between the lines
pointed perspectives and penetrating punditry

What I Learned at the U. of I.
by Jack Cashill

Ten or so years ago, when my academic stars were in perfect alignment, the University of Illinois offered me a professorial gig.

There was a fine irony here. Ten or so years before that, had I sent Illinois an application, they would have pretended no one lived there by that name and sent it back unopened. Oddly, the forces that made me unemployable in the late ‘70s caused me to be entirely employable a decade later, but that
is only part of the story.

The larger part is what I learned when I got to Champagne-Urbana. In this, the era of crunched budgets, a little revisiting might be in order.

The Exile
I can trace my exile from academia to an elevator ride. The Modern Language Association was holding its annual meat market for new academic recruits at a New York City hotel. The ride was long, and my two elevator mates were blithely discussing the job interviews they had scheduled. He had 14. She had eight. I had zero—as in interviews and in future.

As you might surmise, "he" was black. But "she" was white. Universities had restacked the gender deck only after I started grad school. With a flurry of self-congratulation, the old bulls in academia decided to apply the black model of compensatory hiring to women regardless of advantage. My widowed mom, with whom I was staying in her Newark housing project, didn’t quite get the logic of this "disadvantaged" stuff, but with an eighth-grade education, what did she know?

Nor could my mom quite figure why universities gave preferential treatment (and still do) to foreign nationals from any country that didn’t produce blondes naturally. A colleague of mine learned about this malarkey the hard way. Desperate, he paid his own way to the dry gulch town of Cedar City, Utah, to interview for a job only to be told, in an honest moment, that the University of South-South West Utah "had to" give the job to his competitor, a noncitizen male from India. They had invited my friend only to pay tribute to the "equal opportunity" poster hanging on the wall. He promptly quit academia.
As it turned out, he and I and most of our male colleagues were driven out of the university and compelled to wander the globe, Ph.D.s in hand, years behind our more sensible peers who had jumped right into law or business or lawn care. Just a year ago I learned the depth of this oddball diaspora when I ran into a friend that I had not seen since graduate school. An award-winning writer and poet, he had been the best and brightest among us. Now, he is a marketing manager in Topeka.

I, at least, had the good sense to marry the smartest and most employable of my colleagues. Back then women were the only people men could marry. Good thing. Had I been gay I would have been doubly screwed. Since then, however, opportunities have improved for gay men. Now even homespun universities like Truman State offer courses called "Queer Theory" and their more ambitious counterparts offer "Queer Studies" majors. Mom wouldn’t understand this either.

Teaching Loads
Obligingly, my wife chose UMKC because I needed a town big enough to support me. Forced to earn an honest living during my exile, I had gone into advertising and emerged as one of America’s few creative directors with a Ph.D. Priding itself as having America’s best advertising department, Illinois needed at least one faculty member with this combination.

To find it, they had nowhere to look but among us exiles. Oh, sweet irony! And so they recruited me to teach "creative" and not a whole lot of it. The profs I met at Illinois use the almost comical phrase "teaching load" to describe their classroom time. I say "comical" because my "load" at Illinois in the normal semester would have been three hours a week. One class. At junior colleges and smaller private ones, by way of contrast, the load is often 12 or 15 hours a week.

No one I talked to at the U. of I. took the students very seriously. Whenever I asked about teaching, the other profs would just look at me funny. When I asked the dean, he confided to me that there were only two teaching criteria that mattered. "First, we don’t want to hear too many complaints about you. Second, keep your hands off the co-eds."

Publish or Perish
The reason some profs spend so little energy on their teaching is that their first priority, certainly at larger institutions, is research. The phrase "publish or perish" persists because it is true. An ambitious university like U. of I. would fire Mr. Chips in a heartbeat if he weren’t showing up regularly in peer-reviewed journals.

The problem with research isn’t so much the doing of it as the meaning of it. One year, while still working on my Ph.D., I edited the "works in progress" for the American Studies Association. So frivolous were so many of the "works" that I decided to insert a totally silly bogus entry and challenge my colleagues to pick it out. None of them could. My entry? Diminutive Doings: Dwarves and Midgets in American Literature. By comparison with much of what was actually being produced, it seemed substantial.

At Illinois, the ad profs spent most of their energy producing papers and books on the psychology of advertising. But as a professional in the field, I had never read any of it nor even heard of anyone who had. Like most profs today, they were writing only for each other.
Given the limited audience, the hipper among them now write in a post- modern jabberwocky that bears only a passing resemblance to English. The ordinary citizen needs an interpreter just to read the catalogue. Consider, for instance, the description of Smith College’s Queer Studies concentration (no, I wasn’t kidding):

"It rejects essentialized conceptualization[s] of sexuality, gender, and sexual identity as innate or fixed. It represents a deconstruction of hegemonic conceptions of sexual and gender categories within straight, gay and lesbian communities. In queer studies, the interpretation, enactment, and desta-bilizing of sexual identities is linked to that of gender categories."

And for just 40 grand a year, your kid could learn to speak like this, too.

Crunch Time
As kind as the folks at U. of I. were, I ended up rejecting the job offer. Too much of what I did in the world had a point for me to engage in something so conspicuously pointless.

Fortunately, local universities are not as "ambitious" as the U. of I. nor as preposterous as Smith. At KU, the teaching load for professors in the ad program is nine hours, not three. MU does not offer a Queer Studies major.

Still, if they looked, even our relatively sane local universities would find a little bit of the pointless and the preposterous creeping into their own backyards. And what better an excuse than a budget crunch to weed it all out.

The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.