembodied voice sounding out the pronunciations of words as “metonymy,” “cathectic,” and “homographesis.” From this perspective, the problem of my inability to speak up in my feminist theory class was simply one of a lack of words, and I imagined that if I were able to just absorb the words of the dictionary that meaning-making would follow.

I decided on Tuesday to pay more attention to my silence in my feminist theory class, to try to understand why it was that I was struggling to bring myself to the table, even though I had done the readings and homework and was prepared for class. The discussion began as it always does, on a theorizing theory meta-level that asks students to begin from a space that is not bounded by the realism of the words from our texts. Since this meta-level is not grounded in what I have learned is “materiality,” it is free to roam where it will, crisscrossing, overlapping, and intertwining ideas and concepts hovering in a space which is detached from texts, bodies, and any semblance of the real. This discursive space is designed and intentional; many class discussions have included off-hand comments on the uselessness of consciousness-raising, studying lived experiences, or working against “someone or something” that is oppressing or an oppressor. It is my understanding that the assumption under girding these perspectives is a belief that these are second wave feminism’s concerns and that the “feminist project” has moved beyond these questions. In other words, the prevailing opinion in the class seems to be that the second wave did little but identify problems and provide texts to study; today’s academic feminist project has created itself as a discipline by (re)and (de)constructing these second wave texts. In other words, the thinking part of the women's movement is currently concerned with little more than deconstructing the women's movement.

In listening to my silence in that class, I realized that the problem wasn’t etymological, but that I was resisting the removal of feminist theory, and by extension, myself, from bodies, narratives, text and everything else that is material. I am not as post-modern as I believed myself to be, and I know I am being stubborn when I should probably just go with flow. This skepticism seems to manifest itself in a kind of mental resistance: since there is no text, I have no language or way to put my words into coherent thoughts. My throat is not used to being that silent, and at the end of the class, it often aches, and I leave class with inarticulatable, raw emotions ranging from anger to frustration to sadness.

Since I was struggling so much with this course, I routinely found myself spending over twenty hours a week just doing the readings. We had writing assignments due every week, and these assignments were given with little direction other than to create new theory based on what we had read. In order to even do the assignments, I had to read beyond the assigned readings, since I was unfamiliar with the philosophical arguments that were being put forth. For example, in order to dissect a piece of contemporary academic feminist theory, one has to first dissect the postmodern and poststructural thinking that is providing the scaffolding for the argument. Since I only have a working knowledge of Foucault, Derrida, Hegel, Freud, and others, I found myself having to read both the feminist theory pieces assigned for the class as well as original texts from the 1960s that were written by these philosophers. I spent at least 20 hours a week doing this background reading in psychoanalysis and philosophy, and at least 10 hours a week then writing up the weekly assignments. This was in addition to the readings and assignments that I had for the other two courses I was taking.

We never got our assignments back from our instructor, even though we had to keep turning them in every week, so I had no idea how I was doing, or even if I was properly understanding the difficult material. On the last week of October, our instructor finally returned a stack of our assignments. She hadn't even bothered reading half of what I had written, commenting on my second or third paper (which had been written in late September) that I was clearly not understanding the point of what I was supposed to be doing, and giving me a C- as a grade as a grade for all of the papers.

I don't know what was worse: the knowledge that my stuff had been so horrible that she hadn't bothered reading past the third assignment, or the fact that I had received a C- grade in a Ph.D.-level course. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ph.D. culture, a B- is pretty much the lowest grade that a student can earn and still be considered marginally acceptable. A C- is worse than an F because it means that you are not capable of succeeding, and since there are no remedial or brush-up courses to take, it is a covert invitation for a student to withdraw either from the course or from the program.

I opted to do both, since I had little choice. The course was the required "gateway" class for the entire women's studies department, and failure to successfully pass it meant that I couldn't enroll in follow-up classes. After crying for about an hour in my advisor's office (who, I will add was shocked and appalled by my grade, and as confused as I was by how feminist theory and the women's movement were being presented in the course...), we made the decision that a "W" on my transcript would look far better than a grade that was less than a B-. Since neither grade is optimal, she recommended that I just tell future employers that I withdrew from the course because I had taken on too many credits my first semester, a fact that is true. All that I can do is hope that this "W" will not exempt me from consideration for faculty positions. Other than this "W," I have a 4.0 GPA and a history of research and coursework specific to gender issues in higher education.

The irony is that I am currently researching and writing a piece on feminist methodology in higher education research, an article that my advisor and I hope to have published in one of the three main journals of our discipline. The article has generated interest among our peers, and we are hoping to present it next year at our field's main academic research conference. It is ironic that I am writing (and hopefully publishing) about feminist theory and methodology, but that I can't take those courses at the U because my background is insufficient...

Nerds Uniting in Jacksonville

Shortly after withdrawing from my women's studies course, I flew to Jacksonville in order to attend my first academic research conference. Since I have attended professional conferences, I had no idea what to expect. Academic research conferences are like professional conferences in that they have keynote speakers, luncheons, and an emphasis on evening bar culture, but the similarities end there. At academic research conferences, sessions are organized by the themes of the papers that were accepted, each session lasting about 90 minutes. Researchers get about 15 minutes each to present their work, and then a discussant (who has read the papers in advance) will talk for about 15 minutes giving critiques to each presenter. After that is over, the audience will share their own critiques, making the whole thing an exercise in having a tough skin and in being competitive.

Another major difference is that academic research conferences are an exercise in networking with the stars of the field. Everybody who is anybody in higher education research will be at this event, meaning that a lot of graduate students and scholars will go into stalking mode, attending sessions just to hear certain people present their work. Since I generally try to avoid having to speak with people whose work I admire, I found the whole experience to be more than a little bit discombobulating. While I know that my advisor is really well-published in our field, I had no idea the extent to which she is an academic star. People were standing in line just to talk to her, and when I introduced myself to other graduate students from across the country, there was a fair amount of jealousy that she was my advisor.

My advisor knows most of the people who are doing research on equity, social justice, and diversity in higher education, and counts most of these researchers as personal friends. Included in her friends are a constellation of big names. Since I got to hitch my wagon to my advisor's star, I got an invitation to have lunch with most of the scholars who tend to make up the reference list of every paper I write. My advisor was very generous in her introduction of me, and these scholars treated me with curiosity, asking about my research and interests. I was dumbfounded because: a) I was sitting at the same table as many of my idols; b) the woman who I was sitting directly next to is the grandmother of research on women and higher education; c) this grandmother was snarky and shared funny comments with me under her breath; d) I got to pass bread and salad dressing to most of my idols; e) I got many of their business cards, and got to share my cards with them, and f) I managed to not look like an idiot or spill on myself.

Here is an excerpt from my journal that I wrote after skipping out on one of the keynote addresses:

I am sitting in the 75 degree sun of the Jacksonville Riverwalk and watching the ducks go by with the other renegades and session-skippers of higher education research. They are mostly older, male, bewhiskered chain-smokers who are wearing brown tweed jackets over black pants. We are all drinking coffee, sitting on benches, and watching the sun go down.

A man with a full, white beard and tan leather elbow patches has been watching me write in this journal for quite some time. He is leaning up against the railing separating the boardwalk from the river, and I can tell that he is tempted to toss his cigarette butt into the river. He thinks twice of it, turns, and the notices that I was watching him. We smile at each other, knowing that we are the introverts among introverts, those who simply can't process that much information without taking some time to ourselves, the ones who can't handle that amount of contained, forced socializing. He lights a second cigarette and then walks off, heading back toward the hotel and the conference.

I close my eyes for a minute, enjoying the last few minutes of the sun before it sets, my journal and pen balanced on my lap. I open my eyes when I sense that someone is approaching, and quickly close up the journal, not wanting anyone to see that I am doing personal diary writing and not actively reflecting on academic research. The bewhiskered, elbow-patched man has returned with two cups of coffee. He extends one of the coffees to me, and I accept it wordlessly as he takes a seat next to me on the bench next to me, as if grateful for the silent, introverted company. He looks straight out into the sunset and we both remain quiet, as though we have been friends for ages, needing only a gesture or a nod to know exactly what the other is thinking.

After nearly ten minutes of silence, during which we sipped coffee and watched people walk by, he turned to me and asked the cursory, introductory questions. We are both wearing the annoying plastic lanyards that are customary to conferences, our names and school affiliation dangling at the end of a piece of nylon. His lanyard had flipped so that his name was obscured from my view, and since he was so much older than me, I let him ask all of the questions.
Our mindless small talk and idle banter was edged with a gorgeous sunset and tepid coffee.

The rest of the session skippers had begun to file back into the conference, and as we stood up to join them, a gust of wind came and caught hold of our lanyards, turning them around. I glanced at what was written on his name tag, the sudden flash of recognition numbing me for a moment. I was now able to place his face, as I had seen it many times before looking back at me from the dust jacket of a book that I had read earlier in the semester. I had spent much of the semester tracking down this man's writing on social justice and higher education policy, constructing him in my mind as one of the most brilliant writers in the field.

I let the recognition go unspoken, not wanting to complicate our session-skipping friendship with academic speak. As soon as we reached the conference, he held open the door for me, and I walked through. When I turned to thank him for the coffee, I noticed that he had been accosted by someone else who was anxiously pumping his arm up and down and asking him about higher education research. His serene expression and quiet manner had morphed into a voice and body language that I would have described as arrogant. If I didn't know any better.

The conference was amazing, and I got a chance to hang out with graduate students from a number of schools. I went to dinner one evening with all of the students from the University of Maryland because I was interested in some of the research that a few of them have been conducting on gender issues. We have since exchanged emails and Facebook profiles, and are thinking of doing some cross-university research collaborations next year.

In Retrospect

While I am currently petrified about the budget shortfall in my state, and by extension, my student funding at a public, research university, I otherwise have no complaints about my decision to leave my job. I've met some really great and engaging people this semester, and am finding that my second round of graduate school is flying by, and this time I feel good about it. When I was at H, I felt isolated and removed from the faculty and the students. At the U, there is a very strong community of students and of faculty, and the combination of these two factors has made it very easy to get to know people outside of class. I think that my learning style depends on academic subject matter and feeling good about being a part of something, so this program has been a very productive fit for me. In fact, my advisor asked me on Friday if I would be interested in taking on an adjunct teaching load in our department in the fall semester of 2010. Of course a lot can happen between then and now, but she and I are both hoping that I can fund my last year in the program through teaching so that I can hopefully work on my dissertation full-time (rather than having to work on my dissertation while looking for a full-time job outside of the U).

One semester of courses down, three to go. So far, I'm having a blast.