A QUICKIE ON NOTICING

     I was dismayed by something I experienced yesterday. A professor, her eyes looking inattentively ahead, without a by-your-leave brusquely and impolitely brushed by and slightly pushed pass two of the custodial crew with whom I was talking as if they didn’t exist and as if she had the unchallenged right of way in the hall. One of the custodians turned her head, her smile gone, and gave that professor one of those “if looks could kill” piercing stares, saying loudly in her body language, “Who the hell does ‘Miss High and Mighty Queenie Ph.D.’ think she is?” Then, she turned to me, slumped her shoulders, took a deep breath, and then with a sadness in her lowered voice said, “People like her and everyone around here act as if we are no matter, not having any education and all.”

      “Don’t believe that for a second,” I assured her firmly. “You are important. Without you, that professor wouldn’t have any place to run to. You keep this place running. For what its worth, ‘Let me thank you for doing that.'”

      Claretha (not her real name) smiled and the slight roundness in her shoulders disappeared. She and her co-workers do matter! I wonder how many of us realize how we are completely and utterly intertwined with those supposed inconsequential persons, whom she ignored as if they were made of cellophane, who vacuum and straighten up the classrooms in which we teach, who mop and polish the hallways we walk, who keep spotless the bathrooms we use, and who clean our offices? And what too many of us apparently don’t know is that the illumination of our campuses with unconditional mutual respect and appreciation is so powerful that it can ignite an inner flame that lights up each one of us and creates community among us.

Louis

ON POST-TENURE REVIEW

      About fifteen years ago, the Georgia legislature decreed that every tenured professor had to go through a post-tenure review process and would go through such a process every five years henceforth. It was not greeted with hosannas by faculties in the University of Georgia System. “Bravos” and applause didn’t echo through the halls of ivy for the second part of that decree which provided a probation period for those who didn’t pass muster. This year is my fourth such review. I have to admit that at this stage of my career I initially found the process of putting together my resume, student evaluations, annual evaluations, and personal statement a bit of a pain. A lot of colleagues agreed with me. As someone in another department said in response to my smirking of having to endure this paperwork, “Heck, Louis, It’s a laugh. You’ve been here 42 years. Just slap a few pages together and get it over with. It’s no big deal. It doesn’t mean anything.”

       I have to admit that I thought likewise when I began the process. But, as I got into it, I stopped laughing. It became less and less tiresome and more and more meaningful. As I went over my resume, highlighting my activities during the past five years, as I stopped to look at recent “official” departmental student evaluations, as I gazed as the additional end-of-semester student evaluations I require, as I glanced at the one or two annual evaluations I had thrown in my desk drawer, as I put down on paper my personal professional statement, I found myself looking more and more at myself in a mirror; I was talking more and more to myself and caring less and less about anyone who might read it. In fact, I found myself reading and re-reading and re-reading ever slower and deeper what I had put together about who I am and what I have been doing. Maybe that is because coincidently I put it all together during the ten day period known as the Days of Awe, when we of the Jewish faith, are subject to the unyielding demand for reflection, admission, articulation, contrition, and self-improvement. Maybe walking the road when I touched the holiest part of myself in synagogue took me to a place to touch the sacredness of my inner academic self. Then again, maybe it wasn’t such a coincidence after all. I won’t ask.

       Anyway, though I welcomed the paperwork needed to go through this process as much as I welcomed the appearance of a bothersome gnat or smiled at an attacking South Georgia mosquito, I think I was prepared by and drawn in by the period beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with the solemn Yom Kippur. Slowly I acknowledged how this process of post-tenure review has been perverted as a perceived tool for spying on the faculty. Too many of us academics feel, though few will say it, that it is an assault on our professionalism, a questioning of our integrity, and a distrust of our authenticity. Those feelings are not wholly unwarranted since the original motive of a disparaging Georgia legislature and submissive Board of Regents was based on the myth that we professors went into stasis, stopped dead in our tenured tracks, didn’t care how little we did, that moss began immediately gathering on our stone and grass started growing instantly under our feet, once we got tenured. The post-tenure review process was the first shot of answerability and accountability across the academic bow. But, it was fired in the most cynical, intimidating, judgmental, insulting, and threatening terms. It was initially greeted with anger, pessimism, disdain, and a heap of defensive chips on a lot of faculty shoulders. It is, admittedly, an academic distortion based on a “we versus them” chasm of distrust. It is a negative perception that pessimistic legislators, suspicious regents officials, vengeful colleagues, and angry administrators are out to get us, just waiting around the review corner filled with a rage and a sense of “getting even with us.” That is not totally hyperbole, but the process has never really has been publically–and believably–pronounced as something other than the sharpening of fearful Sword of Damocles for someone else to arbitrarily and threateningly wield against the faculty.

       And yet, wasn’t it Socrates who talked about the unexamined life is not worth living? He roamed the public places of Athens asking relentless questions of people that challenged assumptions and beliefs. He wasn’t trying to make people feel bad; he was encouraging them to be better. It is the same with the Jewish Days of Awe; it should be the same with the post-tenure review process. We professors shouldn’t tremble thinking that wrath and punishment are imminent, that we are judged guilty before a verdict of innocence is handed down, that we have to defend and make the case whether we are to be, to put it in Yom Kippur terms, inscribed in the academic Book of Life or the academic Book of Death for the coming years. To the contrary, we can find in the process, if we wish to look forward rather than backward, an uplifting sense of optimism about our capacity to be better in the coming five years than we were during the last five. This review process, like each annual review, can help us become soul-searchers, struggling to see what goes on inside so we understand what we see on the outside, to take an unflinching look at past conduct, and admitting to thoughts and feelings and actions we would rather not talk about. It is a reflective starting point for deep recognition, awareness, acknowledgement, and action. It’s a place that offers space to feel deeply, to think clearly and boldly, and to decide how mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically to change.

       During these Days of Awe, we of the Jewish faith are expected to pause from our daily lives, peer into our hearts and minds, evaluate our conduct during the past year, see that we can reach our deepest goals and achieve our more sincere dreams, and examine the state of our souls so we can hold ourselves accountable for any gaps between the standards we profess and the actions we perform. It should be no different with this post-tenure review, for, be it in a religious or academic context, when we examine our conduct and character, hold ourselves accountable for any gaps between the standards we profess and the actions we perform, acknowledge our faults, and seek to improve and make amends, we reach for our deepest dreams and goals. This is the time of honest, vulnerable, and conscious listening to ourselves. If we can overcome our own egos and let go of self-serving justifications, drop our defensive rationalizations, shed our jaded suspicions, we most certainly can engaged in an academic, intellectual, and spiritual quest for a worthiness that enriches beyond measure our lives and the lives of those around us.

Louis

DO YOU KNOW WHOM YOU TEACH?

        I went out this morning just before dawn. It was a little before 5 a.m. I was passing houses that lined the street. A light went on in one of them. I could not help wondering who was awakening.  Was breakfast about to be ready?  Was she or he getting ready to prepare the children for school? Was that person getting ready to go to work? What kind work did that person do? Half a block later, a car passed me. It was impossible not to wonder who was driving. Why was that person up at this wee hour of the day? Where was that person coming from? Where was that person going?

        It was soon that I was wondering what do we really know or want to know about whom is in the classroom with us.  All this wondering had been stirred by a student’s daily journal entry I had read before I hit the streets. She had a big exam coming up. She couldn’t concentrate. Her thoughts were far away. Her emotions were tied up with her distant family. Her father just lost his job. A few days ago, she was all excited about the prospect to going to China with me for Maymester Study Abroad. Now, her excitement is dashed on the rocks of constant worry. She’s putting herself through a gauntlet of unsettling questions. She’s stressed.  How is she going to pay her bills? Where is the money coming from? What about her car? Can she afford to stay in the sorority? She’s wondering if she’ll have to get a job. How can she study and work at the same time? How are her mother and father faring? What about her brother who is at another college? Will he have to come home? She’s frightened. The daunting prospect of her dropping out of school is for her a reality suddenly looming on the horizon. To this eighteen year old, all seems about to be lost. She needs to talk to someone. She needs reassurance amid this discomforting maelstrom. She wrote that she wants to call me. I told her that I’ll be there for her with hopefully a calming shoulder and ear.

       So, as I walked the graying streets, I wondered. Do we know enough about that person we label “student” to teach her or him and for her or him to learn? What do we really know about her or him? Do we know what going on inside her or him? Do we know what’s swirling around her or him? Do we merely think we know? Do we merely label and assume? We professors are human. So often we lessen our unacknowledged uncertainty with self-deceptions, perceptions, preconceptions, and mis-perceptions. We put ourselves on firm footing with so many unfounded assuming “In my opinion….” and asserting “Students are…” and reinventing “When I was a student….” So many professors are trained only to be supposedly objective, disengaged, and clinical scholars. In the classroom, so many are so subjective. When things go as they wish, it feels great and they infuse themselves with a sense that they’ve made it and they’ve got it. When it doesn’t go as they planned, the feelings sweep the other way and they blame with “Students nowadays are….” or defend with “It’s not my job to….” or accuse with “They’re letting anyone in…..” or dismiss with “They’re adults and….” or attack with “The administration……” or….. Without intent, in classes that woefully are being enlarged under economic pressures and becoming increasingly distant and impersonal, they so often produce bloodless descriptions of who is really in that room with them and what’s really going on in the classroom. They downplay–if not dismiss–individual emotion, as well as, contagious social psychology. The truth is that education is inherently far more of an emotional process then they wish to acknowledge, involving flesh and blood fallible human beings we call professor and student. And, we don’t know all that we should about either of them.

Louis