I walk the line

The picket line, that is. We've gone on strike. Having faculty be a union still strikes me as a little odd; I grew up thinking of unions as for factory workers, construction, that sort of thing. The oppressed proletariats earning bread by the sweat of their brow, not the intellectual elite. What would Marx think?

It's all about what you'd expect from a bunch of striking academic geeks. The Modern Languages contingent is carrying signs with slogans in languages from Arabic to Spanish, while Classical Studies uses Latin and Greek. Some Music faculty have signs with what I eventually realized were the first two bars of the music for Solidarity Forever (also Battle Hymn of the Republic, also my alma mater's fight song, but I'm pretty sure that's what they meant). Engineers have gone in for functional notation: f(no)! There are also the puns, ranging from mildly clever to dreadful, and a few sexual references to our administration.

Strike in German is "Streik," which I'm sure has caused some passing onlookers to mutter to themselves "what are they doing asking for more money, damn academics, can't even spell."

I've been feeling, more than I'd have expected, a sense of ... solidarity, I guess. And affection. Marching and attending rallies with my colleagues, spending time walking and chatting with people I don't usually see much, carpooling in. Sort of: these are my people, with their incomprehensible signs, awkwardness and slight diffidence, intellectual chatter and harried disorganization. I'll happily carry signs with them, and snark about it later, just like they will.

Evaluation

I suspect that very few people write glowingly about how enjoyable, enlightening and empowering their annual review processes are. (At least not if they're the ones being reviewed.) So I'm try not to hold the one I'm currently being subjected to to a very high standard.

Perhaps it has something to do with being the data and computer science librarian, but I like things to be logical, impartial, quantifiable. (At least in my work life; at home I'm a disorganized romantic.) Sessions taught, patrons helped, guides and tools developed, feedback positive or negative. Output, that is; actual results. The success I've had in bringing data files and computer monographs to the masses. But as far as I can tell the only aspect of our job that is in fact evaluated quantitatively is collection development, which appears to be judged entirely on whether or not we spend our budget. Which strikes me as bizarre - what if I spent the entire budget on Winnie-the-Pooh?

All of which leaves me at something of a loss when dealing with the form I'm currently attempting to fill out. These are some of the sections I have to fill:

"Demonstration of ability to communicate effectively" with various (specified) groups of people. Well, I communicate with people all the time - talk to them individually, in groups, write them memos, send email. But how do I demonstrate that the communication was effective? Should I be keeping a running tally of how many people complained that they couldn't understand me?

"Demonstration of ability to work co-operatively" with same specified groups of people. Including patrons. If I let the patron ask the question and then answer it, am I working cooperatively with him or her to find the answer?

What if I can demonstrate that I have the ability, but I haven't actually been using it?

And this is my favourite, here in all its glory: "Demonstration of ability to relate assigned duties to the overall goals of the library." It seems that assigning me duties that serve to somehow advance the library's goals should properly be the task of my supervisors? If they've neglected to do so, should I be using this space to explain how I subverted my supervisors and managed to somehow fulfil library goals anyways? Or, am I supposed to just write a little essay discussing how my assigned duties are in fact congruent with the library's goals - that is, demonstrate that my supervisors did a good job in assigning me duties? Looking back, I think that's what I did last year, but the reasoning behind it escapes me.

Princeton's Students

When I worked at Princeton I sometimes half-seriously wondered if a eugenicist consulted with the university admissions department to admit or turn away students based on their physical appearance. They were almost all slender, attractive and free of acne. (Contrast Windsor, where a randomly chosen group of 5 or so may have more size variation than Princeton's entire undergraduate population. Possibly more acne as well.) The uniformity of appearance was underscored by the unofficial dress code - a sort of discretely preppy look that relied heavily on Lacoste and Abercrombie and Fitch.

As individuals, I quite liked most of them - they were well-mannered, intelligent, hard-working. En masse they left me wanting to dye my hair magenta, get a few random piercings and start handing out radical pamphlets of some sort at the door to the library. Some insane percentage of them - 35% or so - went on to become investment bankers.

They frustrated me intensely.

I remember one student who told me that she was really enjoying her thesis research, because after she graduated she didn't think she'd get to work on anything interesting again. She was going into banking, of course. Why, I wanted to know, if she found it so dull? Oh, well, she shrugged. As if the question hardly made sense. And she was one of the treasures - the ones with a spark of real interest.

And that was the thing. I wanted to shake her, her and all the other little proto-bankers, lawyers, financial engineers. Look, I wanted to scream. You're at one of the greatest universities in the country, and everything's open to you. You could study literature under a world-famous novelist, paint with acclaimed artists, learn about social welfare or cutting-edge physics from some of the best there are. You're bright, beautiful, talented. You could be anything.

The selection process for getting into an Ivy-League is intense, though as far as I know no eugenicists are actually involved. The requirements include high SAT scores (generally gained through months of intense coaching with one of the test prep services), high grades in pretty much every subject (GPA counted across entire high school career) and a full schedule of extra-curricular activities to demonstrate well-roundedness. Serious applicants to the Ivies take on the task of preparing for university as a full-time business, with committed parental financial backing. Their parents need to be very supportive, wanting all this for them, the top school, the high-powered career, the hard-working student they can be proud of.

And yet - many of them seemed to have this peculiar joylessness to them. A way of being industrious yet listless at the same time. As if it was all the same to them - calculus, the Comedy Club, track and field, volunteer work, whatever 101. Everything just another bit of resume padding, another hurdle to jump, another box to check off, and they're a little tired of it all already, before they've even started. And their parents wanted all this for them, and pushed and guided them to get there, but somehow, I think, I hope that if they knew, they wouldn't want that.