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Today, right before my classes, I blithely checked my mailbox only to discover THE REJECTION LETTER.
That’s right the University Press that had been reviewing my Major Academic Project has decided that it “doesn’t fit our list.” The letter stresses that the editor I have been working with, the editor-in-chief, and several other editors at the Press, all agree that the book is fabulous, but they just don’t see a place for it in their collection.
I’ve been corresponding with the editor for a while — couldn’t he have mentioned this concern before?
They didn’t even bother sending it to reviewers (which is what I thought they were doing with the manuscript these past few months), so I can’t gage whether this rejection is really about the press or a code for some problems with the book itself.
Now I have to start the whole process all over again: blind submission letters, waiting for someone to give me the time of day, hoping they will at least be willing to find out what reviewers in my field have to say … and every day another book on my topic comes out that I will have to address/cite/integrate …
Goddamn, I am so discouraged.
In which The Bittersweet Girl discovers the consequences of posting about tights …
Ewwww … a creepy commenter raving about the sex appeal of pantyhose. Apparently, they even smell sexy.
Don’t bother, I’ve already deleted it.
The most recent CHE First Person has set off a new round of blogging about the perennial topic of professorial attire. New Kid and Blogenspiel, among others, have already set Mr. Pannapacker/Benton straight on how his year-long experiment with “dressing formally” has very little relevance to female academics who are held to two conflicting standards: look authoritative but be pretty.
I have plenty to say about this topic, especially since I am still foaming at the mouth about the financial injustices of academia. There’s a conclusion to be drawn from this cluster of facts:
Academics are underpaid.
Female academics are paid less than male.
Female academics are expected to dress professionally.
Female professional dress costs more than male.
And so the circle of life exploitation continues …
I’d also like to share a little story from my day that highlights some of the absurd lengths professional women have to go to dress appropriately:
I generally rate pantyhose alongside high heel shoes and hair dye as part of a trifecta of fashion torture designed especially to keep women miserable. But, in order to appear professional in my university environment, skirts are necessary and it’s been too cold for bare legs so: tights to the rescue. Today I went shopping for tights — nothing else, just a short excursion to the store and home again. Still suffering mightily from the flu, sniffling and coughing, I nonetheless recognized that I have important meetings all week and I would need some damn tights.
I went to three stores: Target, JC Penneys, and Kohls. You’d think you could walk into any one of these joints and find a whole rack of stockings in a variety of colors and sizes. You would be wrong. In my Urban Sprawl Community, each of these stores looked like they had been ransacked by crazed hoards of panty-hose wearing consumers. The kind who open up every pack of hose and then toss them on the ground. Who apparently all wear my size and eschew spangled, silver-striped hose in favor of the sober black and brown I was trying to locate. If, on your errands today, you saw a harried woman crouched in the aisle of your local big box store, rooting through a pile of discarded panty hose — that glorious creature was me.
This outing took the better part of 2 hours. Two hours out of my precious Sunday afternoon when I needed to be prepping my classes, cleaning my house, or at the very least clutching a hot mug of tea as I snoozed on the couch (flu, remember). I came home this afternoon cursing the fact that I’m have to deal with stupid shit like this, that I have to sacrifice time and money and general peace of mind over a pair of tights. Oh yeah, I blame the patriarchy for my troubles.
And guess what, I still don’t have those fucking tights.
On the heels of my last post, check out this video about the dismal state of the academic job market. (Found at The Chutry Experiment)
Every January, I calculate my total personal debt and compare it to the amount of the previous January. This is an act intended to foster fiscal responsibility and self-awareness. It invariably ends up throwing me into a deep depression, as hopelessness and fear overwhelm me.
For, dear readers, The Bittersweet Girl has a dark secret. On the surface she is a respectable member of society, a successful professional, someone who appears to Have It Together, and to whom students and friends turn for advice. But, the truth is that she is a debtor who hovers on the verge of bankruptcy and is only solvent because she relies financially upon her partner.
Enough of the cagey third person: I am in debt. My personal debt exceeds my yearly income, a very injurious statistic known as the “debt to income ratio,” a phrase I’ve heard numerous times as I’ve been turned down for loans. In the past year, I’ve managed to pay the tiniest fraction of my total debt, and, at this rate, I will only pay off my debt after many, many years — if ever.
I am a thrifty individual. I hate shopping. I don’t have a penchant for $300 shoes. I live modestly. I don’t take extravagant trips. I spend my money more or less wisely.
So, why am I so completely fucked? Graduate school, of course. Coupled with many years adjuncting at below-poverty-level pay before I landed a tenure-track job. Even now, after many years of as a tenure-track professor, the debts I acquired during that dark time are with me.
I know that, in the scheme of the “academic job market crisis,” I am one of the lucky ones. At least I have a full-time job with benefits! But every year I have a reckoning with the fact that if I ever want to be debt-free, I have to get another, higher paying job (unlikely, for a variety of reasons) or leave academia altogether.
During the years I was struggling to get by on loans and adjunct pay, I was convinced that if I could just get a regular salary, I would be OK. I never realized that, because my “regular salary” would be embarrassingly low, it would not suffice to pay off my debts.
Every year I think, this is the deep, dark secret of academia — at least, within the humanities.* Education costs money and the better the education (conventional wisdom tells us) the more it will cost. So, graduate students happily take out loans to finance their higher education and, particularly if they’re lucky enough to go to a Big Ivy, they believe that it’s worth the expense.
But, what’s not generally acknowledged is that the cost of education is not balanced by a reasonable paycheck. Our skills as teachers and researchers are so devalued that we are must settle for poorly-paid jobs (if we even get one). This is the circular screw job that many of us face: we will never be compensated for the work that we do to the extent that we will be able to pay off the debts we accrued getting the education that enables us to do this work.
I could go on and on about my own fears and frustrations but instead I would like to offer some unsolicited advice to those readers who may be considering a life in the gloried halls of academia:
Get the cheapest education you can get. I know that it seems that if Harvard comes knocking you should jump at the chance, even if it means taking out a few extra loans, but I strongly believe that it’s not worth it. In the field of literary studies at least, a Harvard degree is no guarantee of future employment. Far better to pay as little as possible up front for your education — go to a state school, go locally, go someplace where the teachers are passionate and committed but where there’s less name recognition, fewer on-campus latte stands, and no rock-climbing facilities in the gym.
Get a job during graduate school — and I don’t mean a job as a teaching assistant. Despite the standard line that “experience as a TA is crucial to being a successful job candidate,” the truth is that most TA positions are pure exploitation. We all know that TA pay is so terrible that it is virtually impossible to live without also taking out student loans. So, rather than TA-ing for years and years, get a “real job” as a waitress, a bartender, a high school school teacher, whatever — just as long as you are supporting yourself. Then, at the very end of your grad. school education, do some TA-ing so you can put it on your CV. But, I guarantee that no fresh-out-of-grad-school job candidate ever got the job because someone said, “gee, she’s really TA-ed a lot.”
Don’t adjunct. I know this is a heartless piece of advice because it presupposes that adjuncting or part time teaching is a choice when, for many, it’s a necessity. It also suggests that adjuncting is always a shit choice, while for some it’s a viable career.** The spirit behind this anti-adjuncting stance is: don’t put yourself in debt for a shot at the academic high life. Even if you can cobble together several teaching gigs at several institutions (and those of you who managed this kind of life deserve to be dipped in gold, as far as I’m concerned), it’s likely that the rewards will be meager — both financially but also spiritually and intellectually. Finally, the promise that you’ll one day land that full time, salaried position may not be as promising as it seems.
Be heartless, be ruthless, be a warrior-bitch-from-hell but get the highest possible salary you can get. If you do land a full time or tenure track job, you must negotiate for more money. Anyone who’s been in academia for a while can tell you that raises are a rarer than the ivory-billed woodpecker; your starting salary is as good as it’s going to get for a very, very long time. Chances are you’ll still make less than your high school friends who don’t even go to college.
For those who are professors, it is your ethical duty to accurately represent the financial realities of academia to your students. You cannot simply encourage your promising young students to apply to Harvard or Yale, tell them that they would make great PhDs, and portray the academic life as one long meeting of the salon over cigars and cognac. You’ve got to tell the truth about how much education costs and how little it pays. Naturally, your students will choose to believe (as you probably did) that they’ll be the exception to the rule, but it’s your responsibility to try to set them straight.
On these few rules might the grinding cogs of academic exploitation be halted. I only wish someone had warned me so many years ago — right before I signed that first student loan promissory note.
* Of course, all my characterizations of the academic life refer to one narrow slice of the pie, the little quivering piece left in the pan after all the big boys have had their helpings: the humanities. Could a more worthy and more devalued area of academia exist? I understand that in the sciences and other “hard” disciplines, they drink from jewel-encrusted goblets, sleep on mounds of dollar bills, and put what’s left over in Swiss bank accounts — but I could be mistaken about that.
** I wanted to link a few blogs about adjuncting here, that would more fully represent this complicated issue, but I stumbled across the Invisible Adjunct’s farewell post and now I’m too depressed to look further. Okay, it’s almost four years old but it’s still tragic.
It’s been a while, my little chickadees. I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been in beginning-of-the-semester hell. Prepping new classes. Building course websites. Scanning and more scanning.
And, we’re running a couple of job searches, so add a few dozen meetings and lunches/dinners into the mix.
Oh yeah, there’s also that pesky little case of the flu that has already caused me to cancel my classes — yes, already this semester.
Point being: it’s hard to be a blogger and a teacher. (Not to mention: a writer or researcher or administrator. Or to have a life.) I really don’t know how all of you do it.
When it comes to bad conference behavior, I’ve seen it all: Presenters who go well over their allotted time, while everyone agonizes about the minutes slipping away. Presenters who close by saying, “Well, I don’t have time for the last 10 pages of my talk, where I really make my argument, but I’ll be happy to address it in the Q&A.” Speakers droning in sonorous tones, apparently unaware that they even have an audience. Audience members who answer their cell phones in audible stage whispers, “Can I call you back? I’m at a conference. I said: I’M AT A CONFERENCE ….” I’ve even seen more blatant violations of conference etiquette: An audience member noisily eating a burrito in the front row, directly in front of the panelists. Another audience member who brought a large dog that barked and whined throughout the presentations (not, apparently, a service dog). Flavia has very appropriately termed these behaviors acts of conference terrorism.
But by far the most annoying, distracting, and troubling behavior I have witnessed is notable for the absence of its perpetrators, those presenters who subject the audience to their talks without actually attending the conference. To my alarm, it is becoming all too common for a panel to open with the chair stating regret that So-And-So was unable to attend the conference for [fill in the blank your choice of excuse: illness, death in the family, bad weather] but had requested that the chair read his/her paper in his/her absence. While I’ve been subjected to in-absentia presentations before, it was the cumulative effect of being forced to listen to several at the recent Big Literature Conference From Hell that set me to thinking about the practice. Indeed, I spent most of the time I was listening to the reading of these conference papers pondering – and, frankly, feeling steamed about – the absence of the author.
I would like to make a modest proposal to my fellow academics: if you cannot present your own conference paper, no one can or should present it for you.
Here’s why:
* The audience immediately disengages because they know there is no reason to listen. The know they will not be able to discuss the topic with or make suggestions to the author.
* The individual reading the paper invariably does so badly – after all, it’s not written in her voice, she doesn’t know where to place nuance or humor, and so forth. I, myself, was cajoled into reading a paper for a missing panelist many years ago, only to discover that it included numerous phrases and names in a language I do not speak and both I and the audience were forced to suffer through my garbled attempts. (Really, it was a horror show.)
* Moreover, in-absentia presenters seem to feel themselves free of all constraints and, without an audience to shame them into concision, every paper I saw went over the time limit, straining the patience of audience and reader alike. (I still inwardly cheer for the panel chair who abruptly stopped her reading with several pages still to go, stating brusquely, “That’s enough of that.”)
* Finally, although it is difficult to quantify the value of academic work, the fact is that it often comes down to a basic measure: a line on the CV. The question that preoccupied me throughout the in-absentia presentations I witnessed was this: do these scholars plan to include this presentation on their CVs? There I sat – having spent hours in uncomfortable travel conditions, hundreds of dollars on airfare and hotel bills, and the less tangible expense of my mental energy and collegial effort – and yet someone who was snug at home, having sent their paper off like a missive to the world, would be able to “count” their labor the same as mine? It galls.
In the end, the responsibility surrounding this practice falls upon panel chairs who agree to support in-absentia presentations; the chair must exercise the authority to say, “I’m so sorry you can’t make it because of your Very Good Reason, but if you cannot attend the conference, your paper cannot be presented.” Consider it as a gift to the audience, a release for yourself, and a reminder that there is a reason we meet in person and do not simply email each other our pages of brilliant prose. A conference is a social occasion as much as an academic one and papers should be presented by their authors, or not at all.
And, to those of you who failed to make it to your last speaking engagement and yet planned to include it on your CV – shame on you.
