Mid-December marked the end of my first term of teaching full time in Britain. It's been three months of adjustments, shocks, disappointments, and reconsiderations—but no regrets.
The first change I had to get used to was the difference in nomenclature. Here I teach a "term," not a semester; I have a "room," not an office; and I'm a "member," not an adjunct. I have as much difficulty now remembering to use those words as I did three months ago. This past fall, as I chronicled in a previous column, "Getting Out of the Kitchen," I left a tenure-track job at Fine Southern University (for a lot of reasons, including a location that left me unhappy personally and an institution about which I was more and more dubious) to pursue my fortunes overseas.
Since then, aside from the lingo, I have had trouble adjusting to the reality of some highly un-American benefits of working in temporary teaching gigs here. The fact that I'm a "member" of the university means I get two free meals a week and the chance to lounge in the faculty common room drinking as much tea as I want. Also, every day there's a different free cake. (Free cake! Every day! Can you see that happening at an American university?)
I could spend hours sitting in the faculty common room—if I had any time, which I don't. And that's the second change I had to get used to. As a tenure-track professor, I knew that my time was my own. Here I get paid by the hour to teach writing, which means that if I want to make enough money to live on and have some left over to save, I have to teach 25 to 40 hours a week. That's 25 hours of meeting students one by one, each one needing a different kind of help with writing, and needing that help presented in the way that will be most effective for them. Some of them are repeat customers, but most are not.
So here is the first lesson I've learned: University students in Britain can't write, either. What's more, they can't write in exactly the same ways that university students in the United States can't write. They use the passive voice instead of the active; they barely know how to use a comma and don't know how to use a semicolon; they appear somewhat confused about what a paragraph should contain; and they like to fill their pages with as many words as possible, organizing them in ways that boggle the mind.
I've been delighted to discover that my training as a writing teacher transcends national boundaries. Indeed, my skills seem more important here, as I am apparently one of only two people doing what I do at this university. I have nearly cornered the market.
It seems that the scarcity of writing instructors is a similarity between American universities and their British counterparts. At every American university at which I studied or taught, the faculty bemoaned the dreadful writing of their students without believing that the teaching of writing should get significant and separate money from university budgets, or should deserve respect equal to that given to other subjects.
In the same way, many British faculty members seem to hold the conviction that students can be, or should be, born knowing how to form plangent and pellucid sentences with no guidance at all. So, not much to get used to there.
Yet amidst all of those observations, I have made a truly surprising discovery: the immense pleasure of doing the work for which I was trained. I don't mean that I'm pleased to discover that I love to teach writing. I always knew that, since I always believed that teaching writing is one of the few ways academics can see—clearly and in the moment—that they are improving the world. What I mean is that I love the number of hours I now spend teaching.
That love is strange enough to draw me up short. After all, surely one thing all academics agree on is the desire for more time alone to do research and write. But after nine weeks of seven-hour teaching days, I have to confess that I am, well, kind of exhilarated.
It was when I stopped to contemplate that odd feeling that I made my most important discovery: When I had my tenure-track job, I felt guilty every minute that I wasn't doing research or writing, in every minute of my free time. Now I have no free time, and so I don't feel guilty.
I don't think my guilt was unique to me, nor do I think that it's likely to be limited to American academics. Rather, it seems to me to be the product of an increasingly prevalent mind-set: the vision of academe as a factory. More and more, scholars in all disciplines are forced to justify their existence by the amount of "work" they produce—and by work I mean publications, presentations, and other scholarly outpourings.
I look at the journals in my field and related fields, and I'm struck by the number of articles that, while interesting, feel workaday or uninspired. When I talk with colleagues here in Britain, just as when I talked with my colleagues in the United States, I'm frequently overwhelmed by the sense that I'm facing hares with the hounds snapping at their heels. I'm often reminded of William Blake's declaration that "More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul," and while I wouldn't say academe is quite at the dark-satanic-mills stage yet, the conviction that quantity equals validity seems to me to be gaining headway steadily amongst the powers that hand out the checks.
While it isn't necessarily surprising that academic bureaucracy—increasingly business-oriented and populated by those drawn from outside academe—should subscribe to that foolish and ultimately disastrous view of knowledge as something that can be measured by vastness of output, it is saddening to me to discover that many academics have unconsciously come to view their worth in the same way. Like Andrew Marvells for the plutocratic age, they hear the winged chariot of year-end evaluations and five-year assessments hurrying near, and they feel themselves unworthy as scholars because of their lack of publications.
In my time here, I've been taken aback by the number of young scholars who call themselves failures because they've published "only" three or so articles. I wonder to what extent guilt is running the show for many academics these days.
We already feel guilty that we don't have enough time to spend with our families. Some of us surely feel guilty that we don't have enough time to devote to our students. And now we're increasingly made to feel guilty, or at least ashamed, if we aren't producing at regular intervals—although the value of what we produce doesn't seem to matter.
As I stand in my "room" in the five minutes I give myself between appointments, sipping my free cups of tea, I sometimes reflect, uncomfortably, on the fact that what I feel exhilarated about might not be that I've found freedom, but that I've found a servitude so constant that I no longer have any freedom to feel guilty about.
