Square One

Well, it was a nice ride, while it lasted.

For a while there I thought that I'd found paradise. Away from the bloodthirsty pursuit of high-profile programs, I'd fallen into the perfect job.

Through the first year or so of work, it was in a way, complete bliss.

The chance to teach what I wanted. No real pressure to cover core requirements.

Speaking of which, no dumping work on new faculty.

Faculty meetings where everyone generally got along.

And were fed by the chair.

New offices.

Travel funding that stayed in the midst of recession budget cuts.

Coming from an intensive graduate program, it felt like the overall workload was actually less!

More money for less work, that's right, you heard me.

I'd talk with people I went to graduate school with, people much smarter and more hardworking than me, and so I had a definite reference point for my own situation, and a reminder of how shitty the first job can be.

So I'm coasting on this highway of bliss. Then I get assigned my first administrative duty. I'm on the department's annual review committee this year. Members evaluate the other faculty based on a submitted report, and recommend that their work be termed unsatisfactory, good, excellent... You get the picture. The chair makes the final call on these "grades" before sending them up the dean, but this little committee gives him a summary.

Is it busy work? Kinda. It occurred to me that unless someone smelled of loserdom, we'd be finding ways to call everyone "excellent."

Sure, that's a SOP I could get with. Looks like Debbie the aging hippie, the second member of the committee, thought so too.

Tamara had other ideas.

Tamara is machine. She's always in her office, publishes like she has her own printing press, and her hands in 50 things at once. I once heard the chair tell another assistant professor that her publication rate was due to the fact that the field that she'd chosen to squat on was so incestuous that the handful of names in its journals were essentially a cult.

I'd also heard Tamara deliver unsubtle digs at faculty who had retired with only one book. (The gall.) But that was the kind of anecdote you mentally file and don't think much of.

Not until you have more anecdotes. Completely psychotic anecdotes.

The annual review committee works off a set of university-wide criteria, differentiating what for instance, constitutes a "good" level of research activity, from what can be termed "excellent." The three of us first familiarized ourselves with the criteria and figured out how we were going to tabulate accomplishments.

Then we opened the first file.

"OK, Matthew Williams," I began, "let's see, teaching... he directed 5 independent studies..."

"I had 10 of those," Tamara stated.

Hmmm, that's kinda weird to say, I thought.

I continued, "...he also chaired 3 thesis committees..."

Tamara: "I chaired 8."

Um, really?

Debbie sought to cut this off right away. "This isn't a competition."

"I know," Tamara responded, "it's just..."

Debbie turned to me and asked, "well what else did Matt do?"

"OK, for research he said he wrote one chapter for an anthology, and has 3 forthcoming encyclopedia entries."

Wait for it... wait for it...

Tamara: "I had 8 entries, and I know what article that was because I gave him that chapter. I asked him to do it."

Now, you might think I'm exaggerating this for comic effect. Shit, I would if I weren't in the room to hear it. But I am not embellishing one fucking bit. This actually happened, in the way that I described.

Debbie and I soon figured out that we weren't ever going to conquer Tamara's one-upman-Tourette's. So we tried to move things along as best we could, in between Tamara's reminders of her own awesomeness.

I thought the 4 hours of work would feel like 8. It ended up feeling like 16.

I can understand if one is a workaholic, committed to scholarship and teaching, and wanting to ensure that the department's standards remain respectable. I can certainly understand if someone wants a meaningful definition of rigor, and a process that did not involve self-congratulatory back-slapping. The young faculty are not well-served by being told that they're great when they're not. Hell, no one is.

But what Tamara was doing went way beyond such concerns. It was clearly all about her. It was pathological. And since then, I've noticed her condition pretty much every time she opens her mouth.

Then I realized she's Penelope!



It depressed me for a while, because she represented the first real "thing about academics that pisses me off" that I found at the new job.

Still great though, but the bubble has burst.