west of the moon

Autumn in Berkeley.

Autumn in Berkeley.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

a quick correction.

There's a particular misconception about the Strange Horizons fiction department that I've seen kicking around in a few different places, and I just want to get one clear definitive statement out into the dialogue: we do not have any intentional editorial practices that favor female authors.

Look, we know the numbers as well as our critics do.  The gender breakdown for our published stories doesn't match our submissions percentages--we're tracking disproportionately high in female authors.  We know this.  We're not doing it on purpose.  In fact, we're actually kind of troubled by it.   (There's a typical kind of moment at the end of our editorial meetings these days, where someone points out that we've just agreed to buy three stories by women and only one by a man, and we all kind of groan, oh no, not again.)  We had a discussion once, a few months ago, about whether there was anything we could do to fix this, but it's tricky.  I've always been very proud of the diversity of our author pool, given that we have a strong representation of both women and people of color without ever having conciously let the author demographic influence our buying decisions.  I've explained this, when asked, by saying that the most important thing we did was make it clear in our guidelines and mission statement that we were interested in seeing work from underrepresented groups--we are, quite possibly, drawing from a different submissions pool than the other SF magazines. 

And, being entirely honest, I'm sure that there's a lot of editorial preference bias.  All three of us are likely to enjoy stories set in non-Western cultural environments, all three of us are readers who are kind of put off by future or alternate worlds populated entirely by middle-class white men, and some of us are also readerly predisposed to liking stories with real emotional impact, often family-relationship impact.  (We also are extremely put off by stories with embedded racism and sexism, which is another factor.  There are a billion factors--I'm brainstorming here, and only on my first cup of coffee for the day.)  There's no reason at all why these story types have to be linked to certain author demographics, but even if there's no causal relationship, there's an undeniably strong correlative one. 

In any event, I doubt that the editorial preference factor is going to change any time soon.  Just like some other magazines (cough) seem to have a weak spot for stories about old men having supernatural experiences that help them reflect on the lives they've led and women they've loved, our magazine seems to have a weak spot for stories about, I don't know, whatever we have a weak spot for these days.  Editorial preference/bias happens.  I've been trying to remember to be more encouraging in the rejection letters I send to male authors, in case that helps re-balance the numbers.  Mostly, though, I just wanted to make sure that we're all clear on one thing: the current imbalance is not, repeat not, the result of any purposeful or intentional action on the part of our fiction editors.  Hope that helps.

doing a job.

If you've missed the recent, er, "bright gumdrop unicorns" academic-blog fuss-up, you're a luckier person than me.  That said, I'm going to drag you into it.  Short version: sometimes academics with tenure-track positions apply for other tenure-track positions.  Some academics, presumably ones with tenured positions, think that these people are selfish and immature gits.  The two sides have been bickering for a week or so, in blog posts and comments.  The bickering was sparked by comments that people going by "webmaster" and "edsmithers" left on "Dr. Crazy"'s blog, and has been discussed by "Sisyphus", "New Kid", "Dr. Curmudgeon", "Maggie May", and a variety of angry anonymous contributors to Rate Your Students.  (And can you tell that I'm a little frustrated with the pseudonyms?  It's not that I don't understand it.  I do understand it--the kind of conversations people want to have about academic culture, they're afraid to have openly and under their own name.  I think I've only seen one real name in this whole mess, from a commented in the phenomenally reasonable and thus far vitriol-free discussion at the Philosophy Job Market Blog.  That person, unsurprisingly, has tenure.) 

In any event, there's a lot in these discussions that's frustrating, and I suspect that the conflict here has been artificially magnified by the lens of the blog community, but there's also a lot that's interesting.  One of the things that I've been noticing is the huge gap between the two sides on this simple question: this "being a professor" thing, is this a job?

You would think this was a simple question.  If they pay you to do it, it's a job, at least of sorts.  It's not that simple, though, starting right at the beginning with the highly stylized (and almost completely opaque) process by which one -gets- academic jobs.   

And then there's the question of departmental structure and oversight.  Last year, I applied for a position doing historical research and analysis for a government agency, and the application forms asked me to list the name and phone number of my current supervisor.  I had absolutely no idea how to fill that out--I don't have a supervisor.  I was trying to figure out if there's anyone in the departmental structure who I have to report to or answer to, for anything, and I'm pretty sure there isn't.  And I'm just a lecturer--for regular faculty, it's much more clear that they don't have supervisors, or bosses, in any kind of normal sense.  There's the department chair, and at some level there's the higher-level university administration, but... but as far as I can tell, those relationships function like bosses or supervisors, in any way.   A lot of the administrative structures surrounding faculty are very historically entrenched, and if you look at that history, you start to realize that it almost makes more sense to think of university professors as independent contractors attached to a university faculty. 

This may seem like a semantic difference, or a trivial one, but it's something I've been having to think about.  Most of the people in my life are not academics--my parents, my partner, my best friends, they're all people who are outside of this whole structure, and in the last few years I've been doing a lot of translation work.  I've had to explain to my parents why sending out copies of my resume to various schools, whether or not those schools currently have a position open, isn't going to help me get a tenure-track position.  I've had to explain to a lot of people why several years of experience teaching a course on pre-modern and non-Western science is not a useful professional qualification for the position of assistant professor in pre-modern or non-Western science.  Trying to explain that last one, actually, leads into a murky exploration of what exactly a professor is--if it's a job, what are the job qualifications and the job responsibilities?  If you're hired as an assistant professor, your job is, broadly speaking, to be an expert in your field of knowledge, and to be a part of the intellectual community in your department.  You have specific responsibilities--teaching certain classes, "service" requirements like committees and advising, and so on--but if those specific responsibilities were the core of the definition of the professor, then these searches wouldn't be so narrowly defined.  If you're a history department, and you're conducting a search for an assistant professor in post-1945 American history and culture, you're not actually just looking for someone to teach your courses in modern American history--almost anyone with a doctorate in US history (or related fields) can do that.  You're looking for someone to attract (and then advise) graduate students in modern American history, someone to write books and give talks and boost the profile of your department as a place with a good modern American history program, and also to teach the courses.  (Increasingly, history departments are dropping full-time tenure-track lines in favor of just hiring part-time or temporary faculty whose only job responsibility is teaching the courses, but that's a discussion for a different day.  And one that's already been covered, in part, by Sterling Fluharty, in posts here and here.)

The question of professional roles and responsibilities is a little bit of a tangent, but one that does relate back to the bigger question, "is this a job?"  If you look at the debate over whether there's anything wrong with junior faculty applying out, the employment language is a contentious point.  You see people on one side talking about the university as an employer, people on the other side talking about the department as a family.  Is this a job, or a vocation?  (The discussion on PJMB has included the question of whether having geographic preferences for where to spend the rest of your life is an indicator that you don't really love your work.)   Those of us without tenure-track positions have to contend with a fiercely competitive national job market to have a chance of getting a tenure-track position, and the junior faculty who have those tenure-track positions have to demonstrate extraordinary success both within their school (in terms of teaching, advising, and service) and in the larger academic world (in terms of the publication record required by your tenure review), but many of these blog posters and commenters describe senior faculty members chastising junior faculty for being "careerist" or "mercenary" in terms of their work choices.  I feel like the heart of that conflict has something to do with the assumptions about whether this is a job, or at the very least, what kind of job it is.

The belief that an academic department is primarily an intellectual community (rather than primarily a workplace) is a wonderful one, and when it works out that way, the result is something enriching for everyone, faculty and students alike.  There's a disconnect, though, between the model of the department as a community (or a family) and the practicalities of the situation most early-career academics are facing.  I wouldn't say that I have any answers or big insights, but I think that the discussion itself is interesting in the way that it exposes the bones of the problem.

 

Flowers on the back fence.

Trumpet flower.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

Outside Tolman Hall.

Outside Tolman Hall.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

absorbing the status quo.

Yesterday evening, at the gym, I was changing back into my clothes when I noticed a five- or six-year-old girl staring at me.  My locker is in the downstairs kids-allowed locker room, as opposed to the upstairs grownups-only one, so having kids around is pretty normal.  The staring part, I'll admit, was a first, but you know, little kids find all sorts of things interesting, and it didn't actually bother me.  She was with her mother, and her mother kept reminding her that if she didn't get into her bathing suit faster, she'd miss the start of swim class, but she was too busy watching me.  The putting-on-pantyhose part was the most interesting, but even putting on moisturizer, combing my hair, buckling my shoes was interesting.  Her mother tried, once or twice, to discreetly get her attention elsewhere, but she was having none of it, and eventually the mom gave up.

"I'm sorry," the woman said.  "I think she just finds your routine fascinating."

"Oh, it's okay.  I don't think there's anything weirder-looking than someone trying to put on pantyhose."

"And she just learned what panythose were last week.  We made a scarecrow for Halloween, and we stuffed some stockings with straw, for his head.  She was really interested in how they stretch and stuff, and now she keeps saying she wants to wear them."

I looked at the girl, whose eyes had gotten really big, listening to us talk.  "They're not very comfortable, you know."

"That's what I told her," said her mom.  "And sometimes they itch." 

Suddenly I felt the need to say something about why I was wearing pantyhose, even though they're uncomfortable and sometimes they itch.  I didn't think I could explain the major reasons to a five-year-old, not while she was already running late for swim class, but I hit on one thing that might make sense.  I gestured towards my feet.  "But it makes it easier to wear shoes like this" (Dansko mary janes, the best shoes ever, by the way) "without socks."

"But they are socks," she said. 

I opened my mouth to start to say "no" and then stopped, realizing, well, kind of, except they're not.  Huh.  "They do the same thing as socks, I guess, but they don't look like socks."

She laughed.  "They don't!  They don't look like socks at all."

"But they work like socks, sort of."

She nodded, as if that made sense, and finished putting on her bathing suit.  Having solved the mystery of pantyhose, she was finally ready for swim class. 

On my end, I spent a while continuing to think about the mystery of panythose.  I mean, this is a problem I sorted and solved last year, when I started teaching, but it still bothers me from time to time.  I dress for teaching much the same way that I would dress for an office job--business-y skirts, button-down shirts, panythose, the all-purpose Dansko mary janes.  (Seriously.  Best shoes ever.  Super-cute, very professional, but also no/v. low heel and good foot support.)  It feels strange to me, sometimes, in the context of all of the discussions of feminism and image and presentation, that I choose to wear this.  It's not just that I'm wearing panythose, it's also that I'm wearing clothes with no pockets, that I wear makeup (extremely minimal, but still), all of it.  It's not as though I'm in a work environment with a dress code.  (Although there's more dress conformity, in my department, than one might imagine.  One or two faculty members will show up to teach in jeans, but by and large, the male professors wear ties, or at least dress shirts, and the female professors are at an equivalent level of formality.)

The reasoning, on my end, has been very simple.  I have enough to think about when I'm in front of a classroom.  I don't want to be putting any real attention into my clothes. (This is, oddly enough, why I choose skirts over pants, even though skirts necessitate pantyhose.  I sometimes get self-conscious about how I look in pants, and I don't want to divert any mental energy in that direction when I'm teaching.) More importantly, I don't want anyone else paying attention to my clothes.  The skirt-and-blouse model has a kind of entrenched position in mainstream American culture--it's the closest I can come to a uniform for this type of work, which means it's the closest I can come to being invisible.  I don't want to be making any statements.

Of course, sometimes choosing to not make a statement is choosing to endorse existing social norms, etc etc.  It's not that I want to be tacitly supporting a system where dressing this way is the default.  It's that I've prioritized other things.  Almost all of the time, it's not an issue.  Every once in a while, like when I'm meeting with students who want me to be faculty sponsor for a feminist-themed DeCal class, or when explaining to a five-year-old girl why I'm wearing pantyhose even though they're uncomfortable, it twinges at my conscience. 

Midway Airport

Midway Airport
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.

The flight attendant's announcement was, as one might expect, our first sign of trouble.

"Sorry for the interruption, folks, but we've got a passenger who isn't quite feeling one hundred percent, and we're looking for any medical personnel that might be on this flight.  An M.D. is preferable, but if we have any registered nurses on board, that would be great too."  We all hear the "ding" from a call button, and the flight attendant did too, because he said "great, thanks!" and clicked off the intercom.

We were about half an hour out of Oakland, I think?  Maybe only fifteen or twenty minutes.  We'd just passed over some hills, filled in with fog or clouds on both sides until the ridges of the hills looked like the shoreline of a thick white lake.  A minute or so after the announcement, the pitch of the engines changed slightly, and I felt a drop in altitude.  The plane tilted, starting a turn, and my seatmate turned to her husband and said, "I think we're turning around."  Which we were, of course, a heavy banking turn that brought the ground into a strange angle relative to the plane, but it wasn't until the final rushed descent that the flight crew officially informed us of what we'd all figure out already--our flight had been diverted for a medical emergency.

It's the kind of thing one wants to make a big dramatic story out of.  How often are you on a plane that's diverted for a medical emergency? It's the kind of thing that happens in movies.  Unfortunately, there was little drama to work with.  The plane landed, and the first two people on were a police officer and a man in a shirt reading "Oakland Fire".  Following them, two EMTs, and the four of them filed slowly down the narrow aisle towards the back of the plane.  A few minutes later, they filed out in reverse order, one of the EMTs holding a man (presumably our sick passenger) by the arm.  Then we waited.  The flight crew told us that we needed to refuel, that we needed to restock the medical supplies used during the medical emergency, that paperwork needed to be filed.  The flight crew told us that they'd spoken to the operations people, and that we'd all make our connections, that planes would be held for us.  Finally, the flight crew told us that it was time to leave again, and corralled back into their seats all of the restless passengers standing in the aisles.

That bit about making our connections and holding planes?  That bit turned out to be a lie.  I landed at Chicago Midway about ten minutes after my connecting flight was scheduled to leave, and learned that it had in fact left on time.  I had three hours in Midway until my rebooked flight, and I confess, I gave in to the Airport Consumer Demons and bought a trashy suspense/thriller novel to help me pass the time.