The Seductions Of Sedan Delivery; Or, Writing Your Own Academic Job Description

It's difficult to think about it while we still have three to four precious weeks of summer left. But on behalf of all the people who will begin full time teaching in the fall, I ask you to conjure -- for a second -- a week in mid-semester. Feel the pain as you stay up half the night to grade your papers! Experience the fear as you go into class half prepared! Recall being fatally short of sleep as you sit, dazed, through yet another search committee meeting, having driven yourself unsparingly through 100 applicant files the day before! Conjure the self-righteousness and hypocrisy, as you lecture yet another student that s/he could get hir work in on time if only s/he would get organized!

Yeah, baby. The problem is, there is almost no one I know in academia who has a job description that would give them a reasonable sense of where a professor's job begins and ends. Couple this with the reality of being tenure-track (or worse, a full-time visitor), which often seems like an endless exercise in pleasing everybody, all the time, in every way we can. Top it off with the fact that we learn early on not to complain about being overworked because some jackass will look at us piously and say, "You just have to learn to say no to things!" (subtext: say no -- except to me) as if you are overworked because, somewhere along the line, you forgot to say your safeword.

The result is that even many of us who actually have tenure end up hard-wired to do far too much, far more than we really want to do or are capable of doing well, even though we don't really have to anymore. We believe that we are powerless to keep unwanted responsibilities in check, that there are no grounds -- not to say no, but to figure out what and who to say no to -- and the result is a work overload. Inevitably, our health, our peace of mind, our good temper and emotional availability at home, and the pace of our scholarship takes the biggest hit. If you are like me, these marathons of overwork and frustration can produce moments when you start to hear Neil Young warbling:

Sedan delivery is a job

I know I'll like;

It sure was hard to find.

Hard to find a job!

Hard to find!

But never fear. Your Radical is here, with the fruits of a recent rigorous self-criticism. How can this year can be different? How can you create a plan of action that will make this year different? The answer is: Take charge. The answer is: Write your own job description, using these principles.

Knowing your appropriate load allows you to know your overload. In consultation with a senior colleague, figure out what are the minimum number of bodies you are expected to manage, and what the department average is for each category and at each rank of the faculty. In the category of "body management," I am counting major advisees, non-major advisees, enrolled students, honors students, and any other person you need to manage (postdocs, graduate students, other faculty.) These categories can overlap -- but count them twice when they do (for example, a thesis advisee who is also a major advisee = two bodies, as these are distinct activities that cannot be folded into the same hour of your time.)

Whatever the category is, count it and stay at, or preferably under, that number. Anyone extra is an overload. This is the basic outline of your job description, because whatever people say, a full-time teaching job is primarily about the students. That said, you have to come up with a strategy for how -- particularly if you are a popular teacher, or are teaching in an underrepresented field (more on this below) -- you are going to say no to students that you don't have time for; and you will send them away to someone whose job it is to help them. Liberal arts colleges have chairs, field advisors, and honors committees whose job it is to help these students; research universities usually have a Director of Undergraduate Studies as well. Whether you are new faculty or a full professor, don't kid yourself that you are turning a student out like one of the little lost animals of FarmVille if you refuse to take hir on as an overload.

If you have a joint appointment, total the activities of each part of your appointment and divide them in half. This means that you don't do all things in either place except go to department meetings, for which you should repay yourself by taking one fewer thesis, or two fewer advisees. You have to figure this out annually, and you must do so with both chairs in the room; if you are tenure-track, your mentor should be part of the conversation. The reason that joint appointments usually end up as more burdensome is because it is often assumed that "full participation" means full participation in both "homes." Not so. It means doing the equivalent of one job in two places. You did not decide the terms of your appointment: the university or college did, and it is up to them to make their expectations clear without, as they say in factories, "speed-up." If one chair needs more participation from you for a reason, the other chair needs to graciously give way. There may also be years when a particularly large amount of activity in one home pulls you away; that can be repaid the following year.

If you are a visitor or a post-doc, do your job well and politely decline to do favors or spend time on anything institutional you have not been hired for. Read your letter of appointment carefully, and have a meeting with the chair at the beginning of each semester to go over your responsibilities. You should also know that most students don't know the difference between permanent and temporary faculty, so that although their desire for your attention is a great complement, it should be firmly and kindly resisted. Don't take on advisees of any kind unless you have contracted to do so; don't go to department meetings, even if you are invited to them (believe me, no one really wants you there); don't agree to meet with job candidates unless they are friends of yours who need the inside skinny; don't get involved in campus or faculty politics; don't let an extra body into your class; don't have unlimited office hours with students who love,love, love you; don't listen to veiled hints that if you go the extra mile for this person or that person that there might be a job authorized in your field this year and you would be a great candidate (this is a lie); and don't bust your a$$ to be the best-est, most creative, Mr. Chips-iest teacher on the planet.

Limit the number of recommendations you agree to write, and be clear with students what they need to do for you. Inevitably, we end up writing recommendations off the clock, and you must set aside some time in your schedule after October 1 for getting this work done at the office within business hours. When done correctly, a recommendation takes between an hour and two hours to write; tailoring an old recommendation for a new purpose takes at least half an hour; and uploading a completed recommendation to an electronic system takes about ten minutes for each school. Insist that law school applicants use the services provided by the Law School Admissions Council. It is also worth your while to have a document, either on your web page or that you can send to students, that tells them exactly what you need, what they must do, and what lead time you need to get the recommendation done.

Inevitably, those of us who teach more students and have more advisees end up writing more recommendations too. This is because students have good reasons for seeing us as allies; because they are comfortable asking for something which is part of our job but that many colleagues treat like a favor; and because -- well, pretty much all students need recommendations for something. But the fact that you are already working too hard, and have no time, does not oblige you to write recommendations that you also do not have time for. Develop criteria and stick to them (for example, that you only write grad school recs for people who have done advanced work with you.) Be honest with a student when you have no basis for an evaluation, or if you can't honestly write a good one. Do not write recommendations if you are not a permanent member of the faculty. Do not "feel bad" when you have reached your fixed and immutable limit and must say no: that's what the other faculty are there for.

And here's a nugget of advice: develop boilerplate recommendations for the B.S. credentialing letters that study abroad programs require. All they care about is that the student can pay, and that s/he is not nuts in some way that will cause harm to self or others.

Do not volunteer, stupid. You know who you are -- whatever your biological gender, you are a girl. You are the one who finds the silence insufferable when the chair has asked for someone to step up, and you think it is your job to make everyone feel good again. Why you? And why now? At least go away and consult your job description before you go all Do-Bee on everyone. It isn't your job to see to it that everything gets done -- it is the chair's job, and believe me, s/he will figure out how to do it.

Underrepresented faculty in underrepresented fields have no obligation to extend themselves without end to under-served students. Sometimes I look around me and it is so frackin' obvious why the scholars who are perpetually sicker, angrier, more exhausted, and frantic about meeting deadlines for their scholarship share certain characteristics. We are queer, we are of color, we are international scholars, we are women, we are feminist men. We are the ones who, in order to make space for what we care about in institutions, do it ourselves. We invent the programs, then we chair them. This is what Jean O'Brien and Lisa Disch write about in an article I strongly recommend (and that partly inspired this post) "Innovation is Overtime: An Ethical Analysis of 'Politically Committed Labor,'" (Aiku, Erickson and Pierce, Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy Minnesota, 2007.) We are the ones that advertise our universities' "diversity" when we labor outside the classroom. We are the ones who students seek out to teach the things they never had a chance to learn in high school. We are the ones who students "like us" and the ones who hold similar political commitments flock to in droves.

Face it: certain faculty lines and programs have come into the academy as add-ons, and there is no intention at most schools to use what we interdisciplinary scholars know to transform the disciplinary paradigms that 95% of faculty are hired to support. There aren't enough of us, our faculties aren't diverse enough, and the culture wars of the 1980s permanently intimidated university administrations from appearing to be "too radical" by allowing what we do to impinge on core curricula. As an individual, yoy can't fill that dissonant gap even if you worked 26 hours a day trying to do so. It isn't your fault that there are too few classes in x; that the program in y is underfunded; that you are one of three z faculty. You didn't make the decision to grant a line to the Underwater Basket Weaving Department for a replacement who will teach ten students a term in the traditional field of Renaissance Wooden Needles that the administration just can't conceive of mounting a curriculum without -- while you are faced with sending forty students away from your Native Studies survey. Worse, the generative political urgency in the various fields that make up American Studies, Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies often moves us to throw our personal energy at immediate needs that are actually the result of long-term institutional dysfunction that our sacrifices help to maintain. Don't make up for the deficiencies of the institution by taxing yourself. Don't. The academic world is littered with broken and bitter people behind who thought that institutional neglect was only temporary.

The best thing you can do for your field is get your damn writing done, get tenure, become famous, acquire influence at your institution in a way that all those suits in the administration understand, and go someplace where the institution is committed to your intellectual commitments.

Which leads me to my final piece of advice for writing your own job description:

Your scholarship is part of your job. Schedule between 25 and 30% of the time you allot for work during the week to keeping your scholarship going. You know you should do this -- and yet, many of us see our writing as the thing that we have time for when our family, teaching and committee responsibilities are done. Which means it can get put off -- sometimes fatally -- for months at a time, causing us to get out of touch with projects we care about and go without sleep at various points in the semester to meet a commitment that has now become a burden.

So the next time you get angry about your perception that you are doing more work than other colleagues, remember: their "normal" is guaranteed by your overwork. Write your job description -- write it now, knowing that you will have to revise it and rewrite it as you figure out how to balance your life. Leave some space for things that may, in the end, be necessary tasks -- and if that space doesn't fill, use it for writing. And while you are performing that exercise, listen to this:

Gonna Walk Before They Make Me Run: On Helen Thomas And Retirement

Because of my grown niece, a second wave feminist in a third wave body, I took an interest in Helen Thomas a few years back. Third Wave Niece, a Smith grad, is very into biographies of interesting women who have battled their way through to careers that are characterized by their maleness -- journalism, politics, and whatnot. So I purchased a copy of Thomas's Front Row At The White House: My Life And Times (Scribners, 2000) and read it. A lively account of her career with UPI, it's a great history of journalism from one woman's point of view. But it's also graphic example of all the ways women were locked out of professional life in structural ways until federal legislation, and lawsuits filed under that legislation, literally permitted them in the room. As Thomas (a not particularly ideological feminist) broke down those barriers in political reporting, women streamed in behind her. I remember back in 1979, thinking that we at Oligarch's college newspaper might just elect the first woman to chair the editorial board less than a decade after women had been admitted to the university at all. It was not to be, and we elected a fine man. But the woman we didn't elect, and numerous others (including Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post) went on to fine careers in journalism through the doors opened by Thomas and her contemporaries.

But over the years, Thomas -- who had a reputation for asking "tough" questions -- became less of a reporter than a nostalgic symbol of what journalism used to be. This was particularly the case after she quit UPI and signed on as a columnist for Hearst. She was cultivated by successive White House press secretaries as a kind of mascot and news-granny, an annoying but beloved old cat that is always leaving fur in your favorite chair. Helen asked the tough questions, sure, but because only Helen asked the tough questions, presidents and press secretaries were also able to reply to them as if they were eccentric. Perhaps you remember --as I do -- spinmeister Ronald Reagan responding to a much younger Thomas's questions with an indulgent smile and a "We-e-ell Helen (a-heh-heh-heh) I don't know whether (a-heh-heh)...."

Now Thomas has, as Jonathan Ferris coined the phrase in And Then We Came To The End, been "made to walk Spanish." Or rather, she has abruptly retired, after having gone on record as anti-Israel (in a particularly cruel way) with Rabbi David Nesenoff after a White House Jewish heritage event. View the video here courtesy of RabbiLive.com. George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made sure that Thomas's remarks got out to the mainstream media; Bill Clinton's former press secretary (talk about a job from hell) Lanny Davis followed Sunday with a statement that "Thomas, who he used to consider a close friend, 'has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot.'"

Do we think maybe none of these guys really liked Thomas after all? She resigned from Hearst on Monday.

Gone the special chair, the distinctive red dresses, the ritual first question. Of course, what happened was nothing new. As most reports of the incident note, Thomas -- the daughter of Lebanese immigrants -- has always been a sharp critic of Israel and of U.S. support for Israel's foreign policy. What pushed things over the edge was not her anti-Israel statements, but her colossal error in judgement in suggesting that the people of Israel "go home" to Germany and Poland. Oh -- and to America, which would be a better idea because there weren't any extermination camps there.

Surely it was a set-up: beware of clerics carrying video cameras, is my advice, and do your best not to say noxious things when you are being taped. I do agree with the many people who are arguing that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh say horrid things in public all the time, and no one is calling for their resignation. Yet if, at the age of 89, Thomas is no longer able to distinguish between suggesting that the descendants of Holocaust survivors return to the site of their ancestors' murder and appropriately partisan political statements about Israel's neo-imperialist policies in Gaza and the West Bank, one suspects that it is long past time for her to go.

Why hasn't someone had the kindness to make that happen before now? Answer: it takes guts to remove an iconic figure. Few people do it, even when they know they should. This is, of course, a common problem in the academy. Venerable professor famous for irascible personality and eclectic remarks goes right over the edge one day and has to be forcibly retired, when in fact the signs of ineffectiveness and mental decline have been clear to close colleagues for several years: inappropriate remarks, fits of rage and/or confusion, memory lapses of gargantuan proportions. And yet, you go to the administration and say, "Hey, I think we have a problem" and administrators claim their hands are tied because of tenure, academic freedom, blah, blah, blah. I have a friend who made this lonesome trek year after year, recounting numerous horror stories that appeared in the teaching evaluations or were related by befuddled students about Famous Professor X, and was repeatedly sent away with a condescending lecture about age discrimination. In one of these meetings, an administrator said to my friend sharply, "Are you a doctor? What makes you think you know what is going on?"

"Oh," s/he replied casually: "Venerable Professor doesn't recognize me anymore, and s/he recently asked the administrative assistant who she was and why she was robbing the department office." Needless to say, nothing happened until said faculty member let loose a blistering stream of muddled hate speech at a stunned group of first-year students who fled the room weeping and dropped the class en masse.

The argument that prim little Ari Fleischer made about ejecting Thomas from the White House press corps is that she has lost her objectivity. The truth is that Thomas has not been objective for years -- she has been strongly opinionated, a useful foil who allowed conservatives and neo-liberals alike to articulate themselves against her. That has in many ways made her an asset, especially to conservative presidents, and to a White House press corps that either doesn't like to ask the hard questions, or doesn't really care to report or think very hard about the answers. The real problem is that Helen Thomas has lost her good judgment -- and while this is not the case for everyone who is 89, we should all see this as a lesson about retiring before we do something awful that allows people to give us the old heave-ho.

What a value added it was for Republicans to make Obama kick the little old lady out of the White House too! If he would only return Bo to the breeder while PETA films his weeping children, a Republican sweep in November will be assured.

But the real moral of the story is for everyone over 50: age narrows most of us more than we can possibly be aware of. It trims away the subtleties and politesse that can make the most extreme things we believe bearable to others. It causes to overestimate our authority, and underestimate the destruction our words cause. It makes us arrogant, because younger people don't want to tell us that we are finished, even as we become caricatures of ourselves. My advice? Pick a retirement age now and stick to it, knowing that you will get out while people still remember you for the best things that you were. Keith Richards says it better than I ever could: this is for you, Helen.