The Sad Professors
by Stephanie Hammer
I am one of the sad professors. We came to the university at the tail end of the 60’s or like me in the early 70’s and we had seen the STRAWBERRY STATEMENT and gone to Woodstock (I went with my boyfriend, but his parents wouldn’t let us stay, because the scene seemed too chaotic and dangerous, so we went home to his penthouse on the upper east side and went out for a fancy dinner instead.). We read about the student revolts in Paris and we figured ooh goodie the university will be JUST LIKE THAT – a utopia, a place where you don’t have to sell life insurance or heck sell anything at all, because the revolution is happening and it’s going to happen here.
Well, as you know, it didn’t. We went to grad school – we, the not yet sad but not as happy as we were about things almost professors — and we worked hard to prove we were smart and talented and disciplined and committed as the job market shrunk and shrunk, particularly in the humanities and particularly in literature – which is what some of us do.
And now we are at the corporate university, where students are clients and the suits aka the administrators control everything, and indeed things were better, or at least more honest when some of us worked at the Strawberry Stores in Manhattan, and the battling cousins who owned the concern would totally yell at us (me) about the stupid mistakes they made with the kork ease shoes inventory. But now the dean yells and it’s not about teaching, it’s all about development, and recruiting grad students for programs that either have no faculty or else don’t prepare them to do anything practical – which is ok, but we are supposed to lie and pretend that we DO (have faculty and prepare them for something practical, which in the humanities just isn’t possible).
And so that’s why we are sad. And I am sad, because I really used to like teaching, but as I get ready to talk about utopia, about the imagination as a country without borders or limits, I look into my undergraduates’ eyes. Then I understand what the theorist Frederick Jameson meant about the decline of “affect” because when my students look at me, I think, I know, they are really already sort of emotionally dead.
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