Monthly Archives: February 2016

Radical Reprioritizing: Tenure, Self-Care, and My Future as an Intellectual Activist

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 Eric Anthony Grollman (@grollman) is a Black queer feminist sociologist and intellectual activist; they are an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond. They are the founder and editor of the blog, Conditionally Accepted, which recently became a regular career advice column on Inside Higher Ed.  In this post, Dr. Grollman reflects on balancing life and the tenure track as an activist scholar.

I am currently wrapping up my third year as a tenure-track professor at the University of Richmond – an elite, small liberal arts college in Richmond, VA. This semester is the first time I am teaching courses I have taught at least once before; and I’m teaching the “two” of my 3-2 yearly course load. Finally, I have a little breathing room to really advance my research.

But, the service demands, and my own campus, community, and professional involvement have increased with each passing year. As far as I know, I am the only out Black queer faculty member on my campus – one of few LGBTQ faculty in general, and one of few faculty of color in general. My classes tend to have a heavy queer, (Black) feminist, and antiracist focus. And, I make an effort to be visible on campus, hopefully letting my fellow “unicorns” on campus know they are not alone. Students’ need for me to be a teacher, mentor, and role model seems particularly great at our small, slightly diverse university.

And, then there is my intellectual activism, especially my blog, Conditionally Accepted, which I hope will expand into a bigger initiative for change in the academy. There are the symposia, conference panels, and workshops at which I have spoken about discrimination, exclusion, and health problems in academia. Though less consistently, there is work I have done to make academic research and knowledge accessible to the community. Trying to earn tenure to stay in academia, while also working to change academia, sometimes I feel as though I have two jobs – and those two jobs are typically at odds with one another, unfortunately, to the detriment to my health.

I am undeniably spread thin. Due to fear of unclear and biased tenure expectations, I do my best to exceed what I suspect that I need on the research front. (Don’t we all aim for that “slam-dunk” tenure case? And, at what cost?). I sometimes push even harder on the research front to “compensate” for my advocacy – again, owing to fear of how others’ perceive my approach to being a scholar. Despite the fears that my blogging would cost me my job, I’ve kept at it since I started my position in August 2013; I’m now the editor of an Inside Higher Ed career advice column that is read nationwide (at least among academics). I’m frequently invited to speak on campus, attend various events, facilitate discussions, and so forth. I’m flattered. But, I’m also frustrated that the campus hasn’t employed more faculty like me to share the labor. For, that’s what all of this is – work. Work that is incredibly important, and affirming, and enjoyable. But, I’m only one person!

I’m only one person. A person who has suffered from Generalized Anxiety Disorder since 2010. An academic who was traumatized by graduate school, and is now seeing a therapist to begin the recovery process. And, now I suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome, probably from the anxiety and trauma. And, I finally got over myself and started taking Lexapro. Health-wise, I’m a mess, or at least a work-in-progress. Why push myself so hard at work? If these were physical health problems, I would not hesitate to rest, resist demands of work, pace myself, and seek proper treatment.

Radical Reprioritizing

Recently, my perspective has changed. I have shifted toward taking the long-view. I want to be in the academy for a loooooong, long time. I’m coming for the structures and culture that allows for the exploitation of, yet lack of support for, minority scholars. I want to educate thousands of students about the social problems of the world, and what they can do to solve them. Maybe I’ll serve as a dean or provost one day; hell, maybe I’ll defy the odds and become a university president. Or, forget thinking inside of the box; maybe I’ll start my own academic justice organization, working with multiple universities rather than within just one.

With that in mind, I have realized it is time to radically reprioritize. I have identified the two most important goals for my future as an academic and intellectual activist: 1) get healthy; and, 2) earn tenure.

Self-care is my number one goal. That means making a serious effort to do the things that will promote my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. I hate exercise, but it’s good for me. I can never seem to find the time to meditate, but I have to let my brain recharge just as I let my body recharge nightly. I’ll continue to limit work to 8am-5pm on weekdays (with no work on weekends, of course), with a mandatory lunch break for leisure reading, seeing friends on campus, or walking. I will continue to see my therapist, take my anti-anxiety medication, and use workbooks and private journaling to recover from the trauma and anxiety. I realize that I will be useless to everyone if I am sick and suffering or have a limited capacity for anything other survival. And, to be grim, I can’t help anyone if I die young. I deserve to be healthy and happy!

Earning tenure means lifetime job security at my current institution – an incredible privilege these days, even in the academy. It means more freedom to take chances in the classroom, in my research, and even in my advocacy. Tenure means power and access to make meaningful change on campus, in my discipline, and in the academy in general. It will also come with the responsibility to be in service to other academics, serving on various committees, mentoring junior faculty, and becoming involved in faculty governance. I find six years on the tenure-track tends to encourage junior scholars to play it safe, prioritize their own career and status over change and service, and promotes worry and mental illness. But, it is, at worst, a necessary evil to make real change.

Together, these goals help me to determine whether I can accept or take on a new invitation, initiative, or opportunity. For example, when I received a last-minute invitation to facilitate an on-campus discussion about racism scheduled for late in the evening, I quickly declined. Staying late and providing the necessary emotional energy would not have enhanced my health, and I am well aware it would do little to strengthen my case for tenure. But, I did finally agree to attend enVision – a social justice weekend retreat hosted by my campus’s Office of Common Ground; I found it incredibly affirming to interact with students outside of the traditional classroom context on these issues. Blogging doesn’t help me for tenure, per se, but it is a necessary outlet for me to vent about injustices that I and others have experienced, to build community, and advocate for change. Unfortunately, I realize there are still some things that will help for tenure that aren’t so enjoyable or health-enhancing – like networking at conferences, occasionally publishing in high-impact journals, etc. As I said, it’s a necessary evil; I can chalk it up to job security as a matter of health and my livelihood.

But, admittedly, there is also a third focus: my post-tenure future. I have heard the horror stories of post-tenure depression. Junior scholars who keep their mouths shut and their heads down find that they are lost when they raise their heads upon receiving tenure. I am beginning to work toward the career I want for myself as an Associate (and eventual Full?) Professor. Maybe my research will catch up with my passion and advocacy; that is, I could turn blogging into actual research on injustices in academia. Or, maybe my joke that Conditionally Accepted will serve as the launching pad for my academic talk show, Academic T with Denise, will actually become a reality. (I could live with just a podcast like On Being, though.) There is life after tenure; so, I’m doing what I need to to have both of those (life and tenure), but also doing the groundwork for my goals for intellectual activism post-tenure.

I am fortunate to have friends, family, and colleagues who support me in these endeavors. I realize that this is not afforded to everyone. But, I also recognize that these concerns – job security, health, and needing to make a difference – are particularly heightened for me as a Black queer person. That is, maybe I’d be stressed, but not mentally ill and medicated, if I were a white cishet man. Maybe I’d be a touch nervous about tenure, but not concerned that my work would be trivialized as “me-search” – even if I studied the lives of other privileged people. Maybe, maybe, maybe – but that is my reality (for now). I need to stick around along enough to ensure that this is not the reality of future unicorn scholars.

 

On not Writing

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Erika Gisela Abad has a Ph.D. in American Studies, and works at Center for Puerto Rican Studies investigating intersectionality, cultural experience, and oral history among Puerto Rican communities and families.  In this post, Erika reflects on how her research in Puerto Rican Chicago sparks tension and memory in dialogues and debates with her mother.  

I struggle with not writing. Sitting with my mom after a long day’s work watching ridiculous TV shows on streaming media. I do this in the midst of professional uncertainty when my conscious tells me it is important to, well, send out applications. A woman struggling with the invisibility of her work, of her motherhood, closing the computer allows me to make her visible in the mundanity of the everyday to which we’ve arrived.

A mixed class Latina the second to finish college, the first PhD, I got this degree because making a living as a writer a mentor once told me, was going to be difficult. In the place many predicted the MFA would land me, I sit with my mom because of the reasons I write:

To heal, to release anger, to get to truths neither speaking nor working reveal. Drafting and talking through to forgive what moments trauma doesn’t want to let go. As I once wrote a mentor, it’s about getting to the table and trying to write what the other person coming to the table could or would look like. It’s about practicing with characters and metaphors how to listen through the trauma, whether the trauma be colonial, patriarchal or material – whether the trauma be that which has been named or that which must be kept invisible. Sometimes the struggle to survive demands struggles be kept silent. Human suffering, as inevitable as it is, often gets lost in the pursuit of fantasy as well as forgetting. Coming to the table is also about assessing whether the wheel turning revolution can be rebuilt or if the pieces of memory missing – memory missing because of what can’t yet be named – requires so many of us to rebuild it.

And sitting with my mom is about waiting, waiting for memory to reappear. And her memories awaken in the memories of others I record as an oral historian. Memories of parking lots turned into playgrounds, memories of late buses to colleges she never imagined. Memories of drinking Dr. Pepper for the first time, her comfort food, the comfort of being able to know more, taste more than poverty and patriarchy permitted to a young woman growing up where Puerto Ricans were trying to make place. These memories give her life beyond the college she never finished for no other reason than being by herself. Her stories lifting up from computer screens in a voice still weary of helping and reaching, come to life beyond the place of making meaning of leaving that requires returning, overwhelmed by isolation.

And I sit with that, when our skin color differences do not write away the sameness of racism we experience. A paleness that encourages forgetting that my brownness writes on the page, for the stage in ways that have her admit—not to me—that the fight continues. Responses to racism are coded in the traumas we share. Retorts and resistance colored by the adverse childhood experiences that divide us. Sitting is all she wants at the end of the day, at the end of days running, at the end of years climbing to find stable ground in which to root, in which to lift me, among her other children higher. My hands race and wring, legs twitch because work, all the kinds, exige movement.

And I struggle to not write in those moments: moments where the cogs in my head turn too fast for her to keep up; when the questions she asks receive huffs and stomps out looking for roads bigger than the rooms we occupy. In those moments where the grumbles she makes about the car driver who works when she doesn’t, because the car that is freedom to her and is more work to me in ways that put her back on the bus, on the train to move because her fixed time challenges the time that, for me, remains in constant question. The need for work fuels us in speeds and codes the other doesn’t understand.

It takes seconds to remember a woman speaking of a girl ashamed and strained by the laundry she carries on the bus. And I see my mom there, then, aching and taking days off to not have to, again cross the street with bags and baskets. She bought to own to never again walk or rent or borrow. She works to have the luxury, luxuries she couldn’t have back then, then when Puerto Ricans were beginning to make meaning, Puerto Ricans who form the history I collect. Her life fills up in the margins of those stories, of those whose mark on Puerto Rican Chicago get printed in newspapers, shine in their awards, appear on screens to see. Those Puerto Ricans now, in between arguments and questions, spark her to remember her story. Histories she lived differently, differently for reasons the more I learn from others, the more she reveals.

So I stretch and listen and sit still, waiting, waiting till she’s asleep to pull out the books, to open the pc, to take out the pen and paper to write. Because writing is still needed to heal, to move, to forgive, to let go, to uncover, to remember. But not writing—not writing in those moments I steal from reason, from economy—allows me to say thank you, thank you the only way a struggling writer knows how. By counting the wrinkles in her face, the sighs in her stories, knowing that, in between them, remain moments and movements to keep me writing.

When it hurts not to write

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In this post, J reflects on their writing processes, and asks readers to reflect on these aspects in their own lives and the way writing or feeling unable to write at a given moment feel and take shape in our own lives.

How do you go about writing?  What is your process?  What do you do when you cannot write for any given reason?  Do you look forward to writing or is it something you have to make yourself do?  Do you operate via a structured schedule, with set time limits and goals, and other rules to keep you on track?  By contrast, do you operate in a more fluid manner writing when the feeling comes or an idea presents itself or some combination of these and other factors?  Do you need to be indoors, outdoors, anywhere specific to write?  Do you keep little handwritten notes or recordings on your phone or maybe a journal littered with in progress ideas and analyses?  These are simply a few of the multitude of options and variations I have come across among other writers over the years.  In this post, I want to share my own experience to encourage others to reflect on how you go about the process of writing and what writing is like for you.

In my case, writing is simultaneously a major part of how I make a living and a huge chunk of my personal life.  Very few things that I have encountered in this world can match how wonderful it feels to write.  I write creatively, academically, publicly, privately, empirically, theoretically, collaboratively, and solo, and attempt to write as much as possible because it is a prime site of fun, pleasure, and enjoyment for me throughout my life.  Despite these lovely aspects of writing in my world, it is also deeply painful for me when I cannot write – I feel lost, like a part of me is missing – and no matter the reason, anytime I cannot write my moods, emotions, and even self concept (i.e., my own estimation of who I am, what I’m worth, etc) suffer greatly.  Put simply, for me writing is a delicate ongoing balance between pleasure (when I can do it I am filled with joy) and pain (when I cannot do it I feel terrible).  I can’t pretend this is the same or different for other writers, but this is what it feels like for me.

All of the above is complicated by the fact that I (best I can tell) have no control over whether or not I can write at a given time.  Likely tied to other elements of the way my brain operates, I go through shifts or fluctuations wherein sometimes writing is the easiest, most natural, and smooth experience in the world, and at other times I just cannot do it no matter what I try or what deadlines or projects I have at my disposal at the time.  In the former case, I’m basically in paradise writing every day and rather communicative in other ways.  In the latter case, however, my entire mood shifts downward, I become very quiet and isolated, and I feel broken or lost.  This ongoing experience means that I write in cycles – or bursts as a close friend of mine termed the process a while back – wherein the difference in me, in what I produce, in how I feel, in how I communicate, and in how I spend my time is noticeable to those closet to me (in fact, many times these wonderful people get very worried about me during “not writing” times because of how down, distraught, and isolated I become and I’m quite lucky to have people who care so much in those moments and reach out to check on me).

This cycle in many ways dictates or shapes the rest of my life.  From August 2014 until the end of January 2015, for example, I could not write, and as is generally the case during such a “not writing” period I was very isolated, depressed (both emotionally and in terms of clinical symptoms) most of the time, and people I collaborate with had to basically wait until the part of me that writes – as one friend put it – “came back to life.”  On the other hand, from February 2015 until the end of November 2015 I experienced a nonstop burst wherein I wrote every day, filled up the inboxes of colleagues, collaborators and friends, and felt happy, satisfied and able to be social (as much as I ever am).  At present, I’m somewhere between the two extremes, which is honestly a new place for me.  I can write a little bit, but its harder than when I’m “on” one of my bursts, but I also have days where I just stare at the screen and want to (or do) cry and scream.  I don’t know if this is a new addition to the cycles or a one time thing, but I feel like I’m located in between the two versions of me I’ve become comfortable with.

This newfound in between “writing” and “not writing” led me to wonder what writing is like for other people.  While this is something I have talked with many people about, I thought it might be useful to ask on a broader scale what the writing processes looks like for others, and also to offer my own experience for anyone who has yet to learn that there is not just one way to go about writing (a curious lesson I come across that some undergrad and graduate students have picked up from some unknown sources).  After years of seeking advice, figuring out my own methods, and working with people who have very different methods (for example both Xan and Lain here at Write Where It Hurts have different writing processes and experiences than I do), I’ve become fairly certain that there are a wide variety of ways people go about the process of writing.  As a result, I want to encourage others to think about these processes, what works and doesn’t work for a given person, and how we can utilize such insights to both Write Where It Hurts and manage the ways it may hurt when we have trouble writing.