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FIND ME

I've been brainstorming a major arcana for a Post-Apocademia tarot. I posted my initial list of attributions on the facebook group "The Professor is Out" and have gotten a lot of feedback and alternate options. I'm listing the 22 potential cards below (number, original Waite version title, my initial title, and alternate suggestions in parentheses). Nothing is set in stone yet. Jump in and offer your thoughts and opinions! 

0- THE FOOL - THE GRAD STUDENT (undergrad)

2- THE HIGH PRIESTESS - THE DISSERTATION ADVISOR

3- THE EMPRESS - PUBLICATION (switch 3 & 4; sabbatical?)

4- THE EMPEROR - THE DEPARTMENT CHAIR (board of regents, president)

5- THE HIEROPHANT- THE PROVOST (dean, librarian, department chair)

6- THE LOVERS - PRIMARY INVESTIGATORS (librarians, associate professors, irb)

8- STRENGTH - ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR (union rep)

11- JUSTICE - THE UNION REP (IRB, faculty senate)

12- THE HANGED MAN - STUDENT AFFAIRS PROFESSIONAL (committees & service)

13- DEATH - FACULTY EARLY RETIREMENT (program discontinuance)

      (workplace mobbing, commenter: devil card isn't solely negative so needs a more ambiguous attribution; bullying & favoritism; note loose chains -- do they trap us or incite us to action? Imposter syndrome, addiction, enslavement, concept of POWER central, rogue scholar, hedonist - HELL, this is getting to be a complicated card to cast!)

18- THE MOON - THE ADJUNCT (bully, provost, administration)

19- THE SUN - THE UNDERGRAD (should star, moon, & sun parallel?)

21 - THE WORLD - PUBLIC FUNDING OF HIGHER ED (public funding/endowment, alumni outreach)

By the way, one commenter shared that there's already an academic tarot. You can see that here: https://visionary-futures-collective.github.io/psychicfriends/

I've been brainstorming a major arcana for a Post-Apocademia tarot. I posted my initial list of attributions on the facebook group "The Professor is Out" and have gotten a lot of feedback and alternate options. I'm listing the 22 potential cards below (number, original Waite version title, my initial title, and alternate suggestions in parentheses). Nothing is set in stone yet. Jump in and offer your thoughts and opinions! 

      (workplace mobbing, commenter: devil card isn't solely negative so needs a more ambiguous attribution; bullying & favoritism; note loose chains -- do they trap us or incite us to action? Imposter syndrome, addiction, enslavement, concept of POWER central, rogue scholar, hedonist - HELL, this is getting to be a complicated card to cast!)

Post-Apocademia Tarot: Major Arcana

What the Heck is Folklore Anyway?

     There were ten of us sitting in the seminar room down in the basement of a building called “Public Policy.” As far as I knew, folklore had nothing to do with public policy but that’s where the folklore graduate program was housed. It was our first day. When the professor walked in, there were eleven. He was genial and warm. He welcomed us then, as he settled a bit more in his chair, he threw out both of his arms in a wide, encompassing gesture and said, “Let’s get to know each other. Go around and tell me your name and the school you went to.”  I was sitting next to him, but his arm seemed to slightly motion toward the other side so the young woman sitting by his other elbow spoke first. She had just earned her bachelor’s degree from the university we were presently occupying the basement of. She had taken a few folklore classes and decided to move onto graduate study in the field. I don’t remember all the introductions because soon I started to get too intimidated to pay much attention.There were at least two from the other venerable public research university in the northern part of the state where I later learned a famous folklorist had been a popular professor (He was a well respected scholar but probably most widely known for receiving death threats after the publication of a study on homoeroticism in football and, possibly, for dying mid-lecture — now that’s the way to go). At that point though I knew so little about folklore that I had no idea who the famous folklorists even were. Yes, I know, I should probably make major life decisions based on a careful assessment of as much data as possible, but that doesn’t seem to be my pattern.

     While I can’t recall the exact names of the universities the others in my cohort mentioned, I remember their impact on me, and on our professor at the end of the table. One by one they mentioned a series of elite institutions that had only existed for me in the same way that Mount Kilimanjaro did: I knew it was there and that it was a real thing, but I also knew I probably would never see it let alone scale it. Brown, Notre Dame, Vassar, Georgetown, Princeton — places like that. To me they were just names on sweatshirts worn by people who I lived in a richer parallel universe I would never find the portal to (Yes, I watch too much sci fi. Right now, I’m imagining the Stargate housed deep within Cheyenne Mountain — how I loved every iteration of Stargate!). By the time it was my turn to introduce myself — my turn to reveal that I was an alum of a lowly state teaching institution that only locals have heard of —  the shame was emanating out of me like a putrid stench so dense it is not merely a smell but a shimmering, visual veil warning of all approaching of imminent contamination.  I couldn’t very well run out of the room; the space was too tight and people would have to adjust their chairs to let me by. But I considered it. 

     I took a deep breath. Then I spit the ugly truth out. The professor kept his smile in place, though I could swear that it stiffened a bit in displeasure. Maybe not. He moved on to the next topic of discussion before i could be sure.

     There was a reason I showed up to graduate school without knowing even the hint of an idea about what the academic study of folklore actually was. I’d wanted to take classes in it in college — I’d even majored in Comparative Literature because the catalog said they offered courses in it — but the folklore courses in the catalog were never actually taught while I was there. Of course, someone with more sense would have looked into it, possibly read up on it, before they applied to undertake the better part of a decade studying it. But I didn’t. Like most of my students who enroll in my folklore class now, I figured I knew what folklore referred to. I’ve since learned to never assume I truly know anything. 

     Given how little I knew about it, I’m surprised I got into the program.  I don’t recall what I wrote in my application essay but it couldn’t have been very good. I applied simply because I had been freelancing as a storyteller and a degree in folklore sounded like a good idea. That’s literally all I knew.

    Once, after I was officially a student, I found myself in the old basement suite of offices after hours.  I was a t.a. or r.a that year so I had a key.  Looking each way down the dark linoleum hallway to make sure no one was there I used that key to open the office where they kept all the files. People saved a lot of paper in those days. After creakily opening several of them and startling myself into paranoia each time a drawer made noise as it opened, I finally found the one they kept the applications for admissions in.  I rifled through the files until I found mine.   On it, one of my future professors had jotted something to the effect of, “Interesting. Could be worth taking a chance on.”  He apparently didn’t have anything more specific to say about me.

    Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t one of the students in my cohort who were offered full funding that year.  When the chair called to find out if I was actually coming now that I’d been accepted, I said I couldn’t afford it.  He said, “How about if we give you enough for tuition?”  It didn’t take me a second to reply, “That’ll do.” I figured I could live with my folks for a while and commute all the way from the bad part of the county up to the shiny part.  And so I was graduate school bound, with no clue what I was going to be doing or studying or that it was not simply “undergrad plus” as I’d imagined.

   Here are a few of the things I learned right off the bat, other than what folklor(istics) actually was:

The people who were not only from fancy schools but from schools where there was a folklorist the professors here were friends with got the most funding in their first year.

Professors waged war with other professors.

Departments waged war with other departments.

Students generally became attached, by their choice or the professor’s, to one professor in the department. Others served on your committee, but everyone knew who you belonged to. I came because I was a storyteller, but the narrative guy was retiring and didn’t seem to like me much while the material culture guy seemed more entertained by me. That quickly, I dumped storytelling — my reason for coming — for material culture.

Where funding is limited, students tend to be eternally anxious. At the end of the year, everyone haunted the room where the student mailboxes were to see who would get a sealed envelope.

Most of us were not expected to survive — if we survived graduate school, we probably wouldn’t survive academia itself. Everyone from the professors to the students were well aware the job market was painfully bad and getting worse. You came for whatever dreams you brought with you from being a naive undergraduate. You stayed because the subject got under your skin like a love that might never be requited. It was a physical love, giving you butterflies in you stomach every time you learned something new.

     In graduate school, they rarely mention that the job you are — despite the low odds — presumably grooming yourself for will include, let alone in many cases, be dominated by teaching. Sure, you sometimes earn money as a teaching assistant along the way, and you know your own professors teach because you are enrolled in their classes, but no one really focuses on it.  If anything, your professors are grooming you to become like them: professors at research universities where the teaching load is light and the emphasis is on the scholarly work you produce.  They probably know that most of you will either disappear into other occupations or be destined for a lifetime of adjunct status, but while your fate might occur to them once in a while that isn’t their primary concern.  Their duty is to produce the few who will get those research university positions and carry on their mantle, perpetuating the survival of the discipline (and in Folklore, or folkloristics if you prefer, the survival of the discipline is a big concern).  

    My goal wasn’t even to get one of those coveted jobs. Not initially. There were moments when I found myself suddenly fixated on the idea because for everyone else it was clearly the end goal, but I hadn’t come to graduate school for that. I envisioned that what I learned would inform my  art and the degree might give me some cred. Nonetheless, I was quickly consumed with enthusiasm for the subject even in its more scholarly incarnation. I wanted to stay. I became driven by the realization that I would have to work twice as hard as anyone else if I ever wanted to get funding.

    I met Meredith in grad school and  initially she didn’t like me — I thought. It was obvious and not just my paranoia: She made a habit of saying “No, Sandra” every time she passed me in the hall. For the longest time I didn’t know why.  It turned out that my enthusiasm was incredibly annoying. I apparently came across as incarnation of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney trying to save the day by putting on a show — over and over again.  

     “You always had a new idea, project or event you were trying to recruit people to help you with,” she later explained once we had become friends, “So I figured the best way to deal with you was to say ‘No’ before you had a chance to ask me for anything.” Unlike me, she was the real deal. She was stellar and intimidating long after I got over what schools people had gone to. She didn’t exactly become one of the researchers who would take on the mantle and save the field, but as I would learn, there were many paths to power or notoriety that an academic could take. Today, even with a degree in something as obscure as a Ph.D. in Folklore, she’s risen to become a big muckety-muck at a large state school. She’ll probably be a university president one day.

    Sidenote: folklorists, please don’t be annoyed with me for saying our field is obscure. I know there are more of you than most people realize and I am well aware of how increasingly relevant a folkloristic approach is in our technologically driven world. But you know and I know that we have all been asked “A folklorist? What’s that?” or “Is that an actual major? At a real school?” more times than we would like. One of my dearest friends in grad school told me that upon telling her mother of her plans, her mother responded, “Good School. Bad Major.” Of course she’s now a professor at the most well established and well funded folklore department in the nation. Folklorists of the world, you too can prove those who question you wrong. It’s important. It’s worth the fight. 

     Surprisingly, for a small, endangered program in a small, endangered discipline, there were quite a few of my classmates who survived and even thrived in academia in one form or another. Some even got the sort of jobs coveted by graduate students of every ilk: at least three of them are now professors at the few folklore programs in research universities that still exist in the U.S.  I think one may even be the chair. Maybe two. That friend with the skeptical mother? She puts out the sort of big glossy books on folk art that university publishers rarely invest in these days. I’ve heard that each of the former grad school colleagues who ended up at these rarified bastions of folkloristic inquiry have coteries of graduate students who follow them around at conferences like puppies. All of us were probably those puppies once. To this day, even though I hadn’t planned on becoming a professor and before my first day of grad school I couldn’t define the term “folklore” if you asked me to, I idolize my dissertation advisor. He gave a lecture once on suburban curbside trash can arrangements that completely changed the way I look at the world. Seriously. I would tell you about it, but I wouldn’t do it justice. I would also probably be infringing on copyright law.

     Other fellow students who didn’t end up with jobs at the fancy schools still did incredibly well: There’s the power player I mentioned earlier for example. She’s an Associate Vice President of Some Huge Chunk of the University. One entire contingent of my peers got adopted by a private art college on the West coast where, while they don’t offer tenure, continue to promote them and don’t seem inclined to dispose of them.  Some diverged entirely — I don’t know where all of them went, but there’s one who became the chief editor of a city alt weekly who lives in an Airstream with pitbulls and a couple of horses (the horses, I’m almost sure, live outside of the Airstream). Another became a yoga teacher and ends her name with both Ph.D. and RYT. 

     Other students I knew are often at least making a living in academia. One taught a slew of online classes (thirteen a semester!) until she got hired by a private firm to be the Queen of Online Instruction, or something to that effect that sounds pretty impressive. She eventually left to become Dr. Acclaimed Independent Scholar and lives in what sounds like paradise. Others, like most scholars these days, work as adjuncts. But at least they are working at what they love. Amazingly, despite less than ideal working situations, even my former colleagues who work as adjuncts still research and publish more than I do.  After all, I never planned on a career in academia. Writing a graphic novel and this blog probably demonstrate I continue to make life decisions without thinking them through. 

    Whatever, I’m still alive. As of this writing anyway.

     There were ten of us sitting in the seminar room down in the basement of a building called “Public Policy.” As far as I knew, folklore had nothing to do with public policy but that’s where the folklore graduate program was housed. It was our first day. When the professor walked in, there were eleven. He was genial and warm. He welcomed us then, as he settled a bit more in his chair, he threw out both of his arms in a wide, encompassing gesture and said, “Let’s get to know each other. Go around and tell me your name and the school you went to.”  I was sitting next to him, but his arm seemed to slightly motion toward the other side so the young woman sitting by his other elbow spoke first. She had just earned her bachelor’s degree from the university we were presently occupying the basement of. She had taken a few folklore classes and decided to move onto graduate study in the field. I don’t remember all the introductions because soon I started to get too intimidated to pay much attention.There were at least two from the other venerable public research university in the northern part of the state where I later learned a famous folklorist had been a popular professor (He was a well respected scholar but probably most widely known for receiving death threats after the publication of a study on homoeroticism in football and, possibly, for dying mid-lecture — now that’s the way to go). At that point though I knew so little about folklore that I had no idea who the famous folklorists even were. Yes, I know, I should probably make major life decisions based on a careful assessment of as much data as possible, but that doesn’t seem to be my pattern.

     While I can’t recall the exact names of the universities the others in my cohort mentioned, I remember their impact on me, and on our professor at the end of the table. One by one they mentioned a series of elite institutions that had only existed for me in the same way that Mount Kilimanjaro did: I knew it was there and that it was a real thing, but I also knew I probably would never see it let alone scale it. Brown, Notre Dame, Vassar, Georgetown, Princeton — places like that. To me they were just names on sweatshirts worn by people who I lived in a richer parallel universe I would never find the portal to (Yes, I watch too much sci fi. Right now, I’m imagining the Stargate housed deep within Cheyenne Mountain — how I loved every iteration of Stargate!). By the time it was my turn to introduce myself — my turn to reveal that I was an alum of a lowly state teaching institution that only locals have heard of —  the shame was emanating out of me like a putrid stench so dense it is not merely a smell but a shimmering, visual veil warning of all approaching of imminent contamination.  I couldn’t very well run out of the room; the space was too tight and people would have to adjust their chairs to let me by. But I considered it. 

     I took a deep breath. Then I spit the ugly truth out. The professor kept his smile in place, though I could swear that it stiffened a bit in displeasure. Maybe not. He moved on to the next topic of discussion before i could be sure.

     There was a reason I showed up to graduate school without knowing even the hint of an idea about what the academic study of folklore actually was. I’d wanted to take classes in it in college — I’d even majored in Comparative Literature because the catalog said they offered courses in it — but the folklore courses in the catalog were never actually taught while I was there. Of course, someone with more sense would have looked into it, possibly read up on it, before they applied to undertake the better part of a decade studying it. But I didn’t. Like most of my students who enroll in my folklore class now, I figured I knew what folklore referred to. I’ve since learned to never assume I truly know anything. 

     Given how little I knew about it, I’m surprised I got into the program.  I don’t recall what I wrote in my application essay but it couldn’t have been very good. I applied simply because I had been freelancing as a storyteller and a degree in folklore sounded like a good idea. That’s literally all I knew.

    Once, after I was officially a student, I found myself in the old basement suite of offices after hours.  I was a t.a. or r.a that year so I had a key.  Looking each way down the dark linoleum hallway to make sure no one was there I used that key to open the office where they kept all the files. People saved a lot of paper in those days. After creakily opening several of them and startling myself into paranoia each time a drawer made noise as it opened, I finally found the one they kept the applications for admissions in.  I rifled through the files until I found mine.   On it, one of my future professors had jotted something to the effect of, “Interesting. Could be worth taking a chance on.”  He apparently didn’t have anything more specific to say about me.

    Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t one of the students in my cohort who were offered full funding that year.  When the chair called to find out if I was actually coming now that I’d been accepted, I said I couldn’t afford it.  He said, “How about if we give you enough for tuition?”  It didn’t take me a second to reply, “That’ll do.” I figured I could live with my folks for a while and commute all the way from the bad part of the county up to the shiny part.  And so I was graduate school bound, with no clue what I was going to be doing or studying or that it was not simply “undergrad plus” as I’d imagined.

   Here are a few of the things I learned right off the bat, other than what folklor(istics) actually was:

     In graduate school, they rarely mention that the job you are — despite the low odds — presumably grooming yourself for will include, let alone in many cases, be dominated by teaching. Sure, you sometimes earn money as a teaching assistant along the way, and you know your own professors teach because you are enrolled in their classes, but no one really focuses on it.  If anything, your professors are grooming you to become like them: professors at research universities where the teaching load is light and the emphasis is on the scholarly work you produce.  They probably know that most of you will either disappear into other occupations or be destined for a lifetime of adjunct status, but while your fate might occur to them once in a while that isn’t their primary concern.  Their duty is to produce the few who will get those research university positions and carry on their mantle, perpetuating the survival of the discipline (and in Folklore, or folkloristics if you prefer, the survival of the discipline is a big concern).  

    My goal wasn’t even to get one of those coveted jobs. Not initially. There were moments when I found myself suddenly fixated on the idea because for everyone else it was clearly the end goal, but I hadn’t come to graduate school for that. I envisioned that what I learned would inform my  art and the degree might give me some cred. Nonetheless, I was quickly consumed with enthusiasm for the subject even in its more scholarly incarnation. I wanted to stay. I became driven by the realization that I would have to work twice as hard as anyone else if I ever wanted to get funding.

    I met Meredith in grad school and  initially she didn’t like me — I thought. It was obvious and not just my paranoia: She made a habit of saying “No, Sandra” every time she passed me in the hall. For the longest time I didn’t know why.  It turned out that my enthusiasm was incredibly annoying. I apparently came across as incarnation of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney trying to save the day by putting on a show — over and over again.  

     “You always had a new idea, project or event you were trying to recruit people to help you with,” she later explained once we had become friends, “So I figured the best way to deal with you was to say ‘No’ before you had a chance to ask me for anything.” Unlike me, she was the real deal. She was stellar and intimidating long after I got over what schools people had gone to. She didn’t exactly become one of the researchers who would take on the mantle and save the field, but as I would learn, there were many paths to power or notoriety that an academic could take. Today, even with a degree in something as obscure as a Ph.D. in Folklore, she’s risen to become a big muckety-muck at a large state school. She’ll probably be a university president one day.

 folklorists, please don’t be annoyed with me for saying our field is obscure. I know there are more of you than most people realize and I am well aware of how increasingly relevant a folkloristic approach is in our technologically driven world. But you know and I know that we have all been asked “A folklorist? What’s that?” or “Is that an actual major? At a real school?” more times than we would like. One of my dearest friends in grad school told me that upon telling her mother of her plans, her mother responded, “Good School. Bad Major.” Of course she’s now a professor at the most well established and well funded folklore department in the nation. Folklorists of the world, you too can prove those who question you wrong. It’s important. It’s worth the fight. 

     Surprisingly, for a small, endangered program in a small, endangered discipline, there were quite a few of my classmates who survived and even thrived in academia in one form or another. Some even got the sort of jobs coveted by graduate students of every ilk: at least three of them are now professors at the few folklore programs in research universities that still exist in the U.S.  I think one may even be the chair. Maybe two. That friend with the skeptical mother? She puts out the sort of big glossy books on folk art that university publishers rarely invest in these days. I’ve heard that each of the former grad school colleagues who ended up at these rarified bastions of folkloristic inquiry have coteries of graduate students who follow them around at conferences like puppies. All of us were probably those puppies once. To this day, even though I hadn’t planned on becoming a professor and before my first day of grad school I couldn’t define the term “folklore” if you asked me to, I idolize my dissertation advisor. He gave a lecture once on suburban curbside trash can arrangements that completely changed the way I look at the world. Seriously. I would tell you about it, but I wouldn’t do it justice. I would also probably be infringing on copyright law.

     Other fellow students who didn’t end up with jobs at the fancy schools still did incredibly well: There’s the power player I mentioned earlier for example. She’s an Associate Vice President of Some Huge Chunk of the University. One entire contingent of my peers got adopted by a private art college on the West coast where, while they don’t offer tenure, continue to promote them and don’t seem inclined to dispose of them.  Some diverged entirely — I don’t know where all of them went, but there’s one who became the chief editor of a city alt weekly who lives in an Airstream with pitbulls and a couple of horses (the horses, I’m almost sure, live outside of the Airstream). Another became a yoga teacher and ends her name with both Ph.D. and RYT. 

     Other students I knew are often at least making a living in academia. One taught a slew of online classes (thirteen a semester!) until she got hired by a private firm to be the Queen of Online Instruction, or something to that effect that sounds pretty impressive. She eventually left to become Dr. Acclaimed Independent Scholar and lives in what sounds like paradise. Others, like most scholars these days, work as adjuncts. But at least they are working at what they love. Amazingly, despite less than ideal working situations, even my former colleagues who work as adjuncts still research and publish more than I do.  After all, I never planned on a career in academia. Writing a graphic novel and this blog probably demonstrate I continue to make life decisions without thinking them through. 

    Whatever, I’m still alive. As of this writing anyway.

Intimidated? Scared? Made a Big Life Decision Without Thinking it Through?  It’ll all be o.k.

	It happens to me so regularly that I’ve almost developed a fear of leaving the house. God help those poor souls who, like me, do not have a common or easy-to-understand profession. Yes, I know, “professor” seems pretty easy-to-understand, but unfortunately conversations never stop there. Here, I’ll paint you a picture of a typical interaction with a stranger or someone I don’t know very well. Let’s just say it’s you:

	You and I are at a mixer. Maybe it’s a farewell party for an acquaintance, or a birthday party for a friend’s spouse. These situations fill me with foreboding, and not simply because I am an introvert. These situations require “small talk.” I am not good at small talk and unfortunately when someone inevitably asks what I do for a living I cannot simply say “I teach” or “I’m a professor.” Each of these seem to lead to a longer conversation because apparently they beg for follow up questions. “What grade do you teach?” “What subject to you teach?” And it goes on from there in a spiraling hell where usually I end up having to give a hopefully shortened intro lecture on said subject. Sometimes the person before me even fights with me about it. Usually I want to go home.  

	But let’s get back to that hypothetical mixer you and I both attend. No, we didn’t date. After all, I still like you and you are clearly not a horrific person.

	Each of us find ourselves in a conversation with a stranger — perhaps even each other! If you are like me, you will have immediately gravitated as close to the snack and beverage array as possible. Not only does the location offer proximity to sustenance but if no one is talking to you, you can busy yourself with the olive selection. But this time, we catch each other’s eye without trying to, which results in an awkward moment. To fill it, one of us starts a conversation. We cover how we know the people at the party. We talk about how truly great they are, though we admit we don’t know them all that well. If there was weather or traffic worth mentioning, we talk about that. Finally though, one of us runs out of our stockpile of small talk and asks, “So what do you do?” If you are lucky, you get to say that you are an engineer or a nurse or “in IT.” I’m just guessing but those answers probably rarely invite follow up questions, and if they do they’re concise and you can move on to the next topic of conversation. After all, you just got off work, so why wouldn’t you want to leave it behind for a few hours? If you say to your conversation partner that you are a consultant, some will ask you what sort of consulting you do and others will change the subject, assuming your answer is a respectable sounding cover for “unemployed.” Whatever the profession, your fate is likely easier than mine.

I earned my graduate degrees in Folklore though I rarely get to teach Folklore.

My first full-time faculty job was at a university in a department called Interdisciplinary General Education

In recent years, I have been at another university as an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies

	At whatever point in my life that you and I crossed paths by the olive selection, it is all too likely each of these answers simply will not pass without a lengthy series of follow up questions. I don’t completely blame you. There was a point at which I knew nothing about any of these so I would probably pepper you with questions too. But after several decades, I’m tired. Frankly, explaining these things is what I do for work and they pay me to do it when I do talk about it. If you’re not offering to pay me, I would probably rather go to Taco Bell right now and get one of those Baja Blast Freezes that only costs a dollar between two and four pm. But generally I’m polite, probably to my detriment, and I try to transmit the basics as quickly and efficiently as I can. I may even suggest we both blow this shindig and head for the drive thru at Taco Bell stat before happy hour is tragically at its end. After all, these olives frankly suck. They are those plain old flavorless olives out of a can and do not hold within them the smoky mystery of the Kalamata or even the pleasant bite of the green olive stuffed with pimento. Whatever your plans are, I’m definitely planning to ditch this uninspired buffet with its small slices of cheese just beginning to accumulate the sheen of oily perspiration that is the sad fate of all cheese and cracker trays. My sole remaining optimistic hope is that I can get to Taco Bell before happy hour ends and those syrupy, caffeinated slushy drinks double in price. So, if you don’t mind, let’s get on with this.

	Folklore, no matter what you’ve heard or believed, is not bounded by genres like fairy tales and myths.  Fairy tales and myths can be a manifestation of folklore, which is really more of a process than it is an end product. Essentially, people communicate through forms that they have learned somewhere else, but when they do, they often take the option of doing it with a twist that is all their own and that “end” product is not the end at all because it is constantly evolving as it passes informally from person to person. So maybe Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their heels and toes to fit them into that tiny shoe or maybe they don’t, depending on the inclination, world view, or forgetfulness of the narrator. Or a single photo can disseminate throughout the internet with different captions or photoshopped modifications.  Folklore is a type of communication. It is often artful and playful, but always informal, and draws upon some precedent, — but it is no more relegated to the Ancient Greeks or the Brother’s Grimm than it is to Rick Astley or Bernie Sanders in mittens. The “product” of this dialogue we use to communicate with each other can be a story or text of some sort (like the drawing I found freshly inked in a new bathroom on campus of a “micro penis”) or it could just as easily be a physical object (like a massive yarnbombing installation where a tree is entirely covered with intricate crochet). The practice of putting out cheese and crackers at these mixers, cutting radishes into decorative flowers? Also folklore. See, wasn’t that simple?

      If you want to know more, find a local university and take a class or go to the library for a textbook that will cover the whole field for you in more detail than I can (or want to) here. It’s fun stuff and it says a lot about who we are as both individuals and societies.

      If you are a folklorist and you take issue with my definition, by all means write about it. After all, I think it can be said that the phrase, “All publicity is good publicity” is usually disseminated in a folkloric manner. I’ll let you know if that bit of traditional, informal wisdom is true. Your results may vary.

     For seven years or so, I didn’t teach much folklore because I was hired into a department called Interdisciplinary General Education. People sometimes describe it as experimental but it’s been around for a couple of decades so I think we can safely conclude the experimental phase is over, though it continues to evolve. IGE was an alternative way students could elect to fulfill some of their general education requirements through a series of linked classes through which they often got to know each other as much as the course content. We promised them we’d read and write a lot but there would never be any tests, and lecturing would be minimal to the point of being undetectable. We always sat in a circle, students called us by our first names, and faculty agreed that 60 to 70% of the content of any section of a course would consist of what we had collaboratively decided earlier would be the core texts. The remainder of the material was open to experimentation with new texts that might be adopted later.

	O.k., that description was admittedly dry and boring, though I’m guessing quite a few of you wished you had that option when you were in college. The short way of explaining it is that IGE had an approach to teaching that demanded student engagement in the material and valued their contributions and observations as equal to our own as professors. Still boring. Do you see how this is utterly failing as conversation at the mixer and making me tired? Let’s leave it at this: Interdisciplinary General Education is an approach to teaching and learning that acknowledges the value of student contributions to scholarly conversations and seeks to develop and empower their voices, at times using creative or unconventional methods to do so. Bleh. That was as boring as ever, but believe me the classes were often flat out fun and more students completed the assigned reading for any given day than in any other department or campus I’ve taught at.

     While I was primarily wooed away from California to take an administrative post, when I was offered the job I said that one of my requirements for accepting was that I would maintain my faculty status and rank, along with tenure. These days, at our hypothetical mixer, my unsuspecting conversation partner usually asks, “What exactly is Women’s Studies?” and may even follow it up with a half-joking “Why isn’t there a men’s studies?” Although there are indeed scholars pursuing masculinity studies and other experiences along the gender spectrum, my mixer answer is usually just, “Because that is the rest of the university curriculum.” Somewhere in there feminism comes up and my conversation partner, of whatever gender, has armed themselves for a contentious battle that is tiring even when I agree with them —usually when I agree with them, they were already so prepped for battle they don’t realize I’m agreeing with them and I am left to stand there while they drone on, sometimes with a discomfiting and distracting bit of spittle accumulating at the corner of their lips.

    I could go on to explain the connections between the academic discipline of Women’s Studies and its connections to the Women’s Movement, but I won’t because blah, blah, blah.

      I think I’ll sum it up by saying that Women’s Studies a vital field that is constantly changing and even finds itself going in contrary directions in its drive to seriously examine and re-examine the systemic sources of oppression that still operate the world over. What these variants of Women’s Studies often hold in common is that in most of them, scholars look at a particular reality through a feminist lens. “So what’s feminism?” you might ask even though I’ve already bored both of us to tears. Just about now I want to cry because there are so many definitions of feminism I not only can’t get through them, I probably don’t know all of them. I’ll just tell you what it is for me: feminism is about the pursuit of social justice (ooh, taboo phrase).  Scholarship in women’s studies points to possible actions that can be taken to correct the inequities in society no matter what complex identities come into play—whether they are related to class, gender, sexuality, race, or innumerable other factors that can intersect and compound the problem, not to mention the analysis.  

I’m going to shorten all that even more: Feminism strives to dismantle injustice in all its manifestations and Women’s Studies, as an academic field of study, has the potential to provide insights into the nature of injustice so that we can effectively act on it to create a better world.

      As with folklore scholars, I invite women and gender studies scholars to tear my simplistic explanation apart. If your reviews don’t send more people over to read me, I may at least learn something from them — if I read them of course. You gotta understand, I’ve got a lot on my plate. 

Ugh. That sort of attitude never brings about change. Shame on me. Send ‘em to me and I promise I’ll read them.

      Ok, so if you ever run into me by a tray of olives, please, please refrain from asking me what I do. I don’t want to teach in my off hours. It’s bad enough that sometimes while I’m zoning out in front of those olives, I’m thinking about the 120 ten page term papers I have to grade by next week waiting for me at home. Instead, make yourself useful and tell me what the best olive is, especially if it’s unfamiliar and I seem to be hesitating to choose it. Or we can leave this shindig and go to Taco Bell. Either way, I’ll love you forever (but not that way — we’re not dating, remember?).

	It happens to me so regularly that I’ve almost developed a fear of leaving the house. 

God help those poor souls who, like me, do not have a common or easy-to-understand profession.

 Yes, I know, “professor” seems pretty easy-to-understand, but unfortunately conversations never stop there. Here, I’ll paint you a picture of a typical interaction with a stranger or someone I don’t know very well. Let’s just say it’s you:

	You and I are at a mixer. Maybe it’s a farewell party for an acquaintance, or a birthday party for a friend’s spouse. These situations fill me with foreboding, and not simply because I am an introvert. These situations require “small talk.” I am not good at small talk and unfortunately when someone inevitably asks what I do for a living I cannot simply say “I teach” or “I’m a professor.” Each of these seem to lead to a longer conversation because apparently they beg for follow up questions. “What grade do you teach?” “What subject to you teach?” And it goes on from there in a spiraling hell where usually I end up having to give a hopefully shortened intro lecture on said subject. Sometimes the person before me even fights with me about it. Usually I want to go home.  

	Each of us find ourselves in a conversation with a stranger — perhaps even each other! If you are like me, you will have immediately gravitated as close to the snack and beverage array as possible. Not only does the location offer proximity to sustenance but if no one is talking to you, you can busy yourself with the olive selection. But this time, we catch each other’s eye without trying to, which results in an awkward moment. To fill it, one of us starts a conversation. We cover how we know the people at the party. We talk about how truly great they are, though we admit we don’t know them all that well. If there was weather or traffic worth mentioning, we talk about that. Finally though, one of us runs out of our stockpile of small talk and asks, 

 If you are lucky, you get to say that you are an engineer or a nurse or “in IT.” I’m just guessing but those answers probably rarely invite follow up questions, and if they do they’re concise and you can move on to the next topic of conversation. After all, you just got off work, so why wouldn’t you want to leave it behind for a few hours? If you say to your conversation partner that you are a consultant, some will ask you what sort of consulting you do and others will change the subject, assuming your answer is a respectable sounding cover for “unemployed.” 

Whatever the profession, your fate is likely easier than mine.

At whatever point in my life that you and I crossed paths by the olive selection, it is all too likely each of these answers simply will not pass without a lengthy series of follow up questions. 

I don’t completely blame you. There was a point at which I knew nothing about any of these so I would probably pepper you with questions too. But after several decades, I’m tired. Frankly, 

explaining these things is what I do for work and they pay me to do it when I do talk about it. 

If you’re not offering to pay me, I would probably rather go to Taco Bell right now and get one of those Baja Blast Freezes that only costs a dollar between two and four pm. But generally I’m polite, probably to my detriment, and I try to transmit the basics as quickly and efficiently as I can. I may even suggest we both blow this shindig and head for the drive thru at Taco Bell stat before happy hour is tragically at its end. After all, these olives frankly suck. They are those plain old flavorless olives out of a can and do not hold within them the smoky mystery of the Kalamata or even the pleasant bite of the green olive stuffed with pimento. Whatever your plans are, I’m definitely planning to ditch this uninspired buffet with its small slices of cheese just beginning to accumulate the sheen of oily perspiration that is the sad fate of all cheese and cracker trays. My sole remaining optimistic hope is that I can get to Taco Bell before happy hour ends and those syrupy, caffeinated slushy drinks double in price. So, if you don’t mind, let’s get on with this.

	Folklore, no matter what you’ve heard or believed, is not bounded by genres like fairy tales and myths.  Fairy tales and myths can be a manifestation of folklore, which is really more of a process than it is an end product. Essentially, people communicate through forms that they have learned somewhere else, but when they do, they often take the option of doing it with a twist that is all their own and that “end” product is not the end at all because it is constantly evolving as it passes informally from person to person. So maybe Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their heels and toes to fit them into that tiny shoe or maybe they don’t, depending on the inclination, world view, or forgetfulness of the narrator. Or a single photo can disseminate throughout the internet with different captions or photoshopped modifications. 

 Folklore is a type of communication. It is often artful and playful, but always informal, and draws upon some precedent,

 — but it is no more relegated to the Ancient Greeks or the Brother’s Grimm than it is to Rick Astley or Bernie Sanders in mittens. The “product” of this dialogue we use to communicate with each other can be a story or text of some sort (like the drawing I found freshly inked in a new bathroom on campus of a “micro penis”) or it could just as easily be a physical object (like a massive yarnbombing installation where a tree is entirely covered with intricate crochet). The practice of putting out cheese and crackers at these mixers, cutting radishes into decorative flowers? Also folklore. See, wasn’t that simple?

      If you want to know more, find a local university and take a class or go to the library for a textbook that will cover the whole field for you in more detail than I can (or want to) here. It’s fun stuff and it says a lot about who we are as both individuals and societies.

      If you are a folklorist and you take issue with my definition, by all means write about it. After all, I think it can be said that the phrase, “All publicity is good publicity” is usually disseminated in a folkloric manner. I’ll let you know if that bit of traditional, informal wisdom is true. Your results may vary.

     For seven years or so, I didn’t teach much folklore because I was hired into a department called Interdisciplinary General Education. People sometimes describe it as experimental but it’s been around for a couple of decades so I think we can safely conclude the experimental phase is over, though it continues to evolve. IGE was an alternative way students could elect to fulfill some of their general education requirements through a series of linked classes through which they often got to know each other as much as the course content. We promised them we’d read and write a lot but there would never be any tests, and lecturing would be minimal to the point of being undetectable. We always sat in a circle, students called us by our first names, and faculty agreed that 60 to 70% of the content of any section of a course would consist of what we had collaboratively decided earlier would be the core texts. The remainder of the material was open to experimentation with new texts that might be adopted later.

	O.k., that description was admittedly dry and boring, though I’m guessing quite a few of you wished you had that option when you were in college. The short way of explaining it is that IGE had an approach to teaching that demanded student engagement in the material and valued their contributions and observations as equal to our own as professors. Still boring. Do you see how this is utterly failing as conversation at the mixer and making me tired? 

Let’s leave it at this: Interdisciplinary General Education is an approach to teaching and learning that acknowledges the value of student contributions to scholarly conversations and seeks to develop and empower their voices, at times using creative or unconventional methods to do so.

 Bleh. That was as boring as ever, but believe me the classes were often flat out fun and more students completed the assigned reading for any given day than in any other department or campus I’ve taught at.

     While I was primarily wooed away from California to take an administrative post, when I was offered the job I said that one of my requirements for accepting was that I would maintain my faculty status and rank, along with tenure. These days, at our hypothetical mixer, my unsuspecting conversation partner usually asks, “What exactly is Women’s Studies?” and may even follow it up with a half-joking “Why isn’t there a men’s studies?” Although there are indeed scholars pursuing masculinity studies and other experiences along the gender spectrum, my mixer answer is usually just, “Because that is the rest of the university curriculum.” Somewhere in there feminism comes up and my conversation partner, of whatever gender, has armed themselves for a contentious battle that is tiring even when I agree with them —usually when I agree with them, they were already so prepped for battle they don’t realize I’m agreeing with them and I am left to stand there while they drone on, sometimes with a discomfiting and distracting bit of spittle accumulating at the corner of their lips.

    I could go on to explain the connections between the academic discipline of Women’s Studies and its connections to the Women’s Movement, but I won’t because blah, blah, blah.

      I think I’ll sum it up by saying that Women’s Studies a vital field that is constantly changing and even finds itself going in contrary directions in its drive to seriously examine and re-examine the systemic sources of oppression that still operate the world over. What these variants of Women’s Studies often hold in common is that in most of them, scholars look at a particular reality through a feminist lens. “So what’s feminism?” you might ask even though I’ve already bored both of us to tears. Just about now I want to cry because there are so many definitions of feminism I not only can’t get through them, I probably don’t know all of them. I’ll just tell you what it is for me: feminism is about the pursuit of social justice (ooh, taboo phrase).  Scholarship in women’s studies points to possible actions that can be taken to correct the inequities in society no matter what complex identities come into play—whether they are related to class, gender, sexuality, race, or innumerable other factors that can intersect and compound the problem, not to mention the analysis.  

I’m going to shorten all that even more:

 Feminism strives to dismantle injustice in all its manifestations and Women’s Studies, as an academic field of study, has the potential to provide insights into the nature of injustice so that we can effectively act on it to create a better world.

      As with folklore scholars, I invite women and gender studies scholars to tear my simplistic explanation apart. If your reviews don’t send more people over to read me, I may at least learn something from them — if I read them of course. You gotta understand, I’ve got a lot on my plate. 

      Ok, so if you ever run into me by a tray of olives, please, please refrain from asking me what I do. I don’t want to teach in my off hours. It’s bad enough that sometimes while I’m zoning out in front of those olives, I’m thinking about the 120 ten page term papers I have to grade by next week waiting for me at home. Instead, make yourself useful and tell me what the best olive is, especially if it’s unfamiliar and I seem to be hesitating to choose it. Or we can leave this shindig and go to Taco Bell. Either way, I’ll love you forever (but not that way — we’re not dating, remember?).

You Know You Want to Ask, So Let’s Get This Over With

People are going to tell you a lot of things, especially people that are older than you are. Some of them are going to be wrong — a lot of them maybe. I mean, can you really trust people who used typewriters and remembered when the hot new video game was Pong? 

 Me? Yeah I remember Pong. And manual typewriters. But I’m always right, so listen up.

Ok, that’s the first thing I told you that wasn’t true. Sheesh, you can’t trust anybody these days. However, drawing on the vast store of mistakes I’ve built up in my life, I’m going to do my best to tell you just a few key takeaways you may find useful as you go along

First though, I’m going to address some common bad advice that people, many people perhaps, may have told you:

Live Without Regrets: People, young and old, say this alot but let me give it to you straight — there is absolutely no way you can get out of this life without a big ol’ shit pile of regrets. Often you are given two or more or a whole plethora of choices, and your time being limited as it is, you can’t choose to pursue all of them. You may choose the wrong one. Even if the one you chose turns out well, chances are you’ll always wonder what life would have been like if you had chosen one of the others. This applies to both relationships and careers equally. The way I see it, the beginning of your life is about endless possibility. The older you get, your life is characterized by the vast density of your regrets and the time you spend pondering them. It’s not a great reality, but real it is.

Live Without Fear: This is related to the former and it’s even more dangerous. Yes, you should take chances, but make them calculated chances. Living without fear can kill you. Worse yet, it can make you an asshole.

You Can Do Anything You Set Your Mind To: Remember, calculated risks. The lower down on the socioeconomic ladder you are, the more systemic barriers stand in your way. Systemic barriers are those things built into our society and laws that infiltrate just about everything we do to keep the people on the bottom on the bottom. Yes, some people make it, but consider your chances of becoming the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or even Kylie Jenner are about equal to your chances of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in flip-flops — sure, it’s possible, but it’s unlikely. And besides, all those people were well off or just plain wealthy when they started. But don’t let that get you down. What should you do? Participate in the work for social justice in anyway you can to dismantle those systemic injustices. With enough people, even the Berlin Wall came down. Keep working on whatever it is that is your passion, but maybe consider a day job too. Remember, while Forbes named Kylie Jenner the “youngest-ever self-made billionaire,” she had a rich, famous family to support her and get her the right connections, so even if she worked hard, self-made is, well, specious. And anyway, having a day job to pay the rent and pursuing your passion on your own time may be a better deal. Why? Because anything that is your passion will eventually become tedious if it actually becomes your job. Truly.

Now that I’ve gotten the usual bad advice out of the way, I’m going to fulfill my role as an old person and pass on what I think is good advice. This may be your cue to tune out and find that cute video on YouTube where the toad leans into someone’s hand every time their head is scratched. You can pick your own video, but that’s my favorite because I love toads.  If you’re not going to read this, I highly recommend it. Now back to that advice:

 If or when you are in college, immerse yourself in your general education classes. They are the ones that will change your life. I won’t bore you with all the reasons why, and there are a zillion of them. Just take my word for it.

Be open. Go to a class (or an event, or to your Great Aunt Milly’s house) without expectations and roll with the experience. Every instructor teaching a class (and anyone you meet there, or anywhere) will have something different to offer and you can’t predict anything by the catalog descriptions. Learn to appreciate the fullness and serendipity of what a college education (and life) can bring you. Remember, college is not about the job you get (but if you actually take the time to learn — from all your classes and not just the ones in your major —  you might find you have a breadth of skills and knowledge that gives your career the potential to be even more successful).

Get into as little debt as possible. Go to community college and state college if you need to but apply to whatever your dream school is too. They may just give you a lot of money to grace them with your presence. When the final tally comes out, taking into consideration grants and scholarships, hoity-toity private institutions with pretty campuses often cost you less out of pocket than your local state school. If grant and scholarship money doesn’t just roll in, remember community college professors often have the same graduate degrees the professors at pricey schools do. They may not do as much research, but they may also be more invested in you personally because it is their job to teach.

Wherever you end up, make a point to talk to your professors. It can be about class but it can also be about almost anything. Seriously, they want to talk to you and they usually want to help you too. Sure, some are self-involved jerks. But the best of them care about you and realize you have something to teach them too. Also, on a practical note, you’re going to need letters of recommendation someday and if your professors don’t remember you personally those letters are going to suck.

If you have, or end up having, money at some point in your life, consider giving some of it it to a school that serves people whose lives could really be transformed by a college education (See Mackenzie Scott for a beautiful example of this) instead of the places that already have enough money and often just educate more rich people. Sure, they’ll pepper their student body with minorities and poor folks here and there because it looks good on glossy brochures, but if you analyze their demographics, there are an awful lot of legacy admits and people whose parents had enough money to send them to hoity toity private schools too (At those really fancy schools 70% of the students are from families that fall within the top 25% income earners). By the time this book appears, this name will hopefully be irrelevant, but Jared Kushner coincidentally got into Harvard after his Dad donated a fuck ton of money to the school. Even Natalie Portman, who attended at the same time, confirmed he was far from a stellar student. The Harvards of the world don’t need your money and clearly have inconsistent standards for admission. Your local state school on the other hand is probably barely hanging on while thrashing during its death throes. You could help. We all could.

As soon as you turn 18 and every election thereafter, vote for more taxes and lobby for better funding for higher education. I know voting for more taxes seems counterintuitive, but I can guarantee at some point you have benefited from tax revenues (or will— don’t be surprised at the coming hills and valleys in your life). Make sure the next generation has all the opportunities and advantages you did. Step up. This is how we make a better society. The future of the world really is in your hands.Show up on the doorsteps of wealthy people in droves with the message about why higher education mattered in your life and why it’s important for our society. It is very hard to ignore droves. You will no doubt annoy them, maybe even get them to feel guilty. There’s at least a chance they might throw some money just to get the annoyance or guilt go away. Some of them already give a lot of money to good (and questionable) causes. It may be they weren’t aware of this particular problem or how dire it’s gotten. Bring it to their attention. Hell, it’s worth a try.

It is easier to get up in the morning if you get a good sleep, but you knew that already and probably ignored it anyway. I often do too. Still, it’s true.  It makes me ramble when I write. Did I mention that?

Whatever you got out of your college education, share it with the world. Maybe you’ll do that by becoming a teacher or professor yourself, or maybe you’ll do it by having a truly meaningful conversation at the water cooler at work. However you approach it, do it and do it often because the world needs more of that stuff.

Speaking of that water cooler (or if you work at a cool start-up maybe you have your conversations while sipping cucumber water and taking advantage of the services of the staff aromatherapist — whatever), don’t let anyone work you so hard or treat you so badly that it exhausts all your physical and emotional fuel or doesn’t allow you time with the people you love or perhaps even comes close to literally killing you (no amount of cucumber water and aromatherapy can reverse the damage done by a horrible boss or work days that are so long you start to hallucinate). Life really is short. It’s not worth it.

Shoot for work that is meaningful rather than something you have a passion for or think is so fun you’d do it for free. Why? Because for most of us, as soon as something becomes a job, it loses a lot of its appeal. It can even become something you come to dread. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: if your work is meaningful, no matter what it is, it will be easier to get out of bed each morning. When work sucks, if it is meaningful you can hold on a little longer. If you’re lucky you won’t collapse. If you do, I suggest you write about it so you can figure out what all that suckiness meant.  Has it worked for me? Maybe. But it sounds good.

Don’t believe the nonsense you hear about professors not using words like “suckiness” in their writing. Good writing means (in part) using the right word for the job and sometimes that word is “suckiness.” Please don’t use the word “suckiness” in reviews of my work if you can help it. Here are some suggested alternatives: brilliant, insightful, funny, genuine, life-changing. O.k., maybe it wasn’t life-changing for you but you could tell people it was life-changing for me.

Here’s something my mother told me that applies whether or not you go to college: “Don’t forget to wear a raincoat.” This is probably advice you’ll only hear from me, at least phrased in this particular way. My mom used to say it every time I went out the door and I had to translate it from Japanese. Even in English, it took me a couple of years to figure out what the heck she meant (my mother could be oblique and cryptic with her advice but she was often on point). It was solid advice then and it remains solid advice today. Basically, she was telling me that always having condoms on hand is as important as having an umbrella when a sudden rainstorm hits. She told me this even before she knew for sure I was sexually active. Maybe she was embarrassed to say it straight out. Maybe the Japanese speak with a lot of analogies. Maybe my mom was just creative. Who really knows? Whatever the reason, it’s worth listening to.

If you end up following any of the advice above, particularly that stuff about immersing yourself in required classes or showing up on the doorsteps of rich people to get them to donate money to underfunded schools, you gotta email and tell me what happened. Deal? I’m secretly hoping that your life will have less suckiness as a result. Then I’d know my work is done. Mostly.

This blog entry is done too. You could probably guess that by the fact that the type will cease shortly hereafter. But it never hurts to give folks a head’s up.

Truly, have a wonderful generation. I’ve heard good things about you.

People are going to tell you a lot of things, especially people that are older than you are. Some of them are going to be wrong — a lot of them maybe. I mean, can you really trust people who used typewriters and remembered when the hot new video game was Pong? 

 Me? Yeah I remember Pong. And manual typewriters. But I’m always right, so listen up.

First though, I’m going to address some common 

 that people, many people perhaps, may have told you:

Now that I’ve gotten the usual bad advice out of the way, I’m going to fulfill my role as an old person and pass on what I think is 

 This may be your cue to tune out and find that cute 

video on YouTube where the toad leans into someone’s hand every time their head is scratched.

 You can pick your own video, but that’s my favorite because I love toads.  If you’re not going to read this, I highly recommend it. Now back to that advice:

If you end up following any of the advice above, particularly that stuff about immersing yourself in required classes or showing up on the doorsteps of rich people to get them to donate money to underfunded schools, 

you gotta email and tell me what happened.

 Deal? I’m secretly hoping that your life will have less suckiness as a result. Then I’d know my work is done. Mostly.

 have a wonderful generation. I’ve heard good things about you.

A Note to Y & Z from X

There are no large endowments at public teaching universities to adequately fund the work needed to keep it afloat.  State and Federal funding (and not just one state; pretty much all of them) have been declining steadily over the years as the student population only grows. Each year, they have to find more places to cut. Voters aren’t blameless in this equation either. Listen, I get it, you get sold on initiatives that promised to limit taxes and cut government spending. It sounds like a great deal. I might have voted for something like that too. 

The problem is that when those laws get passed and have to be implemented, they go to a cocktail party with other laws only to find out the host hasn’t ordered enough wine and cheese for everyone. Some of the laws who showed up early to the party got to set rules about who absolutely had to get wine and cheese no matter what. So the laws started looking around. Hey, someone said in a hoarse whisper, there’s Higher Education. Unlike K-12 Education standing in the corner over there figuring out if they will have enough change to pay for crayons for all their students (they won’t), colleges and universities have outside funding sources in the form of tuition. With generosity in their hearts, some of the laws might have made sure K-12 couldn’t get cut beyond a certain threshold or had to get a specific slice of the budgetary pie (Weren’t we having wine and cheese? I’m scrambling my metaphors. And now we’re onto eggs. Nevermind). 

As individual laws looked around the room, those in attendance observed that there weren’t any laws preventing them from giving Higher Education maybe just half a glass of wine this time and a small bit of cheese. Higher Ed, they conjectured, might even come to the cocktail party less thirsty each year because of rising tuition dollars and would need a little less in their glass each time. 

Higher Education is often the easiest piece of the budget to cut to fulfill the promises of you new laws or you newly elected legislators. Sure, when you drink your full glass of wine a few other laws and policies might look at you with disdain or cynicism, but what can you do? Simple. Try to avoid eye contact with Higher Education whenever you cross paths. Remember: The people voted for you. It’s not your fault.

With reduced wine and cheese (and maybe pie and eggs) from metaphoric government cocktail parties, universities with rising enrollments have to figure out how to either cut services or bring in more funding. Tuition hikes are an obvious go-to, but they’re usually not enough. Hiring more adjuncts than full-time faculty can save them a lot of money, both in the short and the long-term. Adjuncts get paid less than full-time faculty to teach each class and the university doesn’t need to spend any money on benefits for them because they are “part-time.” Best of all, if enrollments go down, they can cut adjuncts whenever they need to, unlike tenured faculty who they generally have to keep employed. 

Adjuncts thus provide last-minute flexibility for universities: if tenured Professor A’s new class on the “History of Engineering and its Influence on Window Sill Evolution” doesn’t enroll enough students to be viable, they can tell an adjunct the day before classes begin, “Sorry, you won’t be teaching ’Intro to Engineering Principles’ anymore.” The university has obligations to Professor A, so when that groundbreaking class on window sills gets cancelled, Professor A is reassigned to teach that section of “Intro.” On the other hand, if tenured Professor B is scheduled to teach the very popular course, “The Biological and Chemical Properties of City Sewage Water,” but suddenly falls ill (maybe because of all that research they had to do in the sewers last summer), the university can plop any adjunct with a Ph.D. in Chemistry or Biology or Biochemistry (or whatever their minimum standards are) into that class, even if the new instructor’s specialty is woodland birds rather than sewage. It’s o.k. If they are lucky they may have a whole week (unpaid) to prepare before the semester officially begins. 

Universities soon find the flexibility of adjuncts to be an expedient solution because the number of faculty is able to stretch and contract according to the variable number of enrollments each semester.  When more and more commentators (who may have no connection to higher education) start to urge universities to change with the times and run on a business model, it’s easy for just about everyone to  begin to wonder why they have tenured faculty in the first place. Well, except for the adjuncts and tenured faculty who have seen firsthand what happens when there is no consistency among instructors assigned to a course or how students suffer when they are unable to develop mentoring relationships with department faculty. And, let’s never forget, adjuncts are working for so little they are ranked fourth among occupations whose laborers must make use of public assistance programs. Oh, and health insurance. There will be none of that.

The use of adjuncts is so cost-effective it provides universities with so little incentive to have moral obligations to them as people. The strategy of hiring adjuncts grows as fast as the budgets shrink. Adjuncts begin to greatly outnumber permanent faculty. 

But here’s the problem: universities simply cannot operate without all the other things that faculty are generally asked to do. Tasks and responsibilities that, because adjuncts are paid by the class (and you can be sure the university will keep their working hours just low enough that they can legally deny them benefits), only full-time faculty can take them on.  With schedules that don’t have fixed times to clock in or out, holding the university accountable for assigning an amount of work for full-time that falls into a reasonable definition of full-time employment is difficult. 

Just a side note: Remember, unless you are pretty much paid a fairly low wage by the hour, the government classifies you as “exempt” from most worker protections like a forty hour work week and overtime. Instead, your job is defined by “essential duties” which can constitute a list so long there is no way that you could complete them in forty (or fifty or sixty or…) hours. Alternately, your essential duties can be phrased so vaguely that they easily embrace additions they were never meant to include in the first place. Soon there is a unstoppable blob-like mass of work that continues to grow for full-time faculty. Beyond teaching (and grading) our classes, there is advising, committee work, subcommittee work, department meetings, faculty senate, task forces, assessment studies, presidential initiatives, and curriculum design. Oh, and you’re still supposed to keep current on the literature in your field, present at conferences, conduct research, and publish in peer-reviewed journals on a regular basis (and the bar seems to get higher every year, even at teaching institutions). 

I can’t mention all of these, however, and leave out my favorite: The useless all-day departmental or division retreat (where nothing really gets done) that may even be scheduled on a day you’re not on contract and are thus not paid for. Truly, you’ve got to agree that to call an all-day working meeting a “retreat” is just mean-spirited. This is a universal truth: Retreats should all come with turndown service and a mint.

At underfunded, public institutions, full-time faculty are assigned enough tasks and responsibilities to kill a horse (How many responsibilities does it take to kill a horse? I don’t actually know. But with the amount of work I’m regularly assigned — I’m fairly certain it would be enough). 

There are no large endowments at public teaching universities to adequately fund the work needed to keep it afloat.  State and Federal funding (and not just one state; pretty much all of them) have been declining steadily over the years as the student population only grows. Each year, they have to find more places to cut. Voters aren’t blameless in this equation either. Listen, I get it, you get sold on initiatives that promised to limit taxes and cut government spending. It sounds like a great deal. I might have voted for something like that too. 

The problem is that when those laws get passed and have to be implemented, they go to a cocktail party with other laws only to find out the host hasn’t ordered enough wine and cheese for everyone. Some of the laws who showed up early to the party got to set rules about who absolutely had to get wine and cheese no matter what. So the laws started looking around. Hey, someone said in a hoarse whisper, there’s Higher Education. Unlike K-12 Education standing in the corner over there figuring out if they will have enough change to pay for crayons for all their students (they won’t), colleges and universities have outside funding sources in the form of tuition. With generosity in their hearts, some of the laws might have made sure K-12 couldn’t get cut beyond a certain threshold or had to get a specific slice of the budgetary pie (Weren’t we having wine and cheese? I’m scrambling my metaphors. And now we’re onto eggs. Nevermind). 

As individual laws looked around the room, those in attendance observed that there weren’t any laws preventing them from giving Higher Education maybe just half a glass of wine this time and a small bit of cheese. Higher Ed, they conjectured, might even come to the cocktail party less thirsty each year because of rising tuition dollars and would need a little less in their glass each time. 

With reduced wine and cheese (and maybe pie and eggs) from metaphoric government cocktail parties, universities with rising enrollments have to figure out how to either cut services or bring in more funding. Tuition hikes are an obvious go-to, but they’re usually not enough. Hiring more adjuncts than full-time faculty can save them a lot of money, both in the short and the long-term. Adjuncts get paid less than full-time faculty to teach each class and the university doesn’t need to spend any money on benefits for them because they are “part-time.” Best of all, if enrollments go down, they can cut adjuncts whenever they need to, unlike tenured faculty who they generally have to keep employed. 

Adjuncts thus provide last-minute flexibility for universities: if tenured Professor A’s new class on the “History of Engineering and its Influence on Window Sill Evolution” doesn’t enroll enough students to be viable, they can tell an adjunct the day before classes begin, “Sorry, you won’t be teaching ’Intro to Engineering Principles’ anymore.” The university has obligations to Professor A, so when that groundbreaking class on window sills gets cancelled, Professor A is reassigned to teach that section of “Intro.” On the other hand, if tenured Professor B is scheduled to teach the very popular course, “The Biological and Chemical Properties of City Sewage Water,” but suddenly falls ill (maybe because of all that research they had to do in the sewers last summer), the university can plop any adjunct with a Ph.D. in Chemistry or Biology or Biochemistry (or whatever their minimum standards are) into that class, even if the new instructor’s specialty is woodland birds rather than sewage. It’s o.k. If they are lucky they may have a whole week (unpaid) to prepare before the semester officially begins. 

Universities soon find the flexibility of adjuncts to be an expedient solution because the number of faculty is able to stretch and contract according to the variable number of enrollments each semester.  When more and more commentators (who may have no connection to higher education) start to urge universities to change with the times and run on a business model, it’s easy for just about everyone to  begin to wonder why they have tenured faculty in the first place. Well, except for the adjuncts and tenured faculty who have seen firsthand what happens when there is no consistency among instructors assigned to a course or how students suffer when they are unable to develop mentoring relationships with department faculty. And, let’s never forget, 

adjuncts are working for so little they are ranked fourth among occupations whose laborers must make use of public assistance programs. 

Oh, and health insurance. There will be none of that.

The use of adjuncts is so cost-effective it provides universities with so little incentive to have moral obligations to them as people. The strategy of hiring adjuncts grows as fast as the budgets shrink. Adjuncts begin to greatly outnumber permanent faculty. 

Sandra Mizumoto Posey

is a folklorist, writer, artist & Professor in the Gender Institute for Teaching and Advocacy at MSU Denver

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