People often ask me about my experiences teaching a 3/3 and 3/4 load as a tenure-track, full-time college professor. It should come as no surprise that teaching fewer (and smaller classes) makes it much easier to publish, the holy grail of the academy. But the 3/3 load and large class sizes are not what dominates my time at a teaching college. I wish it was all about the classroom. It’s not. It’s all about the service.
In the past two months, here is what my service (committees, meetings, and such) has looked liked:
- A graduate admissions committee where I read thousands of pages of personal statements, sample essays, transcripts, letters of recommendation, etc
- A classroom observation for my department
- Attendance and participation at five different candidate talks for a new tenure-track position (this meant hours of meetings beforehand to determine the candidates and hours of meetings afterwards to discuss/select the candidates)
- Participation on a departmental curriculum committee (no meetings yet but plenty of time needed to read an enrollment agreement for state accreditation issues, a new course proposal, a revision of a minor, etc)
- Participation on a college-wide curriculum committee (which meets 3X-4X per month with heavy reading beforehand)
- Participation on a committee to select undergraduate essay award winners
- Participation in meetings and email exchanges to discuss/assess undergraduate capstone courses
- Participation in meetings, email exchanges, and assessment design of my own undergraduate capstone course
- Attendance at multiple department/program meetings
- Participation in a site visit for external review of a program
- Participation on a committee to select undergraduate ePortfolio award winners
- Participation in a day-long outcomes assessment meeting as part of the writing program
I do not hold any administrative positions at my college and do not aspire to. And yet service takes up as much of my time as when I was an actual administrator. This list does not include service to the professional and community organizations I am part of since those are the things that I want to do. On Thursdays, day four of a Week in the Life of a Black Feminist Pedagogy, I try to do the prep work required of my campus service obligations. I also mentally map out the next week’s meetings so I know when I will get some space and time to myself in an upcoming week. Many times, I am on campus, not teaching, but doing service.
I am sure I have forgotten some stuff from numbers 1-12 above. The list would be even longer if I had not outright said NO to many other requests. Every week brings me another email solicitation to perform yet another mundane task. There is no real recognition for any of this work and certainly no extra pay or course release. This is the nature of service at a teaching college in a moment shaped by the logics of austerity and neoliberalism: adjuncts teach almost all of the classes while the main role of full-time faculty seems to be the performance of bureaucratic tasks, bottomless meetings, and infinite committee appointments. Programs are so severely under-resourced that only a Herculean effort on the service work of faculty can keep them afloat, an exploitative cycle that admin will expect and naturalize if you let them.
To be sure, I see some of this work as necessary: the opportunity to select a faculty person of color as your new colleague; an opening to challenge the uber-traditionalist instructional model of a college; the chance to ensure that graduate students of color get a fair shake and recognition; the occasion to bear witness to the endless machinations that determine the look and color of a college curriculum, its assessments, and its awards. The procedures to do these things are, nevertheless, utterly ridiculous.
Necessary or not, I won’t be serving on most of these committees in the future. I can now say: yeah, been there, done that, it was a waste of time and I ain’t doin it again (I mean this very earnestly… this IS exactly what I will say). I have more to say about service as part of my hustle in academia but I will do that later as part of my ongoing Academia as a Hustle posts. For now, I will just say that service also has a Black Feminist ethos in my week’s pedagogy. On some level, many of my colleagues think they are doing socially transformative work in these uber-western, bureaucratic processes and can lose sight of their political center or the very meanings of radical transformation. Riddled with insecurities in an academy that makes you feel like you have to always prove your worth, many of my colleagues want to feel involved and important and they think this college service stuff is the way. Some of these folks act like these committees are the equivalent of planting a tree or working with disaster victims! Get a grip! What Tiffany King calls “Native feminist politics of decolonial refusal and Black feminist abolitionist politics of skepticism,” what I have been referencing across this series of posts, requires you to have a much more critical lens on the ways you are challenging or co-signing service and the logics of austerity and neoliberalism in higher education. This is especially true since it is women of color who will be most expected to do all this free labor. If you let them, folk will run your body, mind, and spirit into the ground by: 1) over-tasking/over-taxing you; or 2) wasting your energy and time in meetings and committees where progress is slow, where your input is miles higher than what the structure will allow as output. It’s always worth it to peek behind the emperor’s curtain and see how the shenanigans back there really work but you don’t need to keep visiting. One time is all you need. Skepticism and refusal are important services too.
I have met a lot of graduate students in the past three years: at national conferences, at talks and workshops that I have given, from personal emails/DMs, and in the classes that I teach. I wish I could stay in touch with ALLL of them. I have seen graduate students from seemingly every corner of the humanities and social sciences, and even some from math and science education. There is one thing that they all have in common at this historical moment: THEY. ARE. MAD. AS. HELL. I love it and hope with every connected fiber and tissue related to my being on this earth that they STAY MAD… MAD AF!
I know this is a radically different era because it diverges so sharply from my years in a PhD program (2000-2005). By the time I started dissertating, my advisors— Suzanne Carothers, Gordon Pradl, and John Mayher— supported and trusted whatever creative move I tried to make, regardless of whether or not it ended successfully because they valued my process. However, getting to that point was a LONG journey. My very first graduate seminar in my very first semester, a required doctoral course, was the worst class I have ever taken. I remember it vividly. I was simply cast as the antagonistic loud-mouth. No one wanted to make waves and jeopardize their future opportunities. This meant that no one had a intelligent critique of anything. It was a curriculum theory seminar and it didn’t matter where you landed on the political spectrum, this class taught you absolutely nothing. Because I worked part-time and did consulting as a full-time student with four classes per semester, I chose my coursework quite deliberately. I just did not have the time to waste on useless reading and writing. This class pissed me off every week! Many of our required readings came from the Brookings Institute. I was the only one who brought that up in class as an issue as, of course, the antagonistic one. Most of the students in the class did not consider themselves conservative or right-wing like Brookings and yet they did not flinch or ask a single question about the relevance of this to our work. After all, being down for the go-along eventually produces silence, complacency, and complicity. Internet search was a REAL thing back then (though google search was still a baby) but my peers had not even bothered to do that because they were determined to obey. If you asked most of them today, they couldn’t tell you what Brookings was/is or that Mickey D assigned so many readings from it (Mickey D is what I called that professor because he was about as real and deep as McDonald’s). There was only one required reading all semester about race (from Brookings) in a class about curriculum theory and nothing from a Black author. No one said a word against it. Not once. The class was so bad that even if you were a conservative, right-wing Republican, you wouldn’t have learned a thing, certainly not enough to get you taken seriously by Brookings. Issa all-around failure. Mickey D wrote on my final paper that he was not interested, as a white mainstream man, in my ideas regarding race, hegemony, dominance, and whiteness (his exact words) and gave me an A-. I got an A in the course but still stomped my way to the dean’s office on his basic Mickey D butt. My fellowship required me to present and publish annually and I so insisted that this would not be possible if I had to sit in submediocre classes that did not reflect current research trends. From that point, I got out of every required course in the program and only took the courses I wanted to take. It made no sense to me, as someone who studied language, to have to sit in classes taught by folk like Mickey D when someone like Ngugi was teaching across the street. I fought for myself and won that battle… and I was the only one in my cohort and program/school who took classes with Ngugi, who taught me more about teaching just from his presence than anyone I had met.