to the exclusion

Is it a healthy thing, this ability as an academic to focus on one thing, one topic, to the exclusion of all else? I haven't had a space in which to work since leaving the UK last December. But today, the delivery men lugged the components of a brand new desk up 5 flights of stairs. I lugged a shiny new laser printer up said stairs. And a chair. And now, for the first time in 10 long months, I have a space, a place, a horizontal surface upon which to work, and upon which to leave my work. Such a small thing, really, but the prices I've paid to get here - to get back to here - were never trivial. And the space, where I'm sitting now (admittedly, slightly worse for the wear after a truly lovely dinner party last night), is the penultimate step in my ever narrowing focus. On my work, on the letters to be written, writing samples to organise, the campaign, as it were, to be marshalled. I come alive in this space, but as time wears on it can be impossibly numbing, dehumanising, as well. Though I know that's the end of this path, for right now I strike out along it with joyous, and grim, determination.

multilingual

It makes me ecstatically happy to live in a city where a Korean shop keeper gets into a heated discussion in Spanish with an ethnic Spanish speaker (Mexican? Puerto Rican?) that he doesn't need two bottles of Italian salad dressing, 'para ensalada' because the Italian-esque pizza joint where the latter works doesn't serve salad. Apparently they mix it into the tomato sauce...

the season

Application season is upon me. Abstract for conference talk this week, post-docs in two weeks, job list out this Friday, strange foreign deadlines in less than a month. On and on anon. Trying to get into the swing of things, for which read: panic has set in, works best under deadlines, and time is always on my side in a sick and twisted way. Plus work-work is ludicrously busy, so even the small number of precious 'pause and reflect' moments there have essentially disappeared. So my infrequent posting is unlikely to increase much, or, worse, it will fall under the 'whinge' category this blog was never meant to support. C'est la guerre.

the flip side

I really have to build up to the expression of more substantive thoughts in prose. It's not an unnatural medium for me, but neither is it one without a certain inertia to conquer. Yet the whole point of this blog was to prevent myself from whingeing and avoid overly personal subjects, and spend more time disciplining myself to write Proper Things. Unfortunately, I have an Irish work-mate who has this amazing, perhaps pheremonal ability to sniff out Irish pubs wherever we might be (not that it's that hard in NY, but the guy is good). Moreover, he earns about three times what I do, and isn't afraid to get rounds in. Last night, focussing my thoughts to respond to Crazy's bait-and-switch post to get me posting (hmmph) resulted in me carrying on and finishing up some long overdue work and submitting it to the various and sundry who are the penultimate step in the process. As well as getting on top of things more generally, re-establishing contact with, well, various and sundry in anticipation of dog-and-pony^H^H^H^H^H^H job-and-conference season. Tonight, despite the pints, is reserved for the other side of my brain, the one that currently pays the bills. Which is rather frustrating, as there are more things to be written and submitted in fairly short order. No quandary, merely obligations that are going to have to be scaled back as I attempt to recreate the academic without the academy.

outside/inside

A friend and mentor of mine once chastened me, several years ago, on the issue at hand here, in relation to Old English University. 'There is no inside', she said, 'at an institution that predates you and will outlast you. You've been preceded by a large number of incomparably great minds over 800 years, and will be followed by a greater number still. OEU doesn't know you exist. If you're striving to find the inside, to "be accepted" by those you've somehow constructed as constituting the inside, you're missing something more fundamental about the nature of the institution'.

The anecdote, admittedly, is perhaps truer of the institution than academia as a whole. But I wanted to include it because I want to simplify the question started on Dr Crazy's here slightly before I return to the richness of my friend's injunction. The report on MLA's 2004 Survey of Hiring Departments (found here) caught my eye the other day, as I listlessly poked at the MLA Job List and its non-availability. This paragraph nearly sent me off the nearest bridge (and bless NY, there are many): 'When candidates were hired as tenure-track assistant professors by four-year departments in the JIL group, 18.1% already held tenure-track positions at other institutions. Of this 18.1%, 11.1% received their PhD degrees in the year 2000 or earlier and 5.8% in 2001, 2002, or 2003. Another 33.1% of those hired to tenure-track assistant professor positions by four-year departments in the JIL group held full-time temporary positions, 8.2% held part-time positions, 3.9% held postdoctoral fellowships, and 34.4% were categorized as still in graduate school. There were 1.3% hired who had been employed outside of academia, and 1.0% who were not employed.'

Depending upon how I categorize myself, I fall into the 2.3% of those employed 'outside' academia or unemployed (which, if you accept the almost implicit definition of employment in the report, are interchangeable, or merely reflects those of us not looking to publicise what we're doing to pay the bills). The numbers fall to 2.0% for English departments. The percentages shocked me, but on reflection I think the language of the inside/outside I used in the comment to Dr Crazy's post was inflected by the Report.

I very much don't want this to devolve into a 'what is academia' discussion, but to rework the hackneyed and unnecessarily insulting phrase, 'There are those who teach, and those who don't'. Also, I don't want to run up against the Ivory Tower(tm) issue: I'm a firm believer in, or at least part-time aspirant to, the idea that academia is an Ivory Tower only if you let it be. Crazy's point about the nuances of academia - the name-tag cruising and elitism rife between, and even within, institutions, subdivides the inside/outside question endlessly. But if one is publishing in the Best Journals and presenting at the Best Conferences, it's distinctly possible that name recognition and quality of work trump institutional affiliation. Which is the longer and harder road to acceptance into the coterie of the Known and the Elite to which some aspire. The flip side, of course, is endemic to the profession, and I'm under no illusions on that front. Smoking, the great leveller...

The lack of an inside to Old English University was a blessing, inasmuch as I was never under the only marginally illusory illusion that there is an inside for those coming from Fancy Research and Top Notch U. Moreover, it's a self-propagating inside that nonetheless sheds the majority of its constituents to RCU et al before readmitting a small percentage of them to the larger cross-institutional coterie. (I'm fond of the word, though as a concept it has been rather au courant and much over-used/abused in my field recently.) But Crazy's 'bait-and-switch' reaction is, I think, completely understandable - at many levels, from those who are employed in, or near, their fields of study, to those teaching at institutions with radically different academic cachet than those at which they studied, to the emphatic impact of geographic and demographic relocation accompanying the First Job.

I don't know the reality of teaching at RCU. And thus, to some degree, I don't know the extent of my illusions and misconceptions of the radically varying 'inside' of academia. Personally, in the 2.0%, I've worked and work very hard to ensure that First Job does not appear as a panacea on the not-so-distant horizon - the disappointments Crazy describes regarding her engagement with her students are only part of the whole. But I still want 'in', if only to have the opportunity to get paid for something vaguely resembling what I've spent an alarming proportion of my adult life working on. Even knowing how fickle 'in' is, how nuanced, even how much it represents a fundamental misconception of what I, we, are trying to do, trying to participate in, to create.