First lines of the semester: my version

'Cos it looked like fun when Fie did it:

I'll feeze you, in faith.

I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.

If music be the food of love, play on.

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

So shaken as we are, so wan with care

Open your ears, for which of you will stop

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

Sir Hugh, persuade me not. I will make a Star Chamber matter of it.

Why I love my university, in pictures

Because sometimes, art installments appear overnight.



Many spectators gathered on the stairs to watch the balloon.





But alas! Not all is well in balloon-land.

Campus-visit eve

We're hiring for a new colleague this year -- the first one in my department since I came along. The two finalists are coming next week, one right after the other. The first one arrives tomorrow, although he's requested to have a day on his own to explore (which sounds like a fine idea), so I don't get to meet him until Monday. (I wonder if he knows exactly how dead downtown Deep South Town tends to be on a Sunday; although I think one of our two coffee shops is open on Sundays, so at least he won't starve.)

I walked around the campus a little, trying to imagine it through the new-person's eyes. We have some lovely buildings: Victorian, rambling, asymmetrical, towered, balconied. We'll be putting the candidates up in one of them. And April is our best month, I think. My own campus visit was in April, though at the other end of the month: magnolia-time rather than azalea-time. I remember the ivory cups spilling their fragrance on the air. I remember deciding (a good decision) to ditch the interview suit and wear a nice summer dress. I remember noticing all the little details that spoke of bare-bones budgeting -- one and only one search committee member at each meal, an ancient TV cart instead of a smart classroom for the teaching demo, a suite in the Honors dorm instead of a hotel room -- and deciding I didn't care. (This may not have been the best decision, as Misnomer U. spent my first couple of years lurching from one crisis to another.)

I hope one of them falls in love with this place. I hope the rest of us fall in love with the same one who falls in love with this place. (Oh God, what if they both fall in love with this place? And what if we fall in love with both of them? I want there to be enough happy endings to go around, but I know that in humanities job searches there never are.)

On wealth

Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860 — Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored, I suppose, by the recital. And she told me — rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters were read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr —— won’t give a penny. The Saturday Review has been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall we hold a bazaar? Can’t we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill said on the subject. Can anyone persuade the editor of the —— to print a letter? Can we get Lady —— to sign it? Lady —— is out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was spent on it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together...

This is Misnomer U's story, pretty much. The long struggle continues; now and again we have to lobby the state legislature for our continued existence. Otherwise, barring a fresh round of budget cuts or a natural disaster, they ignore us. We are small and do not have any sports teams, and while we are no longer exclusively female, we are still stubbornly woman-serving in our demographics and outlook.

Over spring break I went to visit the University of Basketball, where I went to grad school. No particular reason, just missed the campus and the town. There is a small art museum at the edge of campus; I went there now and again when I was a student, though I don't remember thinking it was anything special at the time.

I went in, and followed the signs upstairs to the study gallery. Oh, my God. How did I not know about this when I was a grad student? Faculty members can request to have specific works put on display for their classes -- anything in the collection, any class. There was a corner set aside for a Brit Lit II survey, an ordinary sophomore-level gen ed class just like the one I'm teaching now. Only the students in this Brit Lit class get to go in and see works by Blake and Turner and Beardsley. I hadn't had any idea you could do that -- nor would I have thought to take advantage of it, not back then, when I was still struggling to get through one day of class at a time, trying not to expose my ignorance in front of a horde of unruly undergrads. You don't think about giving your students cool and enriching experiences until later, after you've got a handle on what you're doing. But God, what wouldn't I give to have a resource like that now!

The galleries at Misnomer U. are strictly for rotating exhibits, mostly of faculty and student art; we don't have a collection as such. Much of what we do have on display, at any given time, is for sale.

We don't have a performing arts series. This is why I ferry students "all over hell and creation" (I thank thee, Fie, for teaching me that phrase) to piggyback off of other schools' visiting artists. We don't even have a film series.

We try to pretend these things don't matter: with a little imagination, one can put together a fairly respectable-sounding schedule of "cultural events" for the freshmen in Intro to College Life, even if most of them are homegrown. But opportunities and experiences do matter, and they especially matter when most of your students come from places where the arts are not part of their everyday life, and frankly I am getting sick of pretending.

Taking it on the road

I just got back from an excellent student production of Othello at Scarlet Letter U*, about an hour and a quarter away from here. They really stripped it down to the bone, and cut some of my favorite bits like Emilia's speech about men, but what was left was fast-moving and powerful and generally awesome. I took one student. I was supposed to take two, but one of them bailed without letting me know she was going to bail, and seemed surprised when I told her I'd already bought her ticket.

On Friday, I went to see a touring production of Twelfth Night at BigBox Mega U, half an hour away in the other direction. That was great, too. Fun, inventive staging, and one of the best Sir Tobys I've ever seen. Three students came. There were originally supposed to be six. The production was supposedly sold out two weeks in advance, because most of the tickets went in large blocks to schools; I spent the first fifteen minutes of Friday's Shakespeare class on hold with the box office, and felt lucky to score seven same-day rush tickets. Then, when we got there, there were dozens of empty seats. Apparently the other schools have the bailing-students problem, too.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to see a different touring company perform The Taming of the Shrew at Don'tCallUsWe'llCall U,** fully two and a half hours off in the boondocks. That was pretty awesome too, done with a cast of seven, and with a female Lucentia and a lesbian wedding at the end. I took two of the students from the Shakespeare class, one who's writing her honors thesis about the play, and a friend of the honors thesis student who agreed to come at the last minute when, you guessed it, someone bailed. We got home sometime after midnight, a long dark sleepy drive. I felt bad for the three students squished into the back seat of my tiny little Hyundai. They all said it was worth it. Honors Student also said it was the first time she'd really gotten the subplot; it's hard to keep all those Italian names straight, and so much easier when you see the characters embodied.

Here is the thing. We don't get a whole lot of opportunities to see live Shakespeare around here (this month was something of a fluke), so I take them when I can and drive long distances when I need to, and I love doing stuff like this. I love watching students discover that Shakespeare in performance is funny and scary and moving and not at ALL hard to understand. But I am getting frustrated as hell with the 50% last-minute attrition rate. And it's mostly not the students' fault. They have complicated lives: work schedules that change at the last minute, and babysitters who cancel, and other classes to juggle, and they are genuinely disappointed when things don't work out. I did not have a particularly complicated life when I was a student. I also grew up half an hour away from a major East Coast city, where you could see lots of different plays any week in the year, and with parents who believed in taking their kids to the theater. These things are luxuries. I didn't realize that at the time. I want more of my students to have them. I also want to change the culture at Misnomer U so that it's less conducive to apathy and flakery, and so that more students want to go road-tripping with Shakespeare.

And, as Bill Watterson says, as long as I'm dreaming I'd like a pony.***

* Technically speaking, I believe the letter in question is actually crimson, but I can't resist the appellation.

** Because I had a phone interview with them way back in my first year on the job market, and because apparently when I'm tired I spend all my mental energy making up cute nicknames for the local universities.

*** Not really. I don't think I ever got the appeal of ponies, even when I was a kid.

in which I cannot resist weighing in

Three idle thoughts, in response to the latest gubernatorial pronouncement about how universities are doing everything wrong:

1) If I had to pick a graduate of Misnomer U to hire for a job of an unspecified nature, and if I had to do this without knowing anything at all about the prospective candidates except their majors, my first pick would be ... Women's Studies. For real. It's not a popular major; the few students it does attract tend to be much brighter and more dedicated than average; and almost all of them have served an internship with Grande Dame Colleague, who teaches them all kinds of useful skills, like grant writing and archival research and conducting interviews and transcribing oral histories, as well as general responsibility and professionalism. I don't mean to suggest that this is true of all gender studies programs everywhere, but in general, it's a grave mistake to assume that you can tell from the name of a program whether it teaches students marketable skills.

2) Last time I looked, math WAS a liberal art. (OK, it's possible that the last time I looked might have been sometime in the fifteenth century, but whatever.) Now, I think all the stuff they do over in the math and science department is pretty darn awesome. But much of it is not inherently any more practical than the things we do in humanities. (Nor should it be, since the university is supposed to be a space where knowledge is valued for its own sake, and where people have the freedom to study things because they're cool and interesting.)

3) People have been coming to universities to study philosophy for a lot longer than they've been coming to study business or engineering. It takes a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to cast yourself as a defender of traditional institutions and social values AND take potshots at the very programs and ideals which are, in fact, integral to the traditional mission of a university. (But then, one of the things I find puzzling about conservatives is that they don't actually seem to be interested in conserving things, most of the time.)

travelogue, part 4

It is the first day of classes, and it is rainy and unpleasant and threatening to turn the entire world into a big lake, so I thought I would post some pictures of sunny places. Besides, I never did finish the summer travel series.

So, after a long night on the bus, I came to Istanbul:

(Note the double-tiered bridge, by the way: fish are caught from the top and eaten on the bottom.) The ferries go up and down the Bosporus, back and forth between Europe and Asia; at the end of the line you come to this little village, where there is a castle you can climb up to and some more places to eat fish:

The classic touristy shot of the Hagia Sofia:

And an early-evening one, taken from the rooftop at the hostel:

After a couple of long days on trains and buses (and a quick dip in the Black Sea), I came to Sofia, Bulgaria. I don't actually have a lot of pictures of Sofia, but here is a nice one of Rila Monastery, a couple of hours away.

Frescoes:

And, back in Greece, I went to visit some more monasteries with an even more impressive setting.

(There was a helpful sign saying "Ladies in sleeveless dresses, slacks, or pantaloons will not be admitted." Hiking up the pinnacles in a long skirt is perhaps not ideal, although it was OK until I decided to take a shortcut down, which turned out not to lead much of anywhere except into a patch of blackberry bushes.)

So, finally, I went back to Athens and took a day-trip out to a temple, only to find that someone from the Brit Lit survey had been there before me. Can you spot him?