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Despite many public assurances to the contrary, my anecdotal survey of academic friends and colleagues suggest to me that performance expectations are very much business as usual — with the added of burden of everyone expected to pretend that it’s not.
Even in privileged (so to speak) contexts, such as R1s and TT jobs, the greatest burdens are falling to the most vulnerable. Off the top of my head, untenured or newly tenured women with young children and others who are caretakers.
It would be nice to see seniority used for responsibility and not just reward in academia. But I say foolish things sometimes.
I don’t even need to say what I see friends working in insecure job environments such as adjunct positions going through, right?
(Some days are much worse with regard to my capacity to take whatever this is, so apologies that today is one of the low days.)
I’d like to model some good citizen behavior rn, like taking on some of the advising burden for one of my struggling colleagues. But I have no faith that senior colleagues will see that and say, “That seems like the right thing to do. I should do that.”
Of course there’s long been an equality vs. equity issue in departments’ politics and work assignments, so...
I need to go put my head down on a table for awhile. But not till I acknowledge a colleague was moved to tears last night thinking about being afraid to drive across country for family support because of the call to white supremacist mobilization by the POTUS the night before.
That’s not business as usual, either, folks.
Last thing I’ll say to close the circle: we might, as educators, be doing entirely the wrong thing by trying to “deliver” “course content” to our “custom...” sorry, to our students, during this time. Many of them are Not Okay, either. We can’t support when we are fronting.
