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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Poetry of Departures

There’s an interesting case study, over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, in quitting a tenured academic job. People are shocked when tenured professors at satisfactory schools in nice enough settings give up permanent employment and the many pleasant aspects of academia for something else. The great dread in academia is failing to get tenure; having won it, the decision, some years later, to give it up seems bizarre, masochistic.

But it isn’t really. Not under some circumstances. Take the pseudonymous ex-professor at a public university who’s written a couple of columns in the Chronicle describing her decision to leave.



Part of it’s her personality, though since she’s been at it for 25 years, this can’t be a real determinant:

No academic job has really worked for me. I am no good at politics. I am overly sensitive to criticism; occasional biting comments in my evaluations almost always overshadow the accolades.


All of these are perfectly normal behaviors and responses, except for the actual reading of every student evaluation year after year after year. She’s obviously a good teacher (and a good writer - her Chronicle pieces are excellent). She should have remembered the old joke about the psychoanalyst. How, a friend of his asks, can you bear to sit in that chair in your office year after year listening to such profound anguish from so many people? The psychoanalyst smiles at him and says: Who listens?

I despise the student-as-customer mantra of the day. I loathe writing 11-page syllabi [Ah! The Syllabum Omnium!] in the futile attempt to document learning outcomes as if it were possible to prepackage the essential alchemy of the classroom.


Here we’re getting to the core of her problem. She’s at a very bad university. It sounds like a pleasantly situated, okay sort of place, but with every detail of the administrative nightmare it actually is, this woman’s departure becomes more understandable:

…the innumerable meetings, reports, self-studies, external- and internal-evaluations, five-year strategic plans, and assorted other "objective" measures of success…

…Metropolitan State's president [recently] proclaim[ed] in his weekly radio address [weekly radio address? Is he the president of the United States?] that, to keep up with the for-profit educational sector, professors needed to do a much better job of delivering product, not when it was "convenient," but whenever our "customers" (formerly known as students) demanded it.


When your institution has no self-respect, no sense of itself as a university rather than a market-driven information delivery system, it makes sense to bail.

My president had just announced to the community at large that I was lazy and doing a bad job. I was now going to have to keep up with the for-profit Joneses. Internet classes. Saturday classes. Satellite campus classes. Night classes.

…I began the purge.

On the first day, after a huge latte, and armed with a dust mask, I went through every bookshelf in my home office and pulled out my favorites, a few classics, my essential canon, and some texts I thought my son might need when he goes to college. I put those aside and was absolutely merciless with the rest.

Out came large shopping bags with big, sturdy handles. Into the bags went everything else: books I had not opened in years, books I thought useless or poorly written, books that had bored me to tears. I piled up the bags in the hallway as I literally deconstructed my shelves, and then loaded the castoffs into the car so I would not have time to ponder the consequences of my actions. There would be no buyer's remorse for me.

…My dusty old bookshelves, file cabinets, giant-kitchen-table-as-desk, and huge, very uncomfortable office chair, at which I used to sit for hours, grading, ranting, and raving, are all gone. So are the rants and raves.

Absent the physical and psychological paraphernalia of my former melancholy, I am master of my domain. I have, quite literally because I can reach them now, thrown open the windows, blown out the cobwebs, and shed some light on my present circumstances.


UD’s impressed, and she wishes her well.



(How drearily neurotic that academic thing, by the way, of tucking every tome away on a bookshelf, never mind how turdy…)
Posted at: 3/02/2006 09:18:00 AM