A long time ago– I think it was even before I started blogging again, so it might have been an overgrown Facebook post– I wrote about the sentiment of “going home.” They say you can never go home. Well… they say stuff about masters and tools, too. And so here I am with my big hammer in the town where I grew up working for a school I went to at one point.
But today I went into the building I haven’t been into on campus for… a while. About a year, to be closer to exact.
And it was a little weird.
As I sat working– as the representative of my new program, which is now going to be housed in a different academic division (different college for those of you who know structure, but not a different university for those of you who might be confused by us calling the units in the university colleges :))– I took a few moments to reflect.
First of all, not to brag on myself in an undue way, but I was the most efficient of the people working in the room. I was churning out quality results at a breakneck speed. I think I did that when I worked in that department, too, but I never recognized myself as working with more proficiency than anyone else. I think feeling the difference in how I was being looked at influenced my sense of self. At one point an old colleague/mentor ducked into the room and practically ignored me. I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t really mind.
I just think it’s interesting.
In academia, it’s always said that graduate programs won’t hire their own students because of fear of something I think they call intellectual incest. They want new ideas and thinkers. So they say. In all reality, most of the people who are the ones who would say “we would never hire one of our own students!” are the same people who desperately search for people who will be compliant. Many academics are of a like mind with me and want to be pushed and questioned and to explore new things, but more than a few want people to fall in line. There’s a whole body of literature in my old home field– English and composition studies– that details how a person is to be disciplined (not like being punished– not in the way you’d think– but how to be made to understand how the discipline “does” things– think about being patched into a tweed elbowed biker gang that extends their pinkies when they drink tea).
But that “we don’t take our own” cliche isn’t the reason why programs don’t hire their own. At least I don’t think it is.
Because I realized something, going back to work in the department where I received my MA.
It’s super obvious, so don’t feel insulted when I say it.
But some people cannot understand that scholars grow. I also think some scholars have trouble understanding that as students we can work with people and not become them. The idea of academic incest is just bizarre; it’s not like I caught indigenous studies from Malea Powell and will sneeze it all over people in the same form she does it. As she once said, she was a Miami who had to teach a bunch of Cheorkee– you can bet we have different views of many things. And I’m not my dissertation chair’s clone, nor am I a replica of my mentors from my MA. I’m a real boy, Geppetto.
And that, I think, is what stunted my advancement in that particular English department. There were literature professors who had me as a student in my first semester of graduate study, during a time when I was trying to look at literature with rhetorical theory because I didn’t really care what Harold Bloom had to say (beyond reading the essays everyone and their mother assigned). There were numerous people still on that faculty who shelled my video game research when I wrote my MA thesis (a document that was as long as most people’s dissertations and which featured person-based research that most MA students would even attempt). To them, I was still Phill, the commuter grad student that they thought of as the one who told them off when they were gossiping about his mentor, not Dr. Alexander from Michigan State.
And that’s why you can’t go home. Home has to allow you to change.
But it’s not about any problem with thinking or any magical lack of growth that would happen being back at a school you went to; in another department at that same school I’m thriving. I’m building the sorts of relationships that people who are tenured in my home discipline don’t manage to build until later in their careers. I’m working with major clients and I’m helping build new curriculum and programs. *I* am a good fit for the university. And I could have done some really positive things in that department. They actually needed a bridge to the program I work for now, the other half of the joint appointment I once had with them. I’d be way more useful to them than the empty space.
But that department, when it had to decide whether or not to hire me, made the Monty Hall mistake. They thought they could trade what they had for a glimpse of what was behind door number two, and we all know the potential for something shiny leads us all unto temptation. They gave me up for an empty chair, then they immediately hired someone with less experience but a shockingly similar academic profile. To a different line. They just let my line go to another program. Smart.
I felt weird today being back in that building, the one where I experienced some of my strangest academic stress as a masters student, the building where I had to tell my mentor and a dear friend that I’d decided to go somewhere else for my PhD because the money was better and I wanted to work some of the people there. I experienced my first effort at proving to everyone on a faculty that as the young guy with everything to prove I could take on difficult tasks and come out the other side successful. I humbled up in that building, and I got so upset by the way I was treated that I made a stand in that building.
Then I went where I was treated like an actual colleague.
Going back to that building a year later felt weird because I could feel some of the eyes on me the same as always. Now not all of my colleagues in that department do this, mind you– nothing is absolute. But there are people in that building who still look at me the way they looked at me when I was a BA student from a “community college campus” of a Big Ten school, confused because there weren’t steps to the second floor inside the front door of the building (because why would there be, right?). They looked at me the way they looked at me the first time someone made the crack “oh, it’s the brick building” on a campus notorious for it’s brick buildings.
I’m not that guy anymore.
For what it is worth, I have made an effort to change the relationship. I’ve been more respectful toward those that I realize didn’t take my growing pains well, but I’ve also tried to assert myself, professionally, with those who still treat me like a student.
I beat myself up sometimes for the fact that I gave it my all and couldn’t make it work over there.
Then I remember things.
Like that I was pulled aside and told I didn’t dress well enough.
Like that a full professor yelled at one of my students and slammed the door to my lab in that building. Several times. I heard that same person say, of another tenured professor, “oh, we can’t tell him to shut up. That’s X.”
Like that I was told that my teaching evaluations– which exceeded the department averages by at least 15% in every category– “aren’t bad but could be better.”
Like that someone said my book contract didn’t matter.
Like that when I told a working group that forming a committee to figure out what committees we didn’t need was the very definition of backward I was told to shut up.
Like that when I helped a student to design a brochure that didn’t have numbered pages or a sequential order due to how it was folded, the directors of that department’s programs still had a two hour fight over who got the “first” page and demanded that I hack up an elegant design and re-arrange the squares to match their desires.
Like that when I left them to work for my new department I was the only person capable of teaching two of the classes I taught, and that even after they got lucky and found someone to pick up one, no one can cover the other.
Like that when they brought in a scholar who specializes in what I do to visit they basically said “hey, take care of this” and left me to handle it and juggle my own duties to make space (which I did– and the visitor ended up being great).
Or like how about a week ago their newest hire, who doesn’t even really know me unless she asked people about me, blindsided me (go back and read that if you want– told the whole story in two different ways).
It has never been me. I’ve been doing this right the whole time. The student who challenged established ideas. The student who was honest when he couldn’t answer questions but who was unwilling to accept when someone tried to shut him down. The young faculty member who would take on any task, who put students first, who built stuff and tried to revamp programs and tried to do all he could to make the department and the program and the student experience better. I was always doing it right. I just wasn’t doing it their way all the time. I was the one who admitted when he messed up but expected to be allowed to mess up because that’s how you learn and grow.
And I know that probably seems glib, and it probably seems arrogant, but you know what? It’s the truth. I’ve found that being honest with yourself, even if it makes you seem a little arrogant, is extremely healthy in the academy.
I tried all I could. And yes, I should be the bigger person (as I almost always am) and not talk about it, but when I went back I felt weird.
Because it was never really home.
That’s why you can’t go home again in academia. The places you visit along the road aren’t home at all. They’re connecting flights. Some of the people love you, but to others you’re a burden, or cheap labor, or a cheap labor burden. One grad school professor called me a “cost center.”
Home is where you are respected. Where you belong. Where people treat you right and know that they can count on you and that you’re someone they should support. Home is not the place that overworks you for lower pay then mocks your performance. Home is not the place where people make you promises then pretend that’s not what they said. Well, maybe it is. But it shouldn’t be.
10 years later I’m home.
It’s just across the street from where I started. And it turns out the people who respect me enough to treat me like a real scholar were almost all here the first time I was, too. I just didn’t see them then.
I wonder if they would have seen me, if I’d walked past them.
I wonder if I even was me then.