Anonymous Professor’s Personal Pronoun

Note: Any resemblance to real persons living or dead may be a coincidence

My attitude toward faculty meetings has evolved through the years. In the beginning, I found them amusing. Nothing of much importance was ever accomplished, but there wasn’t a lot of political posturing except for the occasional, brief feminist agenda reveal. I can live with that. I’m sensitive to the needs, wants, desires, demands, and shifting moods of women, and the many obstacles they face in life. I hear about it all the time. I have inside knowledge.

I’m married.

Over time, faculty meetings became insanely politicized and somewhat polarized (seven males vs dozens of females). That polarization changed drastically with the elaboration upon and expansion of the definition of biological sex and gender. In truth, I don’t think about that sort of thing very often. At least, I didn’t give it much thought until this semester’s first faculty meeting.

We had the usual pre-meeting chat to acquaint ourselves with the new folks (six new female Teachers’ Assistants and four female first year lecturers).  The guys who manage to remain in the department year after year had our own mini-meeting to discuss a pressing issue: Where the hell was Tom Brady during the opening days of Buccaneers practice? Was he recovering from a nasty break-up with Jennifer Lopez or the hot little singer who wears those pretty red dresses or somebody else that we don’t know much about? After Shakespeare guy mentioned that Brady is happily married to a super model, nobody had a clue about what delayed his arrival at practice, but we high-fived each other over the assurance that Brady was back with the Bucs. That was good enough. None of us was really sure who Jennifer Lopez was seeing. I’m not even sure who she is. The girl in the red dress? Isn’t that Dillinger’s gal?

That moment of social connection was short-lived when the department chair called the meeting to order and asked what our outburst was about. Her attitude wasn’t called for. We weren’t bickering. We weren’t engaging in petty interpersonal politics, arguing over socio-economic equality, or conniving to get someone kicked off the faculty.

No. We were actually establishing a pattern of cooperation. That’s a good but very unusual thing, especially in this department.

“Well?” she said.

Well? That’s an expression of dominance. She doesn’t expect or want an answer, but the other male professors are so cowed by her that they feel as though someone should answer her anyway, and that someone is always me. I’m not scared of her. She can’t get me fired. Her predecessor told me that the only reason why I’m still around is because I make everyone else look so good. That’s not the real reason, but that’s the one that I repeat to others who let me know that they don’t like me and wonder why I still have a job. Humility—sincere or not— is a good defense around here.

“That’s called male bonding, your highness. Do you have a problem with that?” I said that on the inside.

On the outside I said, “It’s nothing.”

She agreed and launched right into the matter at hand. “At the end of the spring semester, you were all asked to think about your personal pronouns.”

I asked the creative writing guy sitting beside me what the hell she was talking about.

“I dunno,” he said. “I must have dozed off.”

The poetry guy sitting beside him said that it had something to do with gender identity.

“How would you know? You weren’t even here to accept your idiotic faculty award for whatever you did.”

“I was here. You just couldn't see me. Really.”

 “Where were you? What were you doing?” I hissed.

 “I was bent over, tying my shoe lace,” he said.

 “It takes you forty-five minutes to tie your shoe lace?”

“Yeah. Sometimes longer, depending upon how long the meeting is,” he said.

Damn. Why didn’t I think of doing that?

Ms. Department Chair turned to me first. “And what is your preferred pronoun?” she asked me, her arms folded across her concave breasts. She knew that I hadn’t thought about it after I left the meeting in June. If I ever do reflect upon a faculty meeting, it’s usually after one of those holiday-themed meetings when other people bring food. After the last such meeting, I asked myself why I had eaten the hummus. It always gives me gas.

The thought process is a fascinating thing. When the brain floods itself with neurotransmitters, neurons fire and produce zillions of thoughts. When The Chair turned to me, the inside of my head must have looked like Paris at night.

In a flash, I eliminated all of the feminine pronouns. I’ve been getting suspicious looks from some of the women on the faculty since I lied during the Gender Awareness Month meeting and falsely claimed to have worn my wife’s high heels while I mowed the grass on weekends.

I eliminated all of the masculine pronouns because I knew that I’d catch flak for it. Simply being a male and working in this department raises suspicions among female faculty that one is not an “ally”. A male faculty member is just an apparatus of our oppressive male-dominated society. I remembered reading an article in Inside Higher Ed that one way for a man to establish himself as an ally among women is to shut up and listen and learn from his mistakes. It wasn’t the best way or the only way proposed in the article, I’m sure, but that’s what I remembered. It was at the beginning of the article.

Yeah. That’s it. Shut up. It works at home.

“Well,” she said. That didn’t sound like a question, but it was clear that she wanted an answer.

“I like me a lot,” I said.

Titter titter.

The women always titter. I wish they’d stop tittering whenever I speak during a faculty meeting. It gives me the creeps.

 “That’s how I often refer to myself,” I said. “But I respond to you as well.”

 Then the groaning started. I turned to the male faculty to my left.

“What in hell is this all about?” I whispered.

They shrugged and shook their heads. The person most likely to know—the Gender Studies and Queer Theory Guy— skipped the meeting, so we were on our own.

When I emerged from the confusion, someone mentioned “orientation and its effect upon the way we perceive the world”. My west-facing office overlooks acreage that was bulldozed in anticipation of campus expansion, abandoned, then left for nature to deal with the scars.  The university didn’t get the expected funding to erect a Student Life building and a few other buildings, so my window overlooks bare earth and some spindly scrub. Nature has been slow to repair the damage.

I was ready to air an old grievance. My office’s orientation inspired me to name it The Wasteland in honor of T.S. Eliot. I was ready for the question.

The chair turned to me and spoke.

“So. Professor.” Full stops. Just like in the army. “How does YOUR sexual orientation affect your perception of the world?”

 Whoa. I didn’t hear anything about sexual orientation. I need to pay closer attention. Luckily, my neurons lit up like Chernobyl.

“How has my sexual orientation affected my perception of the world? Hm. Well. I’m married with two wonderful kids and a beautiful wife. My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June.  The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so much fun—“

“Alright! Alright!” The Chair said. “I don’t know why I bother to talk to you anymore. Let’s move on.”

Poetry saved the day. It may not have looked like it, but I had a better grip on the whole pronoun/outlook on life thing than anyone in the room. For the rest of the meeting, I thought about my incredibly fast response and the look on The Chair’s face. I amaze myself sometimes.

The meeting adjourned with blah blah blah and a handout that I left on the table. As I approached my office door near the exit, I felt a pang of hypocrisy. I love my wife and kids, but I agreed to teaching two freshman writing classes so I could spend less time with my family.

As I unlocked the door, a first year teacher’s assistant whispered to me from behind. She was a girl I had seen earlier in the day who sported green hair and a sleeve tattoo.

“I want to tell you something. That was a great comeback. I love Robert Burns and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They’re my favorites,” she said.

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

 “Don’t tell anyone that I told you, but after you left, the chair said that she has a preferred pronoun for you,” she said laughing.

And that is—?”

“It. Can you believe it? It! Is she always so mean?” she asked.

“Actually, it is a step up, a promotion. She used to refer to me as slime mold. Hmmm. Maybe it's a demotion. Did you know that slime mold has a highly sophisticated system for communication with other slime molds? That may be why there’s such a disconnect among the faculty. They can’t communicate on my level.”

The girl with green hair and a sleeve tattoo staggered back down the hall toward the meeting room laughing and holding her stomach.

That girl will never make it in academia, I thought. She has a sense of humor and she’s much too kind. I should have a talk with her and tell to run while there’s still time for her to save herself.