Must Be Nice To Have Summers Off

Even with a view like this, it's hard to stop thinking about work.

I just went on vacation. A real vacation, for a whole week, during which I checked my school email only three times and answered only one of those messages (from a student who took an Incomplete in an early summer class for medical reasons, who was distressed and needed reassurance). I did not read for work, although I had work stuff that needed reading and had even slipped one of those books into the bag we packed with tablet and chargers and novels. Instead I read, in heavenly bliss, a modernist novel that my husband had read earlier in the summer and really enjoyed and which is way out of my area, and it was amazing. I hung out with family and ate and even made a side jaunt over to my alma mater for one day for a reunion of faculty and students from my old department.

On our way back from vacation, my husband and I stopped by to visit his brother for a few minutes. My brother-in-law likes to tease me about work, and he wryly reminded me that "summers are for fun." Summers are time off, he says. No working in the summers. I laughed.

I wish. Sort of.

I had a summer off, when I moved to where I live now. I finished my spring term at the school I was leaving and moved here at the end of May and then had no class to teach in the summer for the first time in 8 years. I had no workplace to go to for the first summer since starting college at 17. I felt strangely untethered. I was weirdly between research projects. I unpacked boxes, and walked the dog 5 times a day (old dog, short walks), and drove around town learning my way around, and painted things, and planted things. When pre-semester meetings began in mid-August I was so relieved to have an anchor again that I could hardly contain myself. I was rested and restored, but I couldn't have gone on like that much longer without losing all sense of connection to the world around me. I am an academic - it's how I enter the world. Too much time away (like, a whole summer) and I feel like gravity isn't holding me down adequately anymore.

Moving into my house in VA in 2008.

That summer, I heard maybe 4 times more often than usual the hated accusation hurled at academics nationwide: Must Be Nice.

Must Be Nice To Have Summers Off. Even when said with something resembling humor, it drips with scorn and resentment. Must Be Nice.

This is only one version. There are variations. Must Be Nice To Be Out In Your Garden On A Tuesday Morning When The Rest Of Us Are Working. Must Be Nice To Have Breaks All The Time. Must Be Nice To Have Tenure (1).

I've heard my other garden variety academic friends stumble through awkward, shamed answers, trying to explain how hard we work, how these mythical "breaks" are just chances to live the lives other people live when they clock out at the end of the day, saved up for whole semesters so we can enjoy all those evenings and weekends all at once over Christmas or over the part of summer that we're not teaching a summer class. (I will not discuss Spring Break or fall break, for those of us who get a fall break, as these are merely days to work at the office on a relatively quiet campus, almost always frantically spent catching up on grading. If you've ever graded papers for 7 hour stretches several days in a row, you'll know how absurd it is to think of that as a break). And I will concede that it's not like I'm working my usual grinding hours during a break. I figure I work more like a 30-hour week during breaks. But since during the semester I'm usually working as long as I'm awake -- not kidding, I have stopped at the office on my way home from church and not finished until dinnertime, at which point I came home and read for Monday's class until bedtime -- I feel really okay with working a lighter schedule some of the time. I do enjoy planting my garden and fixing up the house a bit over the summer.

Growing tomatoes is soothing.

I usually just say Yes. It Is Nice. It's very nice to have summers off. Thank You. I don't have a problem with this being sufficient because it is so often followed, necessarily, with: Oh, why no, I'm afraid I can't help you with your volunteer project in June, as I will be working. Oh, no, well not July, either, as I will be working. Oh, no, I'm taking a short vacation the first week of August so I won't be available. Oh, darnit, after vacation I'll be in pre-semester planning, meetings and course prep, so I won't be able to help you with your project then, either.

As for the Must Be Nice To Have Thursdays Off, or whatever variation it takes in that particular instance, I can honestly reply that I'm working from home, in my pyjamas, and you only see me because on days I work at home I often take the dog out for a nice little walk  (and because my car is out front and you care so much about who gets what that you keep track of these things, but of course I don't say that part). I say: Yes, It Is Nice To Work From Home One Day A Week Because I Can Wear My Pyjamas All Day While I Grade And Catch Up On Emails And Collect Sources For My Next Project. I say this with no snark whatsoever. It really is awesome to wear pyjamas all day. In the semester of grad school that I was reading for my doctoral qualifying exams I would spend my non-teaching days entirely in pyjamas, reading theory from 7 am until 10 pm, book open even while I prepared and ate my meals, and when I was done I would take a shower and put on fresh pyjamas (2). This was one of my favorite periods in my life and I remember it with almost weepy nostalgia.

Sometimes, though, it really does get to me and I wish I could reply to these people what I'm thinking: Yeah? Go back to school for 7 more years and work 80 hour weeks and you, too, can walk your dog on a Thursday at 2 in the afternoon. 

But while I find the acid tone behind the Must Be Nice unsettling - and it is, after all, intended to be unsettling, designed to shake me out of my decadent lifestyle as an elitist mooch on society and bring me to the realization that everyone else is out there working very, very hard whilst I traipse around the ivory tower in my silk smoking jacket calling for the butler to pour me another martini (3) - the truth is that even if I did have summers off, I wouldn't want them. I had that one once, and it was confusing to me. Oh, for the first week or so it was lovely to wake up whenever I liked and not have anywhere to be at all. But that was partly because I didn't know anyone here, which isn't a really lovely reason to have nowhere to go. And I had plenty to do around the house, so I'd have a cup of coffee and walk my little, old doggy, Felix, around the block once and then pour myself some more coffee and open up a few boxes to unpack. So it wasn't like I was totally unoccupied. But it wore on me. Before long the lack of a schedule was disorienting. I had tasks, but they had no real deadlines (who cares when the bathroom gets painted?) and they weren't exactly intellectually challenging. I even inadvertently made a few of them more challenging than they needed to be, turning the arrangement of furniture into a major problem-solving exercise. But it wasn't enough.

Petting a six-toed Hemingway cat on vacation in Key West in 2011. 

Every summer since, I have taught at least an independent study, to have something to ground me. I know without teaching of some kind during those months, which seem long in May and excruciatingly brief by August, I will lose my mind a bit. and I have massively overlapping research projects now, always more work to do than time to do it. There is a list out there in internetland, called You Might Be An Academic If... (variants include You Might Be A Graduate Student, You Might Be A College Professor, etc.) which I've posted elsewhere on this blog. My favorite is the one about accepting guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation. It's true. Even finally relaxing on a deck chair at a cabin in the mountains, with a novel in my hand and a drink in front of me, it takes effort to fight back the rising feeling of "But the article I promised to work on. I have to get back to that article."

Must Be Nice. Ah, well. To each his own, I suppose. I do wish there were less resentment towards the collegiate folk. We're really working our butts off, and for not nearly as much money or job security as you think. But maybe we're just really lucky to be doing what we love so we seem less angry about our jobs, so that makes it look as though we're not working as hard? I don't know. Many aspects of my job can be a real drag, a REAL drag, but I didn't work that hard for that many years to qualify for a job I didn't want, so maybe it isn't that it that the job is easy, just that I make it look easy.

And seriously, if you do want to be free to work in your garden on a Thursday morning, or have summers "off," consider going back to school for 7 more years and working 80 hour weeks. Works for me.

At Kew Gardens, on a study abroad, in summer 2013.

(1) I am working on a separate entry for this one, for Tenure, that most contentious issue, and won't address it further here.

(2) Each week I took a 2 hour break on Tuesdays to have dinner with my best friend and a 1 hour break on Wednesdays to watch The West Wing. I did not then, nor do I now, consider the intense restrictions of that life at terribly limiting. I couldn't do it forever, but I have enough of the ascetic in me to treasure the time I spent totally immersed like that in my discipline.

(3) I really do like a good martini, though. A good, dirty martini is just about as good as it gets, but I have to go easy on those things because they'll knock me right out when I'm not looking.

You Might Be An Academic If...

You can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate.
Your office is better decorated than your apartment.
You have ever taken a scholarly article to a bar.
Everything reminds you of something in your discipline.
You have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.
You have ever spent $50 or more on photocopying while researching a single paper.
There is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider to be "yours."
You can tell the time of day by the flow of traffic in the library.
You regard ibuprofin as a health supplement.
You consider all papers to be works in progress.
You find the bibliographies of books to be as interesting as the actual text.
You can't watch a movie without analyzing its hidden cultural significance.
You have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in one general area.
You have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
You find yourself explaining to children that you went to "20th grade."
You wonder how long you can live on pasta without getting scurvy.
You have ever explained to someone, at length, the philosophical approach you used to organize your movie/music collection.
You look forward to time off so you can do laundry.
You wonder if MLA style allows you to cite talking to yourself as "personal communication."

I Profess.

This is my love letter to Academia.

It won't be like the love letters of great poets to their muses, grand and epic and reaching for a sense of the infinite. It's more like the notes passed between ordinary teenagers in history class. Because academia, the industry I work in and love, is not epic.

There is no Ivory Tower. That is a myth perpetuated by media and art, invested in the idea of a legendary place where intellectuals float around on clouds of ideas to escape the annoying and difficult parts of The Real World. It is as real as unicorns. I grew up in academia and I've worked in academia for over a dozen years and I can tell you wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as a place without the annoying and difficult parts of the real world. (I have also worked outside of academia. The frustrations are the same. Same shit, different co-workers). If I could encapsulate my life as an intellectual, it would be desperately trying to concentrate on either the paper I am grading or the paper I am writing while ants we can't seem to get rid of crawl around in the kitchen sink and the roof leak over my head grows from the rain that won't stop while my husband is on the phone trying to get the cable company to stop screwing us out of the few channels we can afford and the dog can't decide if he wants us to let him out onto the deck or down to the basement or if he wants to vomit on the carpet again.

Perhaps people believe in the Ivory Tower because they think the happy bubble of protection they had in college is the same for everyone who works at the school where they enjoyed the innocent existence we work very hard to provide them with for the 4+ years they spend studying the ideas that will help them join the world as educated people. We had those years too, and we think everyone should get to have them. Those years are awesome. They are amazing. They end at graduation, for everyone. (For some students, let's remember, they never existed, because too many of our students work 3 jobs and raise 3 kids while reading 500 pages a week and writing multiple 15-page papers, all while hoping to Holy Jesus that the car doesn't break down again. I call that Real).

Perhaps I should say that The Ivory Tower is as real as Camelot. Because Camelot never existed but we'd all prefer it did (sorry if I'm bursting any bubbles for you - one of the very real aspects of academia is being constantly faced with the sad realities that many of our dreams are not real. There is a definite downside to deconstructing everything. Kind of like finding out there is no Santa Claus every single day). Another very real aspect of academia is the constant judgement we face from our neighbors, our family (not in my case, but in many), from the media, from Congress. Listen to television long enough and you'll think we're all tweed-shrouded, fancy-pants, elitist assholes who work 3 hours a week for 8 months a year and have no bills, massive bank accounts, and armies of grad students to do all our work for us. I don't know if anyone like that actually exists. I've never met one.

Like most academics, I work roughly 75 hours a week. I work from the time I wake up until dinner, and then after dinner I usually work until about 10. I routinely work on Friday nights. I work Saturdays and Sundays. "Breaks" are spent catching up. I long for weekends, too, because that's my chance to do a load of laundry and I can usually spend all day in pyjamas. Summers are spent trying to do the research I didn't have time to do all year while trying to work in a little extra teaching so I can have enough money to pay down some debt. If I seem to have my head in the clouds it's because I'm still trying to figure out a solution to a problem in my teaching or my research, even while walking down the cereal aisle of the grocery store. Or maybe I'm just trying to figure out how to get our food bill down a bit more. Whatever the idealized professor is in culture, it is nothing like the real lives of all the academics I know. It's not like the R1 (major research university) professors, nothing like people researching their asses off at "teaching" colleges like small private schools or regional state schools, nothing like those teaching full- or part-time at community colleges, nothing like adjuncts teaching 6 classes a semester at 4 different campuses just to make ends meet (not counting the online work they pick up so they can afford the books they need for their other jobs). I didn't get tenure by hanging around. I got tenure by working myself into total burnout for years on end. Did I do it for the tenure? I'm still doing it, so I guess not. I guess I love it.

This is not unusual. I am a garden-variety academic. These are our lives. It's pretty real.

And I want to talk about that. I want to look at it from multiple perspectives and hear from multiple voices. I am incredibly fortunate in that I have tenure at a terrific school that I love, in a town that I love, with colleagues I respect, doing what lights me up every single day. I also have an amazing husband who occasionally pulls me away from the computer or takes away the stack of papers and reminds me to breathe and maybe even get outside for a little while.

I cannot pretend our industry is just like any other - it's more like a calling, like the ministry or the military. But it is an industry, with huge challenges and with lovely positives. It can be a difficult and frustrating life, but it is the only life for me. I love what I do, and I will defend it down to the ground. But I will also tell it to its face what it needs to do better. True love is honest. So here is my blazon to academia, in which I will do what we do best: deconstruct to the finest detail, pick apart and put back together, examine and illuminate. With understanding and a desire for more understanding.

(This blog is for everyone, including academics - topic requests are welcome and should be posted as comments to this entry).