After five hours of oral examinations and advising on one paper where I kept saying to the student, “It is not a question of saying whether these phenomena and this concept are good or bad, it is a question of articulating how they appear in the text, and what the text does with them,” we realized we had been paid.
We went to Penney’s where I acquired purple, straight-leg Levi’s which are $37 there although they are still $54 at Zappo’s. With these shoes I now wear by Rx, I look as though it were 1977. If I could acquire Frye boots this situation would veer yet further from my early 90s professor look, those pencil skirts and silk blouses and sling-back heels.
(Actually, I had two professors who were both very intelligent and well educated and burned out quickly, and one had the latter look and one the former. Then there was one whose clothes we really loved, and she did not burn out but she did fail tenure the first time. There must be something about our institution.)
*
I am still considering this question: why do college professors become alienated from their work? I cannot think of anything except what I already know: if you do not get to or dare to say your work is part of you, that you are the person to do it, and that you really can, then you are separated from it and so you are alienated.
Something about the competitive atmosphere has an impact. Throughout school and the job market and tenure and further one is moving up, up, and others are falling down and away; one keeps hitting higher marks on the mountain, climbing against an avalanche.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes has written very well about mothers who do not attach to their children until they are sure they will live. In similar fashion many people hold only tentatively to projects which may be taken from them too soon. Then if one strategizes so as to stay, and gives too great a part of one’s self to the industrial complex we are working in, one is alienated.
I had a colleague who motivated himself to get things done by reminding himself that someone had to do good research; most research was bad and his was good so he had better do it, so things did not fall apart completely. He was working for the field, from within it. I always felt like an outsider, much less invested, only interested while it was still fun or if it could be fun, because to do something meaningful I would do something else entirely.
Why have I always felt like an outsider? Because you cannot expect to finish a degree, to get a job, to get tenure. You are only here for the ride, it is not really for you. I had this startling conversation with a department chair the other day, though, in which I was requested to produce some solid hits for the team. This was a really interesting conversation, unlike any I have ever had before.
Always before it was: our wager is against you. It is entirely different to have someone say I want to use you as a designated hitter, because we really need to bat this on in. Usually having been mistrusted in life it is interesting to see how it feels not to be.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
