I'm getting increasingly and rapidly disenchanted with academia.
Screw that. It's too late for disenchantment, which requires some attachment still to the fairy tale. I'm disgruntled.
It isn't the single-elimination system that Dorothea talks about, although I see the stultifying effects of that daily. It isn't the increasing reliance on adjuncts or the untruth of the "apprenticeship" model of graduate school or the way students and administrators keep writing students as "consumers" who feel entitled, although they all earn my wrath at various times.
No, it's that no one sees this job as a JOB.
How is it that we are promoted and tenured for reseach (whatever lipservice they give us about teaching and service), but buried under teaching and service with the understanding--and even the outright claim--that we're supposed to research and write in the summer, when we don't get paid? Who else could get away with this?
And the worst part is that we're supposed to somehow be "grateful" for the academic lifestyle, which, in my observation, means having no evenings, few weekends, and no real vacations. Sure, we have stretches of time where we don't teach, but that's when we do all that pesky work we can't get done when we do teach, because we have 120 students a semester and three preps. Sure, we can work in coffee shops, but so what? Not having to punch in means never getting to go home.
I was told the other day by my supervisor that the work I do running a program isn't enough, that she has to plump it up with other work, because you know, I get a course release for it. A course release is 10 hours a week for one semester. We get one a year. That means my course release is worth 5 hours a week.
5 hours a week.
But I'm told I don't do enough work to justify it, that she has to protect me from people thinking I don't do enough work to justify it, and meanwhile I can't get any writing done because I'm so swamped with petitions and pleas and emails from students who need our program that I can't leave my office to pee.
And this is what I'm supposed to be grateful for.
I call bullshit.
It's not the cause of the writing plan, of course. The writing plan has been there all along. But it's the impetus for doing the writing plan now, for breaking through the terror of doing something new, of doing something so unguaranteed. There's no point in continuing this career if I can find a way out of it.
Comments