Traveling through the Boondocks

Terry Caesar

Description

What is it like to be a faculty member at a university in the United States that enjoys no reputation or distinction? Traveling through the Boondocks discusses this situation not from the top down but from the bottom up, where the experience of exclusion ranges from that of departments where scholarship gets to count in hiring decisions to conferences where only individuals from elite institutions get to appear on stage. This book reinvigorates our understanding of higher education by illuminating the everyday conditions under which academics work and the hierarchical distinctions in which they are always embedded.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Representing Exclusion, Writing Personal Narrative, and Selling Influence

1. A Credit to the University

2. Electing a Department: Differences, Fictions, and a Narrative

3. The Politics of Institutional Affiliation

4. Taking Nothing for Granted

5. Filing Away Teacher Observation Reports

6. Getting Hired

7. Theory in the Boondocks

8. Sabbaticals, Travel, Frames

Notes

Bibliography

Sujets

• Literary theory
• Tertiary education

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 03 juillet 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791492123
• Langue: English

Extrait

Traveling through the Boondocks

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Traveling through the Boondocks

In and Out of Academic Hierarchy

Terry Caesar

S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2000 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter Two appeared inJournal X(Spring 1997): 175–88. 1.2

A version of Chapter Four appeared inWriting on the Edge4.2 (Spring 1993): 47–61.

A version of Chapter Seven appeared in theYale Journal of Criticism(Fall 6.2 1993): 221–35.

A portion of Chapter Eight appeared inPennsylvania English15.2 (Spring/Summer 1991): 31–9.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y. 12246

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Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

Caesar, Terry. Traveling through the boondocks : in and out of academic hierarchy / Terry Caesar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-7914-4659-X (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-4660-3 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Education, Higher—Political aspects—United States—Case studies. 2. College teaching—Political aspects—United States—Case studies. 3. College teachers—Selection and appointment—United States—Case studies. 4. Universities and colleges—United States—Departments—Case studies. 5. Clarion University of Pennsylvania. I. Title.

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LC173.V34 2000 378.1’22—dc21

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Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction: Representing Exclusion, Writing Personal Narrative, and Selling Influence

Chapter One. A Credit to the University

Chapter Two. Electing a Department: Differences, Fictions, and a Narrative

Chapter Three. The Politics of Institutional Affiliation

Chapter Four. Taking Nothing for Granted

Chapter Five. Filing Away Teacher Observation Reports

Chapter Six. Getting Hired

Chapter Seven. Theory in the Boondocks

Chapter Eight. Sabbaticals, Travel, Frames

Notes

Bibliography

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments are nothing if not an exercise in hierarchy. So let me go straight to the top and record my debt to the National Humanities Center. I’ll never forget just the feel of those plush carpets, upon which I was blessed to trod just at the right time in my career, between post-tenure review and retirement. But there is more, much more. Given the wide, not to say global, variety of contexts in which this book has labored to be born, there are natu- rally more people than I can possible name. Let me merely gesture at various hosts and audiences at Columbia, Duke, Harvard, and Yale (to mention these only) in gratitude for their astute questions, fine wine, and comfortable quarters, right on campus. From Gayatri and Stanley to that custodian who used to be an adjunct, I love you all. Back home, I am virtually embarrassed with a wide circle of friends who have commented on various chapters, sponsored the presentations of different sections, provided stimulating discussion for many issues, and collectively comprised an intellectual commu- nity so congenial that some mornings I still wake up and lie in bed stunned. My administration I would of course shower with praise, especially my dean—the last one, not the present one—who came through for that special faculty leave that enabled me to write the last few notes for my final chapter in a tropical setting, where they, if not I, belonged. I’m sure I would even thank my students, if I could have dreamed up a grad course to accommodate one of the subjects of this book. Just kidding. No one writes a book such as this while feeling flush with a greater professional context in which the words have been shaped

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or grateful for the more local society in which the experience has abided. Indeed, this book constitutes a kind of intricate disacknowledgement of the conditions of its own production, rang- ing from sundry ephemera down the hall to social and political circumstances across the nation. If this were not so, the title— including the double sense of “through” and the play on “ins and outs”—would have no real basis, and the boondocks would have neither the peculiar pathos nor the elusive authority that I try to represent. So let me be content to name just two people: one is my former agent, Tom D’Evelyn, who believed in this book as only someone could who is at once intimate with its peculiar life and yet removed from it, by choice. “If you think you’re an academic,” Tom said to me, very memorably, once, “you’re really fucked up.” After such knowledge, what forgiveness, for I fear I really am an academic? The other person is my wife, Eva Bueno, whose own personal boonbocks have provoked me to understand mine better. Despite the fact that she’s neither an academic nor fucked up, she has supported me in every syllable of my experience, and her care has extended right down to tedious hours at the computer trying to establish the right program for a complete print-out of this manu- script, with notes in the back, where they belong.

Introduction: Representing Exclusion, Writing Personal Narrative, and Selling Influence

This is a book about certain topics in academic life. They do not have directly to do with public policy issues. Indeed, if only because the experience throughout the following pages is empha- sized as mine, everything about it is more commonly the sort of thing that appears in fiction. In Michael Malone’s recent academic novel,Foolscap, for example, there is a moment early on where the old chair, Dr. Bridges, speaks to the young hero, Theo. Theo is respectable. (He has published a book.) Theo is reasonable. At a time when one possible candidate for a prestigious chair is ridi- culed for being “hopelessly concrete” while another stands accused of “spreading herpes along the Northeast corridor,” Theo’s quiet virtues especially matter. Alas, however, there is one problem: Theo is not ambitious. “The way academia is today,” declaims the old professor, “only theverymake it to the top. And the top is all there is ambitious now. Even for those who aren’t in it. In my time, you could live a happy, productive life in the middle. Now the middle is simply not the top. You could be the top, if you’d only try” (28). One way I can describe this volume would be to say that it features a series of chapters about life in the middle. What is it like? How different is it than that commonly presumed in discourse about academic matters? And, most important, how is life in the middle shaped by “the top?” If the time for a happy, productive life farther down is

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