Snarl and the World Snarls With You - Chronicle.com
Every department has its malcontents. Must you enlist?
Question (from "Kelly"): I'm a new tenure-track hire. A tenured next-door-office neighbor, Seymour the Snarler, is constantly barging in to complain about the antiquated curriculum and other overblown concerns. He has some good ideas, but, until I have tenure, I don't care to offend senior professors who are deeply invested in the current state of affairs. I've figured out how to mollify Seymour (coffee, an appearance of listening, sudden appointments elsewhere), and I haven't yet had to hide in my office with the lights out. But do I have to grow up to be a snarler?
Question (from "Lou"): My colleagues often bemoan the ways they think they're mistreated. They're never elected to meaningful committees; they're assigned the worst tasks, classes, and hours; they're socially isolated after-hours. One claims that academic communities are like high school, where only good-looking and popular folks get the goods. Should I just tell members of my cohort to dress better, smile occasionally, listen attentively, and eat lunch outside the confines of their cramped offices?
Question (from "Mike"): Is it inevitable that after being at any institution for a few years and getting to know all the idiosyncratic personalities, one becomes bitter and disillusioned?
Question (from "Nadine"): Why is it that the longer we are in the system, the more work we have — whereas for the old boys, the little work they did grows into even littler work.
Answer: Ms. Mentor recognizes that academics — highly verbal people — have the linguistic resources to become snarlers, fuming with righteous anger and invective. Some may also be snarky, bursting with impulsive mixtures of malice and wit. Snark means you may have to apologize or pretend to feel guilty, but snarly is an existential condition, plaguelike and demoralizing.
October is a prime month for snarliness.
The relaxed glow of summer has faded. Everyone has missed deadlines, and midterms loom. The world turns dry and cranky.
For some dyspeptic souls in academe, it always feels like late October. That's not usually the case for the oldest faculty members. The really senior are often the happiest, grateful to be working, to be alive, to have health insurance. Often they're relaxed, generous, and candid to younger faculty members, since the old folks no longer have anything to prove. They're the ones who'll marvel at the hissy fits of Seymour the Snarler: "How you do run on, young man. Might you want to get a hobby?"
In October the saddest are the adjuncts, shivering and frantic to get on the tenure track before it disappears over the horizon. For them, October starts yet another job-hunting season, and they're more despairing than snarly. But they're not apt to be ambushed in their offices by Seymour the Snarler, since many of them don't have offices.
Then there are the particular disillusionments of those of you who are first-year assistant professors. You've spent up to 25 years in school prepping to be new faculty members. You've endured grad school — the boot camp where you learned that you're a hopeless worm who will never know enough about your subject matter. Finally you pass the last hurdle, the dissertation defense ("I got by again"), and you find a job — whereupon you discover you don't know enough about teaching, either. Your students don't respect you, and many couldn't care less about the subject to which you've devoted your intellectual energies and your youth. ("Are you really gonna make us know this stuff for the test?")
You're lonely and sad and bone-tired by November, as the daylight hours dwindle. Many tenure-track newbies get sick — flu, bronchitis, even pneumonia — in their first winters.
Ms. Mentor urges them to take care of themselves, bundle up, take naps, brew hot soup. Don't volunteer for everything; simplify your grading; cultivate nonacademic friends; and live in a messy house. (Seymour the Snarler can't find you there.)
The bitterest members of academe are the midcareerists, the snarlers who've gotten tenure but now discover that they don't have lifetime goals or passionate pursuits to buoy them through the next decades. They've gotten what they always thought they wanted — but what will they do for their next trick?
They should develop long-term research projects, or concentrate on deepening their teaching techniques, or create new programs in service learning. They could make their work lives startling, unpredictable, and full of genuine excitement.
But some will insist on boring, bedeviling, or frightening newbies with tales of old feuds and future disgraces. They're obsessed with former colleagues who flamed out, suffered student mutinies, or escaped to warmer climes or better-paying jobs in the Real World. Snarling remains the refuge for those who lack the energy or courage to do something really original or dastardly. And so they grumble. They are misunderstood geniuses.
Ms. Mentor prescribes self-starting, and not dwelling on what's repetitive, irritating, or impossible to change. If you're in the humanities at a non-elite university, for instance, your classrooms and offices are probably dilapidated, moldy, and underpainted. You can snarl, mostly to no avail, or you can make your own office into a haven, with bright colors, plants, soft music, or sounds of gurgling waterfalls. Your office can be an oasis.
Besides Lou's good suggestions, Ms. Mentor also recommends for snarlers: noncompetitive walking or swimming, more attention to tasty eating, and cultivating good posture. A dog will give you loyalty and make you go for walks; a cat, softly stroked, will lower your blood pressure and snuggle while you read a good book. Mindless television isn't altogether bad, especially if you can wallow in the miseries of others and have satisfying fits of schadenfreude.
If you have family stresses ... well, you have family stresses, and Ms. Mentor can only prescribe avoiding domestic snarlers, meddlers, and critics. ("All that school and you're still in debt? What kind of a ...?") Don't let that ne'er-do-well nephew live with you indefinitely until he finds a job — unless he's a good nanny, cook, and vacuumer.
The majority of academic snarlers, it seems to Ms. Mentor, are men (as are most of the famous literary misanthropes). Mike, it seems, is working on his snarl. Women, like Nadine and countless literary figures, are more apt to be martyrs, sighing or fuming while they become responsibility magnets, note takers, list makers, schedulers, and prodders/pushers for all.
Ms. Mentor would like everyone to choose roles more carefully — for once October is over, Thanksgiving looms. Will you be the dressing or the turkey?
***
Question: So the top CEO's may earn 500 times the annual salary of the lowest-paid corporate worker. Our football coach makes something like $3-million a year, while I, a lowly adjunct, teach freshman writing for just under $3,000 a course. May I snarl?
Answer: Yes.
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