HWPD

First, thanks to everyone who has advertised the occasion of Happy Woman Professor Day—I’ll be adding links to other posts if folks will send them to me. A couple weeks ago, someone somewhere typed the search string happy + woman + professor into Google and pressed “Google Search.” The third hit for that person was blogos, thanks to a post I’d made about needing to make QJS book review editor Kirt Wilson “happy” by turning in my review essay on time (still haven't done that, btw). RMH, Anne, Cara, and I went on about how ironic/funny/sad it is that the string didn’t yield more for the searcher, and so we decided to take action. As it happens, the day I posted my declaration turned out to be, for me, something of a professional crapfest, or kick in the face, or whatever metaphor you or Jessica Burstein likes. [I offer Burstein's Chronicle piece, "Tenure Club," as an important counterpoint to HWPD--it is outrageous, funny, brilliant, and poignant. Just like a lot of woman professors I know.]

If, in the roughest year of my career yet, I can still pull together an entry about things that make me happy in my profession, then this is probably a good job to have.  And it is. Just a reminder, though: the purpose of this occasion is to note the things we enjoy about our jobs. This is not intended to cover over the very real ickiness and kickiness that women professors encounter, and that most likely are not limited to professors nor even to women.

So, with my disclaimer firmly in place, let's move on to the matter at hand. What makes me happy [as a] woman professor?

1. writing. My dad often wonders why I don't write for money. But it's really the case, isn't it, that we already do. In fact, I would suggest that writing constitutes the bulk of what we do as professors. Sure, we teach classes, but I actually write a lot to prepare for my classes (if you think reading and writing are that distinct, I invite you to look at the margins of my copy of The Rhetorical Tradition, one of my course texts this year). The best classes are loosely fashioned as arguments--ie cases for particular versions of theory or history that my students and I bandy back and forth. Teaching can be one long inventional process, really. As for other more obvious kinds of writing I do, maybe it's strange to admit, but I enjoy making an article or conference paper. I enjoy writing letters to people about graduate students with whom I've been working for years. I also love breakthrough research moments, but those are too few to bank on. I'm definitely happiest in my work when I'm engaged (really engaged) in a long term writing project--when the time and brain space are there.

2. difference & variety. I'm not the first to observe this, and there's already some overlap with #1, but I love the variety in my job. This applies to daily, weekly, semesterly, and annual rhythms. Rarely do I sit and do one thing for eight hours--instead, I move from home to campus to the office to a classroom to a committee meeting, back to my office for a meeting with a student. And the days rarely repeat in exactly the same way. Just when they start to feel like they do repeat, it's time to go off to a conference, or have a snow day (!), or start a new unit in a class, or end the semester. So while I crack up at the image in Don DeLillo's Endzone of the same plane flying over Penn State's practice field at the same time every day--what DeLillo calls "the slowly gliding drift of identical things"--I think that's just about the opposite of what this life is about, or how it feels in real time. 

3. mentoring. One of my favorite parts of the job is mentoring, by which I mean the one-on-one advising that happens in a professional context. Some are uncomfortable with the way the word mentor positions one person as knowing The Way and the other as receiving or seeking The Way, a la the Karate Kid or something, but I like to think of a mentor in terms of its ancient namesake, as the guise Athena assumes in order to give Telemachus guidance. No, I don't think I'm a goddess, and it's not lost on me that Athena assumed the guise of a man, but I do like the idea of slipping into another guise in a kind of sophistic sense, and this is really my approach to mentoring: always discussing possible angles, directions, problems, that sort of thing--trying to inhabit a project alongside the person whose project it is, to co-guide it. And so in that sense, mentoring can be the opposite of a possession model--no one 'has' anything (especially all the answers, that's for sure), but instead there's a co-movement. That's fun.

4. my field. Okay, I know I said three things, but writing about mentoring made me realize how many mentors I have--I really can't count them all or thank them enough. And this is in large part because people in our field care about each other, their careers, and their happiness. Rhetorical studies has some amazing women mentors and mentors of women, including one in particular who long ago took a look at me and told me I was too happy. She was right--I hadn't been around long enough to know better. But such happy conditions--the writing, the endless variation, the particulars of mentoring and the good, good people in my field--are all too easy to forget when we get hung up on icks and kicks.

Got a post for HWPD? email me.

Here are some HWPs:

First efforts

Blog Her (a very nice twist celebrating women professors)

See Jane Compute

AWysocki

Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient

lilysea

the most cake

crunchy granola