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Letter from Washington

Afloat in academia

By MELANIE HUBBARD
Published January 8, 2006

Tuesday, Dec. 27

My voice bounces off the inside of the airport van as I inquire of my seat companion whether he, too, is going to the MLA. By an ironic coincidence, we're letting a couple off at a hotel across the street from the federal education building. It is long and tall, punctuated by bus stop shelters that look like little yellow schoolhouses. "No child left behind" is scrawled in red across the roof of each little house.

I am attending the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Washington, a whole convention full of English and foreign language professors who meet to deliver research papers, interview for jobs and make contacts. The convention is scheduled between Christmas and New Year's, in order to ruin both holidays with the smell of fear, for here fates are decided and careers are dispatched or advanced.

As I walk into my bounteous hotel, I compare fashion strategies: Those in the know and dressed to the nines are already "on," aware that they are being evaluated, even though their job interviews may be scheduled for another day. A sophisticated-looking young man strides by in black woolen pants, black leather shoes, black turtleneck (still and ever "in") and a black peacoat. I am way outclassed and feeling foolish: I am wearing jeans, for starters. But I can relax: I don't have an interview. It's an old saw that academics can't dress, and I'm very relieved - when I get to the convention itself - to find it at least sometimes confirmed: socks in Birkenstocks, suit coats over peasant dresses, ratty beards, tweed. I'll wear my lovely suit the day I deliver my paper.

Still, I pine for a peacoat. My first grad school roommate made postmodernism real to me by declaiming that a peacoat was "aware of its coatness" and thus able to comment on other coats, and in general to "read" fashion and be "read" by others. Toggle buttons were especially self-conscious, she added.

And when we are with people, we are always reading. I read the Japanese rice paddy hat festooned with rags, and parti-colored silk swags draped around a thin male body. I see hollow eyes, the slimmest of fingers: in baggage, but grabbing no bags. He's homeless, a crazy person. Somebody's brother or son.

At night I attend a session on "Artificial Experience in Early Modern England" - riveting - then eat, then attend "Theorizing and Historicizing the Mind in English Renaissance Literature," in which I hear possibly the worst professional paper I have ever heard in my life. This offers me no end of relief, for (not to be too petty) I am now assured that my paper will not be "the worst" ... although it still could be pretty bad.

My hotel: elegant swank. Swellegant ank. I wonder, as I flirt with sticking my toe into the bath's waterspout, whether they make the hole toe-sized on purpose; that is, couldn't they make the faucet hole larger, so people wouldn't get their toes stuck? Old movies and "Dear Abby" tell us that when you get your toe stuck it is an embarrassment, a none-too-well-disguised bid for attention, and you have only yourself to blame. I withdraw my toe from the outer edges of the faucet's hole. Besides, the emergency phone in the bathroom is 6 feet away and 4 feet up on the wall. Heaven help me if "I've fallen and I can't get up."

Last night, endlessly waiting to get into an Indian restaurant across from the convention, I met a fellow who has 17 job interviews, probably a record. He put out about 70 applications. He's finishing his dissertation, and if he doesn't get a job - a real tenure-track, full-time teaching position at a university or college - he will have to cobble together adjunct work, which pays barely minimum wage and offers no benefits, much less job security. This, after at least 10 years of education and a Ph.D. Luckily, he has prospects, and the "market" in his area is wide open this year.

My prospects, for the time being, are limited by a geographical fact: My recently retired English professor husband and my child are in Ruskin in a historic waterfront home, and I care neither to leave them for a job in Anywhere, USA, nor to uproot us all. So I have the life but not, so far, a permanent job. Others have the job, but not the life: There are academic spouses teaching at different institutions separated by a thousand miles or more - a fact made more poignant when they have a baby.

Academics in the humanities are right down there with classical musicians when it comes to low pay, beyond-tight market and imminent public apathy. But since the public continues to have children and send them to college, fortunately higher education doesn't lack a clientele.

It does, however, lack integrity. As administrators and states slash away at education budgets, colleges and universities rely upon adjuncts. Many universities offer up to 40 percent of their courses this way. Why they continue to receive accreditation is beyond me, because poorly paid, overworked creatures willing to cobble five or six classes together per term to break above the government-specified poverty level cannot be offering quality service. I've taught an adjunct course or two; my brother, combining both prescriptions for doom, is an adjunct in classical guitar.

Yesterday is a blur of session after session: experimental computer poetry, contemporary elegy post-Holocaust, Western expansion and Manifest Destiny. And a blur of sightings: ghosts like an old undergraduate professor, glimpsed at the back of the room, then gone, slipped out, slipped away. Old friends, undercurrents of rivalry acknowledged or mediated through mutual admiration, close questioning, the God's honest truth: We are looking, looking for jobs.

An old Columbia buddy is doing well, married (I could have sworn he was gay!). Another friend, certified gay, is still (how shall I say it?) alive. He has a book out from a prestigious press - and no permanent job in sight, unless he wants to go to Turkey or Taiwan, where having a gay partner is either dicey or explicitly illegal.

There should be a book of MLA Convention interview stories, the kind of embarrassing urban legends or stunning, nearly unbelievable events that take place behind closed doors, between interviewers and interviewees. Interviews are held in hotel rooms, beds and all, and part of the ritual - the initiation of a newly minted Ph.D. - is to endure the vagaries of others' or one's own haplessness. What do you do when the interviewer, divalike, demands your coat to keep her warm and assures you you'll get it back by the end of the convention? Or what about the "wrong door" story, in which the candidate knocks at the appointed hour, only to be greeted by a naked, receptive woman? (This happened; it was recited to a group by the person it happened to.) Then there is the more pedestrian and charming true tale of the interviewee who attempted to eat the potpourri in the pretty bowl on the coffee table before him - swearing it looked like nuts, trail mix, nosh.

Ah, Starbucks. What do they put in their coffee? And how did they come up with their name, reminiscent as it is of 1950s space comics, romantic aspiration and Western ruggedness? It has poetry in it, like the names of Shakespeare's rogues, Dickens' urchins or Melville's sailors. Later I do a little research online: Melville. And I am not surprised to find an English major at the bottom of it all. An English major, up all night, in need of a rich, strong coffee.

My paper went well. Whew! People wanted to know where it would be published, if I could send them a copy. One man said it was "beautiful" and "lovely." Repeatedly. Which is good, because it cost me about a thousand dollars to be here, and there isn't even a job in the offing. I'll take all the compliments I can get.

I have learned so much. There is a poet who, eschewing authorial interference, reproduces in one way or another something of reality. One book consists of every word he uttered for a week. Working very differently, another poet, a performance poet scats and riffs and ululates over a short sentence, such as "I am just a little girl," in loops and samples she's created to suggest other, outlying words, such as "justice" or "adjustment." While her grunts suggest refusals, her high-pitched wailing over "little" suggests both how we trivialize littleness and take cruel advantage of its vulnerability. The piece attempts to give a language to traumatic, deeply buried experience - the very experiences that go unrecognized in the larger culture. If you were my student, in my class, you would hear this piece and we would discuss it and you would go out into the world, a person perhaps changed forever by another person's articulation of all our pain.

People seem to think that the arts and humanities are a luxury. After all, Emily Dickinson offers us no cure for cancer, nor indeed, for life. But our ignorance has very real costs. How, for instance, do we begin to talk to our enemies?

Suppleness of mind, an ability to process complex and even conflicting data, to mediate contradiction, to hold open possibilities, to articulate positions, to analyze a complex situation: These are the survival skills people need to stay nimble, even viable, in a changing world. "What can you do with an English degree?" Almost anything you want. Except, of course, be an English professor.

- Melanie Hubbard will finish up her teaching appointment at the University of Tampa this spring. Then she'll continue work on her book about Emily Dickinson, supported by a full-year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

[Last modified January 5, 2006, 10:20:05]