Research is My Dirty Little Secret

In a time of sweeping budget cuts and anti-intellectualism, one of the parts of my job that is first on the chopping block is this amorphous thing we academics call "research."

I don't know about you, but my institution is squeezing more and more out of everybody, the most precarious lecturers most of all. 

"Work creep" is everywhere--for example: we got rid of our college's website manager, and now our personnel manager will be doing all that website work.  The part of her personnel work that is getting displaced is the travel stuff.  Our departments have to figure out how to internalize that labor.  This is happening everywhere.  Meanwhile, administrative bloat is a thing: those flow charts of who reports to whom are mind-bogglingly complicated, and seem to change every year.  

For one unit of advising time, I'll be asked to advise not 45 students, but 70, for example, in the next budget cut.

I'll teach the same amount of classes, but head count will go up 25%.

Lecturers will lose classes.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. 

In this context, committees are convened to strategize how to survive these budget cuts, creating "urgent" service work.  Much more work is spread among fewer people.  Though I'm glad to have a secure job that renders me one of those people who stays in work, I fear for the increased precarity of those who do not.  And I am sad about what it's doing to academia in a cultural moment when intellectual "elites" are losing status in the public sphere by the minute.

Because beside lecturers' job security, what gets cut? What is the unnecessary "fat" in our work lives?  

Research.  

If it's not directly serving students-- and in administrative mumbo-jumbo that means, is it using student unit hours (head-count) as part of instruction?  Are you making your teaching/research obligations so efficient that you can literally do one by doing the other?  Are you leveraging your research to translate directly to tangible, measurable, immediate forms of student success?  Does your research have immediate impact on the classroom?  If not, good luck finding the space in this squeezed budget landscape to indulge yourself in the luxury that is thinking, writing, thinking, writing.

Superfluous to the obligations of student retention and over other imperatives of higher education (oh, for example, producing meaningful knowledge), research can only get done on the side-- it's definitely become my dirty little secret.  

Some of my colleagues are champions of me taking time to pursue my love of research.  They "take the hit" for me by stepping up to committees and making their service work count "double" for their programs and mine.  They compensate for my bureaucratic negligence, all the while enabling the slow creep of bureaucratic entanglements (assess more, report more, figure out more software interfaces, represent your program here and there and there... you know the drill).  I owe those colleagues many, many margaritas.  

But others, less sympathetic about the squeeze that my attention to research might entail for their workload, may find it a sign that I have too much time on my hands-- I'm not serving students enough and not on enough committees-- if I am discovered in the act of carving out time and space to write and think.  You're producing research?  It's like some kind of infidelity to the care of family I am supposed to be doing.  

How would this culture change?  Do we really need a better budget to make people think research is valuable to what we're doing at a liberal arts, teaching institution?  I don't think so.  I think there's something much worse going on here that we need to reckon with: the value of intellectual work in this historical moment, the neoliberalization of higher education, and the linking of educational outcomes entirely to whether or not students get jobs when they graduate.  I would like to have my battles on those grounds-- cultivating really compelling cases for the value of intellectual work in the world-- and not in the hallways of my campus or in the land of nasty work emails.  

"I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie": Or, Why I Should Put My Children in a Bubble

The other day, my nearly 7-year old came home singing "I like big butts and I cannot lie!"

Oh. My. God.

What have I done.

Titillated by my horror, she started singing it louder, and more, and smiling giddily while doing so.

Then, my 3 1/2-year old, who had been watching all of what is commonly known as the classic "child/parent nonverbal horror-titillation feedback cycle," joined in.  Because obviously.

Oh. My. God.

I'm a terrible mother. How did this happen?  How did I end with two children delightfully powering out this line from Sir MixaLot's "Baby Got Back" in the bathtub?

In moments like this, you have two choices, as I see it.  One: laugh, embrace the passing on of a classic song of my own generation to my kin, and appreciate my kids' exposure to all the pleasures of popular culture.

Alternatively, and less likely, I can undo their learning.  Good luck.   Parental advisory noted, but how was I supposed to see "big butts" coming down the pike?  I mean, she's only 7 for goodness sake!  I wasn't prepared for this.

Ok, so, let's go with option 1: laugh and try to make lemonade with these lemons.

I think of myself as a mediator of the world--not the maker of the world-- for my kids. I love grabbing these teaching moments by the horn, and relinquishing the pretense that I can be a kind of saran wrap around my kids, a prophylactic to cultural effluvia.

"Baby's Got Back" isn't really effluvia, either.  Actually, it was a feminist anthem of my generation.  Who can argue with "my anaconda don't want none unless you got buns, hon!"?  And c'mon, this is funny: "you can do side-bends or sit-ups, but please don't lose that butt!"  The song was an irreverent thumb in the eye of the expectations of femininity in American culture, which is and certainly was (in  1992, the year I consider the peak of musical craziness in my life) raced as much as it's gendered. That is, embracing a big butt was both a rejection of patriarchal culture's expectations of thinness and a rejection of white culture's ideals of femininity.



Sure, the song has problems. Sure, it still sexualizes women and dissects them into body parts, and does so in ways that don't do any kind of woman any favors.  The video of the song repeated all the same misogynistic tropes that the genre was famous for, except it did so with women who have large rear ends instead of skinny ones.  Not all that radical, you could say.  In some ways, sure, the song didn't undo as much patriarchy as it perpetuated.

Ok, but flash forward to your 7-year old girl coming home singing it in 2017.

I carry on the campaign to teach kids that women are whole people and that they are not reduced to their looks, regardless of the girth or lack thereof of their backsides.  We are more than our backsides.   But this song isn't the first chance I've had to have that conversation, PA-LEASE, people.

From Hillary to Melania to Michelle, ample opportunities exist to explore how women's whole identities matter little compared to their looks in American culture.  Sir MixaLot isn't the only one preaching that message.

The real challenge is to not be horrified by my child's lost innocence, because I can't keep her in a bubble forever.  She's going to grow up in this white supremacist patriarchal culture, so I'm going to start from that premise.  Instead of pretending that we aren't all breathing in all that toxicity all the time, whether we choose to recognize it or not (aka "white privilege"), or, even more importantly, whether we have no choice in the matter in the first place, I am going to unpack "Baby's Got Back" with my kiddos.

My near-7-year old loves talking about racial and sexual history and politics; she is profoundly interested in understanding how people operate and interact, and how power has worked in history.  So, even though I haven't quite figured out my approach with this particular song, I will.  By bringing that song home, she's opening up a wonderful window into the context of her daily life, and thus an opportunity to talk about these difficult conversations. I'll leave the sex stuff out (for now), but the gender and race stuff is being handed over on a silver platter; I want to rise to the occasion and take this chance to talk to her: why was the song was so powerful, what kind of cultural work was it doing when it came out, why might people not like hearing her, much less her younger sister, sing it, etc?

It'll be fun and important, one day, to deconstruct the cultural shenanigans going on in this Friend's episode, "The One with Ross's Inappropriate Song".  Why would this song be "inappropriate" in this show?  Why is this storyline "funny", and to whom?  What assumptions about race, class, and gender does the joke rely on to work," and who might it hurt?



At the very least, in any way my young girls can receive drips and drops of the message that big is beautiful, to shore up some strength against the tidal waves of "big is not beautiful", I'll take it.  Sir MixaLot did that for me and who knows how many other young women, and, obviously, still is.  The song may reinforce some kinds of problems even as it rejects one form of oppression, but I'll take it.

I'm not putting my kids in a bubble. My parents didn't put me in a bubble, though I do sometimes wish I hadn't seen so many damn Disney movies. Seriously.  I'm still traumatized by the realization that life after marriage is not happily ever after, just sayin'.

But if I can't control what my kids absorb in their hours when they aren't under my roof, I can at least parent the shit out of this song.