The Seductions Of Sedan Delivery; Or, Writing Your Own Academic Job Description

It's difficult to think about it while we still have three to four precious weeks of summer left. But on behalf of all the people who will begin full time teaching in the fall, I ask you to conjure -- for a second -- a week in mid-semester. Feel the pain as you stay up half the night to grade your papers! Experience the fear as you go into class half prepared! Recall being fatally short of sleep as you sit, dazed, through yet another search committee meeting, having driven yourself unsparingly through 100 applicant files the day before! Conjure the self-righteousness and hypocrisy, as you lecture yet another student that s/he could get hir work in on time if only s/he would get organized!

Yeah, baby. The problem is, there is almost no one I know in academia who has a job description that would give them a reasonable sense of where a professor's job begins and ends. Couple this with the reality of being tenure-track (or worse, a full-time visitor), which often seems like an endless exercise in pleasing everybody, all the time, in every way we can. Top it off with the fact that we learn early on not to complain about being overworked because some jackass will look at us piously and say, "You just have to learn to say no to things!" (subtext: say no -- except to me) as if you are overworked because, somewhere along the line, you forgot to say your safeword.

The result is that even many of us who actually have tenure end up hard-wired to do far too much, far more than we really want to do or are capable of doing well, even though we don't really have to anymore. We believe that we are powerless to keep unwanted responsibilities in check, that there are no grounds -- not to say no, but to figure out what and who to say no to -- and the result is a work overload. Inevitably, our health, our peace of mind, our good temper and emotional availability at home, and the pace of our scholarship takes the biggest hit. If you are like me, these marathons of overwork and frustration can produce moments when you start to hear Neil Young warbling:

Sedan delivery is a job

I know I'll like;

It sure was hard to find.

Hard to find a job!

Hard to find!

But never fear. Your Radical is here, with the fruits of a recent rigorous self-criticism. How can this year can be different? How can you create a plan of action that will make this year different? The answer is: Take charge. The answer is: Write your own job description, using these principles.

Knowing your appropriate load allows you to know your overload. In consultation with a senior colleague, figure out what are the minimum number of bodies you are expected to manage, and what the department average is for each category and at each rank of the faculty. In the category of "body management," I am counting major advisees, non-major advisees, enrolled students, honors students, and any other person you need to manage (postdocs, graduate students, other faculty.) These categories can overlap -- but count them twice when they do (for example, a thesis advisee who is also a major advisee = two bodies, as these are distinct activities that cannot be folded into the same hour of your time.)

Whatever the category is, count it and stay at, or preferably under, that number. Anyone extra is an overload. This is the basic outline of your job description, because whatever people say, a full-time teaching job is primarily about the students. That said, you have to come up with a strategy for how -- particularly if you are a popular teacher, or are teaching in an underrepresented field (more on this below) -- you are going to say no to students that you don't have time for; and you will send them away to someone whose job it is to help them. Liberal arts colleges have chairs, field advisors, and honors committees whose job it is to help these students; research universities usually have a Director of Undergraduate Studies as well. Whether you are new faculty or a full professor, don't kid yourself that you are turning a student out like one of the little lost animals of FarmVille if you refuse to take hir on as an overload.

If you have a joint appointment, total the activities of each part of your appointment and divide them in half. This means that you don't do all things in either place except go to department meetings, for which you should repay yourself by taking one fewer thesis, or two fewer advisees. You have to figure this out annually, and you must do so with both chairs in the room; if you are tenure-track, your mentor should be part of the conversation. The reason that joint appointments usually end up as more burdensome is because it is often assumed that "full participation" means full participation in both "homes." Not so. It means doing the equivalent of one job in two places. You did not decide the terms of your appointment: the university or college did, and it is up to them to make their expectations clear without, as they say in factories, "speed-up." If one chair needs more participation from you for a reason, the other chair needs to graciously give way. There may also be years when a particularly large amount of activity in one home pulls you away; that can be repaid the following year.

If you are a visitor or a post-doc, do your job well and politely decline to do favors or spend time on anything institutional you have not been hired for. Read your letter of appointment carefully, and have a meeting with the chair at the beginning of each semester to go over your responsibilities. You should also know that most students don't know the difference between permanent and temporary faculty, so that although their desire for your attention is a great complement, it should be firmly and kindly resisted. Don't take on advisees of any kind unless you have contracted to do so; don't go to department meetings, even if you are invited to them (believe me, no one really wants you there); don't agree to meet with job candidates unless they are friends of yours who need the inside skinny; don't get involved in campus or faculty politics; don't let an extra body into your class; don't have unlimited office hours with students who love,love, love you; don't listen to veiled hints that if you go the extra mile for this person or that person that there might be a job authorized in your field this year and you would be a great candidate (this is a lie); and don't bust your a$$ to be the best-est, most creative, Mr. Chips-iest teacher on the planet.

Limit the number of recommendations you agree to write, and be clear with students what they need to do for you. Inevitably, we end up writing recommendations off the clock, and you must set aside some time in your schedule after October 1 for getting this work done at the office within business hours. When done correctly, a recommendation takes between an hour and two hours to write; tailoring an old recommendation for a new purpose takes at least half an hour; and uploading a completed recommendation to an electronic system takes about ten minutes for each school. Insist that law school applicants use the services provided by the Law School Admissions Council. It is also worth your while to have a document, either on your web page or that you can send to students, that tells them exactly what you need, what they must do, and what lead time you need to get the recommendation done.

Inevitably, those of us who teach more students and have more advisees end up writing more recommendations too. This is because students have good reasons for seeing us as allies; because they are comfortable asking for something which is part of our job but that many colleagues treat like a favor; and because -- well, pretty much all students need recommendations for something. But the fact that you are already working too hard, and have no time, does not oblige you to write recommendations that you also do not have time for. Develop criteria and stick to them (for example, that you only write grad school recs for people who have done advanced work with you.) Be honest with a student when you have no basis for an evaluation, or if you can't honestly write a good one. Do not write recommendations if you are not a permanent member of the faculty. Do not "feel bad" when you have reached your fixed and immutable limit and must say no: that's what the other faculty are there for.

And here's a nugget of advice: develop boilerplate recommendations for the B.S. credentialing letters that study abroad programs require. All they care about is that the student can pay, and that s/he is not nuts in some way that will cause harm to self or others.

Do not volunteer, stupid. You know who you are -- whatever your biological gender, you are a girl. You are the one who finds the silence insufferable when the chair has asked for someone to step up, and you think it is your job to make everyone feel good again. Why you? And why now? At least go away and consult your job description before you go all Do-Bee on everyone. It isn't your job to see to it that everything gets done -- it is the chair's job, and believe me, s/he will figure out how to do it.

Underrepresented faculty in underrepresented fields have no obligation to extend themselves without end to under-served students. Sometimes I look around me and it is so frackin' obvious why the scholars who are perpetually sicker, angrier, more exhausted, and frantic about meeting deadlines for their scholarship share certain characteristics. We are queer, we are of color, we are international scholars, we are women, we are feminist men. We are the ones who, in order to make space for what we care about in institutions, do it ourselves. We invent the programs, then we chair them. This is what Jean O'Brien and Lisa Disch write about in an article I strongly recommend (and that partly inspired this post) "Innovation is Overtime: An Ethical Analysis of 'Politically Committed Labor,'" (Aiku, Erickson and Pierce, Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy Minnesota, 2007.) We are the ones that advertise our universities' "diversity" when we labor outside the classroom. We are the ones who students seek out to teach the things they never had a chance to learn in high school. We are the ones who students "like us" and the ones who hold similar political commitments flock to in droves.

Face it: certain faculty lines and programs have come into the academy as add-ons, and there is no intention at most schools to use what we interdisciplinary scholars know to transform the disciplinary paradigms that 95% of faculty are hired to support. There aren't enough of us, our faculties aren't diverse enough, and the culture wars of the 1980s permanently intimidated university administrations from appearing to be "too radical" by allowing what we do to impinge on core curricula. As an individual, yoy can't fill that dissonant gap even if you worked 26 hours a day trying to do so. It isn't your fault that there are too few classes in x; that the program in y is underfunded; that you are one of three z faculty. You didn't make the decision to grant a line to the Underwater Basket Weaving Department for a replacement who will teach ten students a term in the traditional field of Renaissance Wooden Needles that the administration just can't conceive of mounting a curriculum without -- while you are faced with sending forty students away from your Native Studies survey. Worse, the generative political urgency in the various fields that make up American Studies, Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies often moves us to throw our personal energy at immediate needs that are actually the result of long-term institutional dysfunction that our sacrifices help to maintain. Don't make up for the deficiencies of the institution by taxing yourself. Don't. The academic world is littered with broken and bitter people behind who thought that institutional neglect was only temporary.

The best thing you can do for your field is get your damn writing done, get tenure, become famous, acquire influence at your institution in a way that all those suits in the administration understand, and go someplace where the institution is committed to your intellectual commitments.

Which leads me to my final piece of advice for writing your own job description:

Your scholarship is part of your job. Schedule between 25 and 30% of the time you allot for work during the week to keeping your scholarship going. You know you should do this -- and yet, many of us see our writing as the thing that we have time for when our family, teaching and committee responsibilities are done. Which means it can get put off -- sometimes fatally -- for months at a time, causing us to get out of touch with projects we care about and go without sleep at various points in the semester to meet a commitment that has now become a burden.

So the next time you get angry about your perception that you are doing more work than other colleagues, remember: their "normal" is guaranteed by your overwork. Write your job description -- write it now, knowing that you will have to revise it and rewrite it as you figure out how to balance your life. Leave some space for things that may, in the end, be necessary tasks -- and if that space doesn't fill, use it for writing. And while you are performing that exercise, listen to this:

The Moonlight And Magnolias School Of Women's History: Katie Roiphe's Take On Mad Men

Who needs another blogger bashing Katie Roiphe for not being a feminist? And why read more about what is often obvious nowadays: that if you have decent writing skills, have gone to an Ivy League school, and have a mother in the business you can get published even if your ideas are peculiar, uninformed and often just wrong? And why belabor the fact that, while feminists can't get published nowadays, if you are willing to stand up and tell young women that feminism just doesn't matter, you can make a tidy living?

If, despite my advice, you were a blogger who wrote such a piece, Katie Roiphe would just say you are part of the victim culture bred by 1970s feminism, and you are so deluded.

Which brings me to what I really want to write about Roiphe's contribution to the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section today, The Allure of Messy Lives, in which she argues -- through a superficial reading of Mad Men and Cold War literary culture -- that nowadays people are just too uptight for words. Roiphe, you may recall, earned her chops among the backlash crowd with a book charging that "feminists" had made her generation fearful of heterosexuality by talking about rape and sexual harassment as if they were problems that required solutions.

Silly us: so sorry.

Now, it appears, Roiphe has a new mission: to debunk contemporary social myths that alcoholism, adultery, lying and hypocrisy are to be avoided. Were women and children actually harmed by men drinking and f**king around in the 1960s, when men had all the money, jobs, access to credit and the power of the courts behind them if they chose to dump their families entirely? Heck no: and imagine the price we have paid in lost glamour for giving in to the victim culture once again. After all, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson only used to beat each other up a little when they were drunk (which was pretty much all the time) -- and they were so witty! Using the popularity of Mad Men, which just launched its fourth season last Sunday, as her central text about Cold War culture, Roiphe asserts that:

The phenomenal success of the show relies at least in part on the thrill of casual vice, on the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior to our relatively staid and enlightened times. As a culture we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, and the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink.

Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the 7-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?

The world of the 1960s has been replaced by "tiny rebellions," she writes; "vices [that] are so minor and controlled" (like Adderall and hooking up? or eating packaged food with preservatives?) Gone the world of chain-smoking, cocktail quaffing pregnant ladies waiting for hubby to come home; gone the "fun"world of the executive suite, where men were men and women were absent; gone the sexual playground of the typing pool, where the real work "the girls" got promoted (to marriage) for was done on their backs after hours; gone the world of fabulously talented, well-paid male writers passed out in public at their desks after sucking down several dry martinis at lunch.

So sad. Gone, gone with the wind, along with electroshock therapy as cure for homosexuality.

As a historian, I can't help but notice the similarities between Roiphe's androcentric view of the Baby Boomer years and the popular post-Reconstruction literature known as "Moonlight and Magnolias," in which southern white women reminisced wistfully about a brutal plantation world they had never known. In the process, they transformed a land of white supremacy and black suffering into a glamorous lost "civilization" staffed with cheerful black slaves (who never got promoted either, come to think of it) and were forcefully separated from the white families they loved by cruel Federal soldiers. Disappearing slavery (as it was) required celebrating slavery (as it wasn't.) By 1900, such women and their male allies in all-white southern state legislatures had begun chartering Mammy Memorial Associations, and building public statues to "Mammy," that fictional, sexless black women who abandoned her own children to raise elite whites for permanent rule.

My connection here is that what Roiphe is celebrating in her nostalgia for the paradise of drinkin', and f***kin', and smokin' in Mad Men is something that even a more slightly subtle reading of the show uncovers: a world where women and children had few, if any, rights; and men did exactly what they wanted, regardless of the consequences. It is the world of the patriarchal family, a world of hypocrisy and lies dressed up as a lost civilization of glamour, creativity and liberated sexuality.

This is not to say that I don't love Mad Men: I do. Although the first episode of the new season was not the winner I had hoped it would be, when I MadMen myself, I identify heavily with the flawed and foolish alcoholic pussy hound Roger Sterling. But Roiphe's superficial gloss on the series is a poor counterpoint to what she claims is her generation's obsessive need for order and control in their own families. While Mad Men's award-winning design and the references to 1960s popular culture are nostalgic, the show itself is quite disturbing: the retro fashion and perfect sets only provide a brittle frame for a fraying heteropatriarchal culture where white people can almost -- but not quite -- ignore the change that is a-gonna come. Whether you think the series is, in and of itself, sexist and racist; or whether, as I do, you think it provides a forum for pondering sexism and racism, the evidence for a far more critical take on the world of my youth is what Roiphe deliberately ignores. For example:

1. The series is called Mad Men. This is hardly an accident, and it is also hardly an accident that nearly all of the older men in the show drink heavily and are also divorced or separated; while the younger men drink less, are more self-disciplined, and despite engaging in sexist banter, are better able to achieve intimacy and equality in their relationships with women. That said, the vast majority of women in Mad Men are on a short journey from their fathers' houses to their husbands' houses, with a stop at a Seven Sisters college and a couple years as an actress, model or secretary.

The few choices offered to women in the 1960s, and the costs of making those choices, tell us why marriage was what women invested in prior to women's liberation. By season 4, Peggy has become a copywriter and a player at the new boutique agency put together by the refugees from Sterling, Cooper. But she is still subject to abusive tirades from Don (do we think the drink in his hand plays a role?); and Peggy is the only woman executive. Don sometimes thinks better of his nastiness towards Peggy; but only once, when he was persuading her to jump ship with him at the end of season 3 and his marriage was collapsing, has he been able to admit how badly he treats her. Joanie, the office manager, as dedicated viewers of the show might recall, ended her regular nooners with married partner Roger Sterling to find a man who was actually available, only to see Roger dump his wife and children for a fresh-faced, new secretary. Later, the physician-fiancee with whom Joanie thought she would make a secure life raped her in Roger's office, and then joined the Army without telling her.

2. Don's drinking is directly connected to his f**king; Don's f**king is connected to his hard-wired need to lie to people he says he loves; and all are directly connected to his inability to care genuinely about anyone but himself as he maintains the parallel lives of home and work. In fact, Don might not be too drunk to function, and function well, as Roiphe points out. But he has certainly been drunk enough for three seasons not to be emotionally available to anyone in his family, and particularly to his wife Betty, who was catastrophically lonely. On top of this, Don's f**king kept him away from the house for days at a time while he assured Betty, and perhaps himself, he was "working" for the family's future. (And can I say that just because TV characters don't get drunk from drinking all day doesn't mean that real people can drink all day and function well?)

Granted, the writers introduced a peculiar subplot in season one, whereby we were given to understand that "Don Draper" was an assumed identity, and the protection of his real past created a context for Don's secretiveness that even he might not have understood. Furthermore, it was the exposure of this lie that was the precipitating event for Betty's decision to leave him for another powerful, wealthy man.

But there is a more significant historical thread Roiphe misses here, and it is about women at a crossroads between dependence and independence in the 1960s. While "Bets," as Don calls her, is an unattractive character -- child-like, ill-tempered, cold, selfish, punitive and unloving towards her children -- she is also a woman whose options have been narrowed by sexism, by her limited access to money, by her enforced immaturity, and by the assumption that women's highest calling is domestic and maternal. A graduate of Bryn Mawr (one is reminded of M. Carey Thomas's famous line, "Our failures only marry"), once Betty married and had children she had the choice of either putting up with Don's endless lies and ill-treatment or subjecting herself to the fate outlined in the punitive divorce laws that plunged many women and their children into poverty prior to the 1970s. When, at the end of season 3, she chooses to leave Don, it is as much for survival as for love, because she no longer trusts him to take care of her.

3. Don's drinking helps him control his own reality, and helps him control the people around him. For three seasons, Don has lied by commission and omission to his wife, and by extension to his children. Yet he views each collection of lies as singular and not as a string of events that point to his own emptiness and corruption. As a metaphor for advertising, I think this is very skillful, but as a recipe for being a human being it has devastating consequences for his family. In season one, for example, we learned that Betty was depressed; Don sends her off to a (male) Freudian therapist to be "cured" of "her problems." What Betty discovers in season two by listening to herself (no thanks to the therapist, who reports regularly to the husband who pays the bills) is that she is depressed because no one has listened to her, and because she is living in a fantasy marriage. Furthermore, she discovers that what she "knows" is that her husband sleeps around, and what is making her crazy is that Don (who has built a wall of alcohol and women between himself and his contempt for Betsy) keeps telling her there is nothing wrong and that she is the one with the problems.

The significancance of booze in this series is not its unimportance. Rather, alcohol is the elephant in the room, a force that is so fully integrated into daily life as to be indistinguishable from its effects. Mad Men is not, in fact, a portrait of a generation, as Roiphe would have it, and it offers far subtler advice to the contemporary world of men and women making lives than Roiphe perhaps understands. If the historiography of the last twenty years tells us anything, it tells us that you can't really generalize about "generations" very profitably, and you certainly can't once you understand that social inequality defies our attempts to synthesize a "generational experience." Finally, the question Roiphe fails to ask is whether the safety her peers desire has something to do with the safety they didn't experience as children, the vulnerability of their own mothers to the whims of fathers who had all the power, and the drinking that kept the whole project of family together.