Ferule & Fescue

Gimmicks and gambits and bits

2013-05-15T00:20:00.000-04:00

On the last day of classes I ran into one of my colleagues and we chatted about how things were winding down. He talked about the research presentations his students had done, and then he mentioned a particular student by name.

"You've had her before, right?"

Yes, I said, in three classes: two last semester and one this semester.

"I thought so. She's absorbed some of your teaching persona."

Now, it's one thing to know that one has a teaching persona and to be occasionally aware of dialing it up or down or modulating it for a given circumstance; it's another to think of it as something readily recognizable by others and available for appropriation.

But of course we've all constructed our teaching (and our paper-delivering and maybe even our networking-at-the-conference-bar) selves from somewhere, and usually from many somewheres: just as we pick up bits of knowledge and pedagogical tricks from our own teachers and colleagues, so do we pick up ways of embodying authority and collaboration or whatever else we do in the classroom. We choose the techniques and the modes that work with our own personalities and values, and we make them our own--but probably relatively few of us think we invented our teaching selves wholly from scratch.

As for me, I can't itemize all the parts of my teaching persona, and I'm sure I've been influenced by people I'd never suspect and in ways I don't recognize. But two of my college professors I can immediately point to as foundational.

Both of them were literature scholars, and both were young or young-seeming, though they were at different points in their careers and one was male and one was female. What they had in common, in addition to their youth, was a wacky, irreverent, and colloquial way of talking about the difficult texts they taught. I never doubted the ferocious intelligence of either, but they had a warm enthusiasm for the material that conveyed how much fun all this geeky arcana was to them. Both had a habit of paraphrasing or summarizing in hilarious shorthand ways (some of which I have preserved in notebooks or book margins to this day). And both dressed hyper-professionally, even extravagantly, perhaps to compensate for their youth and informality.

And, uh, that's me. I mean, I'm not either of those professors--not as a scholar and not as a personality. Probably no one who knew either of them and who knows me would recognize anything other than the vaguest of similarities. But I see it. The high-low approach that I associate with both professors is pretty central to my own self-presentation in the classroom, in part because it's what made me feel able to be a scholar, and to overcome my own insecurities and self-doubts. (The combination of dressing the fuck up and being relentlessly self-mocking means you can get away with a lot.)

I'm sure both those professors would be weirded out, were they to know how influential I feel their examples were for me; I'm a little weirded out to hear that one of my own students has apparently adopted some of the same mannerisms from me that I feel I learned from them. But I suppose it's a tribute, all around.

*

Do you have professors (or colleagues) whose personae you've adopted or adapted? And if so, what made the fit feel right?

Editorial intimacy

2013-05-05T22:15:00.000-04:00

I just received my copyedited book manuscript from the publisher. It's humbling. But awesome. But also humbling.

I'm lucky to be working with a press that still does real copyediting, as many now do not--and since I used to work in academic publishing, I take a geeky pleasure in reading through the copyedits and learning the right way to cite a particular kind of source or discovering that someone caught my inconsistent capitalization of a particular term and standardized it. Though I'm surely fussier about consistency and formatting than the average writer, I know I'm not a professional. It's reassuring to have someone else scrutinizing every sentence, every usage, and every punctuation mark.

At the same time, that scrutiny involves a peculiar intimacy:

-Your copy editor knows all your darkest secrets, including exactly how often you begin a sentence with "However" or "But although." Worse, he wants you to change. Why can't he just love you the way you are?

-Your copy editor flags and rewrites any unusual turns of phrase. Some of them are genuinely better his way. But others--you think, defensively--have a better rhythm or effect as originally written.

-But you don't want to be that writer: the academic who believes herself to have a marvelous, original style and clings to her irritating tics and precious locutions.

-And when it turns out that your copy editor is someone you know and like and used to work with--a very experienced senior editor whose first query bubble is actually a sweet little note re-introducing himself and congratulating you on the book? Well, you really can't write him off as some fussbudget in a green eyeshade.

Guess it's lucky I have a blog audience on whom I can continue to inflict my worst writerly indulgences and bad habits.

Welcome to the panopticon, girls and boys

2013-05-02T00:27:00.000-04:00

While grading papers for my two Shakespeare classes, I made a distressing discovery: 25% of them were on the same topic. They weren't just responding to the same prompt, but applying that prompt to the same rather narrow subtopic--a subtopic that was not among the handful I'd suggested.

You know what came next: I Googled it, and discovered that there are approximately a million hits for this topic. It comes up in every discussion of the relevant play and there are dozens of free essays available on the web.

It also happens to be a stupid topic. It's simultaneously obvious and really difficult to do well; if anyone had run it by me, I'd have warned him off. But because it's so obvious, and suggests only a couple of possible lines of argumentation, it's impossible to tell whether any given essay is borrowing ideas from the internet, recapitulating a half-remembered discussion from high school, or doing original (if uninspired) work. Nothing is directly plagiarized: I put in the long hours ascertaining that. But other than writing a motherfucking airtight prompt for next time, what's a girl to do?

I did the only thing I felt I could: I announced to both classes that I believed a number of their essays--giving no specifics--contained ideas derived from uncited sources. I emphasized that it was okay to get information or inspiration from elsewhere, if they were otherwise doing original work, but that they absolutely needed to credit all sources. I told them I would give them 48 hours to get me a new bibliography (and, if necessary, a new copy of their paper with any previously-omitted citations), but that otherwise their grades would be affected.

I should have been able to predict the results.

My students examined their consciences, and at least dozen emailed me confessions. One acknowledged that he hadn't cited a source for the date of the battle of Actium. Another revealed that her decision to write about women in Coriolanus had been inspired by a discussion about gender roles in her Russian Novel class--and she apologized for not crediting that professor. They were, all of them, so very sorry.

I guess guilt-tripping is never a waste.

Send help

2013-04-25T22:57:00.000-04:00

It's the end of the semester. I've been spending a lot of time in my office. Perhaps you'd like to spend time in my office, too?

Regular blogging to resume eventually.

Self-financing

2013-04-19T01:09:00.000-04:00

Vimala Pasupathi's recent post about her decision to take an unpaid research leave hit a nerve with me. Vim isn't the first person I've known to do such a thing, but she lays out with candor and clarity the ways that "doing more with less" at the institutional level can force faculty to do the same thing on the individual level: the more our institutions demand of us, the harder it is to carve out space for our own life and work.

Those I know who have taken or are considering taking unpaid leave--or who have sacrificed a chunk of their usual income by foregoing summer teaching or additional advisement or administrative duties--have done so not just in order to finish a scholarly project they were excited about, but also to recover from a toxic workplace, to be with a long-distance spouse, or to compensate for a nonexistent maternity leave. And I am, after a fashion, doing the same thing myself: I'm taking a year-long sabbatical, at half-pay, both to kickstart my next book project and to live with my spouse full-time for fifteen months.

This is a genuine financial sacrifice, but not the world's biggest one: among other things, I've got tenure, so I'm returning to secure employment, a stable income, and a basically healthy, happy institution that hasn't suffered much in the recent financial downtown (in fact, there's now more money available for research than when I started).

But if my sabbatical sits at the cushier end of the self-financing spectrum, it's worth recognizing that it's not entirely distinct from the kind I did when my professional position was far less stable. Indeed, self-financing may be the skill those who go through graduate school in the humanities learn best.

Here's one example: in the last two years of my PhD program, I presented at five national conferences and I paid for them almost entirely out of pocket: I believe I got $500, total, for five conferences, all of which included plane flights and hotel rooms. I remember struggling to find the money--and I shared hotel rooms and economized in various other ways--but it never occurred to me not to do it. I was almost done with my dissertation, and I needed the lines on my vita and the public exposure.

When I started a tenure-track job, I merely scaled up my sense of what I could afford to self-finance: so I got less than $1000/year for research travel? No biggie. I had a real salary! So I went to two or three conferences in one year, or spent two weeks in England working at an archive, and I regarded it as a necessary expense: I wasn't going to let being at a regional state school limit the work I could do, or restrict my opportunities.

Over the years, to eke out an extra conference or a research trip overseas, I've used frequent-flier miles, spent two weeks living in a dorm, eaten sandwiches for every meal, split hotel rooms with friends--but, above all: I've spent my own money. I never even kept track of how much I spent until I got married and got an accountant and realized, holy shit: that's thousands of dollars, every year, to finance my scholarly life. Next year, I'm "spending" more than $30,000.

I'm lucky to be able to do it, all of it. But I wonder what the breaking point is, for me or for the profession as a whole. I've always regarded my self-financing as essential, as an investment, and my position rewards that kind of thinking: all that grad school debt and lost income did in fact result in a tenure-track job; the work I've self-financed since then has been directly responsible for merit raises and indirectly responsible for my getting tenure and promotion and receiving scheduled raises along the way. But I guess it's a fucked-up system that expects--that takes it for granted--that its members will sacrifice and pay out of pocket for the work that the profession requires in order to consider them full members.

Or to put it another way, when is self-financing an investment, and when is it a scam?

This isn't a matter I'd adjudicate for anyone else; I know independent scholars and adjuncts whose work is wholly self-financed, a real contribution to their fields, and done (I presume) out of love and dedication; they can't not do the work they do. But for me, it's worth it because the profession has committed to me. If I left the profession or it left me, I would not keep doing my research.

I love my work. It provides me with a profound source of meaning and much of my current identity. It's taken years to become the scholar I am, and to be as happy as I am, and it would surely take me years to find something equally meaningful. But if someone weren't willing to pay me for it--or for some percentage of it!--I doubt I'd do it.

What's my breaking point? I really don't know. But since next year I'm getting paid half of what my institution normally thinks I'm worth, maybe that's as good a line in the sand as any: I need the profession to meet me halfway.

If this is self-selection, I'm all for it

2013-04-10T15:07:00.001-04:00

In my current job, it's so rare to encounter entitled, snobbish, self-impressed students that when I do I find myself running to tell my colleagues about this horrifying thing that just happened.

And then I remember: oh, yeah. That's a thing. A thing I almost never have to deal with.

There's lots to love about my job, but the sheer niceness of my students--including the smartest and most talented among them--has to be reason #1.

This conference hangover might be terminal

2013-04-01T19:46:00.001-04:00

I spent last weekend in Toronto at the conference that's finally owning the name many of us have long applied to it--but now I'm back, and I'm crashing hard.

The post-conference hangover (which is not to be confused with an actual hangover, though that also goes with the territory) is a well-known occupational hazard; to judge by my Facebook and Twitter feeds, lots of my fellow conferees are also suffering. I myself spent most of last night in tears for no reason, and it was only in the light of day that I recognized the symptoms. It's hard to jump back into workaday life after a weekend away, and it's particularly hard after three or four days of constant intellectual and social stimulation; I'm always a bit glum and my world seems pokey and disappointing for a couple of days after I return from a conference.

This time, though, I'm not just crashing from a conference high; I'm also processing the conference lows. As the association president said at her luncheon address, the SAA is, for many scholars, their "hometown": the place where they feel most at ease, most fully understood, and most warmly welcomed. It's a lovely description of why professional conferences matter, but it implies (as she went on to say) that the other places we spend our working lives are not as welcoming.

Here's some of what I heard about those other places, in the course of the conference:

-Two of my friends were denied tenure in jaw-droppingly egregious ways;

-Another is in a department that may be dissolved;

-Three more are at institutions that are imploding (one of which may actually go under);

-Other friends and acquaintances spent yet another year fruitlessly searching for tenure-track jobs;

-Still others--like me--have perfectly nice jobs that involve major personal and domestic sacrifices.

Sure, I've heard such stories for years. And everyone I know who's actually left the profession has found happy, fulfilling work (in many cases, they're happier than those who hung on). But in a year in which I achieved both tenure and a book contract, such stories feel paradoxically more personal. This is really my profession now. And it's not getting better.

When I was in grad school and on the market, I was angry about the shape of the profession--but though it felt like my problem (I was one of the exploited, one of those who might never get a tenure-track job), it wasn't really: the crisis was the responsibility of my seniors, who, if they hadn't created it, were at least ignoring and perpetuating it.

I remember asking my union organizer why the faculty were so opposed to unionization, or why they seemed to believe--in the absence of all evidence--that everyone who worked hard and kept her head down would get a job. She said that maybe it was too hard for the faculty to acknowledge that the system was broken, that it wasn't a real meritocracy, and that they themselves didn't have the power to help or protect us.

That explanation struck me with the force of real truth, and it still does now that I'm one of them. We own this shitty system. We didn't break it, but we bought it.

So while I'm sure my conference stupor will lift in a day or two, I hope it's replaced by something less like paralysis and more like outrage.

Catch-22

2013-03-27T23:58:00.000-04:00

For me, tenure has meant becoming more deeply invested in my institution: suddenly caring about everything, from wonky procedural matters to bigger-picture college-wide initiatives.

But caring leads to constant irritation. And my prior capacity for irritation was not small.

Lean In

2013-03-23T13:43:00.001-04:00

It's been a quiet spring break around these parts, with the nasty weather conspiring to keep me mostly indoors watching Marx Brothers movies and plowing through three solid months' worth of magazines. (Side note: when did magazines become so impossible to keep up with? oh, right: around the time I started wasting my life on the internet). But in the midst of that feverish whirl of activity, I also found time to read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

In brief, it's awesome. I actually and literally don't understand most of the criticism it's attracted, almost all of which seems to have been written by people who haven't read the book: she's blaming women for not getting ahead! She denies there's any need for structural reform! She's denigrating women who stay home or who just aren't that ambitious! She's another privileged white lady who doesn't realize that most women have other problems!

In fact, Sandberg addresses all of those objections pretty thoroughly. Now, I'm also a (relatively) privileged white lady, and I don't have kids, so maybe I just missed the part where Sandberg told women who've stepped out of the rat race that they totally suck and deserve what they get. But frankly, I think those invested in the "mommy wars" (I can't believe I actually typed that noxious phrase) just made assumptions about what Sandberg was probably saying or where her blind spots must necessarily be.

The core of her argument is that structural reform is urgently needed, but in order to achieve it we also need more women in positions of power. Moreover, when Sandberg was in college and grad school, she heard a lot about the external obstacles to women's advancement, but nothing about the internal ones: the ways that women unintentionally slow-track themselves. So that's what she's focusing on.

Sandberg isn't the least bit dismissive about the attractions of staying at home and raising kids; in fact, she spends a lot of time talking about the importance of having a satisfying domestic and personal life and is supportive of whatever choices a woman ultimately makes. But she wants women to have real choices, and while some of those choices are dependent on structural matters outside of their control (like whether their employer even offers a paid maternity leave--as mine, for example, does not), others aren't: whether you have a partner who is willing to fully pull his or her weight at home; whether you're willing to ask your partner to step up; whether you asked for what you needed to be happy at your job, or just assumed it wouldn't be available. I found especially compelling Sandberg's argument that people who are really excited about and challenged by their jobs are less likely to leave.

And maybe most importantly, all women, whatever their economic status or their work-life decisions, benefit when more women are in positions of power. So while no woman should feel obligated to keep working or to aspire to leadership just for the good of the sisterhood, we should all care about making sure those who want to rise can do so. And the more women there are in positions of power, the harder it is to dismiss any one as a "bitch," or "ball-breaker," or whatever: it's the rarity of women in power that attracts the vitriol and the who-does-she-think-she-is?

But to talk about Sanberg's "argument" in some ways misrepresents the book, which, although it's making a serious point, is also warm and generous and extremely funny, with lots of practical advice for negotiating around, neutralizing, and drawing attention to sexism in the workplace and the home. It's also chock full of fascinating research. It's an easy read but an inspiring one, a work of big-tent, unapologetic feminism.

Have any of my readers read it? What did you think?

Who you are is what you do--but what you do can change

2013-03-18T16:11:00.001-04:00

My corner of the internet has been full of justified outrage at the sympathetic slant of much news coverage of the convictions in the Steubenville rape case. CNN, among others, chose to dwell on the emotional devastation of the two star football players--the rapists--and the dashing of their once-promising futures. I share the outrage. Whatever errors their victim may have made, they were errors merely in judgment; none of her errors involved treating another human being as an object, as a disposable toy for pleasure and amusement. Any coverage of the case that downplays the wrongs done to her while inviting our sympathies for the perpetrators is indefensible.

But this is not to say there's no place for sympathy for the perpetrators.

Let me be clear: they deserve their convictions, and whatever follows from those convictions--including never playing football again, not getting into the colleges of their choice, being registered sex offenders, and having this case turn up for the rest of their lives whenever someone Googles them. The perpetrators' apparent remorse and tearful apologies don't absolve them of their crime or entitle them to forgiveness--either the victim's or the public's.

However, although they did a monstrous thing, that doesn't mean they are, in some absolute or final way, monstrous people. At the same time, hand-wringing over the perpetrators' lost "potential" is not the way to support them or emphasize their humanity. Focusing on what good boys they are doesn't allow us to acknowledge, to really acknowledge, that someone can be a good person and still do something terrible. And it also doesn't provide a path toward repentance and growth.

As a culture, we're obsessed with the idea that we have some kind of core, essential nature--and usually that nature is good. And when we (or those we like) do something bad, we're unable to assimilate that information. I'm not really a bad person! Or, okay. I did that one bad thing. But I'm really sorry! And can't you tell that I'm actually a good person? (And if the answer is no, it's the other person who's victimizing us by denying our essentially good nature and virtuous intentions.)

We see this all the time in discussions of racism or sexism (and I've even talked about it in connection with plagiarism): a person knows, deep down, that he couldn't be racist. Therefore, it's impossible that he said or did something racist. And how dare you call him that offensive slur, racist? The perpetrators and their supporters can't imagine them as "rapists," and--as I written before--I understand why. The term suggests an unchanging state, a psychological disorder, a permanent condition.

If you rape someone, you are a rapist. But that need not be your primary identity.

So the adults in Steubenville who feel so sympathetic for the perpetrators are not helping them by telling them what good guys they are--much less how they've been wronged by the system, or how their only mistake was circulating the story and images via text message and social media. Anyone who sees the perpetrators as good guys with potential needs to help them deliver on that potential by telling them, frankly, that they did a terrible thing and deserve to pay a penalty, but that they can become better people, that their story isn't over, that they can learn and grow and still contribute good to the world.

I don't know these kids. I know nothing about their potential or their essential nature. But neither does anyone else. It's what they do that matters.

Popery and arbitrary government

2013-03-14T23:58:00.001-04:00

I was in my campus office grading papers, prepping for my night class, and periodically scanning the internet in the hopes of finding something to do other than grade papers or prep for class when someone tweeted "habemus papam #fumatabianca"--and I gladly abandoned my grading for what I thought would be twenty minutes but turned into more like ninety.

And, whatever. The end of a papal election is a cool enough thing to see "live," and with much the same pleasure as watching the Oscars or a royal wedding: there's lots of pageantry; other people are watching and chatting about it; there's a small chance that actual history might be made. In other words, it's 4 parts diversion to 1 part news. While waiting for the Big Reveal, I hung out on Facebook and Twitter trading jokes with friends about what was taking so long, about the goofy marching band, and about how well the next pontiff might or might not accessorize.

As a Catholic, I care who the next pope is, but a new pope is unlikely to impact me that much (at least compared with a new pastor or bishop or even a new U.S. president). Moreover, I'm not a deeply-informed Vatican-watcher. I'd followed the coverage of Benedict's resignation closely and had read up on some of the papabili, but I didn't know anything about Bergoglio; if I'd heard his name mentioned as the runner-up in 2005, I'd forgotten it as soon as I'd learned it.

All of this is to say that I'm not setting myself up as a vaticanista, nor as someone who takes the papal election unduly seriously. But I still found myself exasperated by all the morons on the internet who took the occasion to leave drive-by comments (often on otherwise funny, smart, irreverent threads) like, "don't you know Bergoglio's VERY AGAINST gay marriage??" or "The fact that a woman can't be pope is OUTRAGEOUS!!! When is the Catholic Church going to get with the program?!"

Uh, yeah. Everyone on planet earth knew that no woman was going to be elected, nor anyone who had ever said anything that might even be misconstrued as supporting gay marriage. Thanks for that trenchant and original critique, Mr. New-Age Hippy, Ms. Ex-Catholic, or Dr. Atheist.

Partly it's the tone-deafness and the bad manners that bug me. When someone you know is enthusiastic about something (even something you think is dumb or evil) you don't barge in and say "OMG THAT'S SO STUUUPID." No. You bite your tongue, you roll your eyes. . . and you talk smack about that person behind her back. Partly, it's the combination of ignorance and arrogance. Not all of those fascinated with the papal election are themselves religious: I have secularist friends who are historians or just political junkies who were posting updates on the conclave several times a day. But those of us who do care, for whatever reason, are probably more informed than those who just want to talk about how bad the Catholic Church (or organized religion, or religion) is.

Few practicing Catholics are unaware that problems exist in the church, and none of us, liberal or conservative, are really that interested in ignorant opining, even when it comes from those with whom we might otherwise make common political cause. As a progressive Catholic, I can assure my liberal, non-Catholic friends that I know the church's problems much better, and have thought about them much more deeply, than you have. I'm completely not interested in your opinion--unless you are, let's say, a religious historian, or otherwise have access to some immediately relevant body of knowledge or area of expertise that you're going to draw upon.

If you're genuinely interested in knowing what (and how) I think, I'll happily have that conversation with you one-on-one. But I'm not going to engage with someone whose own insight is minimal and who isn't interested in listening.

*

As for Francis, I'm reserving judgement. I joked on Facebook that the options were basically "huh! coulda been worse!" and "OH NO"--and we seem to have gotten the former. I'm prepared to be surprised by him, but won't be surprised if I'm not. Popes are like Supreme Court justices: there's stuff we sorta know about them, but it's not always predicative--especially since they serve for life and aren't directly answerable to anyone.

Change will come, sooner or later, either from inside or outside--and when it comes it's going to be dramatic. Increasingly, I think I might be alive to see it. Whether that's a good thing only time will tell.

Submitted

2013-03-10T23:01:00.002-04:00

I submitted my final manuscript to the press last week--more than two months before my contractual deadline! Howdja like me now?--and I'm here to tell you what happens as that burden slips from your shoulders and a new day dawns:

You get tendonitis. Jesus. I'm actually pecking at my keyboard with a couple of iPad styli so's not to exacerbate the pain;

Your triumphant email to your editor produces an automatic-reply message informing you that he'll be out of the office FOR THE NEXT EIGHT DAYS;

You get two rejections in the mail the very next day;

You have no sense of direction or purpose when you get home at night;

And yet:

You still have mountains of grading. Most of which was due a week ago.

In other words? Same old life. Except now with tendonitis!

The one that got--or that you gave--away

2013-03-09T16:19:00.000-05:00

Our hiring season has concluded: we've made an offer, had it accepted, and are already thinking ahead to our requests for next year. We got lucky: the three candidates we had to campus were almost equally strong and none of them took themselves out of the running. I don't know whether any of them had other offers, but each felt like someone we had every likelihood of being able to hire and someone with every likelihood of being a great colleague.

On the one hand, this is a fantastic feeling. It's great to feel that any one of the finalists could come, could hit the ground running, and really add something to our department. It's also nice--let's face it--to feel that all the candidates took their visit seriously and were sincerely interested in us. On the other hand, having a wealth of strong options means at least mild regrets about what might have been.

I've felt this before about candidates we've lost--there have been plenty of searches where, for one reason or another, I've gotten really invested in some candidate who ultimately took another offer, and sometimes I've even made grumbling comparisons between The One Who Got Away and whoever we eventually hired. (As soon as the hire actually joins us, however, I forget all that. I couldn't even tell you the names of the people whom I fleetingly regarded as Candidates Who Got Away. An actual colleague, working in our department week in and week out, building a research profile and contributing thoughtfully to our curriculum, is always better than some fantasy about someone I never got to see in action.)

But I've never had occasion to feel this about candidates whom we let go. This year, partly because we had such strong candidates, partly because their strengths were so varied, and partly because I was on the search committee, I felt differently. I'm simultaneously thrilled with the person we hired and rather sad about the people we didn't hire. I liked them. I invested a certain amount of energy in imagining them here.

My regret is, of course, nothing compared with the regret of any job candidates who might be reading this, who necessarily invest more energy in the departments that court them than vice-versa. It's hard not to feel let down or even misled when a department has wooed you hard only to choose someone else in the end. But when all the choices are good ones, the deciding factor is often about "fit." (Or it's about something almost entirely arbitrary: a slightly better teaching demo, a publication in a slightly better journal, a tangent in the job talk that really floated one particular faculty member's boat.)

I don't know if it helps to know that hiring departments get emotionally invested in their job candidates, including the ones they don't hire and may never meet again. But for what it's worth, many of us do.

Resistors

2013-03-04T20:39:00.001-05:00

Every semester I get one or two English majors who are eager, energetic, widely-read. . . but don't know what the hell they're doing. These are often students who are a few years older than their peers, or who have taken time off, or bounced around to a bunch of different schools--but whatever their background, they come across as semi-autodidacts: they've got a whole lot of knowledge in their heads without much framework or context (historical, theoretical, disciplinary). And they can't write to save their lives.

Managed right, they're usually a pleasure in the classroom: they sometimes pipe up from left field or don't take redirection well (they really want to show off their knowledge of Greek mythology, say), but in my experience they're just so excited to be in college or in graduate classes that they're as respectful as they are eager.

The challenge comes with their written work. The kind of student I'm talking about writes shockingly badly, especially relative to the breadth of their reading and the enthusiasm they have for learning. Sometimes they are literally the worst writers in their classes--worse than some sullen, lackadaisacal, checked-out kid who never speaks, never seems to do the reading, and doesn't show up half the time.

And so they require a lot of work: not just the time spent reading their revisions or drafts or meeting with them one-on-one, but also the intellectual and emotional labor that goes into giving advice that's simultaneously hard-hitting (impressing on the student how much work he still has to do) and encouraging (showing him how much I believe in his potential and want to help him succeed).

When they rise to the occasion, it's kind of amazing: I have students whom I beat up on, hard, one assignment after another, and they do every goddamn revision, come to every meeting, and keep showing up undaunted for class. I almost can't believe how indomitable some of them are. It's clear that they've got what it takes to succeed--if not in my class, then in some other class a semester or two down the line. I love those kids.

But some of my semi-autodidacts Do Not Take Correction Well. They refuse to revise, even when given plenty of time and support, and even when they know that the paper grade will cripple their course grade. Instead, they want to tell me (over and over) how successful they were at their previous college, or how they've "always been" A students. They just shut down, resisting the idea that they still have things to learn.

And you know, that's their choice. But I have to admit those kids get to me. For one thing, it sucks whenever a student goes from being smiley and participatory to being glum and resentful--and it especially sucks when I know it's because, on some level, I've made them feel bad about themselves. But at the same time, they make me angry: their thin skin, their stupidly fragile self-esteem, and their unwillingness to accept the help I feel I'm bending over backwards to give.

They're only a tiny minority of my students. But they seem to have such potential. I hate that they're not making more of it--and I hate feeling that I've snuffed out the spark of their fire for learning, or whateverthefuck.

Double the pleasure, double the fun?

2013-02-27T23:04:00.004-05:00

For only my second time at RU, I'm teaching two sections of the same class: Shakespeare's histories & tragedies. And until we hire a second Early Modernist, this is likely to be my future.

I don't wish to do this for too long, both because it hamstrings my schedule (preventing me from offering as full a range of classes in my specialty as I normally do) and because it isn't in our students' best scheduling interests, either (when only one person teaches Shakespeare, the sections get taught on the same day, usually back-to-back, and we aren't able to offer both Comedies & Romances and Histories & Tragedies in the same semester). In the short term, though, it's agreeable enough. I only have two preps, and one of them is a course that, at this point, is more like half a prep: after teaching Shakespeare every semester for seven and a half years, the class comes out of the box fully assembled. All I have to do is re-read the plays (and in a tough week, even that isn't necessary). And yet it's a reliably rewarding class to teach.

Despite these advantages, teaching two sections of the same class back-to-back is weird, at least for those of us who don't do it routinely (as I know many of my readers do). So far I haven't had trouble keeping track of where we left off in each class during our previous class meeting--that's something I make a conscious effort to remember--but I'm completely unable to remember any other differences in class discussion. Which section did I talk to about Early Modern sodomy laws? No clue. In which class did someone ask me about the origin of the title "Prince of Wales," and I promised to look up its history? Couldn't tell ya.

I'm also more likely to fall into that self-alienated space where I feel I'm watching some wind-up version of myself run through a predetermined series of rhetorical and pedagogical jumping jacks. And sometimes, auto-pilot takes over entirely: yesterday I began my second section, like my first, by saying "okay! now before we turn to the text, let me collect all your papers--" and only when half the class visibly blanched did I remember that, oops! My first section had papers due, but the second still had another week. (And then it took me many precious minutes to calm down the ensuing collective freak-outery.)

But there are also ways in which teaching two sections of the same class can keep one on one's toes. It's fun to see what two different groups of students will respond to in a given scene, and sometimes the readings go in interestingly different directions. It's also fun, in a way, to try to maintain the integrity of my lesson plan--which is to say, to make sure I hit a few of the same major points--in classes that may have wildly different interests or that move unevenly through the same material: one of my classes is always running long, which means I usually have to cut or summarize on the fly, while the other class often runs a little short and so gets spontaneous additional discussion. I like the puzzle-solving element of that: trying to keep both on the same reading schedule, covering the same big ideas, while responding to whatever arises organically in each one.

*

Do you teach multiple sections of the same class? What do you see as the advantages or disadvantages?

Thirty-eight.

2013-02-19T20:11:00.000-05:00

No time for a proper post, as a four-day weekend frolicking in NYC means I get to spend my actual birthday catching up on all the grading and committee work I neglected during those days. As for moving definitively into my late thirties, I Have Thoughts About That--but for the most part, I'm just happy to be here.

Since my teens, I've always been expecting my death. Not in a dramatic or anxious or depressive way; just in the fatalistic certitude that this would be the plane to crash, or I'd never live to complete X project. Though this conviction is always with me, it seems to strengthen in proportion to how invested I am in completing X--and so it was that Thursday night saw me contemplating leaving written instructions as to the location and state of my book manuscript files. In the end, though, the logic puzzle of what clothes to pack was too preoccupying and I never got around to it. Astonishingly, both my flights took off and landed without incident, and here I am.

I may be less sanguine about aging than I used to be, but it's sure better than the alternative.

Benedict XVI

2013-02-11T10:03:00.003-05:00

Nothing in his papacy became him like the leaving of it.

Candidate dinners

2013-02-09T15:11:00.000-05:00

So yeah: we're in the midst of a swarm of job candidate visits. Between last year and this year we're on track to have at least eleven candidates out, at least nine of whom I'll have had dinner with. I enjoy getting a chance to know our candidates better, in a lower-stakes environment, and I feel strongly that social events are one of the ways that we sell ourselves to candidates. Still, it's work, and I'm increasingly cranky about the inequities in how this work gets distributed.

I don't mind that I go to more candidate dinners than most of my colleagues. I sign up to do it, after all--and since I live in the city where we usually take candidates to dinner, and since I don't have children with bedtimes or after-school activities to negotiate, I figure that this is an easier work obligation for me to manage than it is for some of my colleagues. (Most of whom are great about stepping up in other areas, including other parts of the on-campus interview process.)

The problem is that we don't have a departmental charge account, which means that one person always puts the whole meal on his or her credit card, handles all the reimbursement paperwork--and then, for reasons both institutional and interpersonal always, always gets stiffed.

First off, since we're a state institution, alcohol isn't covered. Which is okay, but if we want the candidate to feel welcome to have a drink or two (and I do!), we have to order drinks ourselves and cover the complete bar tab. This also isn't a big deal--even at the fanciest restaurants in town, even the fanciest cocktails are relatively cheap, and I'm sure we're all happy to pitch in an extra three dollars or whatever to cover the candidate's drinks. Except that most people don't have cash on hand, and don't remember two days later. Seriously: not counting my own drinks or my share of the candidates' drinks, I'm still owed at least $60 in booze from last year.

Secondly, the state will only reimburse us for a tip of up 15%. And dude, I rarely give 15%. Fifteen percent, to me, means the service was somewhere south of mediocre. Moreover, at a candidate dinner, we have complicated paperwork that we have to explain to the server and have approved by the server's manager--and we need a special receipt, and we don't pay taxes on anything--and you know what? If I'm making a server deal with that on top of our orders, there's no way I'm paying less than 20%. The difference doesn't amount to much--maybe $5-7 a meal--and it's worth it to me to see that our server is treated right. But over several meals, it starts to add up.

And finally, I've screwed up the paperwork before and not gotten reimbursed at all.

(Oh, and don't get me started about the restaurants that won't honor our tax-exempt paperwork. Or the time the manager of a swanky restaurant came over and lectured us, in front of a candidate, about how he got audited for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS and it's all the fault of inconsiderate people like us and our bogus claims of tax-exemption.)

The point is, I don't mind spending $20 or whatever out of pocket to see that a candidate is treated well and that our server isn't stiffed. And I don't mind having the charge sit on my card for the six weeks or however long it takes to get reimbursed. But I do mind doing this multiple times per hiring season.

*

I'm sure that some of my readers have departmental charge accounts and no cost restrictions--but I'd bet most of us are subject to financial or other limitations. So tell me: how do candidate dinners work at your institution? What are your restrictions, how do you work within them, and how do you spread the burden (in terms of time or money) more equitably?

Mentoring junior faculty

2013-02-04T19:25:00.000-05:00

As several of my recent posts have suggested, I'm increasingly preoccupied with the question of mentorship--and, these days, I'm more interested in the giving end than the receiving. (Which isn't to say that I don't still need mentors myself, because God knows I'll attach myself with burr-like tenacity to anyone who shows the slightest willingness to play that role.)

However, I'm still figuring out what it means to be a mentor, and I'm sorting through my own conflicting impulses: it's possible that I'm just looking for disciples to impress and for occasions to wax oracular. But it's also true that we all gain real, pragmatic wisdom as we move through grad school and our first years on a job, and that shit's wasted if we don't share it.

It's not just our grad students or junior colleagues who suffer if we don't share what we've learned; it's our students and our departments, and more broadly our profession. A blogger near and dear to my heart makes this case compellingly in one of the more interesting treatments I've read of the Harvard cheating scandal. Dr. Cleveland suggests that we read that scandal, at least partly, as one in which a junior faculty member was poorly mentored, or rejected mentoring, or both:

New PhDs do not turn into fully professional members of the faculty overnight, or by themselves. It is the responsibility of a junior professor's senior colleagues to guide her or his professional development. . . . Mentoring junior colleagues is not simply part of an obligation to the colleagues themselves, but to the students. If you put students in a classroom with a relatively inexperienced teacher and you give that teacher no professional feedback or guidance, bad things can happen. In this case, bad things did. A large lecture class ended with at least a quarter of the students suspended and more on probation. The school has taken a beating in the press. And a promising young scholar's career has crashed and burned so badly that I can smell the smoke from here. My question is: where were this person's senior colleagues? Where was his department chair? What advice were these people giving him?

[. . . .]

[E]xactly what was said to him about teaching is an open question. He would almost certainly have been told both that his teaching should be good, whatever "good" means, but also that he should be careful not to spend so much time on teaching that his research suffered. Teach well, but budget the time you spend teaching. That's already a pretty complicated message for a brand-new professor who's working up all his courses from scratch and learning to teach completely new kinds of courses. (No graduate student oversees a course with hundreds of undergrads and a team of teaching assistants.) But then the really thorny question: what does the university mean when it says good teaching? What actual benchmarks does that imply?

Is the goal to keep your teaching evaluation numbers high? That goal could pretty easily lead a new faculty member to turn a large lecture course into popular gut for students seeking easy A's. And teaching such a course would also be less time-consuming, for someone being urged to protect his weekly research time, than teaching a class with more challenging assignments and tougher expectations. So a young teacher creating a popular if notoriously easy class might think he was acting on the advice he had been given. On the other hand, a young teacher developing a reputation as a soft grader might also get pushback from his colleagues, and be urged to shed that reputation. Even at a school where grade-inflation is the norm, standing out as an easier-than-normal grader is risky.

There's more, but I'll let you read it on your own. Most of us don't teach at institutions with the kinds of pressures this particular professor was facing--or where the consequences of screwing up a class would be so dire or so public--but it's worth thinking about the ways in which our colleagues' successes and failures are also, to some degree, our own.

Random bullets of again with the start of the semester

2013-02-02T18:02:00.000-05:00

RU's spring term starts late, but we're now back in the thick of it. At least it's light past 5.30 p.m. And maybe in six weeks it'll stop snowing.

Because we start so late, our job candidates come out pretty much the second the semester begins. I don't know how this is for candidates, but it's a little frantic-making to be photocopying syllabi and dealing with last-minute registration bullshit while trying to be all smiley and welcome-to-our-world!

That said, I have the cushiest teaching schedule of my entire career: just two preps, both of them extremely familiar (two sections of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies and a graduate Milton class; though I haven't taught the graduate version in a while, I taught a Milton senior seminar just last term)

Despite my anxieties, my Milton class looks great. It's a small class and many of my students aren't lit students (nearly half are creative writers and a couple are in the M.Ed. program), but they're a good bunch with good energy.

Somehow I always forget that M.A. students really are qualitatively different from undergraduates. They're both fun groups to teach, but I'm looking forward to how much I'll learn from my grad class.

My actual schedule is also awesome: TWTh, with both my Shakespeare classes mid/late afternoon on TTh and Milton on W night. It means going out to campus an extra day every week, but it's much less exhausting.

Given the total fabulosity of my schedule, surely I'll have nothing whatsoever to complain about for the rest of the semester. Right?

Right?

Just you watch.

Rearranging the deck chairs

2013-01-27T16:38:00.001-05:00

This past week I finished revising an article for resubmission: adding an explanatory or background paragraph here, bulking up my evidence there, moving some material from the text to the footnotes and vice versa. During that same week, I was also working on the bibliography for my book, which meant extracting all the citations from my footnotes, reformatting them, and sorting them into a list whose only logic is alphabetical.

These feel like totally antithetical processes. The one involves creating an effective, coherent, and convincing structure for my argument--using lots of component parts to help build something of my own. The other is a kind of disassembly: taking the blocks that helped me build my book, distilling those blocks down to a bunch of titles, and dispersing those titles so that their significance--their linkages and connections--are no longer apparent.

Doing both these things at once was strangely illuminating, for the reasons suggested in the paragraph above. Most of my writing life involves trying to make something: a convincing something, a seemingly-organic something, whose fraught and messy origins aren't apparent. I don't want the seams to show, I want to give the impression of ease and inevitability. And that, of course, is goddamn lot of work.

But once a writing project is done, it's easy to forget that it isn't obvious and inevitable, and it's easy to forget the other possibilities inherent in the material. Creating my bibliography reminded me of some of those roads not taken, and also reminded me that all those other works have an independent existence. In some cases, I was surprised to discover that I'd cited four or five articles by the same author (articles on totally different subjects, in totally different chapters, and which I'd discovered separately and never considered as products of the same brain). And I was surprised to see who wound up next to whom, in the inexorable logic of alphabetical order. Seeing all those works, freed from the context in which I'd put them, made me imagine all kinds of new connections and new conversations.

*

As it happens, I'm also beginning the slow process of tagging all my old blog posts, in the hopes of bringing those into more productive conversation with each other as well. I'm as big a fan of chronology as I am of the alphabet, but after eight years I'm losing track of what's where. It's time to start moving the furniture around.

Rejiggering

2013-01-22T15:27:00.001-05:00

I've been working on the syllabus for my graduate Milton class for ages. It really shouldn't take this long: I've taught five Milton courses at either the advanced undergrad or grad level over the past seven years, and I always teach more or less the same primary texts, always in a roughly chronological fashion. So what's so hard?

Part of what's hard is that I keep switching textbooks, and that means figuring out what is and isn't in each one. Some have more useful supporting materials than others, and none has exactly the same excerpts from the prose works. Moreover, a new text--without my pre-existing flags and annotations--means I spend hours trying to find the things I want.

It's also hard to pick the right secondary sources and the right number of them; I still don't have a feel for how much (and what kind) of critical reading is reasonable to expect of M.A. students. My Milton grad class three years ago was amazing, and I could've given them even more secondary readings than I did--so my impulse is to up the workload slightly from last time (as well as to replace several articles that turned out to be duds). On the other hand, my Donne grad class the following semester was much weaker and had a difficult time not only with dense critical readings but even with some of the primary texts. Since this will be only my third M.A.-level class, it's hard to know whether my first or my second was the more typical.

It's awesome having a well-designed course that's pretty much ready to go whenever I teach it. It's also awesome to design a new course from scratch. Even redesigning an old course can be intellectually stimulating. But this kind of rejiggering-without-real-redesign? Just a drag, man.

Getting It Published: Part 10

2013-01-19T11:39:00.001-05:00

It looks like I'll be ending this series with a nice round number, for as those who follow my every move on social media already know, my book has been awarded a contract.

As I mentioned in my previous post in the series, this wasn't a foregone conclusion. I got a great report from the reader solicited by Press #2, but in addition to having mixed reviews from Press #1 (one recommending publication, one very much against it), the editor at Press #1 wouldn't share the names of her reviewers with the editor at Press #2. This left me with a total of five reviews from three people--two of them unknown--over the course of two years and three stages of revision.

That makes for a complex narrative, and one with lots of things that might raise doubts for those not already sold on the project. So when I met with my editor at MLA, he asked that I write up a careful explanation of the process and of the revisions I'd already made, as well as detailing the revisions I planned to make in response to the final report. Oh: and if I wanted to make the January meetings of the relevant boards? It'd have to be done in two days.

Well of course I wanted to make the January meetings! So I spent the Monday after MLA trying to compose a persuasive narrative--one that was sufficiently detailed without being hopelessly confusing to someone who'd never heard the story before. (Needless to say, it took me something like ten hours to craft 1,000 words.)

Later that week, he presented the project to the press's internal publications board (presumably, the acquisitions editors, the editor-in-chief, the director of marketing, etc.). They approved it. The next week, it went to the press's faculty review board (made up of faculty from various disciplines at the university that houses the press). They also approved it, unanimously.

And. . . that's it! I have until May to submit the final manuscript, though I hope to have it done before then. And after that, I'll probably write a few posts in a new series about the process from final manuscript to bound covers.

*

So what have I learned? Mainly, I've learned experientially what I already knew intellectually, which is that this is just a damn long process. It's been ten years--to the month--since I submitted the first shitty draft of the first shitty chapter of my dissertation, and it's been almost two and a half years since I sent the first version of the book manuscript out for review. If everything moves swiftly from here on out, the book will be in print in about a year.

This means a few things. First, as they told us in grad school, when choosing a dissertation topic, you really do want to choose something that you think you could stand to be working on for a decade. (Not that you can totally know that in advance, and not that your understanding of what your topic is won't shift and evolve, but it's best to think of your project as a very long-term one. Longer even than grad school.)

Second, if you get a job where tenure rides on having a book contract, send the manuscript out as soon as you can. Admittedly, that's a bit of a catch-22: some projects just take a while to gestate and to turn into something other than the dissertation; rushing the manuscript out may also not result in success, especially if you're hired by a department that only counts toward tenure books that are published by certain select presses. Still, within whatever parameters make sense in your particular case, move with all deliberate speed.

Third, your first book is only your first book. There's life beyond it. If you no longer care about the dissertation project and don't need a book for tenure (or to get a first job), move on. And if you do believe in that project, work steadily toward its completion while starting to think beyond it. A good spur toward finishing one project is being excited by the one after it.

*

The full series, for those tuning in late:

I send out book proposals, get responses.
I send off the manuscript (and explain why getting from the dissertation to the MS took so damn long).
Press #1 sends me my first reader's report and asks me to revise & resubmit.
I revise, I resubmit, I feel DONE.
Apparently, the reviewer likes it! Press #1 immediately solicits a second reviewer.
I get both reviews. The first reviewer is happy. The second hates the project.
I revise again, reviewer 2 still hates the project, Press #1 rejects it.
Press #2 expresses interest (and so does Press #3!)
The reader for Press #2 warmly recommends publication.

Convention interviews: don't overthink it

2013-01-12T15:36:00.002-05:00

Since the portion of my last post that discusses MLA interviews from the perspective of a hiring committee seems to have sparked a lot of interest among those currently on the market, I've been thinking about whether I have more to say that doesn't merely duplicate the excellent series Bardiac has been running (see especially here, here, here, here and here). Now that first-round interviews are over, I guess my greatest piece of additional advice is: don't overthink it.

If you were polite and professional, and if you communicated your research interests and teaching experience effectively, you did your part. If someone on the committee looked bored or disengaged, it might be that he had a pet interest you weren't speaking to--and you can't have known or have changed that. But it could also mean that you had already sold yourself effectively enough that in the midst of a long day he just zoned out. Either way, it's not worth worrying about.

The thing is, in order to get an MLA interview, a candidate has to be very strong on paper. (Which isn't to say that there aren't strong candidates who don't get interviewed, because of course there are. However, most departments have a coherent standard for who makes that cut.) In the MLA interview, we're trying to go beyond what's on paper, to see if a candidate can speak engagingly and persuasively about both research and teaching. We mostly ask soft-ball questions that encourage candidates to say more about and reflect more deeply on those subjects, to prove what they know and what they've done; we're not trying to catch anybody out, just to see how they think.

But as I mentioned in my last post, it's amazing how much even those relatively casual conversations reveal. Our top and bottom third were immediately apparent. There were also a few surprises: some people I was totally in love with from their applications were duds in person. Others about whom I was rather dubious did stunningly well. This didn't happen often, but enough to make me humble about what an application alone can predict.

At the end of each day of interviews, we ranked the candidates, talking through and writing up the reasons for our rankings. At the end of all the interviews, we re-ranked them. (We were surprisingly unanimous about most of them, with most of the variation coming in our rankings of the candidates who fell into the middle third). When we got back to campus we typed up a list of our rankings, with a brief explanation next to each candidate, and sent it to the Dean and to Human Resources, who will give us approval to bring candidates to campus. Other departments and institutions have slightly different practices, but usually the rankings are made very soon after the interviews are over and don't change unless the department needs to go much beyond its top five.

All of this means that, if you're a candidate, there's really nothing you can do right now but wait. You can send thank-you emails or cards, you can ask the chair about the status of the search if you haven't heard by a given deadline, but none of what you do now matters. You will not improve your chances by sending a thank-you note, or hurt them by not sending one. And unless you're barraging the chair with emails demanding to know what's going on???, a polite query every two weeks will not make anyone think badly of you.

If you don't hear back for a long time, there are a couple of possibilities. One is that there are internal problems: the department is divided about the search for some reason, or the funding for the line has been imperiled, or something of that nature. The second is that you're not one of the top two or three candidates, but the committee doesn't want you to think you're out of the running. Ideally, a committee will tell you as much, but not often. (I appreciated the search chair, back in the day, who told me they only had funding to bring two candidates to campus initially, but they hoped I was willing to be kept on a list of alternates; I have no way of knowing whether I was their third choice or their eighth, but it was nice to know what was going on and to feel they still regarded me as desirable.)

Above all, it's almost never personal. We had amazing applicants whom we declined to interview because their specializations weren't quite the right fit. We had people we interviewed who are lower-ranked simply because they overlap too much with our current faculty, and hence wouldn't bring as much that's new and necessary. And though my department is often lucky enough to hire one of our top three candidates, we've also gone to numbers four and five and six (who sometimes turn out to give better campus visits than their more highly-ranked competitors did). We've never yet regretted a hire, regardless of how they were ranked initially.

It's a messy, inefficient, and stressful process, and candidates have it hard. I wish I could tell you that everyone doing good work will eventually get a job--but we all know that's not true. On the other hand, not getting a job (or not getting a job this season, or not getting the job you wanted), is absolutely not a sign that you did anything wrong, or that you could have done anything differently. Don't worry about what happened in that interview room. Spend the next few weeks being good to yourself. You're more than the sum of your interviews.

MLA 2013

2013-01-08T23:52:00.001-05:00

I've now returned from MLA and recovered from MLA, and I'm here to tell you that I ain't as young as I used to be. Two years ago, I wrote that whereas MLA had once been a whirl of excitement and novelty, an opportunity to figure out my place in the profession, it's now, increasingly, about my obligations to the profession. Since I was on a hiring committee this year, I was literally obliged to go and to sit in a hotel suite for fourteen interviews over two days--but when I speak of my professional obligations I mean something more expansive than that task, as well as something a bit more rewarding than "fourteen interviews over two days" might suggest.

I'll start with the interviews. The days were indeed long, and they left me more fatigued at the end than I'd expected--but not only is it genuinely fun to meet talented young scholars (and to learn about a field totally outside my own), I also appreciated the opportunity to think about how the conditions of those interviews reflect on us as a department and a profession. I won't claim that our team provided a perfect interview experience--two of us were on a hiring committee for the first time and the third was only doing it for the second--and small things did go awry, especially on the first day. Room service arrived with coffee in the middle of one interview; hotel phones and cell phones went off in the middle of others; there were minor mishaps to do with elevators and room numbers and missed calls.

But I think we were all aware of how stressful the interview experience is for candidates and how disproportionately horrible even a mediocre one can feel; we've all had dispiriting interviews, or interviews where the committee seemed bored or hostile, or where small rudenesses--like not knowing what to do with a candidate's coat or not having a clean cup in which to offer her water--came to feel emblematic of such boredom or hostility. So we tried to be foresighted about a candidate's needs, and we also worked hard to be warm and affirmative throughout by smiling, nodding, asking follow-up questions, and otherwise communicating our engagement. Yeah, it's a long day, and no, not everyone is equally compelling. But though we may not in that moment be able to change the hiring practices of academia, we can make a job candidate feel valued and worth listening to.

(And for any grad students or recent PhDs who may be reading: most of the little stuff really doesn't matter. We don't care if you wear a skirt and nice sweater rather than a suit. We don't care if you flub one question. Having the phone ring or room service arrive while you're talking doesn't actually detract from your awesomeness if we think you're awesome. It's okay to fumble around a bit if you eventually arrive at a strong answer. And I can think of only one candidate for whom we really needed the whole interview to make a judgment call; in every other case, the strongest and weakest candidates were apparent very quickly. On the other hand, interviews really do show things that aren't apparent on paper.)

When I wasn't in an interview suite, I was eating or drinking or otherwise hanging out. I did meet with my editor and I did make it to a couple of panels, but most of what I did amounted to socializing: at coffee shops, bars, restaurants, or receptions; in hotel lobbies, at the book exhibit, on the elevator, or walking the endless mall that connected the conference center to the various hotels. Some of the people I was most thrilled to see I chatted with for just five minutes, and even those with whom I spent a full hour or two I wished I'd had more time with.

I also spent a decent amount of time hanging out with grad students or contingent faculty friends who were interviewing, and I tried to buy every single one of them a drink. Maybe next year I'll expand this policy to any random younger person I see at the bar who seems in need of bourbon. One of the best things about blogging and social media are the friendships I've developed with people outside my immediate age/field cohort, but as I get more remote from my own grad student and contingent faculty days, I worry about losing touch with what the profession looks like from that perspective. And lacking my own doctoral students, I may also have a lot of frustrated older-sister energy to expend. (In other words: grad students! Hit me up for a drink and tell me about your dissertation.)

Many people talk about conferences as an opportunity to rejuvenate and reconnect with their discipline and their subfield: it's what keeps them engaged and up-to-date. Usually this statement is understood to refer to the scholarly work of the conference, but I think it's equally true for the social work of a conference. I need to spend a certain amount of time in bars with friends and acquaintances to know what's really going on with them and with the profession. I guess you could call this gossip, and some of it is--who got tenure or a book contract, who moved jobs, what horrible administrative initiative is happening where--but it's also a vital way of keeping in touch with the field in all its facets.

Conferences take more out of me than they used to, when all I was doing was making new friends and figuring out who I was. But they're equally as important--which is why I'm still at the damn bar at one in the morning, and in an interview suite at ten.