I Don't Advise Students Anymore

I don’t advise students about anything, though at one time I took on the role of advisor in return for a reduction in hours talking to myself in front of a bunch of brain dead students. I don’t do that anymore.

Wait. I still talk to myself in front of a bunch of brain dead students, but I give no advice.

I can’t really advise a student whether this course or that course will benefit him in his career choice. Will a course devoted to the Arthurian poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” help him in his pursuit of a career as a professor of the English language? Hell if I know. I haven’t read it, and I’m not interested in reading it. My advice would be to see if Spark Notes or Cliff’s Notes have anything that addresses Arthurian poetry. (Those publications are considered forbidden texts even though the literary criticism contained therein is written by esteemed scholars). Giving such advice would get me into trouble in a heartbeat.

But it isn’t just advising about academic courses that proves problematic. When I was an advisor, I heard numerous complaints about other tenured professors who engaged in not-so-subtle harassment and racial discrimination in class. I heard repeated complaints about an African American Literature teacher who made frequent remarks that offended and angered white students. Her behavior was so offensive that eventually most (if not all) of the enrolled white students dropped her class before the end of the semester. Worse, the one student who tried to tough it out woke up too late to the fact that the playing field wasn’t nearly level. A common complaint was that the professor gave in-class writing assignments then left the class for forty minutes. As soon as the professor left the room, the black students pulled out completed papers and spent the rest of the class talking until the professor returned to the room. The black students were (somehow) given the assignment beforehand.

The white student had a legitimate Title IX complaint against the professor, but because only one white student remained in that professor’s African American Literature class, it was the student’s word against the professor’s. Every year, I heard the same complaint about the same professor. Students felt that I had a responsibility to report the professor. I may have had some sort of ethical responsibility to say something to the department chair, but doing so would have caused problems for me. Members of a university department behave pretty much the same way that members of a police force behave. They close ranks and protect their own no matter how serious or believable the charge may be.

I refuse to get involved in such matters. The student may take it up with the dean of the college or some committee that addresses such complaints if he has the nerve, but I always advised against it. My advice was for the student to take it on the chin and move on. After he graduates and enters the “real” world, he’ll probably encounter much worse ethical violations. That’s when filing a complaint might actually make a difference. In the world of scholarship and the pursuit of educational fulfillment, complaints will gain nothing but a bad reputation.

I no longer give helpful advice. Moreover, I won’t listen to complaints. Complaints threaten my open door policy.   

A Post-Covid Retrospective

 

dence

I survived the past two years with its burden of remote classes. All tests were administered online and, by golly, almost everyone scored an A on the tests, even for my toughest lecture class. I was fortunate that it attracted the brightest-of-the-bright. The bible thumpers (and I get a lot of them) made NO objections to course title or content (“The many Perversions of Lord Byron”). The title of the course tells what it's about, but there are always a couple of them who are mortally offended. This time, it didn’t happen.

And nobody cheated.

Okay. Maybe there was some cheating, but the remote classes presented a much-needed respite from the headaches of preparing for class and dealing with troublesome and lazy students. Rather than sitting before my desktop computer and trying to lecture before the tops of kids’ heads via Zoom, I directed my class to You Tube  to view lectures that I recorded years ago when the university outfitted classrooms with state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment. Some of the recorded lectures were mandated by a past department chair. I recorded a lot of other classes because I intended to offer them to the “Great Lectures Courses” for sale online. With the help of Anonymous Son, everything proceeded seamlessly.

Perhaps too seamlessly.

Since the Zoom classes were such a success for so many, universities across the nation have been questioning the value and “unnecessary financial burden” of maintaining offices for professors. The argument is that since Zoom classes were such a success, on-campus offices for professors are unnecessary. The Chronicle of Higher Education even presented an online Zoom discussion about this. The discussion is just one more argument for universities to cut costs to the bone. No one is willing to admit to the many downsides of eliminating offices for professors and the many hardships that a move to another location (i.e. home) would impose.

I agreed to a full-time position at this university so that I could spend less time with my family. If my office is vacated, I’d not only have to work from home but I’d also have to drag my couch back with me. I paid a twenty bucks to get two of those pointed-ears-and-no-neck-I-wanna-be-a-cop-someday Criminal Justice majors to haul it up to the third floor of the Lytton Strachey Building.

Working from home is a non-starter. Taking a nap anywhere outside of my office is impossible.

There was an informal discussion about it in the faculty lounge last year when Covid frenzy was at its worst. The women of child-bearing age were all for it. The slacker faculty loved the idea too. The rest of us had valid reasons for wanting an office on campus. Some love the pastoral setting of the campus. (They haven’t looked out my office window lately). Others said that they like being able to socialize with “like-minded people”. (Um… What?! The nonstop political posturing and frequent hissy fits keep me away from the faculty lounge. I go there only when I run out of coffee in my office, so the “like-mindedness” argument doesn’t work for me).

And one professor who shall remain nameless said nothing because he didn't want to call attention to himself. Everyone knows that he has been boinking the Kiddie Literature prof in her office for years.

Others commented that if the entire department were to vacate the floor for a semester, the university could bring in a budding decorator from the art department to give the place a makeover. When somebody referred to my office as a pig sty adorned with Grateful Dead posters, I turned and left. I don’t engage people lacking in awareness and appreciation of cultural diversity. I love my office. It’s not a pig sty. Others just don’t like the way that I keep most of my books stacked on the floor. If the university could give me some more shelves, my office would look like the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript library at Yale.

But just a bit smaller.

The whole idea of doing away with professors’ offices is asinine. If we do away with offices, let’s do away with dormitories. Let the students stay home and take classes remotely. Their alleged minds are far away anyway. They spend most of their time online fooling with their  iPhones.

Get rid of the food court, the cafeteria, the football stadium, and the library too. The university should do away with the library anyway because students don’t use it for its vast resources. The building is just a very large climate controlled rest center. Most of the students in the library sit down in a carrel and pass out. Maybe that's a good thing. I never have to stand in line to check out a book. 

We survived Covid. YAY! Let the Academic PooBahs level the whole damned campus to save money.

Just let me keep my office.

And give me a raise.

The Kris Kringle Faculty Love Fest

It’s that time of year.

 Again.

I’ve got nothing against Christmas. I love it. Covid put a damper on Family Christmas for two years, and I suppose it’ll have an effect on the socially-distanced faculty Christmas “party” too. It'll be the first one in three years.  Maybe it’ll have a good effect, though I doubt it. Every time I think  things in the department will improve, the result is that things are just different.

One thing that won’t differ from past faculty Christmas parties is that we’ll still do the Kris Kringle thing. At one time, it was an anonymous affair. Now, everyone pulls a name from a Jimmy Choo shoe box and each professor is committed to buying a special token of appreciation for that person. I have little appreciation for most of the department faculty— not even token appreciation.

Participation in this annual event should be optional.

The whole event is unfair to the non-Christian faculty, but the English department isn’t like the Math, Science, and Religious Studies departments whose faculty members hail from all over the world; we haven’t had any non-Christian faculty members that I recall except many years ago when there was a guy with a long beard named Shlomo O’Malley. Nobody was sure whether he was Jewish or Irish Catholic. He was secretive about his private life. What little we knew about him was that he professed to be a member of the Anti-Shaving League. He stayed for only two semesters and he didn’t protest the Kris Kringle gift exchange or suggest a reciprocal Hanukkah observance, so we’ll never know about his religion.

My Kris Kringle this year is the department chair. Not a chairman or chairwoman. Just chair. Can you believe it? Other universities have department heads. Our university deemed chairman and chairwoman to be sexist, and head (for some weird reason) was considered limiting. I consider chair dangerous and possibly lethal. When I thought of the idiot who held that position years ago, I proposed a term that was much more accurately descriptive: stool.

Anyway, the department chair and I have sort of a hate-hate relationship.

Wait. Maybe it’s more of a “You Stay Away from Me and I’ll Stay Away from You” relationship.

During the Kris Kringle draw, a slip of paper with the department chair’s name on it is positioned in the shoe box so that only an unlucky first year teacher picks the chair's name. Somehow, I got the chair's name this year. She teaches Feminist and Gender Theory. (Can you believe it? Gender is just a theory now!). So no matter what I give her, it will offend her in some way. The nicest thing she has ever said to me was, “How long have you been divorced?” I've been married for twenty-five years. Never a problem in our marriage that anyone knows about.

The Kris Kringle love fest is held before the Christmas break, so I have time to give it some thought. Because it’s held before winter break, all of the Kris Kringlers pass each other in the hall and sneer at each other because of the crummy gifts they received and the perceived agenda or insult behind them.

When I began teaching at this diploma mill, the gifts were anonymous. There was a drop box in the faculty lounge, and at the appointed time, the faculty would gather. The presents would be handed out. Some of the gifts were pretty expensive. (I think that’s where the Jimmy Choo shoebox came from). I got a couple of really demeaning gifts four years in a row. For two years, I got a rubber door stop. The following two years it was a door knob— one knob one year, then the matching dented one the next year. I was lucky. One of the other male professors got a box of chocolates that looked like turds and another got a coffee cup that bore the inscription, “I See That the Assassins Missed.”

After the new department chair was appointed from our ranks (rather than being recruited from the outside), there were no more anonymous Kris Kringle gifts. It stopped the insults and the re-gifting.

Later:

SONOFABITCH!

The Kris Kringle shindig was today!

I didn’t have time to get anything for the department chair. I went to the student bookstore in search of a card, but the the store was sold out. The helium tank was empty, so I couldn’t even get her a balloon. I begged a bookstore cashier for a ribbon and a University book store plastic bag. (You know the kind— plastic bags with huge type in ink that rubs off in your hands).

In order to maintain social distancing, the shindig was held in the sciences building lecture auditorium. Before I got there, I blew up the bag and tied it off with the ribbon. As I entered the auditorium, everyone‘s eyes were on the door, as if I was expected to be late. (This is not a good bet. Sometimes I skip faculty meetings altogether).

Onstage, the faculty members stood in two lines facing each other, maintaining the appropriate distances. The flunky department secretary called out names, and as each name was called, the Kris Kringle walked to his own Kris Kringle. I held the university bookstore bag with the ribbon behind my back.

Fate is interesting. The department chair/Feminist and Gender Theory professor and I were the last two names called. When her name was called, I gave her the inflated plastic bag and she handed me a heavy gift-wrapped thing shaped like a brick.

Madam Chair/Feminist and Gender Theory professor looked confused. She held the empty inflated bag, shook it a little, then crushed it with a pop.

“Is this a joke?” she demanded.

"Um. No. I forgot all about this Kris Kringle thing. I’m sorry.”

She stared at me. Then she smiled. “Oh, just like a man! You surely don’t disappoint, do you? How rich!” I couldn’t believe it. She actually smiled at me and handed me a gift.

No one was interested in knowing what the department chair gave me, so the meeting was adjourned with all the usual Christmas and New Year insincerities.

When I returned to my office, I opened the heavy brick-like thing. It was a fruitcake.

Now I know where all of those door stops came from years ago.

 

Anonymous Professor Prepares for Thanksgiving

 

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

The Thanksgiving holiday looms large on the horizon. I finally returned one batch of midterm papers to my freshman class. I still haven’t graded my senior undergraduate and graduate students’ papers. Luckily, there are only twenty-one students in that class, and I can count on five of the undergrads turning in their papers late. For each day that the paper is late, the paper is docked one grade point. He might have received an A (haha), but since his paper will be late, the highest grade he’ll receive will be a B.  Nobody writes a perfect paper in my classes anyway (except for the butt kissers), so my conscience is clear concerning the less fortunate.  The best anyone can really hope for is a B, so that late paper receives a C. Of course, I touch my pen to the paper, make light lines under certain phrases, and write cryptic notes at the bottom of the paper so that students believe that I actually read their papers.

My favorite comment is “This seems a bit vague. Could you be more specific?” or “What about [illegible]?" Of course, the student has no idea what I mean because the comment is written at the bottom of the page and references nothing specific within the paper.

Any student can come to my office to discuss a paper and my comments, but he must enter his date onto a calendar to set an appointment. Most students who sign up forget to come, so my weekly student conference hours are pretty stress-free.

I get a kick out of the graduate students’ bullsh*t. Some send me emails telling me that they cannot attend the last class before Thanksgiving. Then they tell me that they’ll just push their papers under my door. They learn pretty quickly that they can’t just slip it under my door. I got sick of that nonsense years ago, so I installed a rubber door sweep on the inside of my door that makes it impossible for anyone to push his tripe under my door. If he attaches it to my door with tape, I just tell him that I didn’t receive the paper. It probably fell off and the janitor canned it. It comes as a shock when Hollee receives a D for the semester’s final grade (if I feel generous) because she failed to deliver her paper in class.

Then there are the somewhat smarter ones who go to the department secretary to try to deliver their papers to my faculty mail box. That doesn’t work either. Years ago, the department secretary (who ran off after one semester) decided to verify every teacher’s public and private email address. I didn’t put my name or email address on the paper that was circulated among the teachers because all she had to do was to look in the faculty directory for my official university email address. Nobody needs to know my private email address.

Once, a newly hired secretary decided to battle the chaos of the mail room, so she ordered nice plastic name plates for the teachers’ cubbyhole mail boxes. She used the email memorandum as a guide to the mailbox layout. My refusal to put my name and email addresses on the paper resulted in the secretary’s failure to order a name plate for my mailbox, so I didn’t get a mailbox that term. Consequently, I didn’t get any notifications of committee meetings. I didn’t get notifications of any sort. (That was a good thing). If I have to attend a faculty meeting, someone has to tell me in person. Otherwise, I know nothing about those time-wasters.

Once, to preempt criticism of my perceived laziness, I complained that I wasn’t getting any communication from the department chair. There was an investigation. TA DA! Somebody figured out that I had no mailbox. Rather than pry off everyone’s name plate from half of the cubbyholes to alphabetize the mail boxes, I told the secretary to just assign me a box on the other side of the mail room. The only available cubbyhole was located way at the top where nobody can reach, much less see. Now, when a student tries to deliver a paper to my faculty mailbox, he’s directed to a box that bears no name in a place where it looks as though nothing is ever delivered because all the cubbyhole ever collects is dust. Result: no student papers are left in my faculty mail box.

Since graduate assistants and teachers’ assistants are allowed to eat in the enclosed teachers’ side of the cafeteria, I avoid the cafeteria during the last week of the semester. That thwarts the ambushes from graduate students. The janitor gave me an entry key to the exit-only door at the end of the hall where my office is located, so I can avoid not only other faculty but also the department chair when I come in in the morning. If I’m lucky, I’ll fade into obscurity as everything else does in this department if nobody sees or mentions it for a long time. That would be wonderful as long as the university continues to direct-deposit my pay check to my bank account.

I’ve got to work on creating a final exam for a horrible undergraduate class. It’s almost lunch time. Maybe I’ll lock my door, pull down the shades, and take a nap on the couch.