First Year Wrap-Up: The Academic Subject
As I have composed these other wrap-ups, I've struggled to get at how this year was different from most other years, since lord knows at earlier institutions, I had done my share of service, research, and teaching. But I could not entirely put my finger on what made this year feel so, well, new. I'm not interested in or able to discuss the ontological status of my subjectivity in the context of a tenure track job in this forum, but I think in practical terms, the notion of the academic subjectivity of a tenure-track faculty member warrants scrutiny.
In Major League Baseball, with its extensive farm system, you can be a rookie, even if you've playing in Triple-A for years. Your first year in the Bigs, not matter what your age or experience, is your rookie year. Hideki Matsui of the Yankees was techniaclly a rookie, despite having a 1,000-plus games-played streak in Japan.
So here, I am a rookie with years of playing time, but I'm also in the Bigs, so to speak.
The difference between now and those other years of experience? I am constituted differently as an academic subject. Part of the changes I am tracing are certainly Institutional, but many seem like part of the profession.
* I suddenly feel serious labour and status inequities for those ranked below me--senior lecturers who have been at this University for years and teach more are paid less and struggle in this system in ways that I do not. There has even been a slight deference (I hate the word, but that's a bit what it feels like) from some who are as qualified as I am, but haven't landed a TT job yet. This feels weird, and unearned, and unjustified.
*Composition is something that I think I am supposed to treat as a chore. Now, after 8 years teaching or administrating composition, I don't mind the break I'm getting next year, and I went looking for this job in part so I could find a bit more variety in my teaching duties. But in my first year here, I was very active with Undergraduate Writing, but I got subtle advice from more than one source that I should be careful about getting too closely tied to composition. eck.
*The prospect of leaving is different...I'm hard-pressed to say how, and right now, I have no intention of leaving, which is precisely the difference, I guess. I could go on the market at some point in the future, but it's not a mandatory thing looming on the horizon as it was for several years. But before, I was expected to leave eventually; now I am more or less expected not to leave.
*The only thing really "looming" per se is tenure, and I'm not worried about that at all, with the humane requirements we have here. In fact, if all goes well (knock on wood) I'd have my minimum publishing covered by the end of year two, perhaps year three. Much of this is work that was already in progress before I got here, and yet I have always had a sense that landing a TT job made me a "real" scholar, which is baloney, I recognize, but I had still internalized, and I imagine that in many ways, I'm still reinforcing that notion to my students, and perhaps even my friends, which is crappy.
*In fact, it's the very notion of gatekeeping, or policing certain kinds of academic boundaries, that marks the academic subjectivity of a TT faculty member, particularly at a PhD granting institution. Before, I was knocking at the gates: Undergrad admissions, the honors capstone, MA admissions, the MA thesis defense, PhD admissions, comprehensive exams, the dissertation defense, the job search, eight opportunities to be weeded out, if you will (how many ciurcles of hell did Dante count? I'm thinking he missed one or two). Now more than ever, I am tending those gates. I'm on the PhD admissions committee, I'm on the qualifying exams committee for the department, I've offered my input on job candidates, and I'll be on both dissertation committees and job search committees before too long, virtually none of which I'd ever been of status to do in the past. The only gate left for me to pass, really, is tenure, and that's more a "let's see if we want to keep you in," rather than "let you in." I need to think a lot more about this particular responsibility, and the power it has suddenly granted me. It's hardly ruling the world, but it's power nonetheless, and it can be misused.
*This notion of being an insider plays out in some other ways, too. I think I mentioned in the research post that I'm being sought out and accepted into discussions in small ways that had never happened before, and credit for this is due, I think, to the fact that I've already been vetted. I'm in, if you will. I don't know. maybe I'm constructing this whole inside/outside business myself, because while there is an outside of academia, what consittutes inside is hazy. Was I inside academia as an undergrad? as an M.A.? as a Ph.D. student and GTA? as a degreed contract faculty member?
Last summer, I participated in the bloggy book group discussion of my colleague Donald E. Hall's The Academic Self. I think I felt that that moment, just before I began the TT job, was one where an authentic academic self was being constituted, that I had entered into subjectivity as an academic. I hoped (and still do hope) to craft that selfhood carefully, but I'm coming to understand how much that selfhood is co-constructed with an institutional subjectivity that was already in place (though perhaps not immutable) when I entered into it.