The Kool-aid of the Academy

My dad once said to me, "Some day you're gonna learn to keep your mouth shut and play the game."  I was seven.  And he was wrong.  When I was in graduate school and working in a semi-professional non-academic environment to supplement my teaching stipend, I listened as my co-workers casually talked in the office and made comments about race, gender, and socio-economics that were wholly offensive and racist and moronic without fear of reprisal or even sanction.  I would go to campus the next day and sit in class, listening to the discussions and think, "Dear God, you hallowed halls of higher education, hide me, hide me, hide me away from this awful world."

I couldn't imagine a life outside of academia, where, while abhorrent ideas and conversations exist, they are the minority and quickly intellectualized down.  I didn't want to be forced to drink the Kool-aid of corporate America.  It wasn't even that I didn't want to.  I didn't believe I could.  My mother used to say, as a gate against the despair each time I pursued another degree in English, "You know what businesses want?  They want GOOD WRITERS!"  My mother drank the Kool-aid of Procter and Gamble.  Saying she drank the Kool-aid really isn't fair, though.  She loved and believed in the goodness of the people of the corporation, and based on their treatment of her when she was dying of cancer, that belief was mostly warranted.  P and G took a single mother, working swing shift on the Head and Shoulders line, and allowed her to move to a management position where she could use her creativity, her intelligence, her leadership skills, and travel the world, and they paid her a fair and living wage to do it.

So I saw and smelled the good possibilities of corporate work.  It wasn't all bad.  But it wasn't THE ACADEMY.  And THE ACADEMY was where I wanted to be.  I wanted to be in a place where meetings devolved into heated debates over word choice, with historical context and etymology.  I wanted to be in a place that served and shaped the lives and minds of young people.  Mostly, I wanted people to call me Professor in the hallways while students perched in corners discussing the readings before class.

But the truth of multiple graduate degrees in the Humanities is this: you can stay in the hallowed halls of THE INSTITUTION.  But you cannot hide here.  Because chances are, no one will be calling you Professor.  They'll be calling you, but it will be to change a student's schedule or attend a meeting about how to properly staple-slash-paper clip petitions sent to people who actually make the decisions.  The odds are much better that graduate students in the Humanities who choose to stay in higher education will end up as staff members, not faculty or members of the upper echelon (aka ADMINISTRATION).

It's taken me this long to get to the point.  Which is that over the weekend I watched Happy Valley, a documentary about the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky tragedy that tried to explore how and why for so many years the crimes of Sandusky were allowed to continue.  Part of that exploration includes a conversation about what Penn State Coach Joe Paterno knew and what his responsibilities were.  At one point in the film, after the NCAA announces stiff penalties against Penn State for "putting football first" the team holds a rally.  And the crowd holds signs and begins to chant, "85 percent! 85 percent!" which was the approximate graduation rate of student athletes under Joe Paterno's reign.

Those Penn State fans, dressed in blue and white, huddled together, cheering on these young men who would play football despite the sanctions, reminded me of how much of higher education is dependent upon the drinking of the Kool-aid in ways both different from and quite the same as, and possibly more insidious than the expectations of corporate America.

The picture that comes to mind for me is of a turtle.  A big one.  And on that turtle's shell is painted code words like BIG TEN!  RESEARCH ONE! 87 PERCENT! FOUR YEARS! TUITION FREEZE! PEDAGOGY! And the faculty and the administration of the university stand on the back of that giant turtle, wearing spectacles and gesticulating as they discuss the important thinks they think, while grad students, maybe perched on the tail of the turtle, kneel with their chins in their hands, waiting to be offered a hand up to the shell where the big thinks happen.  And sometimes the faculty and administration stop talking long enough to allow the graduate students to say something-- maybe protest the lack of soy cream cheese for the free bagels in the graduate lounge-- and the faculty nod and smile at their prodigies who will one day be the torch bearers of the big thinks of HIGHER EDUCATION, the ACADEMY, the INSTITUTION.

But the soft underbelly of that giant turtle is the staff of any large university.

I was sitting on a staircase the other day with a group of staff members, waiting to meet with new freshman orienting to the university.  I mentioned to one that I had seen and admired a social media post of her the week before.  I paraphrase badly and probably more with my own thoughts than hers, because the post was quickly deleted on the "advice" of more senior staff.  Essentially, the post suggested that the lack of leadership and valuing of staff input made this person feel a lack of desire to come to work or enjoy her job.  And she quickly told me, "I love this university.  I love this job.  I don't want to lose it."

The Kool-aid at the university tastes different.  The flavors are unique.
Lemonade Twist: "We don't talk to the media because they twist what we say."
Cost of Living Cherry:
"We heard our students!  Tuition freeze!" without mention that staff in most colleges have gone without even living wage raises for years (in fact, the raises rarely cover the rising cost of parking on campus).
We Serve Students Strawberry:
Wherein major changes to programs, pedagogy, and people's entire lives are modified or implemented wholly on the basis of what higher administration believes students (who may or may not have all the facts or the maturity and life experience to understand) and their parents (the money people) want without regard for staff, their families, or the REAL service of students and their educations.

I don't waste a lot of time in my life criticizing what I do not love.  Just ask my children.  I spent hours upon hours in graduate school in classes teaching pedagogical theory.  I wish some of that time would have been dedicated to the facts, which are that while we're training graduate students for tenured professorship and a life of research and thinking the big thinks, the facts are that students are far more likely to end up in a staff position, adjuncting on the side, the two positions of higher education that make up the soft underbelly of the turtle that, when seen exposed to the sunlight, indicate a serious problem.

I need this job.  I love this job. I love my work and my students. I am the sole support for my three children, and this job makes their good health, braces, glasses, and therapy possible.  You will notice there are some things I won't talk about.  My involvement with athletics.  I won't name names.  I won't talk specifics.  I won't mention actual policies.  Because there are rules.  There are the stated rules.  Thousands of pages of them.  The FERPAs and the advisory boards and the faculty rules that I am expected to know, understand, and abide by.  But there are also the cultural rules.  Those rules that aren't written down anywhere but we learn them and we know them because at chow time we just follow the crowd to the mess hall.

 And those are the rules that concern me.  Should there be rules regarding what can and cannot be spoken publicly by staff members?  Of course.  Students should be protected, because while they are legally adults, maturity-wise they are not, and they deserve our protection.  But these academy rules that are not written down, that are passed down from administration to each new staff member through off hand comments and behaviors, these rules SHOULD be spoken.  They SHOULD be written down.  Because otherwise how can we discuss and shape them?  We cannot.  We are not invited to.

When I see a crowd of Penn State fans chanting "85 percent! 85 percent!" I understand the need to protect the underbelly facts of the academy from its fans, its public, even its students in many ways.  But 85% is part of the shell.  It's painted on.  It's not a fact.  It's a "fact." And I want to talk FACTS.  I think we owe the academy we love and ourselves that.