Welcome to Happy Mondays – My plan for today was to write a post on the rise in for-profit institutions, the move to eliminate the 12th grade of high school, and the talk of letting students finish 10th grade and go right into community college. Maybe I will cover those topics in next week’s post.

There is one news story that I have been avoiding: Amy Bishop. For many reasons, I did not want to write about this story. However, this is a blog written by GenX women in higher ed. Amy Bishop is 44, was denied tenure in 2009, and has been charged with murder in the shooting deaths of three members of her Biology department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She was a GenX woman in higher ed.

This post is not about tenure or the insanity of the process. That story is for someone who has gone through the process. That is not my story. In the end, it is also not the story of Amy Bishop. She was an individual and that was an extreme case the details of which are still unfolding.

However, this is a story of academia and the social contract. There are very few things that link my childhood to my life as an adult. The social contract is one of those things. When I was growing up in a rough and tumble working class home in Flint, Michigan, we were taught to watch out for one another, to keep an eye on things and if anything ever looked off – to tell someone. When I was working on my PhD in sociology, this message was repeated – this time by Rousseau. When people realized that the loner lifestyle in the cave wasn’t going to cut it, we decided to come together to make this social/society thing work. But there are some basic rules – when someone seems off, you do not keep it to yourself, you tell someone. For this social contract to work, we need to realize that all of us are in this together and that we need to work at it to keep it going. We need to watch out for one another. People are not machines, they are human and when they break, they really break. Being denied tenure is a humiliating and emotionally devastating process – one that has broken many an academic. It is one that can drive people to break the social contract.

What does it take to break the contract? To exit the social? Foucault writes of madness as a form of exiting the social and provides the details of brilliant artists, writers, and academics who have gone mad, who have broken the social contract. I do not think that insanity requires brilliance. I also do not believe that all academics are brilliant. But I do know that academia can be a lonely place for a faculty member. In our roles as researchers, we are committed to a solitary and all-consuming activity, one that often requires us to push ourselves to mental exhaustion. In our roles as teachers, we are asked to perform emotional labor. Our students require mentoring, advice, and emotional support and a good teacher provides that. Emotional laborers need the support of a community that watches out for one another and keeps an eye on things.

Too often, communities look the other way and pretend not to see. I fear that this has become the norm in contemporary society. We often look the other way when we witness something that makes us uncomfortable. We pretend that we don’t see. Post Blacksburg, we are aware that we need to watch out for students who may be a little off, who may need extra help. We need to look beyond our students and begin to be invested in one another in the same ways that we are invested in our students. This means watching out for members of our faculty and staff who may need extra help, who may need intervention. It also means treating one another with dignity, respect, and common decency. We often assign our students to teams, give them group work, and give them a final group grade. Perhaps we should give ourselves group work and hold ourselves accountable for one another. A social contract is only successful when people realize that they are on the same team.

Mary Churchill