Overcoming Adversity in Academia: Stories from Generation X Faculty

272 Pages·2013·2.4 MB·English

by  Elwood Watson (Ed.)

O A
VERCOMING DVERSITY
A
IN CADEMIA
_________________________

Stories from Generation X Faculty
_________________________

Edited by
Elwood Watson

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CONTENTS

Preface v
Elwood Watson

1. Only Human: My Experience in Higher Education
Martha Diede 1

2. Confessions of a Bakke Baby: Race, Academia,
and the “Joshua Generation”
Terrance Tucker 22

3. Taking Chances: Gay, Male and Feminist in the Academy
Daniel Farr 39

4. Tenured To Contingent: Life Choices and the Academic Career
Annemarie Hamlin 53

5. The Evolution of Tolerance:
Growing Up as a White Southerner in the
Aftermath of Desegregation
Andria J. Woodell 66

6. Reflections on Navigating Invisibility and the Consequences of
Being Black and Gay in the Academy
Darryl Holloman 83

7. Reflections Upon One Experience Leading To a Career in Academia
Douglas Mikutel 99

8. Living Beyond The Dream Deferred: An Auto-Ethnography of
My Experiences in the Academy
Antonio C. Cuyler 109

9. In Search of the Abyss: Negotiating Xtra-Academic Potential
David Prescott-Steed 124

10. Team Mollick: Our Two-For-One Academic Journey
Kathleen and George Mollick 139

11. My Ongoing Journey: A Black Generation X Professor’s Story
In Appalachia
Elwood Watson 154
iv Contents

12. Leaving the Popular Culture Classroom:
Why I’d Rather Keep My Fandom to Myself...
Kristi Key 171

13. Doogie Howser, Ph.D. in Identity Crisis
Zachary Snider 180

14. Changing the State of Tomorrow Today:
One Generation Xer’s Journey to End Racism and
White Supremacy in the Academy and Beyond
Aimee Glocke 197

15. Hopefully Drifting
Lance Alexis 214

16. The Aftermath of Admission
Jenny R. Sadre-Orafai 225

17. Notes From An In-Betweener
Daryl A. Carter 235

Contributors 256

Index 259
PREFACE

Since the early 1990s, there has been sporadic coverage and interest in
Generation X. When the phrase initially became a part of the public discourse, a
number of terms were used to describe those of us who fell into this generational
category:
Apathetic
Slackers
Troubled
Unusually independent
Proficient with Technology
Adventurous
Ethnically Diverse
Unreliable to employers
to name a few.
The fact is that many of the aforementioned terms could apply to the silent
generation, baby boomers, millenials etc… For a brief time, interest in
Generation X (those of us born between 1965-1979), was so intense, that a
number of journals and magazines such as Swing, Vibe, Details, The Next
Progressive to name a few were created in an effort to discuss and explore the
issues that were seen as relevant to our generation. Even Hollywood cashed in
on the phenomenon with the wildly popular movie, “Reality Bites.” This 1994
movie starring Ben Stiller, Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke and co-starring
Janeane Garofolo and Steve Zahn became a defining symbol for a generation.
Now almost two decades later, the film still resonates with a number of
Generation X’ers.
By the mid 1990s, Time, Newsweek, U.S News and World Report, Nightline
and various other mainstream media dedicated its share of cover stories, feature
articles, ongoing commentary, some of it enlightening, much of it paternalistic
and condescending as to how they perceived us. We were dubbed the latchkey
kids of the MTV generation. Our fleeting affinity for music legend Tony
Bennett was also a source of great interest for the mainstream media. We were
also dubbed as “post-boomers.”
While various segments of the media employed a lot of ink, came up with a
more than a half of dozen catch phrases and damaged many keyboards in their
efforts to define the 46 million Americans who fall into this category, there has
vi Preface
been little attention given to scholars who are members of this age group. This
was the motivation for me solicit essays from fellow academics who I knew had
stories to tell. After all, we are the men and women who will make up the largest
group in the academy within the next decade, if not sooner. Our generation is
making its presence known in the ivory tower.
I am glad to say that I was not disappointed. There were more than a few
Gen Xers who were more than happy to share their stories with me. Like many
non-academics of our generation, our lives and experiences are diverse and
pluralistic. We are not monolithic. We range in age from 33 to 45. We are
Black, White, Hispanic, bi-racial, straight, gay, bisexual, liberal, moderate,
conservative, libertarian, apolitical, religious, and agnostics and atheists. We
teach at colleges in various parts of the nation. We represent the humanities,
social sciences, hard sciences, and fine arts to name a few disciplines. Some of
us are administrators. We represent married couples, single people, divorced
persons and never been married people. It is such a diversity of experiences that
makes this collection of essays a fascinating anthology.
This book would not have been possible without the patience and dedication
of many people. Thank you to everyone at University Press of America for
helping to make this anthology a reality. A special salute is owed to my fellow
contributors for their immense patience in waiting for this project to come to
fruition. Moreover, my family deserves thanks for their encouragement and
support as well. I dedicate this anthology to all of you.

Elwood Watson, Ph.D.
May 2012
CHAPTER 1

ONLY HUMAN: MY EXPERIENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

MARTHA DIEDE

The truth is unbelievable, not because it is untrue, but because no one wants to
believe it. I am living proof. Despite gloomy accounts of the academic job mar-
ket, I earned a Ph.D. and became an academic. Unlike many of my fellow
Ph.D.s, I have an academic job as an instructor at a private, religiously affiliated,
liberal arts university where I occasionally teach Shakespeare, my specialty.
Nevertheless, my work bears frustratingly little resemblance to the professorial
job that my Ph.D. program led me to expect and still less to the position that it
prepared me to hold. True, I was unprepared for the intense teaching load, com-
plicating personality conflicts between colleagues, and faculty-administration
tensions. Still, these surprises paled in comparison to my astonishment at the
way that institutional demands, professional expectations, and personal respon-
sibilities contest over the human faculty member. This battle occurs in the disci-
pline of English, no less, which revels in the complexities of humans and their
stories.1
From the beginning, I knew that this job would present challenges: the Eng-
lish department had never hired a Ph.D. in English; faculty taught four/four
loads—that is, not only four classes each semester, but usually four different
classes every semester, as well; and administrators often “redistributed” re-
sources away from student learning and professional development to meet other
budgetary demands across the university. Yet, I wanted to live close to my aging
grandparents and my mother, who needed assistance with their care. Additional-
ly, I believed that the job offered me a chance to shape a developing major ra-
ther than endure one entrenched in traditions. I believed that my disciplinary
background would ease my way; that I could balance teaching, research, service
1
2 Chapter 1
and caregiving tasks; and that I could manage the lack of resources. I was
wrong.
The fact that the English department had never hired a Ph.D. in English
was, I quickly discovered, a marker for broader institutional issues. The univer-
sity had started as a Bible college and had grown into a four-year liberal arts
university. The English department, developed out of this transition, is relatively
new. Still, change, even without the added burden of traditions, is hard. Bringing
a young Ph.D. into a department that has not had one (or perhaps has not hired a
new scholar in many years) will create discord, and for me, tensions arose most
openly in the area of expectations. I expected to see resources regularly devoted
to professional development and student learning. I anticipated publication re-
quirements in order to keep my job. I supposed my colleagues had been empow-
ered to develop their curriculum in ways that mirrored English departments at
similar institutions, and I thought they could and would do so without having to
justify every change to the entire faculty and administration. My colleagues, on
the other hand, expected me to do as they did, to accept a lack of resources, to
give up my budding research agenda, and to worry only a little about a curricu-
lum that they felt little power to change. Their goal was (and is) survival, an
unsurprising stance given the heavy teaching loads, student advising, committee
memberships, required church attendance, and a lack of resources so profound
that at one point the English department supervised three semesters’ worth of
dramatic productions.
Bulky as this task list is, especially coupled with the changes I had to make
in the ways that I thought about my job, my biggest surprise was yet to come. It
lay not in any of the curricular, professional, or service expectations, but in the
financial ones. Despite my small department’s enviable flexibility in scheduling,
the university had continued to demand more and more of its faculty, at one
point approaching the faculty for donations although it had not increased pay in
two years. The following year, faculty received a blanket request to re-negotiate
their contracts to take a 6 percent pay cut in order to help the university cover a
$3 million budget shortfall. Although a donor saved the faculty and staff from
having to take such a cut, the budget remained tight, and the university was only
able to offer a small raise the next academic year using the remaining donor
monies. Although appreciated, the pay increase does not offset the growing
number of faculty responsibilities.
Still, my colleagues and I have managed to make small but significant
changes. Our department schedules meetings around caregiving responsibilities,
and we allow parents to bring their children to meetings if necessary. University
committees do not, but faculty have recently negotiated for earlier starts—and
thus earlier conclusions—to required meetings. This small change has allowed
faculty and staff members to attend better to their family responsibilities. Alt-
hough course releases for administrative responsibilities (the only kind now
available) and professional development monies may be taken away at the last
minute, faculty representatives are now working toward ways to make faculty
labor more visible and explicitly negotiable.
Only Human 3
These improvements, however, may come too late. I know that the issues—
conflicts of expectation, tight budgets—repeat at schools both small and large.
But human faculty, I fear, cannot survive the contest between public demand for
outstanding but inexpensive education, a back-breaking load (however struc-
tured), and personal responsibilities.2 I did not believe that when I started, but I
am living proof that it is true.
But who am I to speak against the system? I entered graduate school in the
early ‘90s. Despite predictions that aging faculty would retire and academic po-
sitions would open in the wake of retirements, those jobs did not materialize in
full-time, tenure-track form.3 At the end of my academic program, I saw what
others now decry: graduate students are cheap labor for universities, particularly
in first-year undergraduate courses.4 So, universities continue to admit graduate
students, teach them, and grant them tuition breaks and small stipends. Many
graduate students leave their programs unfinished, and the ones who finish like-
ly do not find steady academic employment.5 This is old news. Every dark job
forecast for academics reinforced my understanding that I bet against very poor
odds for finding an academic position. Consequently, I learned medical tech-
nical writing and worked as an editor for a major health education firm while
attempting to research, write, and edit my dissertation. I hoped that this addi-
tional skill set would pay my bills if I were unable to find steady academic em-
ployment. Still, I wanted to complete my degree and realized that I would be
unable to research, write, and edit full-time during the day, then research and
write nights and weekends as a Ph.D. student. Concurrently, my mother needed
help to transition her two elderly parents from independent living to an adult
family home. Although they lived about 2,500 miles away from my graduate
school, the family theory was that I could move, help with the family transition,
work as an adjunct, and write my dissertation. Once I finished my dissertation
and we had settled my grandparents, I would find a full-time job. To me, mov-
ing to a large city—home to multiple universities of varying size and major em-
ployers in technology and manufacturing—felt like the best way to maximize
my job opportunities. With my academic and professional background, I calcu-
lated that I had increased my odds of finding work. I sent my current CV to the
institution of higher education closest to my new physical address, and they
forwarded my CV to a private, religiously affiliated liberal arts college where, as
an adjunct, I would teach the usual first-year composition and create a Scientific
and Technical Writing course. I was delighted.
My delight quickly turned to dismay. Little about my job was what I ex-
pected, and although adjuncting provided me with the time I needed to meet my
family obligations, the pay and resources I received to do my job were embar-
rassing, and my Earned Income Tax Credit from the IRS was only one of the
surprises awaiting me. Entering the college’s English department, I expected at
least a general direction for the writing program, but the department lacked even
a coherent set of first-year writing outcomes. When I asked about textbooks for
the Composition courses, I learned that I could choose one—from all of the
Composition books available. I asked for course outcomes, but the chair could