In the Trenches of the Teaching Seminar

This past week has been busy. Funny, but when I think of summer, I picture lolling about, late hot mornings with Venezuelan coffee and reading for pleasure and preparing bouquets of flowers and taking walks in the forest, waiting on Mr. Gordo to come home from work. At least, that was my summer vision when I lived in the country back at Sadistic College, playing a rather threadbare version of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, except without a floppy hat. Here on my own until the end of June in Cold City, the end of the year and commencement of summer so far has been about work, not so intense as during the academic year but pressing enough to feel strange, a bit dislocating as the temperatures rise and the sultry humid air settles over our fair city. Wool gives way to linen, shoes to sandals, “moisturising” to “refreshing” body washes. The very space of experience is different as well: gone are the forests that surrounded our cottage with its babbling brook in the distance (literally), the wasp’s nest hanging in the tree, the deer in the backyard, the cardinal aloft from the branch.

Now in my little garret I see the side of the next apartment building over, which on some occasions offers interesting views, but only very rarely. More often than not all one can really see are the ragged urban squirrels click-clacking up and down the side of a very sad looking oak, with the urban soundtrack of distant sirens, and the roar of planes above, perhaps the rattle of bottles and cans falling into the recycling bin out back.


The one sensual pleasure that figures prominently is getting out of class at night and driving home along the interstate, the window down and radio loud, the lush air rolling over my face as I negotiate the freeway like a woman from a Cars album cover, all lascivious desire at the power of the engine, lighting a cigarette, changing lanes, sipping a Tab, and adjusting the volume on the IPod simultaneously. The immediate recovery of my pastoral bucolia is nigh impossible, for at the end of the session I shall be joining Mr. Gordo in hot, humid, ugly Big Eastern City (which, natch, he adores: his American dream) for a shared seven-week stint in a mid-size studio apartment on a loud boulevard, with pot smokers in the foyer and a pathetic air conditioner too small to adequately chill the space to my desired temperature of Nunavut. Let’s hope in this instance that Love indeed can conquer all. I guess another way to put it would be that some men are brave.

I am currently teaching a summer course with a lovely group of bright students who are invested in the topic and interested and talkative (!), in a beautiful modern classroom with a view of the skyline, which every session features the most amazing sunset to compliment our conversations. For the last few weeks I have also been participating in a faculty seminar on teaching, specifically concerning the question of difference in the classroom. When I went into this I was figuring, perhaps somewhat naively, that I would have little to learn. Very shortly I was disabused of this quaint notion, which perhaps even in its origin was too simplistic. In other words, I really should have known better, but sometimes I think the motto “Hope Springs Eternal” is tattooed on my forehead.

By this I mean that I always go into these things thinking the best of people, that my colleagues will be open and participatory and interested and invested in creating a learning community. Why I should persist in this thinking after my sentimental education at Sadistic College gives me pause: is this freshness of the ingénue tantalising in its possibilities or hopelessly pathetic? In any event, this optimistic approach is the millstone around my neck that I just cannot seem to shake, and it can at times be a real drag.

Now, any milieu that features discussions on the holy trinity of difference (race, gender, class) as well as a host of other conditions (sexuality, disability, religion) is sure to spark, um, strong feelings. Not the least of which is because these sorts of seminars have a somewhat bad reputation for being doctrinaire and simplistic, even among (or perhaps especially) the liberal faculty who take them. Our sessions are not mandatory, but participants do receive a small stipend for their participation, so there is a consensual element to the proceedings.

In any event, an incident in the seminar upset me greatly, and seemed to detail a number of problems not only with thinking through difference in our teaching but also difference among the professoriate. In short, the apex (or perhaps nadir) of our seminar sessions was a heated discussion of a recent racial controversy on campus. Many of the students involved in this controversy were actually enrolled in various classes of mine, and a number of them approached me: What should we do? How should we respond? How should we deal with our feelings of anger? (Although this wasn’t usually stated so eloquently, for more often my students wanted to literally go find the offending party and whup their ass: “We’re trying to find out where [offending party] lives.”)

As a faculty of colour, this is obviously not my first time in proximity to a campus racial controversy, nor the strong emotions that tend to accompany them, and I urged my students to craft, along with their feelings of anger and rage, an intellectual response to this conundrum. The reasons as to why I would respond thusly are manifold, and both personal and professional. One clearly is that physical violence has no place in a learning environment, which dovetails with my own experience with physical violence in my family, as well as the constant threat of heteronormative violence on the street and in public places. Violence, in my experience, comes looking for you, so why bother going out and finding it. Another is that emotional and rash reactions of this sort, as well as the pure emotive hair-pulling performed in invariably endless meetings, conforms to the vicious stereotypes of people of colour as incapable of intellectual and reasoned response. And this was a controversial moment that could support a pointed intellectual deconstruction (the campus controversy in question was grounded in a discursive racist moment, and was not physical, e.g. recent incidents at Duke).

Even as I say this, I realise from experience that while racist discursive moments may be dismissed as purely emotive (“Students of colour are upset”), they are also often simultaneously physical as well, in terms of students feeling threatened, or vulnerable, or feeling sick, or feeling angry. The point of my advice to my students (advice being key; they were of course free to follow or disregard my thoughts on the matter. Clever, yes, but Svengali I’m not) was to connect my students with their budding intellectual training at Cold City U: if white supremacy is a discursive system that manifests itself in both material and metaphysical ways and is moreover invisible as a system, how do we differentiate the level of risk in confronting it, as well as the level and intensity of response. In other words, how do we craft an intellectual response to the problem of white supremacy as ideology as well as through material action (literal resistance, struggle, protest, self-protection)?

The fact that this incident encapsulates many of the principles of the teaching seminar itself, principally how do we handle and accommodate different stakeholders in the classroom, would purportedly make this a perfect “teachable moment.” However, that was not they way it played out. Several white faculty were disturbed by my intellectual response to the campus controversy, and quickly moved to critique it (which of course was not the point of sharing it in the first place; I was not asking for their opinion). One of my immediate colleagues offered a professional critique that was well worded, immediately followed by an older white woman from another division who said, “Yeah, if I was your student and you said that to me [the need to develop an intellectual response], I would want to punch you in the face!”

Boom! All the conversation at this point was moving rapidly towards a false equivocation of my position as “mind” and others as “body/emotion” (which was not what I was saying), with many people chiming in and voices raised and the facilitator looking pained and trying to regain control, but after this last comment about a fist and my face, time stood still a bit for me. I was deeply shocked that a colleague would enunciate an advocacy of violence against another faculty member, much less one complicated by race and sexuality, solely on the basis of cultivating intellectualism in students of colour. Respecting difference, indeed!

Was it a poor choice on her part? Needless to say, yes, however, no apology has been forthcoming, and in fact, several other white faculty voiced their agreement with this woman’s statement at the moment (“Yeah!", “Exactly!”), in essence, saying that they believed in fact the correct response of students of colour to this campus controversy was violence, unbridled emotion, reaction, hysteria. Intellectualism was not, for these good white people, the appropriate response to this controversy. However, if the university is not the place for an intellectual response, then indeed where is that place?

We stopped for a break, before which one faculty member of colour astutely observed, “This is why it is hard to discuss race in the classroom.” I fled outside to smoke furiously and dial Mr. Gordo on the mobile. I returned, after a somewhat calming conversation, to fume for the rest of the session, and then spend the weekend processing this moment with my closest friends and professional interlocutors. I was unable to articulate my issues with this woman’s statement at the moment, to in effect "stop the process," as Prancilla would later observe.

In fact, through the many conversations we had regarding this incident, the one thing that stood out for me is that Miss Prancilla is one of the smartest people I know, as well as how lucky I am to have such interlocutors in my life. We dissected and analysed the moment, attempting to explain as to why, in a seminar devoted to teaching approaches to diversity, a moment like this might happen. Prancilla and I discussed and debated the symbolic value of the incident, which aside from the professional discourtesy of such a statement, had a lot happening that had little to do with me, personally, and much to do with the placement of faculty of colour in the academy (indeed, the violent rhetorical policing of the boundaries for faculty of colour), the debate over race and difference in an institutional context, and intra-institutional and disciplinary differences and struggles over institutional mission and direction, as well as a profound self-loathing contained in the anti-intellectualism of the response. In other words, what is it we are meant to be doing in the classroom for our students? Are we training thinkers or tending to issues of self-esteem? They are of course linked concepts but tend to be placed at opposite ends of the pedagogical spectrum. How do some faculty get construed as caregivers, why, and what happens when they fail to live up to this expectation?

Prancilla trenchantly observed that had I actually said to my students, “Yeah, go kick that white bitch’s ass,” that would have hardly been the subject of general approbation in the seminar. In fact, then one would have been molding themselves to fit into another stereotype, that of the violent person of colour. But in fact, this is what my white colleagues were implicitly advocating, including that I have my own face punched for daring to challenge students to think, not simply respond viscerally. It was the question of the punition of the professor I found most disturbing, and most compelling. What was at stake in this punishment? Was I being too smart for my own good? Was I being punished for being a professional? Was I being punished for being a bad “mentor”? As my old colleague La Antropóloga put it in an email to me regarding the seminar, “Did she think that by directing the students to think of an intellectual response you were undermining their anger/ passion? That they should be able to express their anger more clearly and directly (like by punching their professor in the face!! -- sounds all too familiar […]), and that an 'intellectual response' was not an effective form of response?” If indeed my white critics in the seminar believe that intellectualism is not an effective response, then what exactly are they doing in their classrooms? They didn't feel the need to share.

Prancilla advocated an intervention in the seminar to address this incident and my own feelings of anger regarding it, to demonstrate some of the profound problems that exist around questions of difference in the institution. I am personally not very receptive to open confrontation in person, but in the end the point was moot. Many in the seminar found the conversational moment awkward or tense, but could not remember the moment enough to articulate a critical position. One co-facilitator heard something different, another was aware of the moment, although was herself engaged in the conversation and unable to properly situate the moment. A Prancilla aphorism, a Prancillaism: “Either there’s something to what I’m saying, or I’m crazy. So if you don’t think I’m crazy, then there must be something to what I’m saying.” And this was the sense I had trying to measure the moment with other seminar participants. This happened, but seemingly was largely invisible to other witnesses, which itself was profoundly disturbing in that no one thought it odd or improper to advocate violence against another faculty member.

In any event, the possibility of a direct confrontation in the context of the seminar was lost when the woman faculty in question dropped out, due to “personal conflicts.” Ironic, and perhaps intentional, although I have no desire to pursue her with my rage, which at this point has largely dissipated to reflection and exhaustion. But maybe that is essential to the moment: faculty of colour have to deal with these situations every day (for example, my white critics did not serve as mentors to concerned and angry students of colour), and we are sensitive to the slights and instantaneous verbal productions that other faculty can walk away from, with the primary differential being one of labour: quite simply, we are responsible for a wide variety of work that our white colleagues do not have to do, both on the level of the symbolic as well as the literal. And frankly, that work is exhausting, never ending, and depressing in its regularity, in the expectation that such work will be present in our professional lives forever.

I have written about some of these questions before, but this incident drove me, in true egghead form, back to reading, to ideas, to the page. In particular, to an excellent analytical piece by Patricia Hill Collins called “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” Collins' work has been broadly influential in Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, as well as other disciplinary areas in the humanities that concern themselves most clearly with race in the classroom, both as a topic and as a factor in classroom and institutional dynamics. She writes:

Whether we benefit from it or not, we all live within institutions that reproduce race, class, and gender oppression. Even if we never have any contact with members of other race, class, and gender groups, we all encounter images of these groups and are exposed to the symbolic meanings attached to those images. On this dimension of oppression, our individual biographies vary tremendously. As a result of our institutional and symbolic statuses, all of our choices become political acts (648).

Collins details the three levels of this politics of oppression: the Institutional, the Symbolic, and the Individual. The incident in the teaching seminar encapsulated the weight of this trinity in a nutshell, and the politics associated with the range of meanings therein. Debates within the profession between different disciplinary centres regarding the function of the classroom, especially around vulnerable populations (race, gender in certain fields, sexuality, etc), can be intensely symbolic, but also function on the level of the institution itself (in terms of mission) and the individual (in terms of the duties of individual faculty to these populations or discourses). The false dichotomy between body/emotion and mind is not only sustained by neo-conservative critics of the academy (with their call for standards, i.e. "mind"), but also ironically supported by liberal and radical teaching pedagogies that seek to teach the “whole” student (i.e. "body/emotion"), with the practical application of emotion in the classroom seeming, in the instance of my white faculty critic, to also contain problematic and troubling associations of emotion and race that favour the emotive over the intellectual in the name of empowering the student. In other words, as professors, are we responsible to/for our students’ emotive needs, as well as their intellectual ones? Is the classroom about self-esteem? How do we nurture “whole” people? Is that even our job?

We do not live in the jungle gym or the kindergarten (contrary to news from the hallowed halls of Congress). We are constrained in our quotidian lives by a number of rules that by both consensus and coercion we follow. I am a trained humanist with a doctorate, but I am not a psychotherapist. I see my role as guiding my students towards fundamentally intellectual patterns of thought and critique. I, for one, am not ashamed to call myself an intellectual, a thinker, someone who uses their brain, who by choice and training privileges, to a large extent, reason over emotion, even within the realm of the emotional (Mr. Gordo’s oft cited critique: “You’re intellectualising!”). At the end of our class time together, my students leave the room and walk back into the gloom of a deeply irrational and emotive society that loathes thinking and intellectualism and intellectuals. That mocks us and denigrates our contribution to society, that questions are credentials and our value. Our students arguably are up to their eyeballs in anti-intellectual sentiment. They certainly don’t need, in my opinion, that standpoint reified in the context of the classroom. Here, they might be able to achieve a state they cannot easily achieve elsewhere. If we don’t believe in the life of the mind, however defined, why are we here then at the university? To change society radically? A decidedly poor choice of venue, in my book, considering how rabidly conservative the Shop is.

This intellectual and pedagogical mission goes double for students of colour, who imbibe almost from birth their implicit unworthiness of intellectual endeavour in a white supremacist society, either through social and economic neglect or being read exclusively as a token if indeed they manage to climb the ladder into institutions of higher education. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If this incident in the teaching seminar was meant to chastise me for my method, it in fact reasserted the belief that what we need is more intellectualism, more thinking, more methodology, in approaching these complicated situations of the new academy filled with race, difference, tension. A simple retreat into the emotive is simply not enough, for we need to find a way to broach this divide between emotion and intellectualism in ways that honour the ability of students of colour to think critically and empathetically, within and beyond themselves, and have the confidence that they can do it. This goes for the symbolism of faculty of colour as well.

We are creatures of mimesis, we scholars of colour. We have learned the rules of the game, and play them brilliantly. As Collins remarks, “Our ability to survive in hostile settings has hinged on our ability to learn intricate details about the behavior and world view of the powerful and adjust our behavior accordingly” (651). Yet, as Prancilla noted in one of our late night conversations, perhaps sometimes we have learned these lessons too well. Do scholars and faculty of colour hide their anger, disappointment, and terror behind intellectualism? Do we use intellectualism to avoid hard political choices, even as Collins implies that all choices we make are political? Is this why so many faculty of colour feel deeply ambivalent over our talents, our success, our roles in the profession? How do we find our voice in this funhouse of distorted images? Is the "real me" the person who can (or cannot) confront this woman with my rage, my anger? Or is it rather the one who uses the written word, here, to respond? Are there other ways to resist? Or as Mr. Gordo put it to me, “Choose your battles. Is this a battle you wish to fight?” There are, there need to be, myriad ways to fight.

As I have said before, the work of difference within the academy and our society is hard, tendentious, difficult, arduous. It is not easy. There are no “safe spaces,” for anybody. We are all implicated, and must all work, on some level, to address these conundrums of difference, for they aren’t going away anytime soon. There will be no magical return to the days of Cordovans and twin sets in the university.

One of the reasons I admire the work of Patricia Hill Collins is that she is in fact a pointed critic who manages to rise above simple polemics. She recognises, on fundamental levels, the nature of the struggle we have set before us. She ends her article with a call for us to examine our positions (655). Like most good teachers, this is something I do all the time, as a matter of survival, both as the professor at the head of diverse classrooms as well as a professional academic. But this incident and the teaching seminar as a whole was a moment to reconsider, to craft my own intellectual responses grounded, ironically enough, in the emotive, in the shock of the profound differences between us in form, style, substance, and politics. In essence, to examine once again my own position(s). Academics of colour are constantly examining their positions, however I would only wish that some of our white colleagues, whether conservative or liberal or indeed radical, would do so with the frequency and urgency with which we approach this challenge.

The Invisible Adjunct: An Appreciation

“I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again
And past your door, but you don't live there anymore
It's years since you've been there
Now you've disappeared somewhere, like outer space
You've found some better place

And I miss you.”

— Everything But The Girl

It has been slightly over two years since the Invisible Adjunct shuttered her remarkably influential website and left the academic blogosphere and the profession for fairer fields. For myself, and no doubt for many other academic bloggers, the Invisible Adjunct website was the first glimpse at what was possible in creating an online community of academics, or as the Invisible Adjunct herself put it, somewhat tongue in cheek, “A Habermasian public sphere (?).” For those unfamiliar, the Invisible Adjunct was a website that lived briefly, brightly, over the span of 2003 and 2004, and was dedicated to a wide variety of issues in academic life. As IA stated in her blog description: “From the margins of academe: Occasional thoughts on higher education, campus politics, the use and abuse of adjunct faculty, the academic ‘job market,’ and various other absurdities. By an invisible adjunct assistant professor of history.”

I discovered the site by chance in the early spring of 2003, and very quickly it became my first stop online. At the time, well into my “3-hour tour” of Sadistic College, I was unhappy and anxious. Finding the Invisible Adjunct and the conversations it nurtured became a lifeline for me as I negotiated the shoals of a miserable academic placement and pondered the questions this placement provoked: What is academic life? What are the possibilities and perils? Am I cut out for this peculiar type of sublimation? Will I live to tell?

What had started, seemingly, as a personal blog very quickly became an online, virtual agora for academicians, students, and fellow travellers. Through her witty, astute, and cogent commentary on everything from academic labour, unionisation, and the exploitation of contract (adjunct) academics, to pedagogy, tenure, and institutional politics, the Invisible Adjunct came to preside over a remarkable moment in time, a meeting of many minds and ideas and arguments that became a veritable town hall meeting, guided by her sensible and sober reflective stance, where discussion raged in the comments and there was always something compelling to read and comment on and think about.

The Invisible Adjunct was the inspiration for my first blog, and she was one of two honourable bloggers who warned me, after a very short time (like, a week), that my anonymity was about to be compromised (which was too bad, for that first blog, a roman à clef based on daily life at Sadistic College, was, to put it mildly, quite interesting). Her principled actions to protect my anonymity (and career, at that moment) struck me as indicative of her ethical and moral worth both as a colleague and a person. Her words and methodology towards blogging and community continue to inspire me and this blog in its current incarnation, which is to say: how do we create community? How do we communicate our issues and contentions to others? How can we use debate, ideas, notions, flights of fancy, to illustrate the conditions of our lives, as academics, as intellectuals, as thinkers in an anti-intellectual society, as workers in an anti-labour society?

In essence, the Invisible Adjunct made visible to me the very possibility of online community, the communitas so many of us find lacking in our actual “Real Time” institutional lives. Her site communicated to us, the avid readers, that in fact we were not alone, that there were other like-minded souls with critical positions and utterances that had no place in the department meeting, the faculty dining room, the professional conferences filled with anxiety and depression. IA was tough, hard as nails, clear-eyed about the risks of the academic life, and woe betide any doe-eyed undergraduate who wandered onto the site by accident, for they would receive a pragmatic assessment of their chances in academe: in short, don’t do it.

While many of us feel ambivalent, at best, about our entry into academia (and this critical aspect of the site garnered, natch, accusations of malcontentment on the part of critics, “the apologists” as IA used to call them), it is hard to quibble with the very fact of the employment crisis in academia. Yes, many of us have attained great heights of intellectual possibility while pursuing our doctorates, but the simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of North American PhDs will never find traditional tenure-line appointments. The element of chance seems to be the most important factor in landing one of these coveted placements, although we continue to believe, as a profession and a society, in the meritocratic principle that, in this instance, masks an abusive and exploitative labour system. The Invisible Adjunct and her website acolytes sought to rip the wig off this particular myth of academia, not out of bitterness but rather from a standpoint of reality: this is where we are.

In thinking of this post, I did a Google search on IA, and found to my chagrin this piece in the Chron on the end of her website. It’s not that the article itself is bad, for in fact it offers a nice survey of the importance of the website for online academia, as well as reading the phenomenon of IA as indicative of deeply rooted problems in the profession. But because the Invisible Adjunct was a website grounded in the invisibility of the adjunct, and more largely the labour of all academics, the very visible swan song of being in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the traditional journalistic voice of the profession, on the occasion of the website’s demise, was a paradox filled, for me at least, with poignancy and some bitterness. Or, as Planned Obsolescence remarked eloquently at the time:

“There’s of course an irony in the contrasting responses to IA’s departure, which Smallwood [the Chron journalist] rightly points to—that only in her invisibility, or rather in the discursive space she created through her invisibility, will she be missed. But there’s another irony, one that Smallwood must surely have picked up on, but of which the article gives no real hint: that this ceasing-to-exist of an online persona has forced the academy itself to take notice, in the form of an article in its journal of record.

And yet: one can imagine IA’s very ‘colleagues,’ reading in their offices, shaking their heads and muttering about the terrible loss to the field, never noticing the woman down the hall, packing her few things to leave.

This is the way we like our tragedies: visible enough to be clucked over, invisible enough to avoid any personal implication therein.”

These remarks strike me as spot on in terms of the blissfully unaware character of we workers in the Shop, and the problematic ways in which we “see” or alternatively “don’t see” the material conditions of both our working lives and our lives as intellectuals.

Around the time of the Invisible Adjunct’s departure, CultureCat offered a Bakhtinian reading of the Invisible Adjunct and her website that captures the unique place that the site offered in an academic world so often filled with bloated egos, glossy viewbooks, and hidden ugliness. I would like to quote her post at length because in this passage CultureCat explicates the vital importance of the Invisible Adjunct, in its virtual moment of brilliance:

“Utterances on Invisible Adjunct
• Instead of the success stories or “good enough” stories about adjuncts we see in the Chronicle, the discourse on Invisible Adjunct focuses almost exclusively on adjuncts and postacademics who express their anger at the current state of the institution of higher education.
• Instead of the bootstrap, personal responsibility rhetoric in the Chronicle, criticism is aimed squarely at the institution and, unlike the Chronicle, the genre is less institutionalized; in other words, while the stories in the Chronicle are selected by the editors and more ideological gatekeeping takes place, the utterances on Invisible Adjunct are moderated by Invisible Adjunct only, thus allowing for other arguments to be made and other critiques to be stated.
• In addition, the anonymity enables posters to be more honest than they would be otherwise. Most of the time, people who post comments to Invisible Adjunct use pseudonyms or no name at all, allowing for a forum that, while public and visible, is also underground.
• The discussions on the blog are less like rhetorical genres, in which hierarchy is usually taken into account with each utterance, and more like what Bakhtin calls “familiar and intimate genres,” which “perceive their addressees in exactly the same way: more or less outside the framework of the social hierarchy and social conventions, 'without rank,' as it were. This gives rise to a certain candor of speech (which in familiar styles sometimes approaches cynicism” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 97).”

This is a really smart reading, and I think demonstrates a critical shift that is crucial for pragmatic and enlightened academics everywhere. Ironically, the very transformation in consciousness attributed by CultureCat to the Invisible Adjunct, the shift from the individual to the institution, from the local to the global, the subjective to the objective, is one that I firmly believe is key to any critical pedagogy. In other words, it is what many of us do, or strive to do, as professors and teachers and instructors for our students. How is it then that so many of us lose the thread when it comes to ourselves, our profession, our practises as they concern our work in the Shop?

This is what the Invisible Adjunct offered us: the Nestea Plunge! Like the Jean Naté splash, she and her site were a tonic for all the crap academics have to put up with, day in and day out: the rictus smiles, the robotic motions, the kissing ass and grinding work and worry and doubt and fever. Talk about clearing the air! One often had the feeling, after reading a particularly compelling entry or thread, of being pragmatically empowered: yes, the pathway was strewn with shit, but weren’t we better for knowing this? As we pranced down the primrose path of the profession, we could attempt to hop, skip, and jump as best as we could, in Cordovans, loafers, high-heeled clogs, Hooker boots, or flip-flops, the shared pitfalls of the experience. These warnings serve community, serve the idea that we need to help each other, reflect an investment in ourselves and each other, both as interlocutors within the profession as well as considering ourselves worthy and deserving of assistance and support.

I still sometimes forlornly return to the site, hoping somehow that IA is back, has said something, has dusted off the old html and is back in business. But in fact the site has been frozen since August 2004. For a brief moment, the Invisible Adjunct was a siren, and although the academic blogosphere has continued developing apace, we have yet to attain another site, another agora, that functions in the same way as this one did. Indeed, the Invisible Adjunct was a labour of love, for ourselves as academics as for our collective as a profession, and represented an incredible amount of quotidian work that perhaps few of us wish to entertain. In any event, the example of the Invisible Adjunct represents still the possibilities that draw many of us to the web, and therefore on some level also reflects the developing and rich heritage of academic blogging as a critical and necessary alternative to "the Official Story," in ways similar to other effects of blogging on public and social discourse (I am thinking here of the profound shifts caused by explicitly political blogging).

Wherever she is, wherever she has gone to, I hope that our beloved Invisible Adjunct has found a better place, and that she realises the incredible influence she had on so many, and also that she is deeply, profoundly remembered, and missed.

Sous l'arbre avec M. Gordo

Mr. Gordo was here in Cold City over the weekend. I was going to post a narrative about what we did until I realised that a) we didn't really do anything "special," due to the inclement weather Cold City has been having of late, and b) because of (a), there was really nothing to report, other than restaurants in Cold City do lunch and brunch quite well but for supper stick to the appetizers or eat in. Take it from those who know.

Of course, requisite snuggling, DVD watching, shopping, visiting with friends like Prancilla, and quiet conversations regarding our complicated and interstitial futures did occur. When we lived together, Mr. Gordo and I made quite the passionate pair, arguing about the little quotidian things that drive all couples crazy: laundry, dishes, errands. In fact, we seemed, to our friends at the very least, to argue as much as cloyingly cooing at one another. With two Latino men sharing a household, what does one expect? Now that our time together is compressed and discrete, we no longer can afford that particular insane luxury, which on some level has distilled our relationship like a fine, expensive bourbon: all warmth, no burn.

Amusingly, now when Mr. Gordo and I discuss our once and future potential reunions living in the same city again, be that Madrid, New York, Toronto, Montréal, Buenos Aires or Caracas, we imagine two distinct apartments connected to a singular bedroom, a modern gay version of Diego and Frida.

The rain stopped briefly and the sun came out in honour of our romantic promenade in a local nature reserve, where Mr. Gordo snapped the photo above. Satie fills my head at moments like this, although we were in fact very, very far from the Palais Royale.

Dreaming Spires (Part Three): Becoming Myself

As I have composed this series of entries on my undergraduate experience at Prestigious Eastern U, what seemed at the beginning as a simple narrative exposition has become something different. It has, in fact, been remarkably difficult to reconstruct a memoir that is both personally emotionally resonant and yet resists simple narcissism. I think this struggle with the word also represents, to a certain extent, the incredibly subjective nature of experience, and the challenge of communicating such subjectivity with an eye towards connecting the personal to the larger metasocial narratives of politics, identity, social and cultural formations, and the like. The left-feminist political truism of “the personal is political” might be easy shorthand for these desires of communication, these desires for connection, but putting the pieces together is actually in fact not as easy as the rhythm of a slogan, something that not only feminists of the eighties discovered to their peril but also we students and activists on the left when confronted with the complicated politics of similarities, differences, and the powerful force of identity politics of the time.

In the eighties, we weren’t terribly interested in the question of the weld, the problem of the connection, although we were forging new connections as we destroyed old ones. I remember one moment in particular, concerning my involvement with PU’s MEChA (El Movimiento Estudiantíl Chicano de Aztlán), the Chicano student organisation. In the spring of my freshman year, I met La Martina, an older undergrad returned from a year stint in Houston as a waiter/hustler, in the spring of my first year. I first saw him in the large undergraduate eatery, at the salad bar with a green sports coat, big hair, and a prominent pink triangle on his lapel. Like my clique, La Martin would be instrumental in teaching me about being Chicano and gay and intellectual and critical. His gay mentorship, his introduction of classic gay camp culture, including the use of “she,” his later touring with me of the gay Chicana/o bar and club scene back home in Los Angeles, gave me a language that was both sexualised, racialised, local (Los Angeles and the Chicana/o Southwest), and global (PU and the Anglo world). Together with him, several other locas (gay Chicanos), Chicana feminist women students, and under the aegis of a liberal and feminist assistant dean, MEChA was substantially changed through a gay and feminist velvet revolution that displaced the older, nationalist, and more heterosexist leadership pool. In the rush of our heady moment, a group of us “feminists and fags” marched to the campus post office and primary crossroads of student life that provided display space, in wooden, glass-fronted boxes mounted on the walls, for undergraduate organizations.

In an exhilarating moment, we opened the box and tore down the old, shop-worn cardboard display of Aztec gods and goddesses that graced MEChA’s organization display. At the time, such displays of sixties iconography struck us as embarrassingly retrograde. We considered ourselves young Chicana/o postmoderns, more concerned with anglophone music, fashion, and political values and struggles than with the myths and gods of a distant, heteronormative, and seemingly superfluous past. The fact that we never got around to recreating any sort of replacement that approached the archaic quality of the cardboard diorama of Aztec serpents we unceremoniously dumped into a trashcan was unimportant. The feeling at the time was that we were all actors in a play of great importance, a shift of thought. We were collectively involved in a feminist and gay rearticulation of the meanings of Chicanismo, a project that was not without its attendant campus critics, but one that we felt was ascendant. What is key here is the joy, the sheer pleasure of acting together, moving together, the pleasure of being one in a group of like-minded people, the power of the collective on the individual, and how the collective was composed of idiosyncratic individuals. That one was, in the end, not alone.

This example of MEChA and the feeling we had of being on the cusp of a zeitgeist carried over to other activities and the general student atmosphere at PU, whether debating politics in the local pizzerias or engaging in combat in other student organisations, meetings, dining hall arguments, classroom discussions. The personal became the political that then became the personal yet again, the endless cycle of criticism, debate, and contestation. My experience of education at PU, broadly understood, was thus largely extracurricular and social, I suppose like any traditional collegiate environment. I remember little of most of the classes I took, a handful of influential professors and TAs, my senior project advisor (whom I remain close to today), certain moments in classes, the dullness of Art History survey with its hours of memorising titles and genres, but the whirlwind of memories are focused around the personal, around what was happening outside of the classroom, in meetings and dining halls and dances and parties and trips to New York and Boston and DC and after my sophomore year, humid summers at PU, working minimally and drinking maximally.

Here the effect of the actual intellectual training is obscure, but forms a crucial foundation. For what was being said in this or that social or organisational moment was deeply influenced by debates raging in classes and among the faculty at the time, over post-structuralist theory, woman of colour feminism, “post-modernity,” the initial undergrad importation of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School (whom I first read in a seminar called “The Decline of Britain”), the demand of PU undergrads to be accountable to their education, both in light of the elitist reputation of the place, as well as the competitive vigour of the undergrads in and out of the classroom. To wit, my career as an unreconstructed essentialist ended in a course on Black women's fiction, taught by an up and coming feminist professor who would go on to great fame in the nineties. Why this ended at that moment was the realisation of the gulf between theory and practise, between easy rhetorical solidarities and the hard realities of working to conceive the subject, the place of speaking, and where that rubber meets the road of differences, self-aggrandisements, delusion, ego and egomania.

What I learned at PU was the embricated and interconnected nature of my identity, as a person of colour, as a gay man, as a future professional from the working class, as a light-skinned person in a white supremacist society, as a consumer, as a poor person with an elite certification, as a person of colour with a white certification. I learned how to coherently take apart an argument, how to write, how to speak, how to intone, how to behave in a variety of social situations, which fork to use and what not to do. I mastered the art of subtlety, the art of flattery, the art of the attack. I learned the differences between “real” formal clothes and the off-the-rack numbers I had brought with me from California, I learned how to shop, how to appreciate a $300 pair of shoes, how to buy a shirt or tie, how to discern “class” from the perspective of the upper echelons, how to present an image of oneself that avoided or ameliorated questions. The key concept here would be the material power of representation, the “realness” of the queens of Paris is Burning: “Do they see me?"

I was educated in genteel racism and homophobia, about silent unpleasantness and discomforts, about the meanings of inside and outside, and how one could straddle, dangerously, both at the same time. I grew into several interchangeable skins, to be worn at will, to be displayed and performed when desired or necessary. I learned about power, in essence, and I had the initial inculcation into a practicum of caution surrounding a lot of these questions and challenges, the cold realisation that answers to complicated questions would not be found in sloganeering and the politics of reflex. Most of these things were perfected following my time there, but all were crucially informed by my experience at PU, if only for the fact that these identities were learned, taught in the particular milieu of the university at that place and time.

“I left home and became myself.”

Does this mean I wasn’t a person of colour, or gay, or what have you, before hand? No, of course not, although identity does change through life. For myself, the family provided a base to move away from, but could not alone or simply support the person I needed to become. Rather, it is to say that the particular and peculiar expressions that I give these articulations of self (racial, sexual, gendered, economic) are ones that, ironically, are largely grounded in the foundational narratives of myself as a young adult and student intellectual at PU. They are performative honoraria, even as they shift, grow, and transform, of a specific time and place and series of actors: The clique, La Martina, Big Sis, my senior project advisor, other friends like La Zeez and La Connaire, and the professors and the TAs and other undergrads and books and dances and articles and parties and ideas and experiences and memories and standpoints I would take with me into graduate school and subsequently the profession and my life inside and outside of academia. My own personal and experiential curriculum vitae that represents who and what I am.

To return to this series of moments in these posts has been emotionally draining, which I have found surprising. When I began them, last week, I was excited by the opportunity to revisit a complex and meaningful time in my life. Now, at the conclusion, I feel both exhausted with the effort of communication as well as feeling acutely the power of the limitations of the personal narrative as explicatory epistemology, although obviously one feeds the other. The danger of relying on experience as a teleological guide has been examined in some detail in the work of feminists (I am thinking here in particular of the work of Joan Scott), but it is one thing to read the theory and another to live it. This is the moment when I think we as academics, as intellectuals, have some trouble smoothing over the edges, resolving the contradictions, squaring the circle.

To take seriously the challenge of postmodernity, or late modernity, or perhaps just the messy historical, social, and economic moment we are living through, paraphrasing The Fierceness, is to embrace the abyss, the free fall of indeterminacy, which is a rather fancy way of saying that certainty is a luxury we not only can no longer afford, but more importantly is no longer available as a fantastical state of being. Certainty, however, is like a warm blanket on a cold morning: it promises comfort and reassurance and the smell of cinnamon and sugar wafting through the house. It is hard to live in reality (read the paper if you don’t believe me), but the alternative seems to be a comfortable place in a pot on the stove, the metaphor of the slowly cooking frog that has become almost de rigueur in the left blogosphere of late. The brilliance of The Matrix was to put these questions in an accessible pop form: Consciousness is hard, but is also a requirement for both adulthood and citizenship. As I peruse the silken pages of the alumni magazine now, I wonder about the role of consciousness in what could pass as the greatest moment of historical sleep walking in our nation’s history. When you are living, as the current undergrads at PU are, in the middle of a brocaded pillow, how is it possible to achieve some critical distance? There are, in classic intellectual style, no singular answers to this question, only more questions. For of course the consciousness of which I speak here is not a unitary state, but a series of fragments, passing views, pieces out of which we somehow craft a reality.

For this is certainly one thing I learned well at PU, even as (or perhaps because) the university itself was imbued in fantasy projections: things are quite often not as they seem, and excavating the self leads not to the singular omniscient subject but rather to a series of pathways and streams that are remarkable for the ways in which they are unconnected, random, divergent, and contradictory and par hasard. In short, I became, like Yellow Mary in Daughters of the Dust, "ruin't," in my case for the metanarratives of self. But better ruined than Stepford. For like Yellow Mary, I choose a certain freedom in exchange for certainty, and as we hear so often nowadays, "freedom ain't free," although in this instance this has a very different valence of meaning.

Dreaming Spires (Part Two): The Enigma of Arrival

I first knew, as in cognitive recognition, that I was gay as I sat in the practice session for my 6th grade graduation. It was a sunny, hot southern Californian afternoon, and we were gathered for what passed as my primary school’s “auditorium,” which was really just a large room with linoleum tile and big windows that looked out onto eucalyptus trees. I was 12 years old, just becoming aware of myself in space, and I considered myself terribly ugly. I was fat (a butterball with sticks for arms and legs), I had big puffy unruly hair. Worse, I had to wear, in approximately seven hours, a really ill-fitting polyester grey suit (size: Boys “Husky”) from Sears, when suddenly, the answer to a series of inchoate questions roaming around in my head for maybe a year or so hit me like a ton of bricks: I’m gay.

I remember being remarkably calm at this revelation, neither orchestra soaring nor slasher movie sound effects, as clueless sixth graders mangled the stage choreography of the increasingly put-upon Choir teacher, and the rest of us shifted in our chairs, bored, in our heads. At that moment, my naïve 12-year old brain made a firm yet practical resolution: well, that’s that, and my family will just have to deal. Punto, final.

Fast-forward six years. I’m not sure where that resolution went, but it came to be lost. As I progressed through junior and senior high, a growth spurt turning me from a meatball with legs into a tall, moderately handsome “big guy,” my sexuality retreated like Napoleon’s armies in the face of a Russian winter, and I threw myself, like so many other brainy LGBT folks I know, into books, ideas, the life of the (teenaged) mind, as a displacement for what my heterosexual peers were exploring in real time: French kissing, bodies, feelings, the placement of various genitalia, birth control. What I did gain, through my rigorous work and sublimation of my sexuality, was a 4.0 GPA and a cream coloured letter with a Latin crest granting me a place as a freshman at Prestigious Eastern U.

Such was the fortuitous set of circumstances that led me to the particular place and time that was Prestigious Eastern U in the mid eighties. It was not only to this place where I would learn a series of lessons on what it meant to be a PU undergraduate and as such being a member of a particular intellectual class and caste, but also who I was as a sexual, cultural, and national person, in tension with other variants of the same models present at an arguably unique time, the mid eighties, when political lassitude reigned in the public sphere, but colleges and universities were seething with racial, gendered, and sexual tensions, and theory was on the rise. This series of posts began as an effort to explain, to a fellow collegiate traveller, the dimensions of my experience at a shared place, but in different times. And although lumped together with its sister schools, PU always seemed to me, at the time and subsequently, to be unique in its odd combination of oligarchic power, radical sexuality and race discourses, and critical student cultures. Universities are constantly evolving organisms, and as such their tenor changes from moment to moment. My PU is one grounded in a certain place and time, familiar to myself and others who shared its temporal and spatial and intellectual elevations and exhilarations, but potentially unknown to others before or after. It is, above all, a personal story of a particular time, a particular place, and a peculiar gathering of like-minded souls.

When the special freshmen issue of the Prestigious Eastern U student newspaper arrived the summer before my first year, I devoured it in one gulp. It was a telling issue, full of stories rife with sexual innuendo and proclamations of alternative sexualities, bisexual dating strategies, double-entendres, and Lesbian and Gay (the B and T would come many years later) organizations, dances, and protests. Oh, sure, it also had articles on how to select courses out of the voluminous catalogue available to undergraduates, how to negotiate roommates, all the quotidian stuff of “special freshman issues.” The sexual angle, however, left me a bit shocked, for by this time I just figured I would be in the closet my entire life, so deadened were my horizons. The titillation of the issue, which I would discover later was of course intentional, designed to shock, didn’t immediately promise a period of liberation. I didn’t see myself marching out under an arc of rainbow balloons. Instead it made me very, very nervous. As it did my mother, who made little commentary but from her face it was apparent she was less than pleased her “str8” son was being sent to some Eastern Sodom and Gomorrah. We were nervous, together.

I arrived at PU that August three weeks early, to participate with about 80 other freshmen in a pre-college “minority” student program that no longer exists in the same form, for a number of reasons (a recent perusal of the student newspaper website reveals that the program now has a trendy multi-culti name, something ridiculous like “Cultural Jambalaya,” and is open to all freshmen/first year students, with the exact same critiques of it made twenty years ago: it marginaliises students of colour, limits their connection to white PU, makes them “angry”). The program had been started in the seventies, when PU, like many elite institutions, had responded to the demands for increasing student diversity triggered by the social movements of the sixties and the rise of Ethnic Studies curricula by literally going into barrios and ghettos and seemingly grabbing any able-bodied local brain who was Black and/or Latina/o, dragging them up to campus, and enrolling them.

Needless to say, this institutional methodology had its downsides, low retention, chemical addiction and a markedly pronounced higher rate of suicide being the most prominent, which makes perfect sense if you imagine, in the seventies, taking students of colour and dropping them onto the big white powder puff that was PU at the time with absolutely no support. So, originally this special program for “minorities” had been an affirmative action support program to help students of colour “transition.” But by the time I had arrived, PU, like its sister schools, had figured out the magic formula that is still very much in vogue today: draw most of your students of colour from your base, which is to say, the middle- and upper classes, the professional class, the BoBos, the rich, with a few extraordinary exemplars from the lesser classes to balance it all out.

None of us needed the remedial aspects of the program itself, arranged around writing workshops, supplemented by lectures on student life at PU by politicised undergraduates who warned us about white racism and generally freaked us all out (the purported “anger” of the program would come later, when we found out for ourselves how true it was). At this point, in the mid eighties, although we were all aware of ourselves as affirmative action currency for the institution, we also were all “qualified,” some of us extraordinarily so, and in any event much more some special groups on campus, such as the “legacies” that always took their fair share of places among each incoming class, dullards almost to the last, yet lacking the requisite outrage of newspaper editorials and op-ed pieces. Acting affirmatively for whiteness, which was the constituency at the time for almost all legacies, rarely raises the ire of anybody, depressingly enough. Those advantages, not based on merit but race and class intertwined (here white upper-class families), are in this instance chalked up to the truism “life is unfair,” and left unexamined.

Most of the students of colour in the program came from well-regarded private schools along the eastern seaboard, or the famously rigorous elite public schools of New York City. Those of us from working class backgrounds, while perhaps not as culturally sophisticated, were on par with their technical training. This rift between old expectations of deficiency and new realities of preparation gave the program an effect that was, in short, bizarre. What it was worthy for was the fact that we got free room and board for the duration of the program, and the chance to socialise amongst ourselves and find a niche way before school actually started. Although in retrospect I think this program was kooky, at best, it was the beginning of a particular approach, a place of critique, which is what made it both so controversial and influential for those of us who attended it.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, PU had a history of homosociality stretching back to the turn of the century. Many of the most famous early and mid-century American gay male cultural producers had attended as undergraduates, and the place practically vibrated with their energy. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but to wit, met my first queen as I first climbed the stairs of my entryway hauling a very heavy and ugly blue trunk filled with Agree shampoo, clothes, shoes, and other assorted and unnecessary freshman junk. Ms. Truffles, as he would later be known, came flouncing down the stairs with his very proper and elegant black Georgian mother in tow, very big hair, very well done, I still remember. Miss Truffles was 5’5,” thin, small, mahogany, with very short cropped hair, and clearly, evidently, obviously, irredeemably gay. We exchanged pleasantries, and he told me many months later, as he continued with his mother to lunch, she said, “I thought you said this was a program for minority students?” To which Miss Truffles, never short of a quick answer for anything, answered, “Maybe he’s Jewish.”

In short order, an odd clique had formed during the program, which consisted of several gay men of colour (including myself and Miss Truffles, although none of us were out at the time of its forming) and several women of colour, all from different races and economic classes. This group would wax and wane, lose a few members along the way (drama!), but remain, somehow, linked, through different dorms, friendship circles, majors, and traumas. After school started, the clique (or as it began to be derisively called by the prep school crowd, “The Circus”) generally took meals together, socialised together, attended dances as a group, and stalked the pathways and lawns of PU as a group, done up in our finest eighties regalia of strange asymmetrical haircuts, trench coats and big book bags slung on our shoulders, Doc Martins and turtlenecks, later (sophomore year) with cigarettes and ennui. As extraordinary as PU said we were (which is also how we came to think of ourselves), we were like most college students: scared, intimidated, emotionally overwhelmed. These ordinary pressures were compounded by racial and class sentiment that exacerbated the vertigo most freshmen feel. We retreated into the clique, somewhat uncritically, as a place to mount a defense. Personally, even with the uneven support of the clique, for of course the clique had tensions and layers, my first year at PU was remarkably difficult: I was lonely, freaked out being so far away from my home life, and confronting significant changes in my self-conception.

Everyone in the clique had a particular visual fashion look that could generously be described as “New Wave,” and as such were different from most other white students, with their classic prep look of J. Press slacks, rep ties, Laura Ashley dresses, keggers, and Bruce Springsteen. The tentative enforcement of these institutional social norms in those first few weeks, however, tended to reassert the importance of the clique as a space apart. For the Freshman Address, I realised to my shame that my formal clothes paled in comparison to my white roommates’ collection: my pleather loafers with rubber soles and off-the-rack navy sports coat with cheap plastic buttons, purchased at Mervyn’s, made me self-conscious next to the army of handsome young men sporting the brothers Brook. I never wore those clothes again, deciding the algebra of whiteness and the upper class in that regard was not worth my time, but in reality too painful a reminder of the true material differences between PU undergrads (I would return to this sartorial primer later, however).

Even with its overwhelming prep atmosphere, PU had always had its share of nut jobs and eccentrics, of which we were just the latest examples. To wit, student sartorial and social pageantry at PU in the early part of the eighties had centred around Brideshead Revisted passion plays acted out against the backdrop of late nineteenth century Gothic buildings: bicycles and linen dresses and white sweaters flung around shoulders and flannels and monocles, a sort of upper class drag show acted out side by side with an actual real drag scene on campus, with my Big Sis as a “lady” columnist for the student newspaper, attending President’s teas as a student’s “mother,” and presided over the inventive and ironic drag shows for GLAD week.

For whatever reason, when my class arrived, this scene had petered out somewhat (not the least of which is that Big Sis had decamped to Paris on an extended leave; I would meet him when we were seniors, when he returned to finish his degree). But especially after a prominent story in a conservative New York daily the summer before my arrival had profiled the “sexual degeneracy” happening on campus (to much alumni and governing board hoo-hah) and a widely publicised and controversial hate incident around GLAD week the year before where PU couldn’t decide whether to expel the offender or let him return to complete his studies, the sense of play had been lost. For all the liberality of the place, PU remained a conservative elite institution, and the outrageous flouncing about of the campus racial and sexual others was not all fun and games, in the end. Acts of random homophobic and racial violence were more common than would be thought, with faggots and dykes parading about in costume dramas and the appropriate cultural centres on campus, but one (visibility) is clearly related to another (violence).

The latter half of the eighties were darker, more brooding, where the upper class fantasies of Brideshead Revisted gave way to hard knuckle racial and sexual identity politics, both in student organizations as well as the classroom and the dorms. This identity politics, which was informed by and mimicked other debates happening in feminism and racial politics, was at this time for us fairly one-dimensional, “radical,” and positivist. Compared to the insouciance and visual splendour of the previous generation of PU “personalities,” we were sober, deadly serious, and grim. We were, in bell hooks’ phrase, “young soldiers for the revolution.” We were unreconstructed and unsophisticated positivists. We believed in the unitary subject, essential Blackness and Brownness and Gayness, and simple paradigms like “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution,” a political zeitgeist that Mahku later, in graduate school, described as “Button politics.” That is to say, the simple performance of the political (for example, placing the appropriate button on one’s lapel or book bag) is sufficient, and in my first two years at PU, indeed this was enough for most of us. It matched the Vanity Fair of desire and projection that typified the student culture at PU at the time.

My clique joined a number of others that either rapidly formed among the freshmen or existed before our arrival: prep school crowds linked by school or family, jocks, nerds, other “cool” cliques of colour, activists, lesbian heiresses, art fags, pre-Meds and Pre-Laws and English majors, the whole assortment of oddbins that make up most collegiate campuses, perhaps made slightly more unusual by the elite status of PU, but only just. The powerful atmosphere of open, vibrant, and questioning lesbian and gay sexuality, coupled with the intense race politics of the place at the time, enabled us to imagine ourselves as both racial and sexual beings, and our political motivations met the personal in tangible ways.

Within two months our arrival at PU, every man in our clique had come out, in one way or another. My own coming out has a bit of the wet noodle about it, but happened almost simultaneously to the other men in the clique (which oddly enough we never shared with each other. We just one day became openly gay, like Venus became the Xtravaganza). By this time, the Gay and Lesbian Co-operative types had noticed us on campus as had the gaggle of lesbian heiresses who hung out in the undergraduate library loudly and lasciviously commenting on any woman who would walk by and making out for passing strangers.

It was in a lounge in this library in October of my freshman year, on big crayola coloured sofa chairs, that a particularly fey junior member of the GLC asked me point blank whether I was “bi or gay.” Until this moment, I had not decided exactly whether or not I had a public identity as a sexual person, but almost instantly answered “I’m Gay.” He nodded, and we moved on to another topic. The earth did not part, the ceiling didn’t collapse, and he didn’t gasp. My personal resolution to myself as a 12-year old was finally fulfilled, six years and three thousand miles later. No doubt the ease of this moment was aided by the open and invigourating atmosphere of sexual and social questioning at a place like PU, but afterwards I couldn’t get over the fact that aside from all this, everyone already knew! “Glass closets,” as we came to call them, were not uncommon at a place like PU, where many men and women had undergone similar formative processes to my own. It was no accident there seemed to be a higher quotient of lesbians and gay men on campus, for we had all worked our butts off to get there, for the most part, almost as if an unconscious force drove us forward to reach a place where we could become ourselves.

The different ways in which we began to put together the puzzles of our various strands of identity at PU in our first two years would determine, largely, those of us who would go on to become artists, cultural producers, professors, teachers, and non-profit mavens, and others who would slide into and disappear within bourgeois conventionality, to be seen occasionally in class notes remarking on their dream wedding in Prague, the birth of their second daughter and their impending move to trade bonds in London/Tokyo/Chicago/Los Angeles/Dallas. These later decisions and fates cut across the lines of essentialism so important to us in those years. They seemed less grounded in identity, per se, and more in the processes of intellectual and social formations of our individual experiences. In short, the dramas and flings and politics brewing between us as undergraduates would have tangible, lasting effects on the course of our lives that were impossible to see at the time, in the heady rush of the crowd.

(Next: Will Success Ruin Oso Raro?)

Dreaming Spires (Part One): The Rocky Road of the Egghead Penitente

Make a firm decision it's time to go
That's for you to find out and for me to know
No more hard times or petty crimes
Forget that life I have left behind
The night goes by
leaving you behind me as I fly
then rise the daylight sky
How do you get to heaven if you never try?

New life, new love
Where's the heart I was dreaming of?
I need a new hope, new dream
another part in a different scene

— Pet Shop Boys

This post started out as a rather elongated email to the fabulous La Lecturess on a recently discovered shared connection, and her post on the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of teaching and institutional space. This led me to thinking about the influence of our first inculcation into the profession, which is usually at our undergraduate institutions. It is here that many of us for the first time are able to conceive of both conceptually and materially the dimensions of the academic life, which however unaware of it we may be at the time, will also someday be our own. So this is a sort of love letter not only to La Lecturess, written across collegiate generations, but also a strange love letter to Prestigious Eastern U itself, my first academic paramour, filled with both loathing and love.

I have written before about Prestigious Eastern U, in a variety of guises: the importance of its symbolic value to myself and my family as “American achievement,” the life-altering changes it provided/enforced, both upon my worldview and my familial relationships, the socio-cultural meaning of “going back East” for a Californian and Westerner. All of these things contribute to and influence my memories of PU, both of the specific time and place that it was in the eighties, as well as returning to it now, either in memory or in person or through my relationships crafted and sustained from that time. Perhaps like some other starry-eyed undergraduates, my time there would determine almost whole cloth the person I would go on to become, the professional I am, the intellectual I am. Its name spoken out loud is almost like a magical talisman, a spell, bringing a hush to the disquietude of voices in a room. While I have discovered that this name alone will not get you much in the end, what it does give you is that one, brief, fleeting moment of respect, or alternatively, recognition, which is not necessarily a function of its actual quality of education and training, but speaks to how we, in our new bold and troublesome meritocracy, give weight to these things in the same way that old family names had in the 19th century. However, the magical transformative quality of the uttered word of PU also speaks to the two-way effect of its alchemic glamour, for such a powerful weapon transforms those who use it as much as it effect others. And I tend to think of my time at PU in this way, as an apprenticeship into various modalities of life (Anglo-ness, American-ness, Power, “Literacy,” “Intelligence,” Influence, Reputation), almost like Hogwarts, a witchy training and transformation into another, different, luminous creature.

Over the weekend, before my thankfully brief end of term illness, Prancilla, Zilla, and I ventured downtown for a bit of quotidian shopping. Miss Prancilla and Zilla insist, for some strange reason, on going to dance classes on the weekends, exhausting themselves in what I jokingly refer to as “bringing down the spirit,” then like homosexuals everywhere seemingly, seek to relax in a shopping milieu. All of which is fine by me, except for the dance class. So, after their dance fever, we went to Target for some household nothings, then hit Crate and Barrel for glasses and stemware, as Mr. Gordo is coming for a visit next week and I would love to serve him a fine wine in something more elegant and appropriate than a coffee mug. However, since they arrive after their Olivia Newton-John workout, their blood sugar is typically low, and they insisted, for whatever strange reasons that have to do with hypoglycemia, to partake in hot dogs chez Target. Not really my cup of tea, but I sat with them. In between Prancilla complaining about the quality of the bun (hypoglycemia certainly, for the Target canteen is not exactly a Parisian boulangerie) and then morosely and deliberately consuming his Target Dog, we attempted a conversation on race that revealed as much about the differences and similarities between Black Americans and Latinas/os as it did about the individualities of experience.

Prancilla was asking me a series of questions essentially about racial identification, and my family’s perception of itself. For me, these conversations are always given a frisson through the simple fact that in my quotidian experience, I pass as an Anglo. Visually, to the “untrained and even the trained eye,” I give Anglo realness (although like Irene on the terrace in Larsen’s Passing, being recognised is always a strange experience, but it does happen on occasion, usually when my hair is extremely short and I look "like a thug" [a characterisation of my beloved Skanque Huore], which is hardly a racial compliment: “¡Hepa, Carnal!”). And for the passing person, one’s racial identification is always complicated, in the connections we maintain (or alternatively, refute) in a white supremacist society. However, as I tried to explain to Prancilla, in my personal experience, my family never discussed race, per se. The differences between ourselves as hispanophone-identified New Mexicans and other Mexicans and Mexican Americans, as well as Anglos and Asian Americans and African Americans, were almost exclusively conceived of and coded in cultural terms: language, religious practice, cultural and social standpoints that recognised and pathologised the Anglo/American as uncivilised, brutal, and alien, a necessary but distasteful evil.

In a perspective that will be familiar to most New Mexicans, we considered ourselves a tribe apart, speaking an archaic form of Spanish, calling ourselves “Español” without irony (for most New Mexicans are in fact mestizos, miscegenated mixed blooded people) with specific and isolated cultural and social practices that my maternal family did its best to preserve in a Californian and Rocky Mountain diaspora. The fact that this project utterly failed for my generation, raised outside of New Mexico, speaks not only to the powerful effects of assimilation and technological modernity (my mother, for instance, spent her formative years in the fifties on a ranch with no running water or electricity, speaking 16th century Spanish and witness to the brutal passion plays of Easter), but also to the dislocating effects of the displacement of culture by race in that transformation. My family never thought of itself as racialised, exactly, although that perception was distinctly affected by individual variations in skin color (for, like many Black and Latina/o families, mine was a myriad of different physical phenotypes, from very dark-skinned to blond). Raised in California away from the “culture” milieu of my mother and grandparents, however, I did think of myself in racial (i.e. American) terms, as a mestizo Chicano from a working class barrio.

This digression into race is crucial to my perception of my time at PU, not only for the socio-cultural context that I entered with, but also because I think (as my family did as well) that PU served as the engine of my accelerated assimilation into the American mainstream, a process begun in American K-12 education, but solidly cemented at PU. And this is complicated, if what I am saying is true, that my time at PU leads directly to the professor and intellectual and person that I am. The bad reputation assimilation has garnered since the sixties can be simplistic, for most people tend to think of assimilation as a one-way ticket to the glue factory: in goes the old horse, out comes a neat, white, American bottle of Elmer’s. This particular pathology of assimilation, which regards the final product as “monstrous” (viz. Sollors), is also terribly one-dimensional, and as such typically American in its pastoral, naïve vision of our previous, unadulterated, uncorrupted selves. Obviously, it is a more complex process. Culture is not an object: it is not material; it cannot be lost, like a wallet or an ATM card. Outside of the theory, however, we tend to think about culture as armature, as a thing, and we look for the appropriate clues and signs of its preservation, as a guide to the authentic, the true uncorrupted self. Was I more real as the precocious but provincial chubby Chicano from northeast LA wearing "fake" Vans from Payless and terry-cloth tennis shorts? Or am I more real as the sophisticated professor (still gordo) who uses big words and shops at Crate and Barrel in pressed shirts, wearing Brooks Brothers boxer shorts under his slacks? Should I sport a serape and huaraches, or a western shirt and bolo tie and cowboy hat, a peasant hat, an embroidered blouse, a crucifix with a statue of Guadalupe in the garden? These are not only sartorial choices, but speak to how we project and read culture and identity in remarkably one-dimensional ways. In any event, I don’t have the carriage for the embroidered blouse, although my Big Sis does, or did, before he became a fireplug.

All of which is to say, my passage into PU precipitated a series of familial crises that were unanticipated by either myself or my family, based in “culture” but really about race and sexuality and authenticity. Upon one of my last trips home, at the end of my time at PU, my mother openly declared that I had become an Anglo, in a tormented and vicious argument made more surreal by the fact that I had come down with severe strep throat and was feverish and delirious as she screamed at me and I sullenly listened. But this Anglo identity, what was it exactly? It was clearly the fact that I had gone to PU and returned a different (gay) person. I remember her words exactly, for they were powerful: “I don’t even know who you are anymore! I would rather you’d have become a mechanic, than what you are! And if you get sick, don’t even think you can come back here and I’ll take care of you, cause it’s not gonna happen!” The irony is that on this trip home my mother had sworn me to secrecy about my sexuality, to which I acquiesced only to keep the fragile (and clearly temporary) peace. This then exploded openly in this argument, for my cousin Lisa was in the kitchen making us lunch, and we were not quiet. Needless to say, the cat was definitely, um, out of the bag.

In short, a series of different coded themes collapse in this painful, and ultimately final argument, between us: Race (“who you are”), class (“rather … a mechanic”), sexuality (“sick” i.e. HIV disease, or “AIDS”). Writing about it, over fifteen years later, still gives me a little nausea. My mother, of course, is not here to defend herself, and no doubt she would have a different version of these events. I don’t think she was a bad person, necessarily, although her words here, filtered through memory, are ugly. But they do represent real pain and fear at change, changes that get read in a series of different ways that on one hand are very general and on the other speak to the specific conditions of Latina/o life in the USA.

What is compelling is that many of the Chicanas/os I knew at PU were having similar tortured arguments with their families at roughly the same time: Who are you? This was especially true for those of us who were LGBT or str8 women, so these tropes are gendered and sexualised as well as racialised. This is a theme for many educated US Latinas/os, whose families fear losing them to the machinations of Anglo culture. There is a remarkably poignant and painful scene in the brilliant documentary Fear and Loathing at Hoover Elementary, which details the turmoil caused by Proposition 187 on one inner city elementary school in Los Angeles, as a Chicana staff member recalls her family’s brutal migrant labour background, the difficulty of the labour itself and of the life of the farmworker, her struggle to study hard, to get into a good school, and the ambivalence of hope, pride, fear, and revulsion her admission to Stanford caused her family, who let her go but without their blessing. Our achievements become weapons used against us, from both family (“you’ve changed”) and society (“You’re only here because of affirmative action”).

Does this misrecognition of ourselves in the most intimate mirror possible (the family) speak to the unavoidable nature of assimilation or its destructive properties? It seems to be a bit of both, in the sense that ambition drives us out of the home, often supported by our families, but education involves significant shifts and transformations that are then misunderstood or resented by family and community, for what occurs in the cauldron of education is above all an individual process. Indeed, did I return from PU a different person? Yes, arguably a better person, and closer to myself, who I consider that self to be, than the closeted and scared state I had been in before. Did I betray my family and community and culture in this process? If one thinks of culture as static, then yes, I was la traidora, in Moraga’s powerful phraseology, from “a long line of vendidas.” It is these dynamics that often have scholars of colour running around like madwomen trying to justify their presence to themselves as much as to Anglo/white society.

But, in more contemplative and self-possessed moments, I think we need to allow ourselves praise, appreciation, care. To paraphrase Hanif Kureishi’s Rosie, “I left home and became myself.”

On the eve of my departure for PU, as we finished the packing and prepared to depart for LAX, my mother gave me a schmaltzy Hallmark card of a sand castle, with actual coloured sand glued to the image. I still have this card, in a box in Skanque Huore's garage, safely hidden away, for looking at the card brings me great pain. Inside she had written, "Make yourself a dream at [PU]." I did go on to do this, wildly successful beyond my own dreams at that moment, but in the end, my dream and her dream turned out to be radically and incompatibly different.

(to be continued)

Some Thoughts on the End of the School Year

One mistake’s all it takes
And your life has come undone
Walk away cause you’re breaking up the girl
It’s a drag
I know it’s hard
But you’re tearing her apart
Walk away cause you’re breaking up the girl

— Garbage

Tonight was my last class. All that remains of the school year is the final grading. I am teaching in the summertime, so I only have a brief respite, but even summer teaching cannot kill the special joy that accompanies the formal end of the official school year. I am, like most of the professoriate now or in the immediate future, knackered. Especially given that over a cold and non-stop rainy weekend in Cold City, my annual end of term cold/flu/breakdown came early, and I spent Sunday wrapped in Proustian neurasthenics, feverish and uncomfortable. If only it was that picturesque, for I was lacking both the linden tea and the madeleines, but I did have 1 litre Evian bottles, cans of cold Fresca, and NPR purring in the background to my innumerable and delirious cat naps throughout the day and into the evening. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to actually hold class today, but my fever broke this morning and suddenly reenergised (in a puddle of sweat), I managed to actually get it together not only to make it to class but also purchase the requisite “goodies” for the final day: pecan buns, oatmeal raisin and peanut butter-chocolate chunk cookies. A veritable carbo overload!

Because I neglected to order my regalia by the ordering deadline, I am blissfully spared the civic graduation ceremony (I absolutely refuse to go if I can’t tramp it up in the academic version of Capote's Black and White Ball, only much less exclusive and all in black). And while I wish I had a whole three months of glamourous candy-eating and slovenly habits ahead of me, my summer class offers not only extra income, desperately needed to have six weeks of glamourous candy-eating and slovenly habits, but is also in a subject area that I love to teach, and promises to be a small but competent class. I am still waiting on my Persephone moment, "emerging from the depths" in Didion's memorable phrase, but am not sure whether that will happen in the next two weeks or when I join Mr. Gordo later in the summer.

This has been a challenging year for me, in so many ways. One of the things that I have learned is that no matter how one wants to game the system, the system will always (or most always) have the upper hand. All of which is to say that, even recognising the dangers of being over-engaged in service commitments, I was this year over-engaged in service commitments. In fact, I think I have ticked off so many necessary and obligatory boxes under “service” that next year I just have to show up for my classes and I’m covered (if only!).

Boundaries, setting them and enforcing them, remain a weak spot for me. But this is in some ways just a function of junior faculty life. Good citizenship entails working rather hard on that citizenship, not just to save one’s skin at tenure time but also because that is what, on some exalting and dismal level, we do. Professor Panty Hose, an absolute dinosaur I loathed back at Sadistic College, did have her moments, one of which was responding to faculty complaints regarding service, remarking, “Reading reports, writing letters of recommendation and memos, this is what we do.” And to a certain extent, she was right. I have learned, to my peril, that faculty governance is exactly that: the faculty govern themselves (i.e. work) or they are governed. I much prefer the former, although the toll on one’s personal and extrainstitutional life can be costly.

In this regard sometimes I think I am the world’s biggest schmuck. Maybe I’m just not good at gaming the system, maybe the stars and mini-stars and starlettes and casting-couch divas of the profession rely on me and my schmucky ilk to make sure that someone is minding the shop while they traipse around making arcane pronouncements on the colour of the sky at this and that conference. Thankfully, Cold City U is not that kind of place, generally, although I have taught at others where one has to wonder.

This speaks, also on some other level, to my own ambivalence about the university, or rather, the triad of research/service/teaching perfection that junior faculty are meant to demonstrate to be considered worthy. My advisor always intoned placidly that one had to do only two of the three to be successful, but I wonder if even one is possible sometimes. Years ago, The Fierceness and I would have conversation after conversation, where she would detail her desire to use the institution as a parasite to fund her own intellectual projects, and I would nod in agreement, make the appropriate noises, then generally fail to follow through, for as The Fierceness would observe after my being reamed by some sort of university claptrap, “You actually believe in the institution.”

I’m not sure I’m in exactly the same place, but the ambivalence over having a critical take (in this case regarding the university and academic life) yet wanting it to all work out, somehow, seems both honourable and foolish. This ambivalence is only growing, not only for myself but for many in the professoriate as our working conditions change, and the very touchstones of what we were taught to believe was good scholarly practice in the humanities also start to shift for students, professors, and administrators.

To wit, one thing that has caught me off-guard at this end of term is a veritable plague of plagiarism in my lecture classes. On two different assignments in two different classes, I have had five cases of plagiarism, which out of sixty or so students is almost ten percent. And this is not the sophisticated, “unconscious” plagiarism making headlines at dear Old Harvard, captured brilliantly in a series of posts over at University Diaries. No, this is sloppy, unsophisticated, easily Google-able plagiarism, amateurish in its simplicity.

Half of my plagiarists are non-English dominant speakers (a phrase borrowed from La Chicana al borde), and so therefore their sudden expert use of “hegemony,” “paradox,” and “axiomatic” was clearly a red flag, especially when their spoken English in class and previous writing had suggested more rudimentary language skills. “Axiomatic” is a word that should have all professors scrambling for their Google even when used by the best student. The others did it the old-fashioned way, taking text whole cloth from our assigned readings, not even bothering to rearrange the words or misspell things. After my initial annoyance at their not “knowing the rules,” I realised that the rules themselves had become slippery, unclear, fuzzy. These were students who had never had any training in the rules of citation. These were students who were focused on answering the assignment question in the most practical manner possible, which was to actually draw from the assigned texts themselves. On one level, it makes perfect sense to those who are completely unfamiliar with the rules of humanistic scholarship.

One plagiarist in particular had been a thorn in my side all semester. Sitting at the back of the classroom, all macho bravado, he spent class time flirting with whatever hapless woman that would sit next to him, writing them notes and chatting them up (barely sotto voce), all the while obviously not paying any attention to me or my lectures, reflected in his increasingly declining scores on exams and quizzes. At times it got so bad I would have to call the woman sitting next to him to come up front and sit someplace else (Their voices, heavy with embarrassment, “Where?” “Oh, anywhere [but there],” I would answer). While I was annoyed with him, I also wished to spare myself and my class an alpha-male confrontation, so let him be, for the most part, as long as he didn't interfere with other students' learning process. I was skeptical about his essay, but needn’t have been, since his plagiarism was clear. I dutifully marked his paper with the appropriate parenthetical annotations as to where in our assigned chapter he had pulled this or that sentence, made a photocopy, and wrote an extensive cover letter (not my first, I was to discover) indicating that his assignment was awarded the grade of “F” for plagiarism, quoting the relevant policy, and urging him to seek the counsel of the writing centre.

In what was to be my moment of schadenfraudic glory, I gave him his paper back at the final exam, where he had plotted a simplistic scheme to actually use the material from the plagiarised essay in his final through a bait and switch (he came up to turn in his exam, asked for his paper, then claimed he forgot to put something in his exam and returned to his seat, exam and paper in hand). He returned a couple of minutes later (clearly having read the typed cover letter), left his exam and departed without a word. Upon examining his exam, my glee at “catching” this slacker was suddenly deflated by realizing that he was, in fact and to put it colloquially, dumb as a brick. He had spent approximately two hours of an open book examination writing two (as in, 2) hand-written pages in his blue book, not only riddled with spelling errors but also patently not even interested in (or capable of) attempting a cogent answer to a pretty straightforward assignment question. On seeing this, I was suddenly and overwhelmingly depressed. On one hand, I could say this man was clearly not “college material.” What was he even doing here? Wouldn’t he be better at a technical school learning how to solder properly, or repairing engines in a garage, or apprenticing for a trade? Not all people are cut out for a humanities education after all, although our society increasingly tells us that we are. But what really shocked and affected me was the depth of the distance between our visions of what had been occurring in our classroom for fifteen weeks. This was someone who didn’t know the rules, period. Plagiarism was just the icing on the horrendous cake of misplacement, confusion, and necessity.

I have always thought that students plagiarise because they fundamentally confuse the work of the academy and scholarship, focusing on the purported desire to create “new” and “unique” work, a task before which they feel impotent. One of the things I tell them (and will be doing so increasingly, since it is clear I shall have to support a plagiarism unit in my classes from now on) is that scholarship is a conversation between what has been produced and oneself (be that a student, professor, public intellectual, or whomever). Knowledge is not sui generis, but is rather like a cake, layer upon delicious layer, building towards the final creation. However, in the case of my own plagiarists this semester, such a speech would have been wasted on them. They are not interested in knowledge and the humanities and scholarship, they just want to pass and get their degree (any degree) and get on with real life, whatever horrific and plastic vision that may be only guessed at. Classes and books and professors like me and you are just standing in their way, obstacles to be overcome.

While on the surface my plebian plagiarists may have little in common with the sophisticated girls on the banks of the Charles, they speak towards a common sense of entitlement, as UD has so expertly captured in her posts regarding the Kaavya Viswanathan controversy (Posted 4/27/2006):

“UD’s been following plagiarists for a long time, and many of them have been raised by amoral, ambitious parents who believe in nothing, who believe that everything is corrupt, and who want all social and financial goodies for themselves and their families.

Life, they believe, is brutal winner-take-all warfare. They pride themselves on their ability always to figure out an angle whereby each corrupt game of life can be won

[…]

What’s striking about many of the plagiarists UD has followed is that they don’t have to break rules to do well in life, but they appear to derive gratification, along with a confirmation of their Hobbesian view of life, from continually breaking them and winning. These are the ‘thesdanians in UD’s world who insist on building their mcmansions bigger than the already-generous rules allow - not because they care about the extra space, but because it’s important to them to show their neighbors their rule-breaking, contemptuous superiority.

Plagiarists, in short, tend to be self-destructive game-players who harbor real venom against civil society. Blair Hornstine and Ms. V. are their unfortunate children.”

The primary difference here being the wide and deep gulf between Harvard Yard and Cold City U, but still, UD is onto something in her contempt for Viswanathan’s pallid attempts at justification. If the upper classes can game the system with glee, as they do, and still remain respectable, what then is to stop all classes from attempting to participate in such a charade?

Well, for one, the fact that rules for the upper class differ significantly from the rules for the rest of us, something anyone with half a brain could tell you. But the real question is what do we, as a society, believe in anymore? The breakdown of rules as represented by Viswanathan finds its modest echo in the sloppy seconds of my own working class students. I would wholeheartedly agree with UD on her observation that aspects of our leadership class have real venom against civil society, but the more important critical observation, at least in terms of my students this semester, is the reference to Hobbes. For unlike Viswanathan and her ilk, given everything for nothing and still wanting more, my students generally have nothing, work horrible jobs, and are attempting to raise themselves up the economic ladder. Yet, they have inculcated Hobbes as much as the Ivyrati, just with fewer options to game the system. To wit, none of my plagiarists had a drama scene when receiving their anal-retentive note, they just read it, nodded, and left without a scene. Try that one with a pampered student at an Ivy or private liberal arts college. The good children of the leadership class know not of shame, and it increasingly shows.

One of our readings in my class this semester was Howard G. Schneiderman’s "The Protestant Establishment: Its History, Its Legacy—Its Future?” on the importance of a leadership class for the stability of democracy. The chapter spoke at length not only of the limitations of the WASP leadership class (its ethnocentrism and racism, its corruption and insularity), but its guiding role in the development of American democracy in a manner that was hard to dismiss out of hand. Schneiderman writes,

“A deceptive myth in liberal democracies like America is that civil liberties and freedom of expression are valued by most members of society, and most certainly by those at the bottom and middle of the social structure. But as Samuel Stouffer amply demonstrated in his classic study Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (1955), and as others have found since, this is not the case. Such freedoms are always most highly valued and protected by the elite few who are better educated and who believe in the liberal democratic tradition, and the last bulwark may well be, as Baltzell (1964b, p. 293) has suggested,

‘[…] a unified Establishment from within which the leaders of at least two parties are chosen, who, in turn, compete for the people’s votes of confidence, from differing points of view and differing standards of judgement, yet both assuming the absolute necessity of using fair means in accusing their legitimate opponents of fallibility rather than treason’” (149).

I’ve thought a lot about this piece, both as I teach it and as I reflect on the Viswanathan controversy. In particular, Baltzell’s quote cited by Schneiderman should be ringing lots of bells regarding our current political moment, a point I was sure to bring up in class. Schneiderman goes on in his article to trace out the collapse of the WASP establishment in the sixties, in the general revolt against authority, but indicates that the reformation of new, perhaps different, centres of leadership will be crucial in maintaining our democratic tradition, however imperfect it may be. And as an underpaid employee of a state institution charged with teaching the students of the working class, we have felt the change in relation to the question of public education, the public good, most significantly. Here is UD’s cited venom contra civil society writ large, in the defunding and privatisation of civic institutions, not only education but also public health (bird flu, anyone?), governing institutions (Our Gilded Age Congress), and media infrastructure (the woes of PBS and the Rise of Fox being two of the most immediate examples).

The professoriate, I would argue, composes one of Schneiderman’s alternate nodes of civic leadership, yet internal doubts as well as external pressures and forces threaten us. It’s one thing to flunk Master or Miss Prissy Pants at Yale for buying a paper online, it’s another to flunk my class thorn, who clearly has a relatively dim future, at least as a student. For the former, a temporary if annoying setback, for the latter, perhaps something greater (and then again perhaps not, for rapaciousness seems to be a general social tendancy nowadays, the tone set of course "by the better classes"). Many leftist academics hold enough of a critique of social and economic power that we can shy away from openly enforcing paradigms of behaviour and/or get all wobbly around some of these questions, because we feel uncomfortable with dimensions of socio-economic power present in "rules" (I could say, briefly, so does the Right as regards themselves, they just believe in rules for everyone else) but also because we are largely intellectual products of the same historical period of doubt that brought about the end of the WASP leadership class. I might hasten to add this is also because most of us are highly conscious, through a combination of personal experience and intellectual training, of the differential nature of "rules" in our society, and seek, rightly in my mind, to at least begin a critique of some of those paradigms of thought, such as meritocracy, which work to obscure the immense differentials at work in things like education.

But in terms of something like plagiarism's delight, what choice do we have? We can only continue to serve as obstacles, not to our students’ success, but to the easy and cheap way of garnering that success, and the avaricious, grasping, and predatory social model it represents. We can attempt to fill the vacuum of leadership our society is suffering through, a vacuum perhaps with no end, not in the name of punition, but in the name of leadership, and in fighting for the humanistic tradition. So, on some level, yes, I do continue to believe in the institution, and its value to our societies. At moments like returning my plagiarist’s paper, however, I also feel a little like an anachronism, a school marm old maid insisting on the rules while the big, bad, corrupt world continues to turn. This is reinforced by the privileged student’s smirk, the implication that we professors mean nothing, are not players, are unimportant, because largely morals and ethics have become unimportant in our society.

As much as I would like to say this isn’t true, that is not what I feel at moments like this. I can only imagine what the faculty at Harvard must feel, confronted with the shining yet empty and terrifying faces of ambition, voracious and with just the edge of the fangs showing, that make Viswanathan look angelic. "Oh. My. God. Becky!" Yuck! While I may lament missing out on the salary and perquisites of teaching at an elite (or in the case of Sadistic College, semi-pseudo elite) institution, at least now I don't have to put up with all the shit involved in working with that student demographic, the constant diaper-changing and pelt-stroking and genius reassurance. That, in its own way, is a small but blessed relief. My challenge now is to invest my modest and self-effacing working class students in intellectualism, which is mostly convincing them to begin to think of themselves as intellectuals in general, as opposed to "not being very smart," which has been said to me this semester more than once by my students, many of whom, aside from technical skills, are as talented as any other student I have taught before.

In any event, I shall not have to confront this challenge or any other for that matter again for at least four weeks, and for that, and the promise of summer, I am eternally grateful. Let the world collapse under the weight of its sin and sloth, I’m on holiday!