All Out of Love

"I'm all out of love/
I'm so lost without you"
Air Supply, 1980

When you think about your purpose, your calling, whatever it is that draws you to your chosen profession, whatever it is that you are just good at, you should bottle up that feeling and save it for days when other stuff gets in the way. That "other stuff" can make you rethink everything. Make you wonder if you even want to do what makes you happy anymore. This semester has me thinking about changes.

This past week was a roller coaster, and I never really left my house. It encapsulates fully the reason why this semester is tougher than most. To begin with, it was the week of our mandated faculty furlough days at my university. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, no faculty were to show up on campus and teach. We weren't supposed to answer emails or grade or prep anything. We experienced a 10% reduction in pay this year, which means we are supposed to reduce our course work load by 10% as well. This comes in the form of fewer assignments (so as to produce less work to grade), reduction in class time, and these three mandated days off. All of this is supposed to make it so I have less work to do, but really, it doesn't work that way.

When you change the number of available class days, you have to shorten some topics, eliminate readings, and restructure your exams accordingly. You have to think about how your students are going to acquire the tools and grasp the concepts from your original course now that they have less material to analyze and less of the reading that illuminates these kinds of things.

I eliminated the big paper for my large GE courses, which was the best way to limit my workload and not sacrifice course topics. But the mandated furlough days were tough to work around. They were right smack dab in the middle of the semester, when I give my midterm exams. So I decided that I would just make my exams online midterms, to fully use the Blackboard digital classroom. I could also avoid showing up to campus just to sit in a room while students take exams. Since midterm weeks don't really have much lecture, this mandated vacation might just allow me to have the diminished workload and yet still keep on track.

Yeah, well, Blackboard's online exams are buggy at best, and rather than working on my dissertation, it was a three day exam giving experience, in which many emails were sent letting me know that exams weren't working, that even though students had 24 hours to complete it, some managed to wait until the last minute and their computers "crashed." Some even plum forgot that they had to take an exam. All of these kinds of excuses are hard to give a professor in person, but very easy via email. Sigh. I had a mini-breakdown. While students were having Furlough Fest on campus, I was at home, figuring out how to fix the buggiest exam, emailing students with a more polite but very exasperated version of "this is why I told you to type up your answers in Word and copy & paste into the exam." After working to adjust the exam to the new, more limited course, I had hoped that my work was done. Not so.

Students of course, are feeling the burden of the semester as well. Furloughs were only part of the University's response to the economic crisis. Students also have to pay more tuition per semester. Full time students in my classes have told me that they are paying $500 more a semester. More money for less class time, less access to professors, and really, 10% less of an education. Classes were also cut, which means that there are more students in my classes than ever that didn't really want to be there, but the class fit their schedule and fulfills graduation requirements. If they didn't like my syllabus or teaching style in the first few weeks, there weren't exactly a lot of classes to choose from as alternatives.

All of this: low morale, limited choices, financial worries has combined to make this a sad semester. I used to walk into class and forget my troubles. For that hour and 15 minutes, my lecture, which I had meticulously crafted over the last 5 years and enjoyably prepared, was the thing that made up for the lack of pay. Students seem to dig my lectures and are talkative. This semester, I saw immediately that they are all taxed in many ways and not as jazzed about me. I, also am not as jazzed about the lectures, not as interested in the process. I give them and enjoy them, but they don't have that transcendent quality they used to have. I miss that.

Luckily, when I wasn't doing work for courses this week, I was reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. It taught me how to love again, which doesn't mean I'm no longer in "sad semester," but at least I'm not breaking up with academia.


Here's the Publisher's Weekly blurb about the novel:

In 1972, a 16-year-old American living in Amsterdam finds a mysterious book in her diplomat father's library. The book is ancient, blank except for a sinister woodcut of a dragon and the word "Drakulya," but it's the letters tucked inside, dated 1930 and addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," that really pique her curiosity. Her widowed father, Paul, reluctantly provides pieces of a chilling story; it seems this ominous little book has a way of forcing itself on its owners, with terrifying results.

Paul's former adviser at Oxford, Professor Rossi, became obsessed with researching Dracula and was convinced that he remained alive. When Rossi disappeared, Paul continued his quest with the help of another scholar, Helen, who had her own reasons for seeking the truth. As Paul relates these stories to his daughter, she secretly begins her own research.

This is a lot of different kinds of novels - thriller, horror, historical fiction, suspense, mystery, but most importantly for me, an almost-epistolary novel. A novel that uses letters, notes, and other "primary documents" to tell its story.

It's a mystery about the final resting place of Vlad Tepes, the 15th century Wallachian prince known as Vlad the Impaler, or alternatively, Dracula. The characters come to believe, despite being incredibly rational and disbelieving historians, that vampires might be real. Or that at least Dracula is a real vampire intent on harming various scholars for some unknown reason. The curiosity of the historian is the force that moves this novel forward, even more than the disappearance of one of the characters early on, which is supposed to provide the emotional pull towards the topic of Dracula for the researchers. Normally, they wouldn't study Dracula as anything other than a dead political figure or folkloric fantasy. But you see, stuff starts happening.

The Historian is long (900 pages), but so full of what historians love that I enjoyed it and found the pacing to be just right. The characters explore the kinds of libraries and archives I have always wanted to explore. Original scrolls, parchments, illuminated manuscripts, all laid out for them by librarians throughout Europe. They leap-frog through time via letters, scholars notes, and excerpts from the original documents. Through these documents, they piece together the disturbing historical events that created the Dracula myth. His favored technique of torture was impalement, but he also skinned, roasted, and buried people alive. He once rid his principality of poverty and disease by inviting the poor and infirm to a dinner, then closing the doors and setting the building on fire. As much as the vampire is supposed to be the fearsome creature, other atrocities of that era and beyond are described as the true horror. Humans did, and still do, horrible things to each other.

The book had me by page 50, where the narrator's father, Paul, reminisces that even though his story is horrific, "writing a dissertation's the really grisly thing."

Vlad Tepes, enjoying a meal in full view of his impaled enemies.
Apparently a favorite pastime of his.

This story allowed me to live out a fantasy for a few hundred pages. The fantasy I used to have about what it would be like to be a graduate student, what it would be like to be a college professor, what research is like. It was about giant sprawling libraries covered in ivy, where students would lay out their books and notes on heavy wooden tables that had been there for over a century. Spending all your time on your studies and as a result, being an expert on many things. About professors who know their students well, and ask about their lives, because everyone's life is the university and all things revolve around academia. About handling original documents and seeing how deep the pen left marks in parchment. About late night reading or conversations about a topic that interested you. About how it's normal to be anxious about your work and presenting it in front of others, but also that people are excited to learn about what you found. In The Historian, there was a sense of camaraderie, even amongst the scholars of different cultures and nationalities, all on the basis of love of historical research - the pursuit of knowledge.

It was not about faculty furlough days and campuses that look more like industrial parks than scholarly buildings. It was not about having to work a couple jobs while going to school, or having a full time teaching gig while trying to write your dissertation that pays less than $2k a month. It was not about crippling student loans, or the anxiety I feel when I look up department faculty webpages at universities I'd like to apply to and see that if I was hired, I'd be a quite lonely person of color there.

So it was a nice mental vacation, that, like most of my mental vacations, are really about the world I live in and not vacations at all. The end of the book (which I won't give away) reminded me of something I have to look forward to. Philadelphia, where colleges look like my fantasy colleges. But also where the Rosenbach Museum and Library houses Bram Stoker's notes on Dracula. I'd love to handle these things in my own little hands. It's now on my list of things to do when we move! Which means I'm still into research, still into learning, and an excitable girl. I'm all out of money, and almost out of energy, but not love, or at least not yet. Ask me again after next semester, another furlough semester....