Blogs

A returning correspondent writes: "I've been fortunate enough to be hired as a visiting instructor for one year at a small liberal-arts college, and I'm very excited to teach there. I will be teaching a class that I've taught several times before (basically an intro survey of my primary field of study), but the head of the department and I have agreed to make it a writing intensive class. This is throwing me for a loop."

I've taught for almost 15 years and just about 1251 students (give or take). How much of it do I remember? Quite a lot, actually.

Being "well" covers all sorts of areas often ignored by busy grad students. Often we are very concerned with avoiding germs in order to chug through our semester, teaching loads, comps, and writing. This is especially apparent when we are in the final weeks of the semester. No one wants to get sick during a period where you have to deal with not only your final exams, but also grading the exams of others. Students are dropping left and right from sickness, both faked to avoid finals and real from too many all nighters. Grad students become obsessed with avoiding the finals flu. But beyond just having an arsenal of Airborne or Emergen-C on you at all times, what does it mean to be well?

I have suddenly realized that my children will have a fundamentally different childhood experience than the ones my husband and I had growing up. Before you say, duh, realize that I’m not talking about social media and texting and cell phones and Khan Academy (not to mention that we’re living in a different country). I am talking about my children growing up in a small, rural town, versus the big-city childhood my husband and I both had.

For the last 12 years, I have faithfully monitored the faculty job listings pages in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and IHE even though my husband and I are happily employed. Why? Because we live on the “wrong” coast. We are 3000 miles away from both sets of our aging parents and families, and for us this is a hardship.

From philosophy classes to street corners, one can hear Niccolo Machiavelli's famous dilemma between love and fear regaled. Machiavelli instructed "the prince" that it was better to be feared than loved by the people, because in his view compliance derived more from the latter than the former. What is often forgotten about Machiavelli's formulation was his additional comment: the prince should never be hated. Perhaps what he meant ultimately was that the prince should be "respected," but that concept may be more dependent on a democratic society and therefore not even thinkable in the wildly volatile political landscape of Machiavelli's day in fifteenth century Florence.

The news from Michigan that Northwestern Michigan College, a two-year school, has applied for permission to offer four-year degrees got me thinking about the entire concept.

Academics are some of the best complainers I know. In my field of English, I explain our penchant for complaining by saying that we are, after all, critics — and we can always find something to criticize. But it may be an occupational hazard for all academics — we spend an awful lot of our time, after all, grading, reviewing, and measuring, and things are bound to fall short more often than not. So we complain.