Submitted by syntaxfactory on February 19, 2013 - 11:15am
I've been reflecting on my spectacularly unsuccessful ethos as a professional within my department.
I'm saying "within my department" because I think that the ethos that carries me far enough in the field is one I'm thinking doesn't work well in a departmental context. And to be clear, I've been a faculty member in two departments, so I'm not complaining about my department; this is generalizable reflection across an "N" of "2." (Based on an "N" of "2," of me and Bill Gates, the average American earns millions of dollars a year, so caveat emptor on what follows.)
A colleague-friend once pointed out that I'm basically a puppy dog in my local professional interactions -- eager to be liked. I think there's a limited accuracy to that statement, and so I'll accept it, but I think I can nuance it. It's not a desire to be liked; rather, it's a desire not to be disliked which stems from being a first-generation college student.
Context: like many of my colleagues and friend in rhetorical studies, I am a first-gen student. And maybe closer to accurate, I am only the fifth person in my entire family to make it past middle school. And like a lot of first-gen kids, I experienced substantial dislocation from my family. As a kid, my great-grandparents and my grandparents and my great aunt lived together in a three-bedroom house. Some were retired, some worked part-time, and some did early shift, the end result being that we always were home together by 4pm, in time for late afternoon game shows and dinner by 4:30. (It was years before I learned that most people eat after 5pm.)
Anyway, growing up, I recognized three things. (1) My ability to answer Jeopardy questions before anyone else in the family quickly went from being cute to being annoying. (2) Being smart was something my family could be proud of, but I could never be proud of it. In fact, being proud of being brainy was a bad move at home or school. (Very quickly, in second grade, while playing "Smurfs" on the playground (in which all the boys imagined adventures with each other by assuming the role of a single Smurf), I ceased being "Brainy" Smurf in favor of "Handy" Smurf, an immense irony given my complete inability to fix anything). (3) There was a fine line between being smart and being the kind of person my grandparents would be suspicious of -- someone who would try to trick them with cleverness. I totally get people who are suspect of the intelligentsia, the ivory tower academic, because those people were my family.
When I got my MA, I received congratulations. I also received an exhortation that it was time to get a job and stop this school foolishness, which was clearly a way to avoid a job. When I pulled out my NCTE card, my grandfather's first question was whether that meant I was union.
In any case, this taught me three survival strategies at home:
1. Absolute transparency. No one can think you have a secret agenda if all of your agendas are on the table. No one can think that you are trying to trick them if you are clear about your motives.
2. When you argue, make clear what personal biases and motivations are setting that argument in motion. Even if those biases undercut your argument. Because honesty is a better survival method than success. Success is fleeting and can collapse out from under you. But if you are honest, your will remain on level ground. Family will relate to you consistently because they know who and where you are.
3. Never argue from expertise. Arguing from expertise is too close to arguing from being "Brainy,"
This looks like a good idea for keeping the affection or at least avoiding raising the ire of my family (who, I know, loved me without reservations -- I don't mean to suggest that they loved me any way other than that). It was a great way of being a grandson. It's a terrible way of being a colleague. I think I have discovered three things that I would share with an academic son, were I to have one:
1. Transparency doesn't work with people who presume that other people are not transparent.
2. Maybe "family will relate to you consistently because they know who and where you are," but so will colleagues, and they will be able to outthink you all the time because you are on their map and they are not on yours.
3. Expertise is never recognized locally, whether you argue from it or not. Expertise is often recognized across the discipline, but only sometimes within the department.
Again, these are not local claims nor an expression of any local conditions. Rather, I want to raise the question on my mind: how does being a first generation student screw up professionalization behaviors? I think I have my answer, but what do you think? And do you have any reading suggestions? (Give me more than a citation -- give me a reason to read!
--db
I too am a first generation college student/grad student/faculty member. For me, one of the big difficulties in terms of professional behavior has been with professional sociality. For much of my life, my intellectual pursuits were such an individual, personal interest; it was something I did entirely apart from my relationships with other people. So the whole realm of professional sociality feels awkward. It feels very unnatural to socialize with people about ideas and without talking about their parents, family lives, etc… So when I’m in social-professional contexts, I think either (1) switch into an overly personal discourse or (2) tend to be standoffish. I can’t seem to manage being friendly/sociable and talking about academic things at the same time. Of course, this means I’m terrible at networking. And when I was on market, it didn’t help with interviewing either.
It took me so long to find a way to relate to other academics socially... and even then, I worry sometimes that it's not the same kind of genuine sociality that I feel with others... Wow! Thank you!
PhD and tenured at a pretty good university, but I have never become acclimated. Neither of my parents finished HS and none of my sibs went to college. Beyond getting tenure--for which my most powerful motivation was getting health care for my children--I still haven't figured out how to thrive institutionally. I love the intellectual work, including writing and publishing, and I feel extremely fortunate to have my position, to be able to be a scholar and not do the hard and dangerous work my father did. I am however, clueless about how to operate institutionally, how to improve my salary (or even talk about it), the logic of department meetings and operations, the mysterious status relations that swirl around me. And socially I'm just completely lost and uncomfortable.
When I read about the experiences of some faculty of color, or of some women trying to figure out how to break through and get ahead, I identify with those parts of their experience that seem to overlap with mine, perhaps where race and gender overlap with class. And I sometimes wonder whether my estrangement and lack of institutional thriving is something I produce or whether it is something that others do to me--because I seem not to have the urge of some women and faculty of color to join up and fight back, and I wouldn't really know what "joining up" would mean in my case.
I certainly feel disrespected by some of the more well-bred folks in my department and in administration, and a few of them have disrespected me in ways that have done me direct harm. However, in those cases it sometimes seemed like simple male-on-male aggression and domination, just as when the tough guys in school might punch you in the stomach for no reason, just to show you your place (and theirs). I suppose just thinking and feeling this way shows my class background and the life context in which I place my experience. But we are what we are. Perhaps in some ways academic life does imitate those HS halls, even if the punching and domination is executed in more subtle fashion. It's hard to tease out the class factor here--it just feels like it's a factor. Who can really say?
I still count myself fortunate, though, and even happy; I love my work. I'd much rather be in my department at my university than almost all of the other places I was more likely to end up. But having affiliations and friendships outside of the university has been essential for me.
A mostly logical reasoning as to why I believe in DB's transparency and general helpfulness:
"He's being so nice, what does he have to gain?"
"Well, I'm not in his class so I know he's not looking for a positive teaching evaluation."
"He's tenured, so I know he's not just playing safe by being nice to everyone."
"I am at the bottom of this academic totem pole, why is he not standing on top of me and showing off his laurels?"
"Conclusion: He's transparent and helpful just because he can be and doesn't hoard smiles like they're in a limited supply. Awesomeness."
Right there with you, David - this was an interesting read. I think that people may have different perceptions based on things beyond education. After all, there are some who want their kids to get as much education as possible. So we have the issue of distrust of others versus potential for success for their own children.
As for being a faculty member, I think that one issue that is difficult to deal with is the rigidity. I have worked in industry and academics is a whole different kind of culture, with rules that seem really stupid to those on the outside (and many of us on the inside). As my brother observed, academics trade not in money, but prestige. This may be why faculty members in other departments so jealously guard their turf. Even within the department, you can sometimes see such issues.
In some ways, unless you have friends or family that have been faculty members we're all in the same boat. I know that graduate school did not prepare me for some of the pitfalls of being a faculty member. It did a great job of making me a scholar, but it did not prepare me for things like administrators who are so ego driven that they would ignore presented evidence because they had already made a decision to do something else. I had worked in industry before coming back to grad school and I was surprised that people didn't challenge the administration when they made really bad decisions. In the tech sector, we would hash it out and come up with the best idea because millions of dollars could be on the line. It's surprising that some can be so cavalier about the learning of these students because they didn't want to admit thatthey were wrong. There are also the unspoken rules of a particular department that we all have to figure out, sometimes by trial and error. It's that way in every organization (see Pacanowsky and O'Donnell-Trujillo work on organizational rituals, for example: Pacanowsky, M., & O'Donnell-Trujillo, N. (1983). Organizational communication as cultural performance. Communication Monographs 50, 127-147.), but can be rather unforgiving because of the ego-driven nature of academia. In fact, for the scholarly side of things, I also like Pacanowsky's "Slouching Toward Chicago" (Michael Pacanowsky, “Slouching Towards Chicago,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 4 (1988): 453-67.) Talk about depressing! But it is a beautiful essay that captures the conference experience in ways that I couldn't have imagined.
I know that you have read it, but I wrote a chapter on helping first generation students who are considering graduate school ("When First-Generation Students Go to Graduate School"). You can get it at http://www.academia.edu/941413/When_First_Generation_Students_go_to_Grad.... To become a first generation faculty memeber you first have to make it to graduate school and frankly I had no idea what I was doing. I pretty much screwed everything up and it was a miracle that I got in!
Thanks for the interesting remarks.
Brett
I have been recommending this to anyone considering graduate school:
100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/p/complete-list-to-date.html
See especially Reason #25.
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