immanence

Or, Things I love, like, dislike, and hate about it…

I love that I can research, write, talk, think, and teach about things that I’m passionate about, or at least care very much about. And because that passion derives from a sense that the world needs certain kinds of engagement and that my activity can contribute to them, that is immensely satisfying. Curiosity and the desire to engage with the world is what drove me to academe, and, happily, it’s kept me there. This part of my work has been making up about 25-60% of my workload, depending on the year, which makes me one of the blessed ones. (It’s far from the norm in academe, a norm that’s been generally receding, and it usually takes some time to get there, but it’s possible.)

I love that I get to travel to interesting places around the world, for research, to speak at conferences and at universities, to connect with others doing interesting things, and just to experience the world.

I love that I have a strong say in shaping my daily schedule, that I especially have a say in shaping my summers (when I don’t teach), and in shaping my research and writing projects, that I’m respected for what I do, and that sometimes those I have an influence on (did I mention that?) express their gratitude for that influence. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s wonderful when it does.

I love that I engage with people — faculty and students — doing interesting, engaging work whom I can learn from, learn with, and help with their learning. Since the pursuit of knowledge played a central role in my life, sharing that pursuit with others is pretty cool.

I like that my work gives me an excuse (and motivates me) to stay current with things going on in the world. Sometimes it even brings those things to me. (As when the student group NoNames for Justice recently stopped traffic on the city’s main artery, just outside my office window, for three hours during end-of-day rush hour traffic, and then occupied the main administrative building on campus for a good part of a day.)

I like and sometimes love my teaching, at least when I can teach what I love, and can get to know the students, and when those students are enthusiastic (as some will be) and interested (as many are or can be encouraged to be).

I don’t as much like teaching when it is part of a set of requirements that students aren’t convinced they want, and especially when it involves large classes, passive learning methods, testing for the sake of testing (because there are too many students for qualitative and more constructive methods to work). Or when I feel I can’t quite be there for them because I have too much else on my plate. One or the other of these happens pretty regularly, but fortunately isn’t yet the norm for me or in my program and School.

I don’t like that there’s a lot of piddly paperwork, an endless stream of committee meetings discussing details that are largely (and sometimes entirely) uninteresting, assessments of various kinds — from grading papers and tests to keeping detailed track of everything I do and have to justify over and over (when applying for funding, or being evaluated, which happens all too regularly) to learning the ins and outs of complicated new forms of software that are required by the managerial appetite of the ever-engorging bureaucratic (and neoliberal) administrosity that many universities are becoming. I’d say that that kind of thing (if you include the parts of teaching that consist mostly of that) makes up about 20-25% of my workload.

And I hate the constant feeling of overwhelm, the sense that keeping up with the flow of work is almost impossible, that it will take over parts of my life (family life, health life, sleep life) that it really has no business taking over, that I have to keep running ever faster to just stay in place, and that there are always people I cannot respond to effectively or respectfully because of the constant stream of demands. It really is a 50-60 hour a week job (and sometimes 70+), at least for the nine months of the year for which I get paid, and that is never enough.

Are the trade-offs worth it? Yes, of course they are (for me).

What would I change if I could? I’d fund universities better. I’d introduce job sharing, flexible workloads, and other things that would make us all less “productive” but more effective and satisfied. I’d require that students take a year off after high school and support them to live in another part of the country, or in another country, working on collective projects of some kind or other. That year would do wonders for clearing their heads for university (if in fact they decide they want to go to university after all).

And I would change the structure of academe so that it would be more directly rooted in and responsive to the communities and regions in which it’s located, and so that it could help those communities and regions transition to more socially and ecologically sustainable life-ways than those currently required by fossil-fuel industrial capitalism. Academe needs reinventing just as the larger world needs reinventing. But that’s all for another blog post (or fifty).

In the meantime, we endure. (As did The National, when Ragnar Kjartansson asked them to perform the same song for six hours.) And we find love, hope, and enjoyment in that endurance.