New Kid on the Hallway

My undergrad alma mater is full of psychotic people

So, the home of the lavender bovine sent me a press release announcing the award of various fellowships the school offers for post-graduate study at Cambridge and Oxford. Here's a sampling of the people who won:

- art history major who studied at Oxford hir junior year.
- Named Scholarship holder.
- has interned at the X College Museum of Art, a major news channel, and a national magazine.
- a member of the varsity track and field team, the varsity cross country team, the varsity tennis team, the concert and chamber choirs, and the -------, an a capella group.

- physics major
- Phi Beta Kappa
- winner of a scholarship for contributions of music.
- a member of the X College Symphony, the [Local] Symphony Orchestra, and the X College Symphonic Winds.
- interned at the Argonne National Laboratory and studied at the U.S. Particle Accelerator School
- is writing an honors thesis on [scary quantum physics topic].
- captain of the fencing team.

- history major
- Phi Beta Kappa
- Named Scholarship holder.
- studied at Oxford hir junior year
- took part in X College program in X studies (residential off-campus program in cool stuff).
- winner of Named Travel Fellowship and spent last summer in food research and interning with a number of premier pastry chefs in France.
- member of the X College Brass Ensemble, Oxford crew team, and the X College Bhangra dance troupe.

- political science major
- co-founder of [Organization], an organization that aims to reclaim childhood for Iraqi refugees in Jordan by organizing sports camps for young girls.
- awarded a Really Cool Grant to fund [Organization].
- op-ed columnist for the X College Newspaper.
- has interned for a national news channel.
- serves as the co-head of an X College tutoring program and is a member of the X College Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. 
- co-author (with Professor --------) of "Cool Article Title Here."
- awarded a [Emeritus Professor's Name] Fellowship to fund a research project about the Olympics and national identity. 
- a member of the X College varsity ski team, captain of the X College cycling team, and a member of the X College varsity crew team.

Now, I realize that college-sponsored press releases are like Lake Woebegon on steroids - everyone is WAY above average. But still. Are these students not insane? How do they accomplish such things??

Well, actually, I take that back - one of the ways they "accomplish" such things is by getting into a school that has the money to hand out named fellowships/scholarships left and right and create opportunities for students. Not that these students haven't done impressive things to get those fellowships/scholarships. But my alma mater has a LOT of money and a LOT of connections. That helps undergrads do things like intern at the Argonne National Laboratory (which may not be all that big a deal, I am not a scientist, but hell, it sounds really prestigious to me).

Nonetheless, these are crazy impressive people. Granted, these scholarship winners are 8 people out of a class of about 500. Still scary, though. I look at these students and think, dang, they're all WAY more impressive than I was when I was there! (Of course, I don't know if today I'd even get IN to my alma mater.)

But I also look at this and see the intense professionalization that has pervaded graduate education trickling down to undergraduates. Sure, these kids are going to Oxford and Cambridge, so are (theoretically) the cream of the crop. But I swear that when I graduated, you didn't have to have saved the world and played a varsity sport while doing so in order to go to grad school. There were students in the sciences (and maybe psychology) who were named authors on articles, but not nearly as many as you see now. It wasn't quite such a necessity to intern at really cool places in order to do something when you graduated (and boy, is that a practice that depends on having money - of your own, or your college's. If you have to work to put yourself through school, you literally can't afford to do unpaid internships at national news channels, no matter how much you want to get into that business).

I forget, sometimes, how unusual and downright bizarre the small, elite (rich!) liberal arts colleges really are - until I encounter people who've never spent any time at one. It really is an attitude you have to experience to understand. They're amazing sites of opportunity - people attend this college (and others like it) precisely because they can set you up with amazing internships, give you the chance to do cool research, and put you at the head of the pack. (Which isn't to say that other kinds of institutions can't do this - of course they can. But you have to be much more willing to take the initiative at a huge research university, and I think there's a lot more specialization; I don't think there's as many students who, say, do lots of cool internships AND play in a musical ensemble AND play a varsity sport, while doing independent research in their major field. Feel free to rebut that assumption in the comments.)

And at the same time, these colleges are incredible bastions of privilege. They would, I know, HATE that characterization, and they do extend opportunities to many students from underprivileged backgrounds (they have so much money, they can afford to do so). And I know that many of their alumni go on to do amazing social justice-y kinds of things. But they also, by virtue of their wealth and connections (and incredibly strong alumni network, which fuels both those things), continue to raise standards for undergraduate success. The more students graduating from these schools rack up the nifty accomplishments, the harder it is for students at schools that don't make such accomplishments possible to distinguish themselves. (It's not impossible, of course. But harder.) And there's something about that that makes me a little uncomfortable. (Though it could just be my inferiority complex talking.)

Brief note on the generation gap

I meant to mention something interesting that came up in the mock interview experience: the straight-out-of-college (or close to it) young women in my class who participated were chagrined to learn that the skirt-suit was considered a more conservative choice than the pants-suit, as a number of them consciously chose to buy pants suits. Their reasoning? Pants have to be more conservative than skirts, because with skirts you're showing your legs, and pants, you're not. Flashing your gams, they reasoned, can't be the more conservative choice.

I just thought this was a funny generation-gap moment, because I realized that I was old enough vaguely to remember that pants suits on women had been a big deal, and to realize that for the truly stuffy traditional, skirts are always the most appropriate wear for women.

And that these classmates had no awareness of that attitude at all.

In which I am amused

So, my school held mock interviews this week, and I broke out my new suit and did one.

It was really helpful - the guy had some very useful tips about how to present myself - but the really funny part was that he could NOT believe how old I was. He graduated from college a year before I did, and said he would never have guessed that we were the same age. He kept saying how I didn't look any different from the other students.

(It was in the context of interviewing - that I looked young enough that I'd need to make sure right from the beginning to remind them that I have done other stuff before going to law school.)

It was pretty darn funny. I think he must have been smoking a little crack before the interview, but hey, I'm not complaining.

How did this happen?

How is it possible that I am this far behind when it's only the second week of the semester???

(Yeah, I know, hardly the uplifting inauguration post you might expect. I watched Obama take the oath and make his speech with most of my Constitutional Law class, our prof having graciously agreed to stop a little early so we could watch, once it was pointed out to her that the Constitution itself specifies that the inauguration begins 10 minutes before our class ends [no, I don't think that was what the framers had in mind at the time]. The Constitutional setting, so to speak, seemed fitting. That said, I'm conflicted about pomp and circumstance; I both enjoy it - I fall for it all: music! speeches! solemn oaths! close-ups on tears! fluttering bunting! - and find myself suspicious of it. But that's all I have time to say, because, yeah - behind. Which has somehow reminded me that my laundry's been sitting in the dryer for two hours. Crap!)

Bwahahahaha! Well, THAT was funny

I think this quiz has aspirations confused with reality...

Your Word is "Fearless"

You see life as your one chance to experience everything, and you just go for it! You believe the biggest risk is being afraid and missing out on something amazing. Sometimes your fearlessness means you're daring. You enjoy risky activities. And sometimes your fearlessness means you're courageous. You're brave enough to do the right thing, even when it's scary.

What's Your Word?

(And I know I owe some people thank-yous for awards... thank you! will post something more soon!)

Relief: all hail the Ann Taylor Factory Store

Where, today, I purchased a suit, a hoodie sweater, and a car-length wool winter coat - for $172.

It was AWESOME.

So, yesterday a friend of mine went with me on my quest to find a suit. (Summer job application season is upon us, and I'm doing a mock interview next week with volunteer attorneys, for which we need business attire. Of which I own none. I bought a suit before I went on the market in 1999, I think, but it stopped fitting me around 2005 and I ditched it long ago.)

We went to the big semi-upscale mall not far from campus, which has a Dillard's, a Macy's, a Nordstrom's, an Ann Taylor, a Talbots, and all the other paragons of American consumerism. Could I find a suit? Not to save my life. First, very few places even had any reasonable suit selection (my friend pointed out that we do live in a state not exactly known for its suits - after all, you don't wear them climbing a mountain). Second, the places that did have suits had few or none in my size. (I hover at the top end of sizes you can find in mainstream stores.) Third, the suits in my size were ugly and horrible on me. In short, a fun expedition, socially, but a bust, success-wise.

So this morning, after a lovely breakfast out, NLLDH and I headed to an outlet mall about 20 minutes south of town. I was fully expecting to have a frustrating, discouraging day of fruitless scrabbling through racks of ugly clothing. In fact, before we even left I'd already earmarked tomorrow for tramping round the snooty upscale mall near home.

And then the first store we went to was the Ann Taylor Factory Store. And they had clothes in my size! Lots of clothes in my size! And I tried on three suits, all of which were fine, two of which I liked, and one of which I liked a lot! And I didn't even try on everything that I liked! And everything was on massive sale!

Sorry for all the exclamation points, but this was both hugely exciting and a huge relief. One of the best things is, I don't even have to get the suit tailored - the skirt might benefit from being taken in a little, but it's very wearable as is. And the jacket fits great (it's possible that getting the next size up and tailoring it down would have been even better, but they didn't have the jacket in the next size up, and that size was really too big in the other suits I tried on). And honestly, right now, I just need something I can look presentable in for an interview. If I end up with a summer job that requires me to be in suits or the like daily, I will have to do some more shopping!

And then we walked around all the rest of the shops, and tried on but resisted many more cool things, and came thiiiiiiiiiiiiiis close to taking home the 12-year-old cat up for adoption in the pet store we visited. (NOT a pet store that sells pets; a pet supply store, which had a cat from a local humane society there, looking for a home; he was curled up in his kitty condo when we saw him, and as soon as he saw us he came right out and rubbed his head against our fingers and purred at us for ages. I think if we were in something bigger than a 1-BR apartment we'd take him. Unfortunately, trying to introduce a new cat to two old ones in such a small place seems like a pretty bad idea. But he was sooooo nice! And he's 12! What if no one else takes him??)

So that was our day. It was exhausting, but good.

And now we are going to re-watch last night's Battlestar Galactica. We watched when it was on last night, but we want to see it again.

How's everyone else's weekend?

Wow, there are some weirdos out there

Okay, so I'm in the hell of job searching (I say "hell" mostly because I have no idea what I'm doing), and I was looking up a judge who may or may not want summer interns, and came across the following (names changed, of course):

IN THE FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF [other state],
[JOHN DOE],
Plaintiff

[a whole lot of judges and counties and stuff],
Defendants

Motion for Emergency Hearing

Plaintiff, [John Doe], pro se by Necessity, hereby moves the Honorable Court to Grant an Emergency hearing to request a temporary Injunction against above Named Defendants, and as grounds therefore states as follows:

01.) Plaintiff has been unlawfully persecuted and maliciously prosecuted, held without arraignment for over 11 months on excessive bail, subjected to solitary confinement for over 5 months, jailed without charges, imprisoned without due process or bail, threatened, assaulted, harassed and menaced with deadly weapons by [state name] STATE and FEDERAL Agents based upon their characterization of Plaintiff as a "patriot."

02.) Plaintiff has been unlawfully persecuted by [state name] STATE Agents based upon their characterization of Plaintiff as a "Christian Constitutionalist."

03.) Plaintiff has been unlawfully persecuted by [state name] STATE Agents based upon their characterization of Plaintiff as a "Criminal Constitutional Extremist."

04.) Plaintiff has been unlawfully persecuted by [state name] STATE Agents based upon their characterization of Plaintiff as a "Martial Arts Expert."

05.) Such characterizations establish an invidious discriminatory animus against Plaintiff that is not only erroneous, but has lead to Plaintiffs potentially murderous assault by Three S.W.A.T. Teams, imprisonment in X County Jail for almost two years on false, fabricated charges, imprisonment in Y without charges, unlawful extradition and the continuing persecution and prosecution of Plaintiff based upon acts committed solely by [another guy], Esquire while acting in the capacity of "Defense Attorney" paid by the STATE.

06.) It is the official opinion of legal experts and private investigators that [state name] STATE AGENTS are actively attempting to murder Plaintiff.

07.) It is a matter of official court records that [state name] STATE AGENTS named as Defendants in this Constitutional Controversy are attempting to unlawfully imprison Plaintiff in the STATE OF [state name].

08.) Defendant [state name] STATE Actors and their conspiratorial aide, Defendant Z are presently actively endeavoring to lure Plaintiff back into the STATE OF [state name] in order to consummate their evil intentions.

09.) Defendant [state name] STATE Judge Q has ordered Plaintiff to travel in interstate commerce from the State of [another state] to the STATE OF [state name] for a "review" in order to provide opportunity for [state name] STATE Defendants A, B and C to consummate their conspiratorially agreed upon plan to murder or incarcerate Plaintiff.

10.) Plaintiff is in credible, well-documented and verified fear of death or imprisonment.

11.) Plaintiff appeals for Political Asylum within the State of [another state].

12.) Case #------ has been appealed. Defendant [state name] STATE Judge Q does not have jurisdiction of the connected case [number] forming the foundation of the current Constitutional Controversy before this Honorable Court. Judge Q has exhibited a flagrant disregard for the rule of law and Constitutional safeguards and cannot be relied upon to act with any modicum of judicial probity or integrity. Based upon her official record in case [number], Judge Q is most assuredly preparing to act outside of the law and her official power in order to aide and abet STATE DEFENDANT'S plan to murder or imprison Plaintiff so as to prevent this Constitutional Controversy from proceeding to a judicial conclusion.

13.) Defendant [state name] STATE Actors have utilized this exact same tactic many times in the past in order to unlawfully arrest or imprison Plaintiff without cause so that Connected Cases in the --th Federal District could not be prosecuted by Plaintiff.

14.) Today, at 1300 hours, Defendant [state name] Judge Q intends to steal $10,000 from Plaintiff in the form of Bond Revocation and attempt to murder Plaintiff by issuing a nation-wide Fugitive Arrest Warrant for Plaintiff with the caveat that Plaintiff is a "danger to police" whereby it can reasonably be predicted that Extreme Prejudice and Deadly Force will be authorized to create a lifeless corpse of Plaintiff in order to conceal and cover-up the criminal acts of [state name] STATE Defendants and limit the liability of the STATE OF [state name] relative to the charges contained within this action, other litigation pending, and potential [state name] STATE liability not yet revealed.

Wherefore, Plaintiff requests that the Honorable Court grant Asylum within the State of [other state] and an Immediate Emergency Temporary Injunction against the Defendant STATE OF [state name] and all political sub-divisions constraining all named Defendants from luring Plaintiff within the Boundaries of the STATE OF [state name] by threat of revocation of Bond, Issuance of Bench Warrants or any other act or actions that could be utilized to force Plaintiff to leave his Residence in [other state] and journey into hostile Enemy Territory where Plaintiffs Life, Liberty and Property are all in imminent danger and at deathly risk.

Plaintiff also moves the Honorable Court to restrict and prohibit all [state name] STATE and FEDERAL AGENTS, including Agents of the Multi-Jurisdictional JOINT TERRORISM TASK FORCE, operating in collusion and conspiracy with [state name] STATE Defendants in the State of [other state] from murdering, harassing, threatening, menacing, arresting or otherwise or causing physical or economic damages to Plaintiff within the State of [other state]. Plaintiff further requests that the Honorable Court set a date for a hearing in order to make such Injunction Permanent.

Respectfully Submitted,
[John Doe]

Who knew being a "Martial Arts Expert" was so politically risky???

(I mean, this guy may have some legitimate grievances, I have no idea. But...wow. Can you say conspiracy theory?)

This has been the Monday-est of Mondays

Evidence:

1. It was the first day of class of the spring semester.
       
2. When I got up to shower at 4:45 am, there was no snow on the ground. When I got out of the shower, we could no longer see the downtown skyline out of our windows for the white stuff blowing around. The weather people had predicted "a dusting" of snow; it turns out, we got about 5 inches in 4-5 hours.
      
3. I got up to shower at 4:45 am!
       
4. Because of the snow, it took me 3 hours to drive 30 miles.
      
5. I am a big fan of breakfast, but I had just a small snack before I left, because I was supposed to go to a breakfast meeting at 8 am. Instead, I walked into my 9 am class 20 minutes late, starving.
       
6. This one's a little TMI (sorry), but the chicken-chorizo chili I ate for lunch VIOLENTLY disagreed with me and I spent an intensely unpleasant half hour in the bathroom as it worked its way out of my system. There were about 5 minutes in there when I seriously wondered if I would make it out of the damn law school bathroom alive.
       
7. And because of #6, I was late to my afternoon class - such a good way to start the semester. Which also meant that I had to sit in the only empty seat I could find, which is now my seat for the rest of the semester.

Can I just go back to bed now??

Snark: the first of two acts

Act I - The Past: A Further Salvo in the Senior Faculty¹ War against Special, Special Snowflakes

I can't decide if this makes me sad, or makes me want to break things. In either case, this piece from (where else?) the Chronicle Review, by philosophy professor Gregory Pence, was distressing. (I think that link will actually connect to the whole article, at least for five days; if not, my apologies, because it is a subscriber-only piece. But I excerpt almost the whole thing below.)

Shorter Pence: Kids these days!!

Longer Pence: apparently, those of us junior faculty people who have chosen to leave academe when we have not found jobs to our liking are special, special snowflakes who need to lower our standards.

Recently a young male professor in philosophy astonished me when he turned down a tenure-track job offer at a small, rural public university and then decided to leave academe. If he couldn't get a great job at a research university, he told me, or at least a job in a great city, he would change fields.

Another junior acquaintance in philosophy, a single woman approaching 30, confessed to me recently that she might quit her tenure-track job at a private college in a large city, a job she has had only for a year and that she obtained after a series of one-year appointments. Her major complaints? Her school has old buildings, average students, and lousy computer support, and her department doesn't organize socials like her department in graduate school did.

Those discussions made me realize that today's young academics might need to lower their expectations, especially in light of the country's current economic woes. But judging by my experience, that mental adjustment could lead to rich opportunities. My struggle to establish a career in philosophy turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

Oh, look! Analogies based on experiences in the 1970s! How sweet!

In philosophy at NYU, no one felt entitled to a job, much less a good job. For two years before and after graduation, I taught as an adjunct professor at Brookdale Community College, in New Jersey, and St. Francis College and LaGuardia Community College, both in New York. One year I taught 12 courses. To make ends meet, during the summers I also managed a pool and taught swimming lessons at apartments in Riverdale, N.Y. I envied professors who had an office in which to talk to students, who knew they would be teaching the following year, and who didn't need to kowtow to the person who decided which adjuncts taught each semester. I looked for a full-time job at the American Philosophical Association annual meetings, sometimes doing 10 interviews in three days, but I never got an on-campus interview.

So in addition to teaching, I started selling real estate in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., working for a man who, before he quit to become a broker, had been a philosophy graduate student at Cornell. During the first year, I made good money, and I soon started to emotionally detach myself from the idea of having a career in philosophy. Then, when the APA met in Manhattan in December 1975, I had a bit of luck. A former professor at William and Mary had been hired to start a new department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He had only a two-quarter job to offer, and no guarantee of anything after that.

I got the job, but then I had to decide whether to take it. It was a big risk: I would be leaving a budding career in real estate, a good apartment, and friends, and six months later I might have no job at all and be stuck in Alabama.

But what the heck — this was what I had wanted for years. So a week later I quit real estate, packed a rented station wagon, and moved to Birmingham with my future wife, a native New Yorker. We both feared moving to Alabama, especially after our New York friends made constant jokes about outhouses and the Ku Klux Klan....

And no, Birmingham wasn't Manhattan or San Francisco, where some of my classmates from William and Mary moved to become cab drivers, waitresses, and bartenders. But over the past decades, Birmingham has soared: It has transcended its racist past; its medical center has flourished; and its suburbs now contain good bookstores and three Indian restaurants. We can get The New York Times delivered at home and cable TV with 200 stations.

Wow, glad to hear you're so positive about Birmingham, dude.

I'm not saying I didn't work hard. But as I look back, my major feeling, after teaching for years as an adjunct and working 80-hour weeks in real estate, is great satisfaction in having any job at all in philosophy. Because for many years, I never expected to get one — and even after I did, I kept looking over my shoulder at the shadow of what might have been.

I now believe that too many graduate students feel entitled to a great job. That attitude sets them up to fail. Some of the graduate students I knew at NYU's philosophy department, then a program of slight stature, eventually forged careers because they endured — they moved, they compromised, they published, they would not give up. They had the right attitude.

Some colleagues from elite Ivy League programs who say they are "stuck here in Alabama" feel as if life has passed them by, that they missed the boat because they never got a job at Yale or Berkeley. Maybe the current economic downturn, which is already affecting universities, will make those young professors more thankful for their tenure-track jobs, no matter how imperfect. [emphasis added]

To be happy as a professor, you don't need to teach in buildings that win architectural awards. You don't need a two-course-a-semester load to publish (I published during my first years in Birmingham, despite teaching nine or 10 courses a year). You don't need your university to give you a dedicated blog site or IT personnel to support your home computer. You need a tenure-track job, and then you need to work hard at the three things we are expected to do: teach students who want to learn, publish about things you care about, and be a good academic citizen through service to your institution and field. That's the deal. If it doesn't sound good enough, then maybe you should try bartending in San Francisco. And when you do, lots of adjuncts will apply for your job.

[Sorry, those are really long excerpts.]

So, where to start??

With the extrapolation from two anecdotes about an entire generation of young academics?

By pointing out the charming attitude that, "I paid my dues, so everyone else should, too?"

There are just so many things wrong with this.

First, it's kind of sad to read that someone experienced the hell of adjuncting and frantically scrambling for an academic job, and his reaction is not, "There's something wrong with academia," but that you should then take and be grateful for any job you can get. (NLLDH's comment was, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?")

Second, he critiques junior faculty for not wanting to move further afield than New York or San Francisco, and I understand his point. But his own journey took him from NYC to a flagship state university in a major city (not one often on, say, New Yorkers' radar, but a major city nonetheless). I know a lot of people who would consider a job at the U of Alabama a fairly plum position. So his adoption of the "I took the suckiest job in the world and thrived!" persona is a little disingenuous. Your personal experience does not make you an expert qualified to comment on people's experiences at every kind of job. Guess what? There are some jobs not worth having.

The whole trope of "evil junior faculty who don't want to live outside coastal major metropoles" has, I'd argue, turned into a horrific cliche, but what those who trot it out usually fail to acknowledge is that people who go into academia are not a random sample. They start out as people inclined to want the kinds of amenities that cities have to offer in greater quantity and quality than other areas. At least in the humanities, people who go to grad school tend to like books and films and art. Even if they don't care so much about such things when they start, academia trains you to value museums over snowmobiling and fine dining over Perkins (or, at least, to say you do). There are all sorts of problems with these attitudes, I'll grant you. But it seems a little disingenuous to take a group of people who've spent 5-10 years, usually in some kind of vibrant metropolis (because few major research universities are in the sticks), learning to value what major cities have to offer, and then tell them that if they're not thrilled about living absolutely anywhere, they're not dedicated enough.²

Third, where does he think junior faculty get these attitudes? Graduate students don't spring, fully-formed, from the head of Zeus, with Ivy-League elitism implanted in their psyches. They learn these attitudes somewhere. Why not critique programs like the U of Rochester [where he studied prior to NYU], where he and his fellow students "were led to believe that we could get hired at Princeton or, if not there, at least Columbia" and "when someone took a job at Colgate, we felt sorry for her"? The academic prestige hierarchy is not determined by what junior faculty think, and there's no sense in blaming the victim.

Fourth, Pence talks as if there has been no crisis in academic hiring between the 1970s and today, that the "current economic downturn" is what will open people's eyes. Honey, anyone who's made it to junior faculty status today is very clear about the crisis in academic hiring. They knew they couldn't expect jobs at Princeton or Columbia, or hell, Colgate (sounds like a great job to me!). They go into current academic jobs with their eyes open, and, yes, are in fact extremely grateful to have landed those positions.

But that does not mean that they have to want to stay in those positions for the rest of their lives.

You can be grateful to get something, and still decide that it's not what you want to do.

And you have the right to do that.

I think that this, after all, is what most gets me about this piece. Is Pence resentful of people who know what they will find necessary to have a satisfying career AND life, and who are willing to turn to something else if their current jobs don't cut it? "Kids these days" change careers a lot - people no longer work for the same employer for thirty years and retire with the pension and the gold watch. Why should academe be exempt from that? If a job doesn't meet someone's satisfaction, for whatever reason, why should that person not change jobs? And who is Pence to decide for someone else what is and isn't satisfactory? Just because teaching nine to ten courses a year wasn't a deal-breaker for Pence, doesn't mean it can't legitimately be a deal-breaker for someone else. (Which isn't to knock jobs that require teaching nine to ten courses a year - I just pick that as a random example.)

Pence is correct in that no one job will have everything that a given individual wants, absolutely. But that doesn't mean that junior faculty have to put up with everything and anything in a job. Just because Pence was willing to suffer through conditions that were not his ideal does not mean that junior faculty not willing to work under those conditions are selfish or overly entitled.

Finally, why does it matter? If these people are, as Pence implies, selling their jobs short, AND, as he acknowledges, there are "lots of adjuncts" waiting in the wings, desperate for positions, why doesn't he just say, Good riddance? The disgruntled will leave the profession, and those who are truly grateful for the opportunity to teach under any, even the crappiest, circumstances, will be left. Won't everyone be better all round?
    

¹ With all apologies to the senior faculty I know out there who do DON'T think like this, which is most of them.

² I mean no disrespect here to people who live in rural areas and people who prefer rural areas. I think people should be able to live wherever it is that suits them best, whether that's cities, rural areas, or the much-maligned suburbs. I'm just suggesting that grad school is probably a somewhat urbanizing experience, in the aggregate.

I'm going to whine - you have been warned

And I feel very weird bringing this up, because by doing so, I feel like all the students that I and my former colleagues and many of my bloggy peeps have bemoaned since the day we started teaching - because I'm going to whine about grades. Feel free to click away now.

[crickets...]

[crickets...]

Okay, still here?

So, grades. Yuck.

I'm not claiming that they're unfair, mind you - given that in law school you receive almost no feedback on anything you do over the semester, I have no evidence at all that they're unfair. In fact, they may well be generous - who knows? They are what they are, delivered one-by-one from on high into the ether of my on-line student account.

No, I just wish they'd been higher. Not that they're bad, but I would have liked them to be better. Okay, strictly speaking, I'm happy with 2 of them, I would have liked one to be higher but it's fine, and I'm not super-thrilled with one of them (especially since it was for a 4-credit class). So, honestly, not that much to complain about - but still, I kinda wish the average were higher.¹

Well, and I also wish they'd shown up in reverse order; I started at a high point, then each subsequent grade was a little worse than the last. Since I really didn't have any expectations when I got the first grade - really, I had no idea how I'd done - if I'd got the worst first, I'd have been relieved to do fine, and then I could have got a little happier with each one. Instead, I got the best first, got my hopes up, and have watched each one decline a little bit more, which (for no good reason) makes me feel like I've deteriorated. (I know, dumb, isn't it?) Plus, I'm now convinced that my last grade is doomed to continue the trend and be even lower.

My Legal Writing prof made a little speech, the first time he handed back a graded assignment, about how we are not our grades, and how people with some life experience tend to be better about understanding that than students straight out of school (not sure why he told us that last, but whatever). This may well be true; I have dealt with many more dispiriting things than getting lower-than-I'd-hoped grades, and I know that in the long run they're not that big a deal. (Plus, I have five more semesters to ruin improve my GPA further, and historically, I've always had an upward trend in grades.)

But I think what is hard for the returning student - especially someone who's left a previous career - is that it's really easy to look to grades for validation that you made the right decision in choosing to go to law school. I mean, I tend to feel like I had to leave academia, not like I was really giving something up to do law school, but technically, I could have continued in the job I had for at least one more year, I could probably have put together more teaching in the area, and I could probably have worked out something else to do. I didn't actually have to go to law school. But I chose to give up an income and take on more debt, and on some level, I think, I look for evidence that this was the right choice to make. A really good GPA would say Yes! You were right to do this! You belong here!²

I also have to confess that the law school curve brings out the envious, competitive side of me, and when I look at my grade, I know that it means X number of students scored higher than I did.³ Now I want to know WHO THOSE PEOPLE ARE, so I can be sure they DESERVED THOSE GRADES.

Isn't that lame? And judgmental, and nasty, and petty? But it's how I feel. There are plenty of people for whom it wouldn't bother me at all if they did better than I. And then there are some - well, I'm going to be honest and say that yes, it would bother me if they did better than I did. (In case you're wondering, it's not to do with age - there are any number of straight-out-of-college people likely to have earned higher grades than I did, who I consider to merit those grades. It's more about attitude. I tend to get ticked off if someone whom I consider a slacker does better than me.)⁴

Finally, one last piece of evidence of how lame I am: the lowest grade was for the professor I'm going to work for this semester, and I'm convinced she's going to regret the decision to hire me and hate me and think I'm a loser and all kinds of good stuff like that. I read her latest e-mail with trepidation, convinced it was more abrupt than usual and that she was cursing herself for hiring a student before seeing their first semester grades. Thing is, this may well be more about me than about her, since although this woman has never been anything but nice and encouraging to me, when I see her name in my inbox, I feel an echo of the dread which I came to associate with my grad advisor's messages. Despite the fact that this professor is not any kind of official advisor to me. And that I am a grown woman who finished grad school seven years ago.

So, yeah, I'm kind of a freak, and grades are stupid, and definitely exacerbate my freakdom. Can't we get rid of them? Why did I decide to go back to school again?⁵

    

    

¹ There's still one to come, but it's for a 2-credit class, and it's not likely to change the overall average vastly.

² My GPA doesn't say, You idiot, you were wrong, you don't belong here!!!! It just says, Eh.

³ This was so not the case in any other of my educational experiences - if you got something less than a straight A, it was a pretty good bet that someone else did get a higher grade than you, but beyond that, anything went. You weren't burdened with the knowledge that there were mathematical calculations undertaken somewhere by someone that determined exactly how many people were above/below you; everyone could get As or no one could get As. I know classes tend to fall in a bell curve, but profs, haven't you had those really weird grade distributions in the past, like 12 As, 2 Bs, 3 C, and an F? Or reversed?

⁴ Although now I'm thinking of one of the notorious slackers, who seemed (to me anyway) to be taking the "I don't have to worry about performance in class/daily assignments, I just need to start studying for the exam from day 1, and I can get all I need from the supplements, not class" route, and honestly, if he did better than me - which he may well have - I'd just have to laugh. Because it would just show how silly this all is.

⁵ And yes, in a fit of nostalgia for the humanities, I decided to figure out how to put footnotes on my blog. Because it's not like I have a gazillion other better things to do. Like I said: freak.