not overdoing it

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for the "nice problem to have" files.

I developed and taught a university course last semester, and while the kids were great and the evals were total valentines and it paid well, and I stopped hugging the lectern after a few weeks, it was actually quite a lot of work and I got supertired of hearing myself talk by halfway through. There are people who live to teach and are convinced that they're the keepers of distributable wisdom, and as it turns out, I'm really not one of them. So I was kind of relieved when my department dropped the ball on recruitment and it looked like the fall class would be cancelled. Less money, yes, but I've made enough to get by for now and I have plenty else going on. Also, I'm really not liking my department very well anyway. Some things went down last winter that were just ugly and political, and while I understand that's normal for faculty, I don't like it a bit and will be fine with leaving when the time comes.

I had a meeting today with the people in charge of deciding the course's fate, though, and they decided that while they don't want this particular course, they do want me developing and teaching something else. It'd probably be foolish to turn it down, and it'd (I think) be less work than the last course. But I'd have to work closely with one of the faculty, and also be very tactful (our teaching styles and views on the value of ed theory differ wildly) and...man, I'm despondent just thinking about it. I don't know whether I can just suck it up and do it. And I've just realized that the non-department boss who's actually driving this whole thing is trying to give me an escape hatch...develop this over here, and eventually we can hand that ferry off to someone else and put you in charge of classes that are actually fun and where you can rev the engine...

I don't know. I'll be very glad when I don't have to make this much money anymore and can stop worrying about problems like this. I just so don't like these people. And I recognize it's my own problem, I'm on their turf, nobody's forcing me to stay (except the fact that my employment options are limited). I'm just in the wrong place. Anyway. I'm just trying to manage this without exhausting myself, because I'm really tired from the last year.

People are out for themselves where you work. Because you are lucky enough to have skills that can forward your and their agenda, they offer you this chance to work with them and make money you need. It would be nice if they were your friends, it would be nice if they were straight forward. That's always possible. But right now and maybe forever, this is a business deal. They aren't offering to be nice to you, they are offering to pay for what you offer that can forward their agenda.

And don't overlook the lack of threat you represent to some if you aren't politically savvy will cause them to support, in order to use you. With luck everyone's agenda can be met for awhile.

Congratulations on the offer.

Sounds like your non-department boss may have clued in to some extent your need to be more of a "lone-wolf".

So, the door might be open to have a somewhat honest discussion around where you'd like to see things go given the choice. It may be a "trade-offs" kind of thing. "Sure I'll work with that guy to get this & that done but afterwards I'm looking to do this."

A helpful phrase may be "given the choice, this is where I'd like to see my career going...."

In a politicized work environment it's often about negotiation and "staking one's own claim". You indicated you got good reviews from your students, so, to some extent you probably have a little bit of leverage. Not all instructors are liked and - and the end of the day the students are the clients. No students - no school.

Good luck - just be sure to be careful and watch out for your own interests in any negotiations.

Thanks.

Yes, they are out for themselves. I understand that, I just don't understand, or am not in sympathy with, being out for yourself in a manner that guarantees unhappiness all around you and rage and bitterness within. I was involved several years ago with a professor, and he misinterpreted something I said, then apologized for getting angry, saying that free-floating rage and paranoia were the environment in which he operated. I see he wasn't kidding. I also see that "but can't they just do their work" is some sort of laughable thing that goes on a Christmas card.

I understood today too that the reason so many staff keep pushing me to get a PhD (which I don't want or need) is that they think I ought to be in a position to get mine. My cut, that is. Because that's the only way, in a university, it's set up as a sort of orgiastic devotion to the order. Fortunately I'd never have the patience and there are things even I'm too sensible to do.

The whole business makes me sad, though I can't say I'm surprised. I haven't yet met a massive pile of money that doesn't involve some variation on terrible. I guess the way this goes is that they tolerate me as a disapproving foreign object as long as they have to - which means the end of one grant period or another, since I've managed to get myself on someone's grant, and there isn't anyone who can replace me there - then pull the plug on the position, which ought to take several months to organize, and since they don't like kicking they'll have something else to point me to, where I'll have priority. They'll have told necessary lies about what an asset I am, etc. the alternative is to take it all very unseriously, or read a lot of Molière and Voltaire and chuckle a lot to myself and drink more.

Anyway, it's done, I'm to teach this. And I'm fine once I get in front of the kids, they're quite nice on the whole. Of course, if I were an administratively ambitious faculty member who wanted to shuffle a bright writer and popular teacher out of view, but the higher-ups were wanting to keep shoving her in as a teacher, I'd assign her to teach something that was a bit of a stretch, and pair her with a woman faculty member whom the kids don't much care for, think is mean. Then in a year's time we could agree that the experiment had been run and it hadn't quite fit the instructional needs, something like it surely, but perhaps this wasn't the time, though everyone's grateful for the effort and the willingness to devote the time.

You know, that's the thing, I can see how these things go perfectly well, I just want nothing to do with living them.

The non-departmental boss really does get me but he's been burnt badly himself and is limited in what he can do. And the truth of it is I don't belong at a university, am the sort of person who's celebrated as an undergrad, tolerated as a grad student, and a monkey wrench as anything else. Interested in the thinking/talking bit, fully capable, but dismissive of the game. For real, not in the mumbled-complainy way. Well. One day it'll break, that's all.

I don't understand why you don't want to get phd

Why don't you start considering your options outside of the present academic environment you are in. You're certainly well educated and by your own admission enjoy teaching and the students seem to like you.

What about something like teaching at an adult high school - the students there are motivated and mature. Or professional instruction in your field at a private college. Perhaps even running the training group within a mid-size company.

Life is short - you deserve to be happy. Explore your options.

Good luck.

It's weird for me to read your accounts, Tarantella, because the chance to complete my college degree and get a masters and doctorate are things I always dreamed of and then gave up on.

It's like being a devotee of some religion and getting a report from a resident of their paradise that it basically sucks there.

I wonder if people are in institutions like the one you describe are in the grips of shared fears and desires--something like the buddhist "hell of the hungry ghosts"--and in some collective and largely unconscious process they duplicate aspects of the things they fear in their environment.

Because it'd be 5-7 years of underpaid hell for a ticket I don't need. PhDs are great if you want to be a tenured professor, or if you want a life as a contract lecturer or scientist. Or if you're a scholar with enough money to support your own research but you still need someone to talk you seriously when you try to publish your book. But I'm a writer, not a scholar, and while I enjoy teaching (assuming someone wants it), I really don't enjoy the biz of academia and am too old to get in by its front door anyway. I just happen to live in a university town where that's it, that's the industry. I'm more or less stuck here for the next several years; then I'm done. Having a PhD outside academia...well, there are a few places where you need it, but apart from those, what it says on a resume is often "don't hire me, I'm expensive and I don't like business." It's also hard to keep up a professional resume while you're doing an academic PhD -- looked down upon in academia, and besides you're supposed to be "serious", devoting most every waking moment to molding yourself into a PhD. I used to know a guy who used to moonlight for IBM while doing an English PhD - kept him in money, but he had to sneak around to do it.

Academia is very turfy, very rulebound, very herd-oriented, and very, very hierarchical. Say you like history. Well -- suppose you go off to grad school for history, and you're all on fire to study a certain thing. That's cool, so long as it's not unfashionable, but not too fashionable, from the pov of mid-career academics. And so long as there's someone in your department who's got enough fingers in that pie to look like a legitimate advisor to your dissertation. And so long as you pick from a certain set of ideas and forms and vocabulary in how you write about it. And so long as you understand who you're picking fights with and what size claims are seemly to make, given your exceedingly junior status and your department's ranking nationally. And so long as (assuming you're going to try to get a job as an historian) you know how to cozy up to the right people in your industry and do things they find interesting (doesn't hurt if they're flattering). And so long as the whole project smells like legit historianship according to whoever's in charge of the field at the time, and so long as you smell like a legit future academic historian. And so long as you know how to ingratiate yourself with undergraduates. Your advisor, depending on age/temperament, will also be forming you as part of a cohort of mini-me's, so you'll forever be known as so-and-so's student. There will be people who regard you as an enemy, or useless, just because of that.

If you're going off to grad school in sci/eng, it's a little different; essentially you're signing up to be someone's research/teaching slave for five years or so while they turn you into a useful scientist (maybe). It's your apprenticeship and you may or may not have a nice boss, but you'll find that if you don't, or if your project's a dud, or you guessed wrong and your boss doesn't have any grant money to pay you, you're kind of screwed. It's very hard to switch labs after the first couple of years - you need time to get your research going, you need data for your dissertation.

While you're doing all this, of course, you have to be polite. That's the key thing: stay polite, agree and be supportive in meetings. The knives only come out in private. Of course, as a grad student, you don't have any knives, you're helpless. Except that it looks bad for the faculty if you leave without your PhD or take forever to get there. (That's the other thing that I think is making grad life difficult for people with AS: there's tremendous pressure on faculty to reduce the number of years it takes a grad student to get that degree. The eight-year PhD...nobody wants that student hanging around anymore.)

There are people who dig it. There are also people who can't do their work anyplace else -- they need academic research labs, research libraries. Or they really need students, need to teach. And for most of this stuff, good luck getting that kind of money for it anyplace else. I mean I don't know who else is going to pay you $120K/yr to teach two or three courses that probably aren't directly related to employment, and do research on something that 300 impecunious people in the world care about, and train young people to be the next you, and argue at faculty meetings about rules and help write administrative reports that say you're doing something and should get more money. And persuade kids to keep shelling out, that's part of it too. I mean you'll spend an ungodly number of hours a week working, but it'll be on stuff that for the most part has no market value except in academia.

Anyway -- yeah, Adamantium, it's one thing for undergrads and master's students -- they're customers, after all -- but you really have to be made for academia to enjoy it. And you have to be weirdly naive about how damaging all that behavior is, and married to your identity as an academic. It just ain't me.

I think it's mostly that academia collects a lot of very frightened and insecure people who need university life, then puts them in a ring and makes them brawl with each other for money and opportunities. (This is called "collegiality".) There's also a strong Hotel California element. I'd say it was better in the old days, but the academic novels & plays of the whole last century say otherwise.

Can you elaborate on the "Hotel California" idea?

I am thinking of the song "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" is that what you mean?

I like that song--it seems poetically right for many situations. "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"

I wonder sometimes, or perhaps "second-guess myself" is more accurate: when I am feeling the way you describe about a situation (and sometimes almost all human situations seem like variations on this theme) is it true? Is the setting you are in perceived by all the tortured souls who languish there (or sharpen their pitchforks there) in the same way--or is it me?

Maybe my warped mental processes and fixations make it seem that way but there are other equally valid perceptions that find another and better place in the same environment? I really don't know. Sometimes, though, I think the possibility to choose the preferable perception exists--and good things can flow from that choice. I could see my current job in similar terms, but I could also paint it in a very positive light and recognize that I am extraordinarily lucky to have it--and to have kept it, despite the impact of my differences.

Thinking this way can become a sort of inward turning spiral, so I usually drop it. But I wonder. Your way of thinking and describing this seems so familiar, like an echo or harmonic of my own patterns of thought. It's impossible to read your descriptions without beginning to think about these questions of perception and reality.

In any case, I really hope that you come out of this doing something rewarding and enjoyable. I value your writing here.