Labor Reality

I note a column in the Wash Post projects the University of Maryland and Virginia moving to a three-two teaching load.

My day goes as follows.  I sneak in twenty minutes to read the New York Times and the front page of the Post.  This is a responsibility for an American who purports to teach about the world. I help get the girls off with E., feeding them, making sure P. gets dressed, which is not easy, and into E.'s car by 7:30 am.  If it is me driving, I get to swim where I drop P. and this takes about forty minutes.  If there is time, I step into the steam room for five minutes of contemplation: internal review-time, and prep time, for my first class, a lecture to 55 or 60 or so students, about the place of Africa and Africans in the declining years of transatlantic Slave Trade.

Being a white, New York Jewish-looking guy, I am grateful for keeping the fifty-odd who still show up.  The class is a cross section of the university: heavily "minority," foreign-born, African, Muslim in nature.  This semester, I have made a point of stressing the historical role of Muslims' jihads, in the creation of the Funj, Dar Fur, various Futa Jallon, Hamdullahi, "Fulani," Qadiriyya, and other militant Muslim movements that arose —

Okay, here, one would like to say, "in reaction to the slave trade."  But in fact, "that grew within the system of relations that involved capture, pawnage, and enslavement, sometimes in reaction to abuses or violence," is more accurate.  The caliphates of West and Sudanic Africa contained infidel slaves thereafter, too.

And I stress the Christian response: Dona Beatrice, set into Kongolese context; and Exeter Hall missionaries, who harnessed the wealth and zeal of evangelism (and Quakerism) with an anti-human-traffic message.

We've already covered the mutually-feeding development of Nago (especially within Candomble, the religion), Yoruba (der. Yarriba, which I love), Lucumi a bit, and a self-help society in Cuba modeled on Epke (Leopard: Slavery-fed debt-enforcement secret society) yet put to entirely different use.

Ooops, time's up.  I step out of the steam room, and in a few minutes (okay, ten) I am driving the New York Avenue—Route 50—to arrive at my classroom at teach.  I always get to the class early to set up the Power Point and maps I project.

I feel like I am poured from the previous night (finishing preparations at midnight), through the swimming pool through to my classes, which are separated in time by only about an hour. This means I often only have say forty minutes in between.  I use the time to get myself ready for my second class, which is a set of 27 lectures on the history of South Africa, many with Power Point images snatched from books I've scanned.  We are up to (this is Prof-speak for "I have told them things but not yet this") the reasons, historically speaking, South Africa "changed" in 1990-1994.  I have to convey my best estimate of the interplay of forces they've read about and I've told them about, from the BC movement (Biko) to education and housing issues (Thaba Nchu, Soweto, Kathorus), to Soweto (June 16th onward), the ANC bases and UN presence, Alex in 1983, the State of Emergency, the Civil War in Natal, the fall of the Berlin wall and the loss of the CP bogeyman (and "Soviet" backing for the ANC), the meeting of elites, the Thatcherite refusal to promise to roll over normal loans . . . Mandela's age and wisdom.

Class is over.  I talk to four students about their papers.  This semester, I've posted ninety-two small movies on a blog dedicated to the purpose for the thirty students in the class.   I've read aloud entries from an unpublished 1881 mining expedition, an Ox-wagon trip lasting 92 days, that is at times maddening and myopic, but at times wonderfully and suddenly revealing of the actual politics and relationships infused by racial lines and machismo among the participants.  I was posting the last ones just before midnight, the last thing I did.  The students are now writing a paper based on this primary source, together with secondary material I put on reserve at McKeldin, the actual, physical library.

Anyway, I get back to my office in time to meet with my T.A. if I return by 1:25, which I ordinarily do.  I then trudge out to eat a late lunch at 2:00.  I do this in half an hour and return to my office.  I meet with a student and answer e-mails.  Some local high school students had claimed they wanted to interview me for information, in a proposed "Shaka Day," but I think now they were having me on.  I usually leave around 3:30, if I could, especially if I skipped lunch, or if E. made me something.  Unless there is a departmental meeting or a Center talk which I want or need to see, which takes until 6:00.  Driving home at 5:00 is almost as bad because of the snarled traffic.  Previously, I would make a circuit through the library before driving home, but the library has got rid of all its paper history-journal and Africanist-journal subscriptions, so there is no reason to go there.

I get home and settled and go directly to the book: the revisions to chapter six, which should have been made before submitting the whole thing I guess, but none of the changes are really basic or deeply significant ones.  I am a consumate reviser: I need to read right through each paragraph to the end and change things to make the voice consistent, persuasive, "showing" instead of "telling," and remove all flourishes . . . Adorno: "If you have the slightest suspicion something is not quite right in your writing, magnify that suspicion by a factor of a hundred to understand the real situation."  This is not a direct quote, but a paraphrase from memory.  I know this is a patent instance of finding classical "literate" support by cherry picking for my weaknesses.  I think of Steven Jay Gould, who wrote his manuscripts by putting sheets of paper in a typewriter and banging away.  A few hand corrections in pen, perhaps, and he was done.

Half past five or so I'm either cleaning up in preparation for E. and the tots and cooking-dinner time, or I am with the tots themselves.  Let's be serious: it is critically important for parents to spend time with their children, interacting with them, learning from them, hearing them, playing "baby games!" (there are several main roles: the babysitter, "Rena"; the mommy; the baby, who may also be played by a doll; the big sister; and the fairy godmother).  Teaching them not to launch themselves off the couch onto their heads.

Dinner time.  Dinner's over: it's clean-up time.  Bath time: Dada's in charge of baths and tooth-brushing and getting into jammies.  (E. does way more in the mornings.)  Humidifiers.  Clothes to be chosen for the morrow.  Clothes to be put back in drawers from the "clean" pile of laundry.  Now it is story time.  Coming back to tell a last story, to P., one more time.

Then I clean up the kitchen from E.'s cooking and everybody's eating.  Then I go into my home-office and work on the book review I'm late producing, and make sure I have all the South Africa class's papers in my bag.  I read a JSTOR article for a moment and then I look at a book I am seriously thinking about selecting for next semester (I know, I'm very late with that decision, but it is a domestic paperback I saw at the ASA and so it will arrive very fast).

Finally, I come out and spend an hour with my wife.  Sometimes we watch Law and Order, just right for our demographic.  Although, if you watch it late at night, all the TV commercials are about assisted living or cancer drugs or life insurance for the elderly.

It is midnight again.

How might I "add a third course" to my teaching schedule?  I  continue to act as if the University expects me to be aware, vital, producing scholar, going to conferences and writing books and chapters and articles.  There are not more hours in the day than the above suggests: the days vary, but add a sudden dissertation to be read, a sudden decision to honor a promise to onesself and read Matory's Atlantic book and teach it at just this point in the semester. In the non-Academic world, people who work nine to five or nine to seven and have Blackberries are paid enough that they hire caregivers for their children and housecleaners and order food in alot.  But not us.  We middle profs do not make that kind of money.

Look and tell me how many articles and books your married, with-children are producing right now, in their most vital time of life, and tell me it makes sense to increase the teaching load.

There is no magic trick.  You can't have it both ways.  Respect the reality of our lives — that faculty work to capacity, if they are good, all the time — or you decrease quality and attract repetition, uninformed parroting of old interpretations, rote lectures unresponsive to the times or issues of the day, new technical limitations on the interpersonal nature of teaching.  There is a labor reality here, with concrete effects.  With a third course, I will not be assigning twenty-five pages of writing, all of it line-edited for sense and argument by me, to thirty-six students any more, as I do now.  Hence the "quality" of their education will deteriorate.  Not necessarily their happiness as recorded on their feedback "evaluations," but the quality.

Other things a healthy faculty member who cares about his or her job needs: Friendships, Downtime, a non-academic interest or two.  F**** you, popular media, for making it seem as if the profs are getting free ride.

PS This morning I blew a half hour on this.  Now, I'm monitoring my two Independent Study students via exchanged ideas on e-mail.  One is going well, one very not so.