Invisible Adjunct is calling it quits, both leaving the academy and shutting down the blog. Having given herself a deadline for finding full-time employment, and having been failed by the job market once again, she is following through, and moving on.
Reading IA has been an important aspect of my blog-life this year, and her departure will leave a significant hole there. I’ve had a hair-raising year, but reading her always trenchant commentary on the contemporary state of the academy has never failed to remind me that I have the luxury of griping about things, in this space, without fear — under my own name, for the most part, with my students reading, in the safety first of a tenure-track and now of a tenured position. And reading the conversations of her commenters has made me more carefully assess why it is I do this job, why I continue to value it, and, not least, that at times someone else is forced to bear the costs of my success.
My fondest hope, tonight, is that we’ll soon find the Invisible Adjunct in the blogosphere again, no longer adjunct to anything, but central, and completely visible.
Gee, it’s nice to be in the news for something other than hate crimes or hoaxes thereof. This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] has a lovely consideration of the beauty and impracticality of our relatively new campus center. Designed by Robert A.M. Stern, the building is gorgeous but uninviting, somehow untouchable. It never ceases to remind its constituency that it is a “campus center,” not a “student center.”
One of the issues that has come up repeatedly in the discussions of campus “climate” over the last few weeks has been the near-total absence of a public sphere here at Pomona; our quads are generally deserted, and our students gather in atomized clusters rather than in public spaces. A colleague of mine has asked several times, and quite pointedly, whether there can be any viable political discourse in a place this devoid of real public centers for that discourse to take place.
It’s a challenge, I think, to make a campus designed by architects and administrators work for students whose interests might run counter to those of the powers that be. At my undergraduate institution, students had taken over an area in front of the student union and rechristened it “Free Speech Alley,” an area where political speechifying and public organizing of all varieties took place. The space didn’t seem amenable to such organizing — it was all concrete, with nowhere to sit. But it was in a heavily-trafficked pathway between the main academic quad and the union, and it became, gradually, because of the persistence of the organizers, a real public space.
I’m left, today, looking around our pristine campus, wondering where such gathering places might be, where students might begin spontaneously to create a culture of debate and discussion. It can’t be made for them; no amount of comfy furniture will make the space genuinely theirs. And it won’t happen overnight; such adoptions require the passing of time to become tradition. But I’m holding out hope that some group of students, motivated by our recent conversations, will seize upon a spot on this campus where they might create their own Free Speech Alley, outside the restrictive visions of architects and trustees.
Today, on Salon [subscription or ad-viewing required], the travails of the mid-list author in contemporary publishing:
If, on the other hand, you want a sobering view of the publishing industry’s focus on the bottom line, go read the full article. I’m left even more convinced that many writers — and not just those writing for a scholarly audience — would be well-served by a move back toward a gift-economy model of publishing.
Or perhaps it would be best just to cut our losses, hold our collective breath, and just plunge on through.
Really, I’ve never been one to look longingly backward in time. I wouldn’t go back to my childhood, I’m fond of saying, not even for cash dollars. The good parts of the past come along with way too much bad, and there’s no guarantee that a do-over would include the kind of knowledge necessary to avoid the bad parts the second time around.
So, okay, this semester has been way too painful to want to repeat it. No mulligan. What I need instead are strategies for getting through the second half without succumbing to the stress produced by the quantity of overdue work surrounding me or the despair that is pervading the campus this week.
It occurs to me, though, that the academy is — or maybe it’s just the academo-bloggers I read — living through some kind of protracted Friday the 13th/full moon/millennial-type period. There are scandals afoot everywhere I look: a university president accused of plagiarism, another firing tenured faculty on spurious grounds.1
Perhaps it’s simply, as I opined at Invisible Adjunct last year, that having found myself in the midst of an academic community in crisis, such crises are all I can see.
So: breath held. Plunging forward.
1 Scott has been following this story in remarkable detail.
The Claremont Police and the FBI have released a statement saying that they have concluded their investigation into last week's apparent hate crime, and in so doing have announced that the victim is now the primary suspect:
My brain -- or perhaps it's my heart -- is furiously resisting this result: if something like this happened to me, I'd be mighty inconsistent about it... who are those eyewitnesses, anyway...
So far, the only response that makes any sense to me, the only response that gives me any hope, comes from the president of one of the other colleges in town:
Above all, we must focus on this: even if the vandalized car and slogans were a hoax, our responses last week were right and appropriate....
However painful and confusing this latest development is, we cannot forget the reasons we were outraged in the first place; we cannot avoid the challenges that hatred poses to our community, to our country. We will continue to work to make our campuses welcoming, open, diverse, and productive so that all of us can freely teach and learn to the best of our abilities.
The question that's haunting me now: What do I say to my classes on Monday? How can we talk about this in a way that rejects the reactionary "you guys totally overreacted; allegations of racism here are all part of a liberal plot to make us feel bad" response that is already building around here?
From the New York Times:
In a short session with reporters in the Oval Office, President Bush challenged Mr. Kerry to identify whom he is talking about when he asserts that some foreign leaders privately support him over the president.
Worry not: I have right here in my hand a list of 57 known foreign supporters of Senator Kerry.
HATE CRIME INCIDENT ON MARCH 9TH, 2004
Detectives from the Claremont Police Department and Agents from the FBI are continuing to follow-up on many leads regarding the hate crime incident that occurred on 3-9-04 at the Claremont Colleges. As a result of the continuing investigation, several witnesses to the incident have come forward and provided significant information. The Claremont Police Department is urging any additional witnesses or anyone with information relating to this incident to contact either Lieutenant Stan Van Horn or Detective Eric Huizar at (909) 399-5420.
