On Empathy and What We Do ... Together

by JONATHAN HSY

Hello ITM readers! I'm just on my way to the BABEL symposium in NYC (#cla2013) by way of Oceanic New York (#ony2013)—of course more about this on ITM after this weekend. But first, in this posting, I'd like to quickly comment on a few buzzworthy online items that might at first seem unrelated—but are actually intertwined by an important common thread.

On Contingency: Earlier this month, MARY KATE returned to ITM with this thoughtful blog posting entitled “On Contingency.” In a large part “giving props” to her medievalist community during her time teaching at Yale, Mary Kate offers one positive example of professional experience as an adjunct, and she illustrates the importance of working in an environment in which one is valued as a peer and well supported on all fronts (emotionally, intellectually, and materially). I found it so striking that soon after Mary Kate’s posting, this truly devastating “counterpoint” began to circulate regarding the experience of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a dedicated teacher and adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University for 25 years (see “Death of an adjunct” HERE). This story has been picked up and re-circulated by the NPR, Huffington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed (and I’m sure many other outlets) generating righteous outrage—and sincere discussions about the adjunctification of higher education continue to reverberate online and in the corridors. The inherent pathos in this story of the suffering of Margaret Mary Vojtko is not without a certain literary (almost hagiographical) tinge: in some respects she becomes a kind of modern-day “martyr” for the case against our profession’s increasing dependence upon (or even exploitation of) contingent faculty. This concern about the adjunctifation of higher education is something we've been thinking about quite a lot on ITM: Jeffrey and Eileen, most noticeably, have attended to issues relating to what Jeffrey has called the “precariat”; and see the comments on Mary Kate’s posting by Ben Tilghman and Myra Seaman on their own experiences as adjuncts and the need to find a “home” as a scholar, teacher, and fully valued peer. 

On a related note, read Rebecca Schuman’s excellent posting on “Horrible Job-Market Platitudes and How to Retire Them,” which provides some tips for mentors and job placement officers on avoiding well-intentioned but ultimately unproductive words of “comfort” for people who haven't landed tenure-track positions. Many of us who act as academic mentors are products of a culture that still codes non-TT status itself as “failure” and this posting goes one step toward changing some of these attitudes and sentiments.

Declasse Academics: You may have seen this posting making the rounds over the past week on "declasse" academics, a link I first saw posted by KARL on Facebook (see the link by @WernherzBear HERE). In this list, this blogger reveals a certain implicit assumption that all academics come from a privileged (and Northeastern US) background. I feel many items on this list don't quite apply to people of color and/or folks who grew up outside of the US, but what this posting suggests is that unstated social codes (i.e., the implicit norms of WASP culture) still underpin many aspects of (North American) academia. Everyday interactions can make even TT-faculty “insiders” feel like perpetual “outsiders,” people who don’t “belong.” There are many ways in which people can feel “othered” in the profession beyond class of course (gender, race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability), but the posting draws attention to something we can be so reluctant to discuss openly.

Serious Literature (No Women or Chinese): This is a much newer story (really only “broke” yesterday and last night). I’m closely following the ongoing reaction to a recent interview with David Gilmour—an author and apparent literature instructor who (now notoriously) reveals he doesn’t “love” literature by women or by “Chinese” (?!) and is instead most invested in teaching works by “serious, heterosexual guys”—and the apology/interview making up for the original interview didn’t help matters. I’m not linking to the original interview or follow-up here, but you can see that the posting has swiftly generated both online rage and mockery, with this spot-on parody HERE and response HERE, an awesome open letter by Anne Thérault HERE, and a devastating point-by-point takedown HERE. The comments on the Facebook event page for Serious Heterosexual Guys For Serious Literary Scholarship (created by Miriam No, on twitter @imposterism) are pure COMEDY GOLD (and track #SeriousReads and #GilmourReadMore on twitter RIGHT NOW for the ongoing University of Toronto community response).

On Empathy

So what ties together all of these items? In his very insightful response to the Gilmour story, early modern literature professor Holger Syme offers these remarks on the importance of empathy:

Good teaching requires empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those things are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different gender. Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is not just what research means, and why research is necessary, it’s what reading is. 

This statement beautifully showcases how empathy is not only the key to good teaching but also a feature of research and scholarship, including (as is the case in medieval studies) people who seek to understand a culture or worldview that is distant and “alien” to one's own. I would extend things to say that empathy is, of course, a key part of human interaction in general -- which includes one's treatment of students, mentees, and coworkers of all kinds (regardless of rank, social affiliations, or employment status).

I will end by stating why I believe that online communities like the ones cultivated here at ITM and the BABEL Working Group—and other forms of social media—are so very important. In a lot of cases, being a medievalist means being “the only medievalist in the village” (so to speak), and in these instances many turn to online venues a way to stay engaged with a broader community of people who share their scholarly and intellectual interests. Moreover, the field-specific isolation one might feel as a medievalist can certainly be compounded and complicated by so many other factors (most noticeably, contingent status). What I hope ITM and BABEL can continue to foster is this genuine sense of community and support for people who might physically be far apart, and I hope (collectively) we can create non-hierarchical forms of community that not only think beyond discrete academic disciplines but also break open the very idea of “the university” and the world that surrounds and sustains it.

Physician's Tale, Favorite Comments

Detail Filippino Lippi, "Scenes from the History of Virginia," a cassone (c. 1470-80); Louvre

by KARL STEEL

Obviously, read Mary Kate Hurley first. It's a great post.

Maybe you've also just graded your first set of Canterbury Tales papers. Mine were on the Physician's Tale, where I now routinely start because of David Wallace's facetious (?) recommendation at the New Chaucer Society in 2010. He was right, anyway.

The Physician's Tale is short, with a stirring narrative, moral and ironic, graced with an obvious source and as obvious alterations, and without a lot of weird vocabulary: in other words, it's a far better place to introduce students to the tales than the usual slog through the General Prologue.

Apart from my habitual comments about characters being tools and not real people, about literature making culture and not just "reflecting" it, and about upper-class women having a lot less freedom in marriage than women in general, I've landed on some new ideas, because grading is also thinking. Sometimes.

Here's my list of some favorite new comments, maybe of use to you when you next read or teach this tale:

1. Who is responsible here? Apius sins because devils enter into him; Virginius calls his daughter the ender of his life. And the Host dodges the Physician's weird moral about 'sin finding you out.' The men shift responsibility onto anyone but themselves.
2. Virginius's belief that virtue requires female virginity does kill him, in a sense, since it turns him into a killing machine, a zombie working for a patriarchal system that compels him to kill what he loves most
3. human sacrifice simultaneously degrades humans and attests to the supreme value of humans as the greatest sacrifice
4. martyrs are killed by the enemies of God, while sacrifices are offered by his friends: is Virginia a martyr or a sacrifice? And what does that make Virginius?
5. since Virginius is well supplied with money and friends, he could have saved Virginia, especially because Chaucer has cut out the political content of his source material. So, Virginius fails Virginia as a knight and father as much as Apius fails her and the law in general as a judge. The tale's about a systematic failure of masculine authority and the resulting death of a girl who, alone, has done everything right.
6. Why so much attention to Virginia's whole slate of virtues when the threatened failure of just the one means she must die? How shaky is virginity as the foundation of a whole system of virtue?
7. Why is the tale so specific about Virginia's honors and so vague about her father's: full of honor and worthiness, and that's it.
8. Note how Virginius spares Apius and kills his daughter and the various guilty churls: think about the prerogatives of inter-masculine respect.

On Contingency

by Mary Kate Hurley

(this post was written on 9/5/2013, a little over a week ago. The photo is one I took at Yale in Fall 2011.)

I’ve written – and rewritten – this blog post at least ten times in the past two years. It’s not because it’s a particularly hard blog post to write, but rather because it never felt like the story I wanted to tell was complete. Sitting in a plane somewhere between Ohio and California, looking down at the tops of the clouds and feeling like the world’s been turned over somehow, I’m beginning to realize that stories don’t come to a “finish” point. You stop following them, but they continue on in other forms, in ways you can’t quite expect.

It’s fitting that I’ve been returning to Nicholas Howe’s Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England in preparation for a conference paper I gave at Berkeley on the Tiberius B.v version of the Wonders of the East.* In his chapter on Cotton Tiberius B v and Cotton Vitellius A xv, Howe writes beautifully of the stories of geography that these manuscripts tell, the stories of “here and elsewhere.” Perhaps problematically, these stories of elsewhere have the “ultimate effect” of returning “you to a more complex understanding of home” (Howe, 191). A more nuanced reading of what that might mean, and what such a reading of the Wonders of the East would ultimately entail, is part of the work I did in that paper. But for now, I want to write about the places – metaphorical and literal – I’ve been for the past two years.

I spent the last two years working as an adjunct instructor of English at several different schools. I spent time at The Cooper Union, Barnard College, Rutgers, and – for the duration of those two years – Yale University. In each of these institutions, I learned as much and more about myself as a teacher and as a scholar than I had in the entirety of my time as a graduate student. That’s not to underplay the role Columbia played in forming my scholarly personality. But there’s nothing like the pressures of a tight job market and twelve hours or so per week on a commute to teach you who you really are, and what you really value.

I suppose, in the end, this post becomes an encomium Yalensis, although I want to write this work of praise by way of suggesting that while Yale may very well be an exception to the experience of adjuncting, it’s one that higher education and the people who populate it can learn from. When I came to the end of Columbia’s very generous funding package in the spring of 2010, no full-time positions materialized. In the end, I suppose it was as much the two years of writing fellowships I’d had as much as anything that kept me from finding a place, but no one who has been on the job market can doubt that there is no formula for success other than “be the best you can be.” And so I took on the academic equivalent of “odd jobs” – it started with a writing center position at Cooper, and began to look more livable when Barnard’s first-year English program gave me a section of Women in Culture to teach.  A late-in-the-game interview for a composition lectureship at Yale became an offer of two writing courses rather than a full-time gig – a quick bit of math revealed that I could afford both train fare and my rent, and I gratefully accepted what would become the job that gave me an academic home for two years.**

So in a way, this is a story of elsewhere becoming home. I landed in a less than ideal position – no “real” job, not teaching in my field, not even sure if a tenure track job would ever materialize. I was, to put it mildly, nervous. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure why: medievalists, as no one reading this blog needs to be reminded, are a friendly sort. Before I’d even taken my first 6.30 AM train to New Haven, I had heard from the Yale cohort of medievalists, welcoming me to their ranks despite my position as contingent, as adjunct.  It took me a month or so to feel at home enough in the department to attend the weekly medieval lunches, but once I got my courage up, I realized I didn’t need it – the medieval community at Yale was willing to have me for however long my in-between job lasted.

Adjunct faculty face a number of conditions that makes scholarly life well-nigh unlivable. Wages that don’t reflect the sheer amount of work being done.  Lack of the benefits that make a healthy life possible.  My position at Yale was, thankfully, one that allowed me a more-than-living wage, and provided the benefits I’d assumed I wouldn’t get until I was a full time faculty member somewhere. One might say, “of course they can do that, they’re Yale.” And in some measure, that’s correct – but it also reflects an ethical position that I wish more universities were able to take – investing in the people who help the university run on a course-by-course basis is as important as any other investment a university makes.

That these material concerns – healthcare, money for rent and food – were less of a worry for me allowed me the time and space to appreciate the less material but equally vital concern of finding a community. Leaving Columbia, spending so much time in other places and teaching as much as I did meant that I felt bereft of an academic home. My first year, the medieval faculty at Yale (including Roberta Frank, Alastair Minnis, Jessica Brantley, and Ian Cornelius) all made me feel at home by welcoming me to medieval events and – that most mundane of tasks – being certain I made it on the right listserves and email lists for events. The graduate students were no less welcoming. Fellow Anglo-Saxonist Eric Weiskott made certain that I found the Old English reading group (even when I didn’t have time to prepare, due to all the marking I had to complete for my first year writing courses). Senior graduate students Samantha Seal (now at Weber State University in Utah) and Andrew Kraebel in particular were models for collegiality. In them, I found not only colleagues but friends – people with whom I could share a coffee or pint, lament the state of the job market or celebrate its small successes, and exchange useful critique that furthered my scholarship even as I spent most of my time on teaching. These names stand out in my memory – but really, all you have to do is scan a list of medievalists, both faculty and graduate students, at Yale, and to each name accrues a myriad of small kindnesses that made an intellectual wanderer feel as though she had a place.***

Finding this community – or more aptly, being drawn into the close-knit medieval community at Yale – was, in many ways, a surprise.  But looking back over the past two years, I recognize the theme that had pervaded my scholarly life – generosity. Institutional generosity brought me to a place where the personal and professional generosity of so many colleagues could be adequately appreciated.

I’m not a wanderer anymore. Three weeks ago Sunday my partner Nick and I relocated to the small town of Athens, OH, home to Ohio University and my first tenure-track job.  I’m not contingent anymore. But I take with me the lessons contingency taught me. As a dictionary might tell us, sometimes what is unforeseen or unexpected can change your life. If you’re lucky, it does so in ways that aren’t catastrophic in the way the colloquial usage of needing a “contingency plan” might suggest.

Sometimes, it takes elsewhere, and makes you feel at home.

_________________________________

* Some will remember that my first contribution to this blog was on the occasion of  Professor Howe’s passing in 2006.

** I should also take the time to say that I felt extraordinarily welcomed at all of the universities I taught at in the past two years – Barnard College and Rutgers University in particular. I write about Yale particularly because I spent so much time there in comparison to these other positions. But the faculty and most importantly the students at Barnard, Rutgers, and Cooper were all engaging, kind, and a pleasure to spend my time with.

*** A myriad of other names – friends and advisers at Columbia, many readers of this blog, my co-bloggers, friends at universities from NYU to Berkeley to Austin – also helped make the path less hard. Those names belong here too, those kindnesses recognized, though to do so in anything but this group format would take far too long, and leave far too many people out.