Afshan Jafar, writing from New London, Connecticut in the US. 

When three of my students approached me a couple of months ago to participate in a TEDx event, I balked. The students sent me a very well-organized folder with information about TED, some of the speakers already lined up, links to their favorite TED talks and then they set up a meeting with me. The event was in the middle of April. As many academics know, April is not a good month for us. The semester, at least for me, picks up like a roller coaster and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down for the end.

I had so much to do in April. I had taken on an extra course in April (part of a gateway course for another program), so I was teaching four courses. That means I was grading for four courses. I had over 65 proposals to review for my new volume, and I needed to put together a proposal for the (possible) editor. All of this would be happening the week of the event itself. There’s no way I can or should take this TEDx event on, I thought. I decided I’d meet with the students, but that my response would probably be a “thanks for thinking of me, but I really am very busy and I just can’t fit this in to my schedule”.

But then I had the meeting with the three students. They were so excited and working so hard to pull off an event of this magnitude all on their own!  They had put their hearts and souls into trying to organize this event and now they wanted to line-up speakers.  I was torn.  I told them I’d think about it over the weekend and let them know.  “Of course I know I should say no”, I kept saying to myself. “But if I were to do this, I would probably go with this topic” would be the next thought. And so back and forth I went.

When I finally sat down to talk to my husband about why I was so torn, I realized that part of it had to do with my schedule. The other part had to do with the fact that this was completely new territory for me. This was no academic talk at a conference. Far from it: I would actually need to be concise (what academic knows how to get their point across in under 18 minutes?), entertaining, and intellectually stimulating at the same time! I had never spoken in front of such a large audience before, and then the thought of being video-taped… to be honest, that was intimidating. This will be around forever! What if I screw up? I feared the exposure: my thoughts will be out there in the form of a video, I won’t have control over this “product” once I put it out there.

Not so different from blogging after all is it?

By the end of the weekend I decided I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. TEDxConnecticutCollege took place on April 14, 2012. The theme was “Rethinking Progress” and I spoke on “Women’s Bodies”. So, what do I have to share with my fellow academics and bloggers about the experience? You know the thrill that you get when your blog post is about to go live? Now multiply that by about a hundred and you’ll get a good idea of what this kind of public speaking is like. It was an exhilarating experience. It gave me the same sense of freedom that blogging does. You can be funny, even if you’re discussing something serious; you don’t have to worry about quoting important scholars endlessly to prove to everybody that you know what you’re talking about; and you can (and should) leave the audience thinking instead of providing them with neat little conclusions that they must accept because you bombarded them with data and evidence.

Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that just as we, as academics, feminists, thinkers, have turned to blogging because “we have something to say”, we should also consider using public speaking opportunities to say what we want to or need to say. It’ll help us reach a wider audience than any academic conference we’ve attended, especially, as in the case of TED/TEDx when those talks are made available to anyone with a computer connection.

What are you waiting for? The world is waiting to hear what you have to say . . .

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

Afshan Jafar, writing from New London, Connecticut in the US

Inspiration can sometimes come from the most unusual sources. In my case (and in the case of one of my colleagues at University of Venus), the Muse was none other than Tina Fey in her book Bossypants. In retrospect I should have known that academia and the world of comedy writing would have much in common.

In one of her chapters, Fey discusses her experiences at The Second City, which is an improvisation and sketch comedy theater.  She discusses “The Myth of Not Enough”, which was/is the belief that if more women entered improv and sketch comedy, there wouldn’t be enough (enough material, enough screen time etc) to go around for all the women. This of course doesn’t make much sense when the characters make up the show as they go along! But this idea becomes so entrenched in people, including women, that they start to see other women as competition, instead of allies and collaborators.

I have witnessed this attitude in academia quite often: junior faculty feeling threatened by other junior faculty. This feeling becomes even more pronounced when that junior faculty is “like you”—which may mean the same age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. But this is not about blaming junior faculty. Like the women in comedy that Fey talks about, junior faculty have been made to feel like they’re in competition with one another. We’ve been made to feel as if there are limited spaces available for us, and hiring or promoting or granting tenure to one more like us will make our job less secure. This is simply not true. Fey offers this response to women who see other women as competition: “Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.”

I have similar advice for junior faculty but with a twist: You are not in competition with other junior faculty. You’re in competition with yourself. If someone writes an article in a more prestigious journal, it doesn’t mean you should feel threatened. If someone publishes a book before you do, no need to be sour about it. When you come up for tenure, you are not evaluated against the accomplishments of other faculty; you are evaluated against a standard that is expected of all faculty at your institution. Of course standards can be reevaluated and they can change over time. But it’s not going to happen overnight during your tenure case because the other junior faculty produced a book and you didn’t. So relax. Instead of approaching other junior faculty as competition, why not approach them as allies and possible friends? Why not experience the possibilities that such a relationship can open up to you?

And while we’re on the subject of allies, there is one other piece of advice from Fey that I must pass along. “When faced with sexism or ageism, or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’ . . . if the answer is yes . . . I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, ‘Over! Under! Through!’” (a reference to an old Sesame Street segment which taught kids the meanings of these words). This is really valuable advice for all faculty, but especially for junior faculty who find themselves caught between ego-battles of senior faculty, or find themselves in dysfunctional departments, or working with an unpleasant colleague: Go Over! Under! Through! That is, make connections at all levels and across disciplinary divides in order to get through and get tenure.  I am not implying that you should simply ignore unpleasant behavior, but that you should have enough allies around you so that the disagreeable person cannot stand in the way of your success and happiness (or tenure). This may be especially important at small liberal arts colleges because junior faculty may find themselves in two, three or four person departments. In these cases, where one other member alone can make your work experience unpleasant, it becomes even more important, for your success and happiness, that you have allies, and trustworthy colleagues in other departments and at various stages of their careers. Furthermore, these colleagues can offer valuable advice and point you towards the right resources, if need be, for how to deal with the hostile colleague(s) in your department.

So, think about Tina Fey the next time you have an unpleasant encounter with a colleague: Go Over! Under! Through!

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

Afshan Jafar, writing from New London, Connecticut in the US.

In my own experience and judging by the experience of those who have many more years in academia than I do, there is one trend that is steadily and maddeningly on the rise: parents calling deans, provosts, and college and university presidents, yes presidents, to plead on their child’s behalf. From what I’ve been told this kind of intervention used to be a rare occurrence, but nowadays it is common enough that it makes academics dread advising/registration periods and the assignment of final grades. I have heard from many faculty members in various types of institutions that the number of calls and emails that administrators receive from parents is appallingly on the rise. They call about final grades (or sometimes they fly in on their personal jet to discuss the matter), they call about extensions on assignments, they call about adding a class late, and they call about their kids not being able to get into the courses they want.

What lies behind this rising trend of parents calling faculty and administrators? There are at least three factors that I can think of. On the one hand, this trend is clearly the manifestation of a consumerist mentality: I’m paying for this, so even though I am a sophomore, I should be able to take the course which is open to juniors and seniors.  Or: I’m paying for this, so this better be good (and “good” really means a good grade here). This consumerist mentality explains the sense of entitlement that we perceive in some of our students and their parents. This is how we end up with a scenario where parents unflinchingly “go right to the top”. So what if the professor told your son or daughter the class was full and he or she wasn’t going to over-enroll? You’ll take it right to the president, darn it! Just the other day you told somebody at Amazon that you wanted to speak to the supervisor and you got what you wanted. And you will not have some professor stand in the way of your child’s success and happiness or more importantly in the way of a convenient Tuesday and Thursday schedule!

But consumerism, as infuriating as it is, gets doubly worse when coupled with another trend: helicopter parents. As most of you surely know, this is a relatively new generation of parents. These are those parents who like to “hover” over their children, watching their every move, preempting every mistake, and perhaps even taking a test or two in place of their children, or ghost-writing a term paper in order to make sure that their children never face failure or rejection. In Scandinavia, they are known as “curling parents”: the phrase conjures up parents bowing down and dutifully sweeping every obstacle from their children’s paths. Some colleges and universities are now calling this breed of parents “lawn-mower” parents as these are parents who vow to mow down any and all obstacles and challenges in their children’s paths.  It is the confluence of these two trends—consumerism and the hovering, curling and mowing school of parenting—that makes parental involvement much more common on our campuses today than it used to be. In a 2009 essay, Nancy Gibbs writes that “Helicopter parents can be found across all income levels, all races and ethnicities, says Patricia Somers of the University of Texas at Austin, who spent more than a year studying the species at the college level. “There are even helicopter grandparents,” she notes, who turn up with their elementary-school grandchildren for college-information sessions aimed at juniors and seniors”(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940697-3,00.html).

A third trend that is connected to both consumerism and helicopter parenting is the inability to delay gratification along with the inability to deal with rejection and uncertainty. In the current consumer market, if you can’t find something at one retail store, you can find it at another, or you can buy it on-line and order one-day shipping so it gets to you faster. But this way of consumption is also encouraged by parents in helicopters or those wielding lawn mowers. These parents have made sure that their children are the stars of school plays, that they get into their top choice of colleges whether it’s a suitable match or not, that they change dorm rooms in the first week of school because they don’t like their roommate. So a simple thing like waiting to take a seminar in your junior or senior year seems “unfair”. Why should your child be made to wait for that particular course? So, what do you do when you can’t order over-night shipping on a college seminar?

Speak to the supervisor, of course.

Afshan Jafar is a member of the editorial collective at University of Venus and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College. She can be reached at afshan.jafar@conncoll.edu.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed