New Kid on the Hallway

Random comments on the past few days

For the gazillionth time, will someone tell me NOT to get into arguments with strangers on the internet? Sometimes I'm such an idiot. I need to put a copy of this over my computer or something.

* * * * *

I sat in the coffeeshop a couple of days ago and read a 264 page book in three hours.

Okay, well, it was 264 pages of word documents that, put together, will be a book, so not REALLY 264 pages.

And it was a collection of essays, so it wasn't like I had to muster the energy to read a book-length exposition on something; I had to read ten essay-length pieces, each of which requires much less energy to figure out.

And the reason I had to read them was to see what connections I could make to my own essay for the collection, so it wasn't like I had to read very closely - once I figured out there were no real connections, I skimmed like a madwoman.

So, really, it wasn't that much of an accomplishment. But I still FEEL accomplished, darn it.

* * * * *

Why is it that the one essay with which my own had the greatest connections had to be the stinker in the collection? Seriously, in its current state it was both slender and incoherent. It has the potential to be interesting, and there's still time for revisions, of course, but I really didn't understand what its argument was - it read like one of those "let me throw out random observations and hope they stick together" kinds of essays. (It's possible that I'm misunderstanding disciplinary conventions/differences and such an essay is perfectly okay in the author's discipline, but I don't think so.) I should probably read it again.

One author was fond of doing what my students often did, linking two independent clauses with ", however."

One essay fell into the "one damn fact after another" trap. In some ways, I think I was poorly suited to be a historian, because I have very little patience with narrative - and that's what this essay was: narrative. This happened, then that happened, then this happened, then that happened. Such writing bores me to tears. But the problem was that the essay said very little about the significance of what happened. That is, it stated that the events/actions showed us how [theme of the collection] played out in [historical context], but just stated that in the introduction and the conclusion, and didn't say anything along the way about what was interesting about this particular expression of [theme of the collection]. And there was no attention to what these specific events had to say about [theme of the collection] more broadly. That is, it's kind of like saying, "Trees are important to a community. Community X has oak trees, elm trees, aspen trees, cottonwood trees, and the occasional maple tree. Trees are important to a community." Okay, but what do Community X's different kinds of trees tell us about how tree are important to a community? It's almost like the author took [theme of the collection] as a given and said, "here's an example of it." But s/he didn't use hir evidence to illuminate [theme of the collection]; it was more like the theme of the collection gave her an excuse to talk about stuff s/he wanted to talk about anyway.

(I don't really think it's just my problem with narrative, because there was another, very similar kind of essay in the collection, but that author did a good job of making clear hir argument about how the specific events s/he described illuminated something specific about [theme of the collection].)

The one thing to be said about the narrative essay is that I think it's easier to punch up the significance and broader implications in what was otherwise a perfectly solid essay, than to render coherent the incoherent.

* * * * *

Some of you will be wholly unsurprised to find that once I'd read the whole, it was clear to me that my essay connected most strongly with the essays by literature scholars, rather than those by historians. 

* * * * *

It was kind of weird to sit down and do something scholarly for the first time in about six weeks - and especially to think about medieval history again, rather than trying to imagine what law school will be like.

It was nice to discover that my brain still works, though.

* * * * *

And after I did all that scholarly stuff, I drove to a ritzy mall and drooled over a whole bunch of things at Sephora and JJill. The biggest downside to returning to school? NO. MONEY.

* * * * *

The high is supposed to be 101˚ today. Wheeee! I'd better head to the grocery store now, while the temperature is still something less than molten lava.

FAScinating!

Today's NYT includes an article by Patricia Cohen titled: "On Campus, the 60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire." Go read - it's fascinating (or, well, read on, because it turns out that I've excerpted huge chunks below). The title sums up the main point, but basically, Cohen argues for a significant shift in campus culture as Baby Boomers retire and are replaced by 30-something* faculty - faculty who weren't  yet born when the Baby Boomers were protesting and rioting on their own college campuses. Having been on at least one campus undergoing that shift, I think she gets a lot of things absolutely right. Some points that stuck out for me:

“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”

ABSOLUTELY. Though I'd say it's more like the last 30 years.

A new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

This actually raises one of my criticisms of the article - I'd be curious to know how such a study - and Cohen more generally - defined "liberal," because I don't think most of the faculty of my generation are actually any less liberal than Boomer faculty. I think the significant divide is really in the second set of statistics, the role of "activism." My sense is that for a lot of Boomer faculty, being an activist and being a professor are part of the same cloth, whereas this is much less the case for junior faculty. Which Cohen also acknowledges:

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations, summoning Barack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

(I did not know Barack Obama said that, but despite supporting that Baby Boomer Hillary, I heart him for saying it.)

It also struck me that the "decline" of liberals falls along disciplinary lines, which Cohen notes as well:

Changes in institutions of higher education themselves are reinforcing the generational shuffle. Health sciences, computer science, engineering and business — fields that have tended to attract a somewhat greater proportion of moderates and conservatives — have grown in importance and size compared with the more liberal social sciences and humanities, where many of the bitterest fights over curriculum and theory occurred.

And the next important bits:

At the same time, shrinking public resources overall and fewer tenure-track jobs in the humanities have pushed younger professors in those fields to concentrate more single-mindedly on their careers....And with more women in the ranks (nearly 40 percent of the total in 2005 compared with 17.3 percent in 1969), different sorts of issues like family-friendly benefits have been brought to the table.

YES. I would say that fewer people in American society overall are as "activist" as the Baby Boomers were (not going to try to tackle reasons why since that's a huge sticky mess), so it makes sense that faculty from later generations are not as activist. I don't know whether academia has become disproportionately less attractive to academics or not, but once one has made the choice to enter academia, I don't think the pressures of the profession today make combining professoring and activism as manageable as was the case in the 60s and 70s.

Cohen goes on to look at the careers/life experiences of two U of Wisconsin faculty, one (Olneck) aged 62 and about to retire, and one (Goldrick-Rab) aged 31 who is seeking tenure.

Like many sociologists and education researchers, Mr. Olneck said that today both the kinds of analyses and the theories that prevailed when he was in college have changed. Overarching narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change — of the capitalist system or the social structure — have gone out of style. Today, with advances in statistical methods, many sociologists have moved to model themselves on clinical researchers with large, randomized experiments as their gold standard. In their eyes, this more scientific approach is less explicitly ideological than other kinds of research.

Goldrick-Rab falls into the latter school.

“Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,” she said. They want to question values and norms; “we are more driven by data.”

As for professional concerns, hers are closer to home:

When Ms. Goldrick-Rab speaks of added pressures on her generation, she talks about being pregnant or taking care of her 17-month-old while trying to earn tenure. The lack of paid leave for mothers is high on her list of complaints about university life.

You all know I'm not a parent, but that sounds spot-on to me, based on academic friends and colleagues of my generation. She's certainly not alone:

At a conference titled “Generational Shockwaves,” sponsored in November by the TIAA-CREF Institute, Joan Girgus, a special assistant to the dean of faculty at Princeton, underscored how these sorts of concerns were increasingly on the minds of younger faculty members. Universities need to focus more on the “life” side of the work-life balance “because faculties historically were almost entirely male and the wives took care of the family side,” Ms. Girgus said. “I don’t think we can do that anymore.”

EXACTLY. I'm not knocking the Boomer generation of faculty who were so activist in so many ways and so traditional in others, but I will point out that the vast majority of Boomer faculty I've known are married men, whose wives often didn't work outside of the home or were underemployed for their level of education. That's not meant as a criticism of them, but just an acknowledgment that if faculty private lives have changed significantly, it's not surprising that junior faculty attitudes to the profession are different from those of their Boomer colleagues.

The next bit I found absolutely fascinating:

Ask Ms. Goldrick-Rab if she believes there is a gap between her generation and the boomers, and she immediately answers yes.

Mr. Olneck and Mr. Wright are more cautious. “Some of my closest colleagues are 25 years younger than I am and I feel absolutely no barrier of sensibility,” Mr. Wright said.

Um, yeah. Do you think the fact that Boomer faculty are evaluating the 30-something faculty might have something to do with that? I don't mean to accuse Boomers of being obtuse or complacent, but in the relationship between tenured Boomers and untenured 30-somethings, the balance of power isn't equal. Goldrick-Rab pointed it out earlier: senior faculty evaluate junior faculty. I'm not suggesting that senior faculty consciously set out to make junior faculty conform to their standards, nor that senior faculty aren't capable of recognizing a junior faculty member's own goals and standards for their work and evaluating that work accordingly. Of course Boomers and 30-somethings can genuinely be close friends. But I'd also argue that the Boomers have the luxury of overlooking the gap in a way that junior faculty can't.

That said, Wright has an important point:

For him, the institutional shifts outweigh any others: “I don’t think the big things have anything to do with generational change, but with financial pressures on education,” he said.

He's absolutely correct that when Boomer faculty entered academia, its economic situations/structures were very different than they are today. Boomer faculty have seen the erosion of tenure-track lines in favor of adjunct positions, for instance; 30-something faculty have always lived with this. My sense of the state institutions in which I've worked is that there was a time (early 80s-ish?) when they were flush with money, and those days have fallen away. (Conversely, some of the private institutions I've worked in struggled through those years and have only now managed to build up a significant financial cushion, often through making connections with non-academic institutions and individuals, and/or the growth of their technology/business side.) That said, I don't think that you can separate the generational gap from those changing economic pressures on education, as each generation is shaped by the economy they experience.

So, while I do wonder how exactly Cohen defines "liberal," I nonetheless think that she does a decent job of highlighting many of the differences between these two academic generations. What I also think is fascinating is that the article makes no mention of associate professors, that generation between the Boomers and the 30-somethings (who might not all be associates, of course, but it's the simplest label). When quoting the study of faculty political affiliations mentioned above, Cohen ignores the 35-50-year-olds between the new faculty and the old. I suppose this isn't all that surprising because in my experience, there seem to be far fewer of them - that academic lost generation of the lucky few who got jobs in the 80s and early 90s when, filled with academics from the late 60s and early 70s, few universities were hiring. On the one hand, this middle generation probably presents less of a stark contrast to either the Boomers or the 30-somethings, and thus makes for a much less interesting article. On the other hand, I'd argue that if my experience is at all typical - if it is the case that there are many fewer 35-50-year-old profs than <35- or >50-year-olds - then the generation gap between the Boomers and the 30-somethings really is the one that most affects todays campuses.

Anyway. What do you think? Does the generation gap that Cohen describes make sense to you, or has your experience been different?

*I'm ducking the whole Gen-X/Y/Millenial brouhaha by labeling this generation "30-something," even though yes, there are 20-somethings on the tenure-track, though probably not many true Millenials out there yet. I have no problem with the Gen-X label myself, but such labels carry baggage. Of course, so too does "Baby Boomer," but that label's been around much longer, so I'm going to use it regardless.

Oh, please

A First Person column extolling the scholarly virtues of smoking marijuana as a graduate student, complaining that the younger generation of graduate students party way too hard because they use cocaine/ecstasy instead of pot? (For instance, comparing - and criticizing - a student's fondness for the beats/lights of raves as "a visual and tactile representation of the global-consumer economy, oriented toward pure sensation and the quick fix"?) And postulating that humanities scholars' drug use (i.e. the shift away from pot) may reflect the shift to the "corporatization" of the university??

I'd ask what the hell he's been smoking, but I guess that's pretty obvious.

(I should probably add that I don't use any kind of drugs myself - except allergy drugs - and have no patience with the "drugs inspire great literature, man!" school of thought. I don't care if someone chooses to use drugs, but I think discussing it as some kind of scholarly policy is asinine and smacks of protesting too much.)

RBOC, Kzoo edition

I realized that after losing my post in the Detroit airport, I didn't actually say very much about this year's Kalamazoo. So I thought I'd rectify that. But in the absence of any central theme or point, I thought I'd go with some RBOC.

• To work my way backwards, I've returned home to find that ironically, attending Kalamazoo has rejuvenated my teaching. I'm not going to claim any brilliant pedagogical performances in the week since I've been back, but I was really dreading going to class in the couple of weeks leading up to the conference (and class was always fine once we got started - I just didn't want to go), and this week I wasn't dreading class anymore.
      
  
  • On the one hand, this makes me a little sadder about changing careers - when I was DREADING class, all I could think was, Thank God I'm going to law school! What a brilliant decision! Now that I'm not dreading class, I think, Huh, I can actually imagine continuing to do this for a while longer. But I won't be. That's a little sad.
        
  • On the other hand, having a better attitude about teaching is good, because it reassures me that I wasn't deluding myself about this career all the years I've been doing it so far. I'd been getting so sick of teaching that I'd been thinking, Have I really just hated teaching all these years, and somehow I managed to fool myself into thinking I liked it? Was spending all these years on teaching just a sham? It's nice to think that even if I've decided to change careers, it's not because my first choice was a complete disaster and a waste of my time.
       
• There were times at Kzoo when I was sad about leaving the profession. In many ways, Kzoo is so much about the future - planning sessions for the following year, pitching potential books, connecting with other scholars in your field in order better to pursue all your upcoming projects - that attending with no eye to the future was strange and a little isolating. Here's everyone around you buzzing with (sometimes manic) energy and hope for big things to come, and it has nothing to do with you. It wasn't devastating, which is good, but it was bittersweet.
      
• One of my FAVORITE moments: attending a very interesting panel on some "big picture" kinds of things in women's history, hearing someone ask a (slightly random) question about teaching and students and teaching students about "bias," and getting to hear an extremely eminent scholar say: "If I can get on my 30-second soapbox: never never never never never never never NEVER say bias. Say perspective, point of view, mindset, attitude, whatever, but NEVER say bias. For one thing, students can't use it grammatically and keep saying that someone is 'bias' without the '-ed.' But mostly because if you talk about bias, the students think it's possible NOT to be biased, if you try hard enough, and that bias is a sign of poor character or bad morals or something." It was awesome. I nearly stood up and cheered.
      
• I did not manage to collect any spectacularly weird medievalist outfits this year. Everyone I encountered looked pretty darn good. (Although I did notice a couple of hovering-on-indecent wrap dresses - sometimes those plunging necklines are a little difficult to navigate for those of you with serious boobage.) However, watching the prom kids parade around the Radisson on Saturday evening was pretty amusing. One young lothario was wearing a FUSCHIA tuxedo. Seriously, it was retina-searing fuschia (a color I quite like, myself), with a fuschia brocade waistcoat. The crowning touch? His date was wearing teal.
      
• I presided over a session with more presenters than audience, which was a shame, because the presenters did a nice job. I'd actually thought that the sessions this year had all seemed very well-attended, but that fell apart on Sunday - post-dance, early in the morning, and this year, cold, windy, and wet. I also think that flight options to/from Kalamazoo have narrowed in recent years, and that more people are forced to ditch the Sunday sessions than ever before, if they want to get home on Sunday, because there aren't enough flights after the Sunday sessions are over (I know one person who presented in the last time slot on Sunday had to fly home the next day because there were no available seats on any Sunday flights).
      
• Each year I go to Kalamazoo I have more fun because I know more people, and this year was no exception. In fact, I think this year was the first that I had potential company lined up for every single meal I had free. It was great to see online medievalists Dr. Virago, T.E., meg, ADM, and Lisa again, and it was also great finally to meet in person Notorious Ph.D., the Rebel Lettriste, Dame Eleanor Hull, and Janice (who probably wins the award for "early history person I've known longest online before getting to meet face to face"!). My apologies if I'm leaving anyone out!
      
• I really didn't explore the book exhibit this time round (though I did see Dr. Virago's book, which cracked me up because I saw the title before I realized it was her book, and thought, "oooh! that looks really cool!" - then picked it up and realized, well, OF COURSE it's cool). I've mostly made my peace with my choice to ditch academia, but it still depresses me slightly to see books coming out by people who finished their degrees well after me. (I'm thrilled for them, etc. etc. etc., but I'm also a petty envious sort who is depressed when other people get things I wanted to have. Unsurprisingly, I am also the queen of Schadenfreude. I'm not proud of this, but sometimes the whole scrambling-for-prestige aspect of academia really does feel like a zero-sum game. When someone I consider sort of a peer produces a book, it really does feel like it diminishes my accomplishments, because I should have produced a book by now, too. Of course, I also realize that if I'd taken all the time I've spent pondering the intricacies of the prestige hierarchy in academia and used it instead to write/publish, I'd be higher up that hierarchy by now, so perhaps it's time to drop this subject.)
     
• I did, however, regularly cruise by the Scholar's Choice stall, because they always put out bowls of Jelly Bellies. These are a great source of sustenance in the trough between meals.

So there you go - my self-indulgent and relatively-scholarship-free RBOKalamazoo. And now I have tp finish grading some stragglers from earlier assignments - I've been reading so many posts about people slogging through final grades that I keep thinking that's what I'm doing, too, then have to remind myself that I still have a week and a half of classes left to go!

Eek

I'd completely forgotten about an essay collection that had been proposed by some people I know and for which I'd submitted a proposal. You know how these things go... someone asks for something, you throw a few paragraphs together, and then a year later you're confronted with the news that the collection is a go, and you're left trying to remember what on EARTH you said you'd write about.

Digging out and rereading my proposal, my reaction is about two parts "that actually sounds like it might be pretty good, if I didn't have to write it" and about one part "what the HELL was I thinking when I claimed X??" I guess it's a good thing I haven't started selling off all my academic books yet.

I think this is a sign I've made the right decision

I just got back from (what was really a quite lovely) class, to find an e-mail reminding me that book orders for fall were due [at some upcoming date].

And I was filled with glee at the thought that IT DIDN'T APPLY TO ME.

(Technical note: while stuck in the Detroit airport, I futzed with my blogroll, trying to clear it out/update it a little. If you think you should be there and you're not, feel free to drop me a line. Also, tell me what you think about the new template!)

(ETA: I should note that I do still like the original header picture, VERY much, which a very kind blogger made for me - but I was just feeling like a change. Maybe I'll go back to the other one when I'm a Real Lawyer with Real Leather Books [which are all entitled LAW...].)

Can you be nostalgic if you haven't really left yet?

Survived the paper. I think the session went well; there was a decent crowd and some interesting discussion, and people said nice things about my paper.

It's also been fun running into people I know.

But I have to confess that being here is making me sad about changing careers. I like giving papers; I like hearing papers; I like the discussion afterwards. I even like hating, or disdaining, certain papers and certain discussions. This is the part I'm going to miss.

EXcellent

First paper run-through: 19 minutes and 52 seconds.

I am going to cut a bit more, but it's good to know it's a question of paring away the excess avoirdupois and not of figuring which limbs or bodily organs are most expendable.

(Yes, I present later today; but I still have a lot of time for practice before then. How far in advance of presentation would you ideally finish your paper? And how far in advance do you actually finish in practice?)

My conference work ethic was probably permanently maimed in grad school by 1) seeing lots of people present with hand-written emendations, often entailing paragraphs written on the back of a printed page and 2) even seeing a grad student I knew finish writing his conclusion during the presentations of the other speakers on his panel. Even though I knew darn well at the time that this was NOT the way to go - and was, in fact, pretty darn rude - it leaves a very different impression than, say, seeing everyone I know board the plane to Kzoo with a shiny finished polished paper gleaming in their briefcases. Which has never happened.

Is this just a Kzoo thing - a function of its unfortunate timing at the very end of most people's semesters? I've seen eminent senior-type folks harrumph that this last-minute finishing of papers has led to a terrible decline in quality of the papers at Kzoo. Said harrumphers, however, are usually tenured at R1 institutions with plenty of support to help them handle the grave burden of grading of their thirty-odd students for the term; the people I've seen finishing last minute - which is many; check out the computer center at Kzoo during the conference and count how many people are wearing conference badges! - are often untenured people teaching heavy loads who need the line on their c.v.* Whose papers have rarely seemed to me consistently weaker than those by the harrumphers.

*Although they really probably don't. Looking back, I'd have been better served going to Kzoo less and publishing more. The good thing about conferences is that they made me get something down on the page; if I have to stand up in front of strangers, I will get the writing done. The bad thing is not so much that the conferences really took time away from writing for publication, but that they made it easy to think I'd accomplished something simply by presenting (which I had, but nothing that makes up for not publishing more), and to be lazy about transforming the paper into an article. Yet, conversely, almost all the publications I have managed to produce have come from contacts I made on the conference circuit. So maybe it's really a wash in the end.

Drowning in conference paper, please send chocolate

A bit like Dr. Virago, I have reached the point in writing my Kalamazoo paper when I am convinced that everything I have to say is dumb - and not just obscure dumb, but the most glaringly obvious of dumb. (She just said dumb, I'm adding the glaringly obvious bit about me, not her.)

It doesn't help that I'm reworking something from my dissertation (a piece that was jettisoned for the book version, so I really haven't looked at this in six years or so), which means it's something that I used to know really well, and probably spent a ton of time on figuring out back in 2001, and now that I'm "rediscovering" it, I keep rewriting it and then realizing I've just figured out exactly what it says in the dissertation in the first place. I should just give up and read the bits straight out of the dissertation chapter. Well, no, I shouldn't, because the central argument of the diss chapter was different from the central argument for this paper. My cunning plan is just to insert the key word from my new argument at the beginning of each dissertation paragraph and hope that will tie everything together. (Okay, not really, but that's what it feels like sometimes.)

The other problem is that I think I have about 5000 words for a 15-minute paper. Some of those words are footnotes, but what I think this really shows is that I write papers the way I teach - I panic about not having enough to say and so pile in everything, then take a closer look (the night before the conference, or 15 minutes into class) and think, "Damn, there's no way I'm covering all that." It's better than the other way around, but I think come Wednesday night I'm going to be going through my paper copy crossing out line after line. (But then, it would be a shame to break with tradition now.)

I find myself ambivalent about this paper - on the one hand, this is my last Kalamazoo, and I'd like it to end on a high note, with a paper of which I can be proud. On the other hand, this is my last Kalamazoo, and it's not likely that anything I do there is going to have any significance in my new career, so it's hard to muster a huge amount of academic enthusiasm (though I am enthusiastic about what I think of a nerdy vacation). I think in this respect it helps that this is from my dissertation, so it's a topic I've already really moved past, rather than being something new - if it required me to do entirely new research rather than revisit something I've already worked through, I think I'd resent putting in the work. As it is, the paper's a pleasant mental exercise, but not grueling labor.

I also feel like I've come full circle with this paper, because come Thursday I will find myself the only historian presenting in a panel of literature scholars. Because of some elements of my dissertation topic, this happened to me a lot in grad school and soon after finishing. The revision of the dissertation into the book project moved me into much more traditionally historical waters, but my first publication saw my wee little historical essay floating all by its lonesome in a pool of literary essays (which I know baffled some readers - the reviewers commented on the lack of "theory" in my essay). It's fun to be the lone historian - you don't have to live up to the same expectations as the literary people, but there aren't other historians around to criticize what you're doing!

Anyway, on top of the paper, I have a stack of exams to grade, and I also need to get chocolate groceries, so I should toodle off. I may not be posting much until after the paper's done (although the stating of such is usually guaranteed to produce 2-3 posts a day), so if not, see you towards the end of the week!

In the immortal words of Charlie Brown

AAUGH!

I just got an e-mail from an editorial person at a very decent press (not Oxford or Cambridge decent, but they publish a lot in my subfield), asking me if I had time to meet with hir at Kalamazoo about any publishing projects I might have.

Obviously such a meeting wouldn't guarantee anything, and certainly wouldn't eliminate the need to, oh, WRITE A BOOK MANUSCRIPT, but still, I can't help but think, Where were you last year??*

*Okay, honestly? I don't think this. Obviously publishing is my responsibility, and nothing was stopping me from contacting publishers myself prior to this, if I'd felt in a position to shop the manuscript around. Still, the timing amuses me. And it's amazing how difficult it is to write back and say, Sorry, I'm leaving the field. Not because I'm reluctant to tell people, but it's amazing how deeply-rooted the academic instinct that says OOOH! POSSIBLE PUBLICATION!! has become.