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

When skyrocketing college tuition becomes the target of public critique, I tend to think about the recent study of spoiled American middle class children as opposed to academic salaries.

I’ve known a few faculty to flaunt their wealth with ostentatious automobiles and sumptuous square-footage.  Most, however, hold true to a lifestyle that shares more with Jane Austen’s genteel poverty than Donald Trump’s outlandish ostentation.

Undergraduates are an entirely different matter.  The one percent have not only monopolized the admissions process but also set the material expectations for the student body at large.  Even their classmates on work study and substantial financial aid flash pricey gadgets as they fill out paperwork for need-based scholarships.  I suppose they have imbibed the advice to ‘dress for the job you want not the job you have.’  They carry the cell phones for the jobs they want upon graduation.  Despite public discourse about cutting back in the wake of the ‘great recession,’  students remain committed to their stuff.

Institutions comply with this materialism as a means to recruit.  Our definition of how to improve higher education too frequently hinges on dorm room connectivity and coffee shops per capita.  Somewhere along the line, the furniture of the mind got shoved against the wall as an impediment to social mobility.  Socialization to the professional class via swanky dorms and sports clubs (whoops I mean centers) outstripped reading Socratic dialogues in dingy basements while digesting stale cereal.

As we discuss how to bring the next generation of high school kids to college and launch them into careers, the focus remains on mimicking the lifestyles of the lucky few as opposed to building an intellectual framework upon which to hang the rest of their lives.  Building projects garner money from wealthy alumni who want to see their names carved in stone lintels and to imagine future generations passing beneath them.  Money for tutorials on Montesquieu for mechanical engineers or particle physics for playwrights proves harder to raise.

I understand the need to train students in decorum.  Come to my home on a January weekend and you will likely find students eating off my wedding china while they explain grand schemes to illustrious strangers.  Grammar of all sorts has fallen by the wayside in our schools.  Our kids arrive in college – even the most elite – unsure as to the appropriate use of ‘I’ versus ‘me’ and unaware that you ought not proffer a handshake if the palm is covered in snot.  Neither of these skill sets requires a smartphone to learn.  Indeed, the gadgetry distracts from lessons at desks and in dining rooms.

I grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of her days in a one room schoolhouse and hearing my grandmother’s tales of the same.  Sentence diagrams and washed hands featured in both.  Neither Wilder nor my grandmother could dream nor would wish to deny their progeny the incredible laboratories and libraries this generation takes as a birthright: common resources held for the common good.  I wonder, however, what they would make of ubiquitous SUVs and iPhones.

Even the spoiled Oxonian scion Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited treasured his worn teddy bear above his more glamorous goods.  When universities began to educate aristocrats as well as clerics, it seemed a sound idea.  Let the rich but dim Sebastians subsidize the broke but bright like Charles Ryder.  The stuff of tragicomedy ensued.  Read or watch Porterhouse Blue; listen to Kenny Chesney’s “Keg in the Closet.”

In the centuries since the collegiate clergy welcomed the wealthy into their midst, the relationship changed.  Middle class parents now mortgage themselves to the hilt in order to gilt their offspring’s protective cages in a close facsimile of one-percent opulence and expect their colleges to follow suit.  If the child manages to escape and can’t control his or her underdeveloped wings, the shocked elders sue.  The college has failed to maintain its promise to serve In Loco Parentis Luxus.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

I’ve been struggling with writing this post. I’m “burying” it here rather than sharing it on my regular blog post. I’m publishing it in the early summer hoping for fewer readers and that if anyone I know on campus reads it, they’ll have forgotten it by August when school starts again. I am going to be going to conferences and other activities soon where I will be meeting a lot of people face-to-face for the first time, and I hope that this isn’t the only thing they remember, being perhaps the last thing they read by me, about me.

I’ve been told more than a few times that I am brave for what I write in these spaces. What has come before this, I think to myself, has been easy. A friend of mine noted to me that I talk an awful lot, and I write just as much. I read voraciously, do multiple things at once, juggle as many things as I can, just to keep at bay that thing that I know is there but I most want to ignore and forget. If I stay busy, no one will notice, least of all myself. If I keep talking and writing about everything and anything else, stuff that I know people will react to, they won’t be tempted to ask for the truth from me, and I won’t be tempted to tell them.

I am depressed. This sounds like a flip or glib admission, and I don’t mean it to be, but I’m not sure how to put it any other way. I could use metaphors or imagery, but somehow it makes it worse, sound worse, more cliché than it already is in my ears. Ah, a depressed humanities academic. How quaint. How many times has it been done. What would she like us to do, award her a medal? No, I don’t want anything, really. But I also don’t want to be alone in it anymore, because it is too easy to bury it, ignore it, suffer in silence, tough it out, try to get over it, reasoning with myself, by myself, and failing.

Because there is nothing reasonable about this. My life is going well: good job, great family, a career on the (relative) rise, opportunities, community. And yet, I enjoy none of it. In high school, I listened to Denis Leary’s NoCureForCancer, laughing as he told those people who just weren’t happy to shut the f- up. But I’m tired of shutting up about it. I’m tired of my family not talking about how this is something now three consecutive generations of women have struggled with, leaving me to try and make sense of everything by myself.

This is not my first episode, far from it. But I could always blame it on something else. In high school, it was hormones. In university as an undergrad, it was acting out/finding myself/stress. It was easier, however, in university to hide (this was before cell phones) than it was in high school. My tiny res room became a place where I would hide, in the dark, for days, weeks, barely going to class, rarely going out with friends. Or I would embrace the most debauched elements of being an undergrad, once again to try and ignore the blackness, the unease I was never quite able to shake. At one point, during my masters after I had completed my course work, I didn’t leave the apartment I shared with two friends for months.

I figured I needed a change of scenery. Like I had so many other times before, I completely turned my world upside-down in the hopes that it wasn’t me, it was everyone and everything else that was making me feel …anxious and listless. Academia also provides a nice set of rules and guidelines, ones that I could fairly easily meet, and people would see me as “normal”. Above all, I wanted to blend in and appear normal. When I realized somewhere late in high school that what I felt and the thoughts I had weren’t what everyone else was thinking and feeling, I became increasingly self-conscious about trying to blend in. I don’t want to say that I was looking to fit, as I realized that it wasn’t going to happen, but at least remain, if on the fringes, acceptably so. And you could always fall into a hole for a while and no one would question where you were and why.

My life, at the moment, has become performative. I go through the motions of being happy, excited, optimistic, a loving wife, a good mother, a careful and engaged academic. But really, I’m just barely hanging on. The problem is that this status I am in comes and goes; I know what I should be feeling (but am not) and I also know that at some point, it ends. Now, however, a lot more is at stake than one more year of grad school or a lost weekend; I have relationships, people who live with me every day and see and notice a difference. I have two very small people who understand even less about what’s wrong with Mommy and one very large person in my life with whom I pledged to share everything and to whom I can’t even articulate exactly what’s happening. Or why.

So this is who I am right now. If I’ve appeared more disconnected, more distracted, less engaged, it’s because of this. I would take a break, but all of my activities are what keep me moving forward; if I stop, I worry I might never start again.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

Not long ago, the Swedish design duo Hjärta Smärta, composed of Samira Bouabana and Angela Tillman Sperandio, initiated a project aimed at recognizing the talent of women designers. They noticed that most of the books in their field showcased the work and the biographies of male creators, and wanted to fill the gap by including all those major female figures in the world of design. They admired their older counterparts’ artistic muse but were looking for also for some inspiration in the biographies of these highly successful but less known female personalities in the world of design.

The result is now known as the Hall of Femme, a nice pun on the Hall of Fame that does not include as many women as the team at Hjärta Smärta thought it should. Besides having a blog (in Swedish) which gathers their design-related posts from around the web, Bouabana and Tillman Sperandio authored also several books based on extensive interviews with the grand dames of design such as Lillian Bassman or Carin Goldberg.

After I had read about the Hall of Femmes I thought immediately that this is exactly what I would love to do: collect the life stories of the big names among female academics. It is true that we here at UVenus are representing the younger, Gen X, women, but, as the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of giants. The life narratives of these first ladies of academia are documents about the history of the process of bringing in and recognizing women’s merits as researchers and professors at the university level. They are also potential models and terms of comparison for our own lives and struggles today. After a long and successful career, perhaps one looks with different eyes at one’s working life, and at one’s priorities. This could be an inspiration for us younger women in the academia, and perhaps also a comfort, to know that these women we admire have shared our own passions and our own occasional desolation.

I always wondered about such things as:

How did the women professors in any given country active in the 1960s or 70s cope with the patriarchal biases so much more present and visible at that time?

How did they solve the “life puzzle”, combining academia with families?

Did they feel recognized for their work and how (and when) did that recognition come?

As for my imaginary interlocutors, there are many, some dead, some still with us. I would have loved to talk to Marie Curie or Rachel Carson, for example, but that chance is gone… I would love to talk to Nobel Prize winners such as Elinor Ostrom (Economics), Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn (Medicine). Or with some of the women authors in my field of study, social sciences, professors like Katherine Verdery,Wend yBracewell, or Helen Wallace. Of course, I would also like to go outside the English-speaking world and get the opinions of women, both young and old, such as Leyla Neyzi, Daniela Koleva, or Barbara Törnquist-Plewa.

We all need role models, and have such people as references in our everyday professional and private lives. Let us recognize their impact and acknowledge their contribution.

Who would you like to include in the Hall of Femmes of Women in the Academia and why? Which questions would you like to ask these prominent female figures in the world of higher education and research?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

April is the cruellest month in (Anglo-North American) universities, given that the yearly academic cycle reaches its peak with final exams, which are in turn preceded by the crushing weight of major end-of-term assignments. Some students, worn out by the demands of the season, lapse into a state of caffeine-fuelled zombie-like vacancy. For those of us on the receiving end of their work, there is the prospect of a mountain of marking that forms the final obstacle to a brief breather before the summer term begins.

Based on the feelings expressed regularly by many professors and graduate students, I don’t think grading is something many people see as a form of genuine and enjoyable engagement with students–unless it is a case where the course director has been creative with the assignments and/or most of the students are motivated to work hard.

Instead, professors and teaching assistants tend to experience grading as a chore (or in some cases, an ordeal) that must be completed so that marks can be submitted–a technocratic necessity rather than a pedagogical one.

This makes sense for a few reasons. Grading is not an inherently meaningful activity, but more a function of a massified hierarchised institution. A letter or number grade assigns a relative value to a student’s performance, which is then used as a measure of his/her value within the educational system overall. Outside of this system, assigned marks have little relevance.

As such, in an increasingly competitive environment students may see grades more as tokens of exchange than signifiers of acquired skill or learning. That’s partly because it’s so hard to assess those things and link them to an objective “standard”. Students may (rightly) see grades as flexible, and act on this assumption, possibly encouraged by the consumerist tendency that comes with attaching a price tag to education–conflating payment for access with payment for an outcome.

Another issue is that we’ve institutionalised the way in which grading is un-enjoyable. The process and schedule of the academic year ensures this: grading tends to happen all at the same time, there’s usually quite a lot of it–and because students are fatigued and under pressure, what we see might not be representative of their potential.

In the past I’ve also felt as if I have little influence over the outcomes I see when I’m grading assignments. I remember this was among the first issues that alerted me to “something rotten” in the state of academe, years ago when I started working as an undergraduate teaching assistant. It wasn’t that I didn’t care–I cared a lot; I wanted then, and still want now, to help students to learn and write well and earn the marks they desired. But I didn’t have the time and energy (and skill) to provide the level of help they seemed to require. Later, it was both relieving and distressing to realise I was working with all their past and present educational (and life) experiences, not just my own inadequacies.

Grading is just one of the experiences I’ve had, inside the classroom and out of it, that’s led me to look at the institutional frame in which university teaching takes place. To make the larger connections, why would excellent professors be limping along on contracts without job security? Why did undergraduate TAs make only half as much as the graduate students who did the same work–who, in turn, would later make less as contract workers than on the coveted tenure track? It was clear from early on that teaching in the university could be downloaded with impunity on to those with little or no experience or training (or control), and who were willing to work for lower wages.

Can these problems be addressed in a context where more and more people are being told to get a postsecondary education? Not only do we have more students now, but the students themselves must juggle their involvement with education with other demands on their time and energy. We must also find ways of engaging with, and helping, students from more varied educational backgrounds, without making unreasonable demands on those doing the teaching (and grading). And somehow, as teachers in this system we must become more “efficient” given the perpetual economic tightening in the context of managerialist governance of education.

This is where governance meets (and clashes with) pedagogy in the institutional context of the massified university; it is why the conditions of postsecondary teaching demand attention at the level of the egg timer often used to ration each minute of essay marking. Grading and the feelings and problems associated with it show us only a few of the ways in which the long-term devaluing of teaching in the academic economy is both experienced and perpetuated in our everyday lives.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

A colleague, who is now Assistant Secretary of National Defense, once told me he likes my work better than another similarly-inclined “strategist” whose conceptual anchor is notoriously rusty and whose data is suspect. He says the empirical data I bring gives an “added value” to my work. In retrospect, this is standard research practice to academics in my University. There’s an emphasis on primary data– interview, focus group discussions, and  direct observations. That this primary data is secured at a heavy cost (think days of fieldwork in remote and inhospitable locations; literal armies of survey enumerators tasked to hop household-to-household; hours of facilitation with bureaucrats to secure FGD participation) is commonplace where I come from. There’s an implicit understanding even about what it takes a lot to earn your “research” wings, including  a close brush or two with guns, long hours of trekking (forget about public transportation; there’s none) and a several nights of un-hygenic situations. None has beaten the record of my anthropologist-colleague Dr. Alicia Magos whose pioneering research on the Sulod-nons’ (indigenous people of central Panay highlands) oral tradition of epic chanting required her befriending communist rebel commanders and military officers alike at the height of insurgent conflict in the area in the late 1980s.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

Do you like being an academic editor?

Honestly, I have many important reasons for a ‘no’ answer.

First, instead of focusing on your fantastic projects of books, articles and revolutionary research, you must deal with doubtful works of people that enjoy a generous scholarship for spending four full years in a nice European capital city or in an American university. Of course, due to a full entertainment schedule, some of them do not have too much time and proper mood to focus on their intensive academic work. Instead, they prefer to do superficial research, hoping that it will not be difficult to find someone happy to help them with the editing and eventually with the full writing of a real academic paper. I am referring strictly to my direct experience, as I am a lesser qualified person in the world to make evaluations about the level of foreign students enrolled in famous human sciences universities of the world.

The second reason for my negative attitude is that I do not know at all what price to ask for such academic work. For most of my life, I never received a penny from my academic activities. In conclusion, I am not familiar with the quotes for various editing services. And anyway, in my humble opinion, academic work in general is priceless and beyond any negotiation. Maybe it is about time to change my perspective dramatically.

But probably one of the aspects that makes me have feelings opposite of love regarding the work of academic editing is in regards to the problematic communication with the author of the respective work. Most of the beneficiaries of such services expect from you more than suggestions; they would be happy that you do perfect writing in their place, including the addition of a rich bibliography. And, if possible, very fast, in less than 24 hours as if the poor paper is a piece of cake that you should gulp immediately.

However, there are also some good lessons learned from my latest experience in the field of academic work. Each moment, I am able to appreciate more and more the merits of quality academic work and the incumbent responsibility of giving the right advice. When I am trying to make suggestions or to outline certain aspects I try to put the problem into perspective: one should not learn for the sake of grades or to make parents happy but because one considers he or she has something to say and share. Otherwise, there are so many simple domains where you can reach easier professional targets. The confirmation of the human value does not come automatically as a result of academic achievement.

Looking strictly from a personal perspective, this new sporadic connection to the academic world gives me some food for thought for an uncertain professional perspective when I would be tempted to be involved at a certain extent in the academic life. Maybe there are many people that need honest advice about their academic future and work.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

Here at University of Venus, we talk a great deal about work/life balance — how to maintain the balance between family, private life and the demands of academia, which are many. Looking back at some of my remarks or answers about the issue, I sound fairly confident in my abilities to enjoy my life and get my work finished.

But this semester, I’ve been terribly unbalanced and that unbalance was unhealthy and detrimental to my well-being. Even though my personal life is great — I have a wonderful and supportive partner, a close-knit group of friends, a loving family, an adoring dog and a pretty healthy social life, I became depressed. I gained weight, I stopped going to my yoga classes, I slept late whenever I could, and my writer’s block became overwhelming (so much so that I haven’t kept up with my UofV posts!). How did that happen?

Well, panic.

Panic because I can see the “finish” line — tenure — and yet to get there, I put a great deal of pressure on myself to make certainthat I could get there. We all know that publish or perish trope about academia — it’s been tattooed on our brains since we were little baby graduate students, and the pressure never stops. My third year review letter, for example, gave me faint praise for getting my first book out as I came up for review, but then extolled me to “ramp it up” before coming up for tenure: to write a second book, get some articles out, and generally over-perform. I took that to heart, did more field research, got a book contract, sent out two more journal articles, and created a fairly ambitious research plan.  And taught, a lot.

On top of that, I took on even more service commitments. I served on numerous committees. I said yes to every guest lecture. I played nice with the admissions office. I spoke with student groups, and I had lots of coffees with colleagues.

Getting that second book finished (the conclusion is still evading completion), teaching, and serving, as well as trying to keep a semblance of a personal life, have taken their tolls. The real issue with trying to impress so many people is that you never feel as though you  can impress them, that nothing you do will be good enough, because that finish line called “tenure” often looks like a bar set so high that you can’t possiblybe that good. And the system is also set up to make you believe there are enemies where there are none, so I spent far too much time worrying about comments, sidelong looks and imagined slights.

Instead of going out for a good long walks or to a favorite yoga class, I sat at my desk, forcing myself to churn out work. I ate a lot of licorice (my secret addiction) and my favorite comfort foods. I threw out most of what I wrote, and started again, then again, every time berating myself for not being a writing machine, unlike “everyone else.” I took no joy in the compliments and praise I was getting on my work and instead focused on criticisms, most of which were my own. I had weekly anxiety attacks, and found myself complaining bitterly about my work.

But the end of the semester is a time to reflect. I didn’t finish everything I meant to finish this semester. The book is almost there. I’m still waiting on a revise and resubmit decision on an article.  But—but…I did get an article accepted for publication. I was nominated for a teaching award. I got to know my colleagues in a different way because of all those committee assignments and coffees. I realized the dean actually  likesmy work. I went to a conference and met interesting people who also liked my work…

I took a good long look at myself last week, and took a big long breath. All those pressures and deadlines that made me panicky and anxious were pressures I had put on myself. I was the one who didn’t make time to breathe and I was the one who punished myself. I got on a plane to Indonesia the other day, and I’ll be meeting students here on Tuesday to begin a great program on social entrepreneurship. I took some time out for myself today, to remember why I like doing what I do.  I went to a yoga class by a rice paddy and reveled in my standing balance poses.

I took a big breath and thought, I really do like what I do. I just have to remember not to forget to balance.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed