I just finished the second year of my inaugural tenure-track job, and my contentment checklist borders on the obscene.
My kids, growing up fast, have become fixated on potty humor. They're happy. My wife is on sabbatical next year. She does not have to drive 300 miles and spend two nights away from us each week to teach. She's happy. My dog is snoring on the couch. He's happy. My first book, published in 2004, won two awards last year. My department head is happy. The cat will always hate me, but everyone else in my personal and professional orbits seems cheery enough.
I'm a very fortunate assistant professor, which explains my absence from these pages for nearly a year. I began my run in The Chronicle's First Person series with an angry piece, a grim story of a murder most fowl. Frustrated with the job market in my field, I had returned from the annual convention of the American Historical Association and taken out my rage on Lighty the penguin, a plastic Christmas decoration that had been perched innocently on my porch.
Left jobless my first year on the market, I lashed out in print, hurling righteous opinions like hand grenades.
But then I got hired at a good university and my vitriol bottomed out. I wrote about my office, my wife's commute, and my father's death. Yet, while those topics continue to fill me, respectively, with pleasure, consternation, and grief, they hardly rank as earth-shattering outside my peculiar family drama.
How many stories of academics grappling with pregnancy, colleagues, manuscripts, toddlers, parents, hiring committees, students, houses, CV's, promotions, and mortality do we need? After a while, the narratives run together into a single meta-article with a predictable finish: It turns out that life afflicts even highly educated people.
I've felt silenced by privilege before. Ten years ago I enrolled as a graduate student at Yale University. Like most incoming first-years, I worried about GESO, the school's unrecognized graduate student union. GESO (Graduate Employees and Students Organization) had gone on a well-publicized grade strike the semester before, and I found the grievances that compelled that action a tad overwrought.
I knew poor wages and dismal working conditions. I had served as a grader at a public university while pursuing a master's degree. There, instead of being handed a generous stipend, I received 75 students in a large lecture course taught by a senior faculty member. I slogged through their blue books and essays for $10 a head. A fellow grader calculated our wages per hour: "It's a couple bucks," he reported.
At Yale, the university took care of my tuition costs, and, for the first two years, paid me to attend classes. I traveled East to enter a grad-school nirvana, and I didn't want a bunch of wild-eyed union activists ruining my bliss. I joined GESO my first semester in an effort to avoid multiple and lengthy conversations with organizers, not out of any real conviction that a union was the right thing for graduate students.
Yet, by the end of the first year, I had started organizing, and by the end of the second, I was on the union's staff. My journey from grateful silence to open rebellion may appear extreme. However, looking back, I'm surprised by how little my thinking changed.
I still wanted my paradise. Alas, Yale, like all human-run institutions, proved imperfect. I felt that graduate students had both the right to voice their concerns and a role to play in finding solutions to the labor dilemmas that plague higher education. The union fight at Yale continues to baffle many onlookers. What on earth do people who spend their days reading, debating esoteric topics, and teaching a class or two have to complain about?
Not much, I agree. I've seen, and been in, worse situations. But I also believe that we should strive for more than not being the worst. We should be working to make our places of employment as decent and democratic as possible, and those of us with tenure-track jobs, light teaching loads, sabbaticals, health care, and retirement plans have a special obligation to speak out.
Still, what could I say that would make higher education better? Bloggers, forum chatterers, conference roundtablers, and the numerous columnists and diarists writing for this site have covered the terrain thoroughly. They have documented the pain and frustration (and sometimes the exaltation) of job searches. They have described the personal toll of commutes, radioactive departments, and unhappy spouses. They have addressed teaching and harassment, tenure and drinking, publishing and weight gain (and loss). I have little to add.
My personal experience in academe has been both mundane and aberrant. I don't want to repeat stories others have already told, and I can't offer advice. I'm unsure how I wound up here.
Which brings me to the subject of Civil War facial hair. I concocted a tour of Civil War beards my first semester at my current university. I had taught the opening half of the survey course on U.S. history, but writing lectures consumed so much of my time that my multimedia accompaniments consisted of handouts and stick figures drawn on the chalk board.
Now I had the leisure to ramp up my presentations. I clicked on the PowerPoint icon and wandered into the realm of digitally enhanced oration. Most historians consider images, bullet points, and film clips show-biz flash. If old-time audiences could sit and listen to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas discuss slavery for hours without photos or outlines, why can't modern students endure a lecture about their debates without the indulgence of eye candy?
I sympathize with those retro sentiments. We have all watched computerized slide shows induce brain-deadness in otherwise vibrant human beings. They stare blankly at the screen and repeat every word that pops up there like zombified parrots. Instead of revolutionizing academic presentations, PowerPoint has -- and this is a true miracle -- dulled them further.
Yet I worry about abandoning PowerPoint completely to scientists and human-resource administrators. History teaches many lessons regarding the adoption of new technology. Long ago in the 1970s, for example, "corporate" rock bands like Journey and Boston staged elaborate stadium shows filled with props, lasers, pyrotechnics, and fog. As we all know, the success of those groups prompted a musical backlash -- punk.
Eschewing decadent showmanship, punk bands like Iggy Pop and the Stooges sold raw, ugly authenticity. But they did not reject technology; they merely stripped it down and cranked up the volume. They plugged in their guitars and microphones and growled: "Look out, honey, 'cause I'm using technology./Ain't got time to make no apology."
My classroom tour of Civil War facial hair represents my feeble attempt to bring punk to PowerPoint. I start with the restrained beards of Lee and Grant, move through the slightly more creative chin hair of Lincoln and Davis, and end with the resplendent follicles of Jeb Stuart and Ambrose Burnside.
Stuart's thick, curly locks look as if a raccoon parked on his face, while Burnside's chin is bare. The Union general focused his creativity on location rather than length. He constructed a bushy mustache that grew directly into his sideburns. In the photo, Burnside is fat and bald. His hair is greasy and his eyebrows need plucking. He's not a handsome guy, yet the fur bursting from his upper lip elevates him. Through avant-garde grooming, Burnside turned being ugly into art.
I use the tour of Civil War facial hair to teach two lessons. The tour is a fun way to demonstrate how to raise a historical question, find a thesis, and formulate an argument. It's an exercise in essay writing.
But it's also a goof. I'm not really interested in discovering why generals and politicians on both sides of the most deadly struggle in American history grew such fabulous whiskers. I wanted to do something strange and pointless with PowerPoint. And in so doing, I hoped to make academe a little better.
You see, I think the path to better runs through weirder. At no time in history have so many avenues of expression been open to academics. Yet, instead of running wild with those new mediums, we plod around with the same old phobias, complaints, and obsessions. Ambrose Burnside would be ashamed at our timidity. Do you think he would have trimmed his man-hedge for a job, or tenure, or better teaching evaluations? Of course not. They don't name hairstyles after the meek.
