Every year on Move-in day, I think of those first pages of DeLillo's White Noise where the protagonist, Jack Gladney, sets up camp with a folding chair and a cooler of beer to watch the parents move their kids in, to be part of something...

Well it's Jack Gladney weekend here in Morgantown, and In between cursing the spike in traffic in this recently-small-town-now-small-city, I'm thinking about not only what these students and parents are taking part in, but what I'll be part of as the year gears up.

I don't need to say that I've got a lot of values wrapped up in the institution of the University--I've only been looking forward to it or participating in it for most of my post-pubescent life. And instead of doing some self-affirming paean to academe and its pleasures, I want to think a bit: how does this life make me a worse person.

I think first of all, I am far more anxious--the whole impostor syndrome thing--but after less than a year here a few friends/colleagues had noted sarcastically that "no, you're not anxious about anything..." But anxious is anxious.

What is far more troubling is how judgmental I have become...Not judgmental in the "You're a bad person if you smoke" kind of way, but simply willing to make judgments about people--How smart they are, how much taste they have, how socially adept they'll be. Having the authority to assign grades makes it really hard not to come home and NOT say, "You're doing really well with your eating skills today, Lilah." Or "You can do better than that, Collin." This is what I have to work against--it is my job to make judgments about intellectual work, but it is neither my responsibility nor my privilege to judge those around me. This is something I hope to work on this year: being less judgmental.

Even about the stupid drivers that have suddenly overrun my path to the local *$s...