seven years ago, i booked a two-week trip in kauai for mom, dad, mo and me. we didn't know then that it would become a triennial tradition, of which cozumel is the latest iteration. it tends to go the same way every time: i get antsy about booking something and spend the month of may scouring the internet for independent places that offer something the average tourist never gets to see. i corral my travelling companions, lay out options a to j and ask for their opinions. "they all look lovely, heather," my mother will say. mo knows better, but sometimes picks the wrong one or two. my dad will typically ask something like, "are we going to mexico?" result: heather gets in a huff and books exactly what she wants. everybody is happy.
for the kauai trip, i thought it would be swell to spend one week on the touristy coast and one week in the rain forest. "they all look lovely, heather," said mom. "i like this place," said mo. i gave her the stink eye and she stopped opining. dad said, "kauai: is that the big island?"
the rain forest cottage might have been just as advertised, but it was not at all what we had expected. for one thing, it really rains in the rain forest. every day. nothing ever dries. ever. as for "charming": mo and i slept in a loft six feet above the kitchen and two feet below the thatched ceiling, while mom and dad slept on the sofa bed which extended into the same kitchen. there was a hammock; the moment mom sat on it, it collapsed. there were geckos; they seemed particularly fond of our little loft. (candor compels me to admit that, to comfort mo, i told her geckos had tiny little pads on their feet - true - that meant they would never walk on bedding - not so true.) we took advantage of jim's homemade trails. imagine slippery red mud through ravines overgrown with kudzu and other relentless greenery. add the rain trickling down your neck. add bright white ked's (mom's). miserable, right? now add the twist: wild boars chasing us back to home base.
the week on the coast was a little better, though i learned that "isolated" is not always synonymous with "desirable." mo and i walked in and laid immediate claim to the only double bed in the property, leaving my parents the twin beds across the hall. everything in the coastal house advertised the "jerry jones discount," which was the same everywhere: a measly five percent if it was recognized at all. the beach was across the street, as advertised; what was not so clear from the internet is that this was the beach where the american navy boys drink.
oahu/maui three years ago was better.
but cozumel this year is definitely the best.
we started at las anclas, a chic boutique hotel run by the kindly pedro and his gay son ayal. if you have time, click through that link and look at the photos. perfectly located, it's close to everything you'd want nearby (markets, restaurants, beach promenade, ferries to the mainland, taxis) and far enough away from undesirables like the cruise ship terminals and the air-conditioned mall. you can't help feeling cosmopolitan and superior at las anclas.
this morning we relocated to casa tropicale, which is further from the downtown core, closer to the airport, would require us to do our own cooking, and might not match the description on the internet, which among other things refers to the property as a "villa." i was relieved by las anclas (we return there next week) and a bit apprehensive about casa tropicale.
i needn't have worried.
i am writing this post from the kitchen;s breakfast bar, which is four feet by eight feet of bright white tile. this gives onto a dining room table set for eight but that could easily accommodate ten or twelve. beyond that is the living room, which gives onto the courtyard with fountain and pool. out the side door - sorry, one of the side doors - is a carport, a screened sitting room, a sand sink, an outdoor shower and a gear room. over near the maid's entrance is a laundry room and a powder room done, like all the bathrooms are, in mexican tile. there are two principal bedrooms here, each of them the size of a typical hong kong apartment. each bedroom has its own terrace. there is a kids' bedroom we are not using, but if you want to use it, please know that it comes with its own giant bathroom and its own giant lanai. there is another common lanai on the second floor, making a total of three on that level alone. the entire third floor is a rooftop terrace with areas for lounging, areas for eating, areas for sunning, areas for reading, areas for drinking, areas for getting away from each other should more than one of you be on a given level at any given time. did i mention the (non-collapsing) hammocks? the six-burner stove? purified water on every level? the fridge stocked with beer and soft drinks?
i am hereby redeemed.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
Dancers in the square
of all the things i've seen today --
- a pink plaid store
- mayan women making tortillas
- the panaderia cozumelania, lost for two days but appearing suddenly right where the guidebook said it would be (though, regrettably, not until early afternoon)
- the peacock blue of hotel las anclas's walls in the slant afternoon sun
- lunch in someone's living room
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Incremental
each year professors are required to submit an annual report detailing how we've spent our time. we list the courses we teach, the students we supervise, the research we've published, the work we have in progress, the service we undertake, supplementary professional activities, honors and awards. it's an electronic form so you don't really know how long it is until you print out the 4 or so pages at the end of june.
once you've done this, your department chair provides a summary assessment. you report, she evaluates, putting an increment recommendation (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 or 2.5) next to your file. an increment is worth a certain amount of money, keyed to the salary scale, which in turn is keyed to rank. the chair sends the entire department's assessments "upstairs." in the case of a department like english and film studies, this involves literally moving papers from the third floor to the sixth, but in most cases it's metaphorical.
upstairs in the dean's office, an associate dean reads all the annual reports and summary assessments for a group of departments; in my case, five (about 140 files). i advise the chair if things seem unclear or if i think someone is being undervalued or overvalued. we meet, and chairs talk about the agony they go through weighing an assistant professor's apples against an endowed researcher's oranges.
even at this point, none of this is binding, because the faculty evaluation committee makes the ultimate decision. the faculty evaluation committee, FEC, is comprised of chairs plus an equal number of elected representatives from across the faculty of arts. associate deans have to be there too, but we are non-voting observers slash resource people. FEC reads every file - the binders by this point are unluggable - and arrives at the final decision of how many increments each case merits, in a scarcity context: increments are limited to 120% of the number of faculty members in arts.
that's the process, in a (five-month) nutshell.
people tell you FEC will be exhausting, but you don't really know what it's like until you've been there. the big confab takes place during the first week of december starting at 8:30 every morning. the multi-day meeting is highly confidential. by friday afternoon, we emerge with an increment recommendation for all 400-some academic staff members.
people who have been through the experience typically say the following about FEC: "it's time-consuming, it's expensive, it's difficult, and it's exhausting - but it's ultimately worthwhile, because it's fair."
i have been thinking about this all week, as i sit mute and unvoting in the same seat at the same table in the same room, day after day. that it's time-consuming and expensive can't be denied. yes, yes, biennial or triennial evaluations of tenured faculty - great idea (and you should vote for that faculty association any time now). but how is it exhausting? and is it ultimately fair? these are the questions i've been turning over this week.
i find FEC exhausting emotionally. i feel a wide range of hard emotions in sometimes quick succession: fear, rage, frustration, incredulity, envy, irritation, trepidation, resentment. people who've been around a while also find humor - which i admire, but can't get to. i feel that too, my rawness. i am not inured. there are things i don't want to know, things i don't want to witness. i feel uncomfortably complicit and want to be back outside. it reminds me of how i used to feel about doctoral candidacy exams. a PhD exam used to be all i could do in a day, would come home stunned and needing to have a good cry before heading to bed at 9. i felt for the students, that was part of it, but mostly i cried with dismay at our inability to imagine things differently. what kind of anti-creativity turns an opportunity to engage with student work into a brute instance of institutional humiliation? students never fail, but they never have to, as long as they know they could.
(these days, i take candidacy exams as given: not my favorite part of the job, but a necessary evil. eh, what are you going to do? i register that as a loss.)
as for fairness: well, it depends what you mean by fair. if you mean procedural justice, which most people do, then FEC is absolutely fair: astonishingly so. cases are evaluated, not individuals; it's not personal; the year's work is under review, not your past, not your prospects, not your personality. most of the people in the room have their own files in the mix (chairs' are done by the dean), so there is a weird and radical democracy at work. i understand what colleagues mean by saying it's a fair process.
but if by justice you mean something other than a liberal process based on individualism - distributive justice, perhaps, or restorative justice, even retributive justice (which i am sadly not above); if you want the university to be a place that actively makes the world better; if you yearn for external markers to match your internal sense of what's fair; if you believe meaning is only made in complicated contexts, dissensual communities and vexed histories: if these are the things you value, then you would probably want something other than FEC.
i suppose at the end of the day - at the end of this day - i don't know where to find what's captured in this fragment of poetry, written about the changing light in long june days but relevant to december's dark as well:
because of course we all must try
and do our best to buoy one another
to know remember and hold dear
what it means to work by increments
once you've done this, your department chair provides a summary assessment. you report, she evaluates, putting an increment recommendation (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 or 2.5) next to your file. an increment is worth a certain amount of money, keyed to the salary scale, which in turn is keyed to rank. the chair sends the entire department's assessments "upstairs." in the case of a department like english and film studies, this involves literally moving papers from the third floor to the sixth, but in most cases it's metaphorical.
upstairs in the dean's office, an associate dean reads all the annual reports and summary assessments for a group of departments; in my case, five (about 140 files). i advise the chair if things seem unclear or if i think someone is being undervalued or overvalued. we meet, and chairs talk about the agony they go through weighing an assistant professor's apples against an endowed researcher's oranges.
even at this point, none of this is binding, because the faculty evaluation committee makes the ultimate decision. the faculty evaluation committee, FEC, is comprised of chairs plus an equal number of elected representatives from across the faculty of arts. associate deans have to be there too, but we are non-voting observers slash resource people. FEC reads every file - the binders by this point are unluggable - and arrives at the final decision of how many increments each case merits, in a scarcity context: increments are limited to 120% of the number of faculty members in arts.
that's the process, in a (five-month) nutshell.
people tell you FEC will be exhausting, but you don't really know what it's like until you've been there. the big confab takes place during the first week of december starting at 8:30 every morning. the multi-day meeting is highly confidential. by friday afternoon, we emerge with an increment recommendation for all 400-some academic staff members.
people who have been through the experience typically say the following about FEC: "it's time-consuming, it's expensive, it's difficult, and it's exhausting - but it's ultimately worthwhile, because it's fair."
i have been thinking about this all week, as i sit mute and unvoting in the same seat at the same table in the same room, day after day. that it's time-consuming and expensive can't be denied. yes, yes, biennial or triennial evaluations of tenured faculty - great idea (and you should vote for that faculty association any time now). but how is it exhausting? and is it ultimately fair? these are the questions i've been turning over this week.
i find FEC exhausting emotionally. i feel a wide range of hard emotions in sometimes quick succession: fear, rage, frustration, incredulity, envy, irritation, trepidation, resentment. people who've been around a while also find humor - which i admire, but can't get to. i feel that too, my rawness. i am not inured. there are things i don't want to know, things i don't want to witness. i feel uncomfortably complicit and want to be back outside. it reminds me of how i used to feel about doctoral candidacy exams. a PhD exam used to be all i could do in a day, would come home stunned and needing to have a good cry before heading to bed at 9. i felt for the students, that was part of it, but mostly i cried with dismay at our inability to imagine things differently. what kind of anti-creativity turns an opportunity to engage with student work into a brute instance of institutional humiliation? students never fail, but they never have to, as long as they know they could.
(these days, i take candidacy exams as given: not my favorite part of the job, but a necessary evil. eh, what are you going to do? i register that as a loss.)
as for fairness: well, it depends what you mean by fair. if you mean procedural justice, which most people do, then FEC is absolutely fair: astonishingly so. cases are evaluated, not individuals; it's not personal; the year's work is under review, not your past, not your prospects, not your personality. most of the people in the room have their own files in the mix (chairs' are done by the dean), so there is a weird and radical democracy at work. i understand what colleagues mean by saying it's a fair process.
but if by justice you mean something other than a liberal process based on individualism - distributive justice, perhaps, or restorative justice, even retributive justice (which i am sadly not above); if you want the university to be a place that actively makes the world better; if you yearn for external markers to match your internal sense of what's fair; if you believe meaning is only made in complicated contexts, dissensual communities and vexed histories: if these are the things you value, then you would probably want something other than FEC.
i suppose at the end of the day - at the end of this day - i don't know where to find what's captured in this fragment of poetry, written about the changing light in long june days but relevant to december's dark as well:
because of course we all must try
and do our best to buoy one another
to know remember and hold dear
what it means to work by increments
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
And then again...
from that same file, called "great email," and from that same period, 3 months before i started my job, this dot-matrix fragment:
... raft of management strategies going on now, largely because the traditional english areas are - get this - claiming minority status. they feel marginalized by the interest in the "new" (read feminism and postcolonialism), and so the grad committee has reorganized so that we provide "balanced" coverage at the grad course level. which means fewer poco courses, mandatory sign-ups for the early stuff. in other words, it's not about us, and the real problem they are worrying over is Whither English over the next quarter century? .... the department needs to hear more about rigorous models approaching cultural difference (not blanding it out into pop theories of "difference") that don't buy into simple national boundary issues, and that means we have some work ahead of us. daphne read, you, and i will do some summit work on this, and OBVIOUSLY we are not in competition with one another, no matter what SB would hope or think.
i've been going crazy lately but heather it's great to hear from you. write write write. have a wonderful break in ireland. XO stephen
... raft of management strategies going on now, largely because the traditional english areas are - get this - claiming minority status. they feel marginalized by the interest in the "new" (read feminism and postcolonialism), and so the grad committee has reorganized so that we provide "balanced" coverage at the grad course level. which means fewer poco courses, mandatory sign-ups for the early stuff. in other words, it's not about us, and the real problem they are worrying over is Whither English over the next quarter century? .... the department needs to hear more about rigorous models approaching cultural difference (not blanding it out into pop theories of "difference") that don't buy into simple national boundary issues, and that means we have some work ahead of us. daphne read, you, and i will do some summit work on this, and OBVIOUSLY we are not in competition with one another, no matter what SB would hope or think.
i've been going crazy lately but heather it's great to hear from you. write write write. have a wonderful break in ireland. XO stephen
A message from the sister(hood)
to: heatherz@leland.stanford.edu
from: shannon zwicker, mcconnell fellow
subject: connections
date: fri 5 mar 93
i am entirely disillusioned today about the university and its role in society (as opposed to most days when i am merely disillusioned with my job).
i have determined the function of a penis. in addition to acting as most men's primary cerebral organ, it is essentially a handle to make "manager shopping" easier. it works like this: an organization enters the management supermarket, filled with aspiring young managers, many of them (and most of the women) well qualified. the shelves are stocked with these managers, and the organizations take the easy way out. they grab the ones with the convenient handle, ignoring the ingredient labels entirely. after all, it's easier that way - no one will question their choice. the penised model is, after all, the most popular model in use.
i have determined this after observing men in positions of power in the university. ...
do i sound a little bitter? this has been a weird few months. i have given up my search for a mentor entirely - i am now in search of a half decent manager. can't find one anywhere and am not tempted to stick around and continue to look.
(shannon left the university for the private sector shortly after this.)
from: shannon zwicker, mcconnell fellow
subject: connections
date: fri 5 mar 93
i am entirely disillusioned today about the university and its role in society (as opposed to most days when i am merely disillusioned with my job).
i have determined the function of a penis. in addition to acting as most men's primary cerebral organ, it is essentially a handle to make "manager shopping" easier. it works like this: an organization enters the management supermarket, filled with aspiring young managers, many of them (and most of the women) well qualified. the shelves are stocked with these managers, and the organizations take the easy way out. they grab the ones with the convenient handle, ignoring the ingredient labels entirely. after all, it's easier that way - no one will question their choice. the penised model is, after all, the most popular model in use.
i have determined this after observing men in positions of power in the university. ...
do i sound a little bitter? this has been a weird few months. i have given up my search for a mentor entirely - i am now in search of a half decent manager. can't find one anywhere and am not tempted to stick around and continue to look.
(shannon left the university for the private sector shortly after this.)
And now, a word from hothead paisan
so two days after the 20th anniversary of the montreal massacre, we get a story in the globe and mail fretting that women outnumber men at university. the implications for family life are particularly scary: "faced with a dwindling number of potential mates who are their education equals, ... more women may take a pass on the traditional family, or be more willing to leave it when things don't work," worries elizabeth church. what's worse, "more men may find themselves tending to hearth and home."
this is followed by an editorial in the same newspaper -- an editorial, by the way, based on its own story -- called "the male minority" that comes down hard on the side of indira samarasekera's inflammatory october comments about the "demographic time bomb." specifically, her fear is that "we'll wake up in 20 years and we will not have the benefit of enough male talent at the heads of companies and elsewhere." what's that you say? - you thought at the current rate it would take 260 years to move from 4.5% to 50%? silly girl! you never were any good with numbers. in addition to coming down hard on samarasekera's side, the editorial comes down hard on the undergraduates who produced clever posters satirizing the comments: the samarasekera response team was "soon collared by campus security, but were not disciplined." insert disapproval here.
and that editorial gem sits right next to a new piece of idiocy from margaret wente blathering on about the absence of systemic misogyny in canadian culture. stop me if you've heard this line of argument before, but mark lepine was a random homicidal lunatic and not a garden variety misogynist. dec 6, pace wente, "has been an annual excuse for fevered breast-beating over the moral failings of society and the persistent inequality of women – as if the glass ceiling or the lack of universal daycare existed on the same moral continuum as homicidal misogyny."
what world are these people living in?
admittedly not mine, which this week involves supersecret meetings evaluating faculty members' performance over the year. i cannot talk about these meetings - what happens in room 5.20 stays in room 5.20 - but i will assure you that the academy intervenes before our classroom presence translates into actual material success.
all of this begs the question of exactly how few women students we should be aiming for (pun intended). what would be the ideal ratio for preserving heteronormative family structures and the current wage inequity between men and women? i ask so i can start advising my smart, hardworking women undergraduates to drop out.
this is followed by an editorial in the same newspaper -- an editorial, by the way, based on its own story -- called "the male minority" that comes down hard on the side of indira samarasekera's inflammatory october comments about the "demographic time bomb." specifically, her fear is that "we'll wake up in 20 years and we will not have the benefit of enough male talent at the heads of companies and elsewhere." what's that you say? - you thought at the current rate it would take 260 years to move from 4.5% to 50%? silly girl! you never were any good with numbers. in addition to coming down hard on samarasekera's side, the editorial comes down hard on the undergraduates who produced clever posters satirizing the comments: the samarasekera response team was "soon collared by campus security, but were not disciplined." insert disapproval here.
and that editorial gem sits right next to a new piece of idiocy from margaret wente blathering on about the absence of systemic misogyny in canadian culture. stop me if you've heard this line of argument before, but mark lepine was a random homicidal lunatic and not a garden variety misogynist. dec 6, pace wente, "has been an annual excuse for fevered breast-beating over the moral failings of society and the persistent inequality of women – as if the glass ceiling or the lack of universal daycare existed on the same moral continuum as homicidal misogyny."
what world are these people living in?
admittedly not mine, which this week involves supersecret meetings evaluating faculty members' performance over the year. i cannot talk about these meetings - what happens in room 5.20 stays in room 5.20 - but i will assure you that the academy intervenes before our classroom presence translates into actual material success.
all of this begs the question of exactly how few women students we should be aiming for (pun intended). what would be the ideal ratio for preserving heteronormative family structures and the current wage inequity between men and women? i ask so i can start advising my smart, hardworking women undergraduates to drop out.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Freedom 45, where are you?
it being 14 above today and me not working well anyway, i went for a run in the river valley. at 2:15 the only people about were the blue-rinse crowd. they tend to be friendly but i am not. i am angry and resentful. i fantasize about retirement all the time, even though i live in a world where no one wants to retire. my people, the academic tribe, boast about never wanting to go. this suggests that most academics have a better worklife than i do, or a higher pain threshold.
but i digress. when i get there, to freedom 55 (okay, 60: i really don't think i can make it to 65), what will i think of this moment in my life? will i remember what it's like to be buried under unanswered emails and unfulfilled expectations? will i recall lying in bed all night fretting about the work to come? will i feel the panic about teaching, the panic about grading, the panic about missed deadlines and eleventh-hour demands? will i remember feeling pissed on by all the dinks in the world?
or will i think: she ran so fast, then, and missed it all.
but i digress. when i get there, to freedom 55 (okay, 60: i really don't think i can make it to 65), what will i think of this moment in my life? will i remember what it's like to be buried under unanswered emails and unfulfilled expectations? will i recall lying in bed all night fretting about the work to come? will i feel the panic about teaching, the panic about grading, the panic about missed deadlines and eleventh-hour demands? will i remember feeling pissed on by all the dinks in the world?
or will i think: she ran so fast, then, and missed it all.
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