For ridiculousness, one of my favorite academic experiences of all time was the telephone call I received from a senior person in Women’s Studies who announced that I was the least oppressed person on the faculty: no husband, no children, not a woman of color, not disabled, not gay. As the least oppressed person, it was my responsibility to adopt some faculty cats. Their owner’s girlfriend had her own cat, who did not like these cats.
I explained that my cat was a formerly abused female cat and needed her own space, that I preferred to have only one cat anyway, and that I would not adopt more cats. The senior faculty person accused me of insensitivity to the oppressed. I said she had to be kidding. She said not at all. I said she could not be serious intellectually or politically. Women’s Studies did not support me for tenure. I stopped teaching for them. My life improved.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
oh my
(still playing catch up – but OH MY)
can I steal this as scene for the acadmeic satire I am writing (right now it exist only in the rough draft-thereputic stage)
the chapter would be titled: Faculty Cats
Why, sure! 🙂
Infamous University was the same way, it was just I was dealing with fellow graduate students with that same mentality.
Yes. This is one of the things I most hate about academia. People. Are. So. Infantile. !
FURTHER RUMINATIONS ON THAT:
1. And: what they call “adult” is rank conformity.
2. The existence of two modes: “adult” (conformity) and infantile … remind me, Unbeached, of the two tracks of Southern existence (institutions and what I’ll call the “savage zone”) you outlined in the sex education thread.
3. The 2-track idea also reminds me of Kristeva’s symbolic and semiotic orders. Is that why I always thought she and certain theorists like here were so reactionary, I wonder? I thought that the idea that there were only two places to be, prelinguistic/chaotic and Part Of The System, was really depressing.
4. It was depressing because it seemed to allow for no individuation, no freedom but in joining the earthworms, no growth.
5. I notice this in the university as well: they want original research by mature people, but in the culture of the place, they want infantile emotions and absolute submission to authority.
6. I have always told myself there must be some way to conjugate or negotiate this: be perfectly submissive, and also produce perfectly original stuff. It *appeared* to me that others were doing it.
6.1. However, now that I say this out loud (as it were), I think I take it that seriously and literally because that was also how we were supposed to be at home (and in an academic family too, so it was a double dose).
7. I think my search in point (6) is misguided. I think that in fact, the “original” research of those who are perfectly submissive, is not original … and that those who do produce original stuff, are not asked to be so perfectly submissive as I have been.
7.1. Of course, I had my own reasons to take the requests for submission so seriously.
Anyway, this has become another wandering and therapeutic thread, useful in ways I had not foreseen.
We can sum up:
8. My effort has always been not just to seem, but to *be* perfectly submissive to everyone, while also producing perfectly original work – which then, of course, had to be exactly what they wanted *and* also exactly what I wanted. This is of course entirely against my nature, which I took as a challenge – it was something wrong with my nature. In fact, though, it is an impossible task and there is not in fact anything wrong with my nature.
8.1. At a certain point I used to watch minority faculty at meetings with admiring fascination. They seemed to have these “off” buttons – they could shut up and settle down on demand, without fidgeting, but you knew from their more subtle body language that they did not agree at all. They seemed to know how to feign when necessary, and to be much better than I at knowing they were just feigning, and at not letting that feigning get into their consciousness.
8.2. I observed that in three other states, none located in the Confederacy, but I have not observed it here except from *one* guy, and he is not from the Confederacy or Old Dominion either. Here, of course, most minority faculty are either even more oppressed, confused and powerless than I, or they are part of the power structure, glad to have made it into the Big House and believing every word that issues from it.
8.3. When I used to observe the people referenced in 8.1., I thought those abilities, that consciousness, were unavailable to me. I knew it had to have taken a lot of experience and work to be able to divide oneself up for successful survival in that way – as opposed to attempt to balance truly impossible contradictions, as I was doing. However: perhaps those abilities, that consciousness, are available to me now.
What about the expense of caring for another cat? What about not wanting to care for another cat?
Total intrusion.
Intrusion is the key word here, for sure. It is also my main Issue.
I’d love to start a thread – maybe I will sometime, although if I do it now I will never get any “real work” done – on intrusiveness and or vs. support. It seems to me that the same people who justify not giving support to others on the grounds that it might be intrusive, are perfectly willing to be intrusive if it might benefit *them.* And that there is a lot of “wisdom” in current mass culture to support this.
“5. I notice this in the university as well: they want original research by mature people, but in the culture of the place, they want infantile emotions and absolute submission to authority.”
I was stumped by the same combo in a corporate research lab. As in your story there wasn’t any answer to it, just hadda get out.
Still fixated on the surface question: why couldn’t Professor Bully of Women’s Studies adopt the cats herself?
I am not sure I would say “infantile.” I would say “6th grade,” rather, which is when the mean girl syndrome starts to kick in. This is just one form of the domination that you’re talking about, though.
Tom – yes, and that is what people who have been in corporate research labs say is (or is supposed to be) so nice about the university. Although at my university, people in technical fields are complaining about how, due to funding issues and cooperative agreements with industry, academic research now blurs into corporate R&D. Frustrating.
Undine – 6th grade, mean girl syndrome, you’re right. Why Professor B couldn’t adopt the cats herself – I asked that and she said because she already had a husband and kids, so she was already doing caretaking, whereas I had the least of all those who were not official Others in some way.
It was ridiculous, and there were many more details I cannot recount because for all I know, some of the principals may read this blog. The thing was, these cats only needed a home for a year, because the owner was on sabbatical. She thought she had arranged one, but the home backed out after she had already left. Women’s Studies believed that if she discovered there was a problem, she would give up her fellowship and come home. They kept saying don’t tell her, don’t tell her, you will be oppressing a poor Other.
Finally I screwed up my courage and called her – because WoST had in fact already delivered the cats to me, without my permission. They said to tell them if I took the cats to the pound, and they could rescue them then, but I was not to call the owner under any circumstances.
When I did call her, though, she just said oh gosh, I’m so sorry you’ve been put in this position! Let me make a few calls, and I’ll arrange a home for the cats from among my other friends. Said other friends came and got the cats that very night, and were very nice about it, as was she. And there was absolutely no hint of her giving up her fellowship and rushing home!
That reveals that this story has even more layers of patriarchal women othering other women. Because the cats’ owner was Other, she had to be Weak. Because I was Privileged, I could not negotiate directly with an Other about her cats. At least, so it seems to have been according according to Prof. B.!
The worst of it was not that I was having terrible tenure problems (I was, and could have used the WoST support – although it worked out in the end, I “just” had to come up a second time the next year). The worst of it was that these cats had been delivered to my house – they bamboozled the neighbor who had the key – and my cat was so scared of them (or maybe mad at me) that she was hiding in the kitchen cupboard, would not come out.
[OT: That cat, of course, pulled it again a few years later, while I was in Colombia (see the Shahrazad posts). The Colombia trip took place during the N.O. Jazzfest, and I got a colleague to babysit for me with the hook that he was a jazz fan and my house was just steps from Jazzfest. She hid in the cupboard and this very macho Latin guy, as it turned out, not at all a pet oriented person, spent large parts of the weekend sitting by the cupboard door with a candle in his hand, crooning, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” !!!]
It all seems to be double-speak — Academia. A friend from Portugal told me that I should not try and get a PhD because of my problem with conforming to anything. She was really dissecting my disdain, rather than giving me advice from out of the blue — for the longest time I did not know where it was coming from.
Middle Earth seems really hard to reach for me sometimes in these academic settings. We have not even gotten into the levels of favoritism and the different ideological camps that come with the profession..
Today, I was introduced to this website. And here is a cat that looks very much like mine, and therfore like yours:
http://www.catster.com/cats/66458/in/stroll/
Joanna – OMG what a hilarious website – and the name, Slobodan Pussivitch! It is definitely our cat, even if yours is the much larger version (mine is even more reduced in size than usual right now, due to the heat – it is really really hot, by the way, and it will get worse).
But “Slobodan” is my current cat, not the cat in question, who was Isabel Artemis, La Indígena. A Chicana and striped, fitting for a mestiza, she has been buried under the birdbath (fitting place for her, I am sure she enjoys watching the birds) for almost seven years. She had a vodun funeral. No kidding.
Unbeached – yes. Favoritism and ideological camps, I know, but this, I can handle as it turns out – I lost, and I know it, but I survived, and they know it.
Actually, I started the blog because I decided to start myself on a new assistant professorship, without tenure pressures since I have tenure, and with myself as my own dissertation director and senior mentor!!!