Walfuck

I spent way way way too long in Walmart this week. Some of my soul has been sucked away, I am sure of it. I hate walmart on many levels (oh * so * many * levels). I refuse to shop in that store, seeking alternatives or going without if none are immediately available. Inside the store, it is a non-stop assault on every sensory level. I think there is a psychic assault going on as well, but I can't quantify it in the simple and physical terms like decibels of the booming and ubiquitous walmart tvs or the number of maze like turns they strategically create with their towering shelves full of underpriced inventory. But there I was Thursday, just another lost and tormented soul wandering the narrow child choked aisles of a walmart superstore.

Why would I ever do such a thing, given my general hatred of shopping and specific loathing of walmart? I'm not sure if I was had, tricked, hoodwinked, or bamboozled. Shit, I'm not even sure if I did this to myself. I think I did a little. It seems in retrospect that I trusted too much to social convention, that I assumed what I still believe is a shared general consideration of the other (there's that naivete again). Well, it won't happen again, I am quite sure of that. Not with this guy at least. As the saying goes, trick me once, shame on you. Trick me twice, shame on me. (or in the words of our president "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again")

How did I even end up at walmart in the first place? I met one of our new students for lunch. And over lunch, I volunteered to take him out if he needed to run some errands. He had just arrived from Canada by plane, brining very little with him. He's living in the dread and dreary grad dorms because he can't afford a car here in the states just yet. So here this guy is, on campus, knows no one, without a car or the means to get off campus (we have one erratic local busline here in Nowhereville CT). And (as it turns out) he is without even sheets, towels, and a couple of other necessities. Now that last one I found out after the fact....I figured he'd need things like a lamp, you know, dorm type stuff. When I realized he had no sheets, when I saw the soiled-looking thin bedspread hastily thrown over the bare extra long twin mattress in his dorm room, I simultaneously experienced several conflicting feelings. I felt very bad for him. I felt quite guilty for having been so monsterously annoyed that I had been stuck at walmart while he shopped. I still felt monsterously annoyed and taken advantage of because my feet and head hurt from the hours spent in walmart. And I felt total shock that someone who is even remotely grown up and intelligent enough to get into grad school would fail to pack sheets and towels. I understand the need to travel light, but even Ford Prefect carried a towel for christ's sake.

Post hoc guilt or no, I was and remain highly annoyed that my good intentions to offer a little bit of help had been, at best, misconstrued as an offer to mother this maturity challenged individual. So how did I, a feminist and the least doormatty person I know, end up in this situation? Out of noble intention for a mutually beneficial goal, I contend. But some background is necessary for that to be clear. Otherwise, you might think I'm some kind of frikin' martyr. I don't know the word for what I am (I know there are several four letters ones that have been applied but that's a different topic), but I think it should be something like a confronter. When I see a problem around me, I am highly inclined to address it fully.

When I first started graduate school back in the Bronze Age, I was astounded at the complete lack of community in my department. My shock was provoked by the seemingly obvious functional necessity for even a loose community, as the rural campus afforded no other resources for the new (and possibly international) graduate student. And yet there was nothing.

When I got to CT in July of that year, I immediately contacted my department (well, by "immediate" I mean after I spent a day panicking because I thought I had lost my cat, who turned out to be hiding under the air mattress....the ONE piece of furniture that had not been packed on the strangely elusive moving truck). I wanted to get in there and start doing stuff because (a) I was bored shitless here in rural nowhereville; (b) I had a big ugly house to paint and make homey and while I like a little nesting now and again, I'm no Martha Stewart; (c) I figured there would be important things I should do before school started, like meet with my advisor to discuss the finer details of the program requirements, select and register for my courses, figure out how things worked so I could get the most out of my graduate experience. I don't really know what exactly I was expecting to find when I got in there. I guess I thought there would be some faculty and grads around. I realize now that this implicit belief must have come from my observations at the (state) university where I finished my undergraduate degree. At Other State U., summer undergraduate courses and faculty/graduate research had ensured a year round population. Other State U had only offered an MA in the field of study, and had not been as prominent a school as This State U, so I think it made sense for me to transfer the model of industriousness from the smaller less known U to the larger one.

I was wrong.

When I called, the secretary seemed perplexed by my questions. She explained, somewhat impatiently, that all the information I needed "should be on the white board". I had not yet studied presuppositions in detail, but I knew immediately that her choice to use this term with me was indeed a bad omen. It disturbed me that she believed I should somehow already possess knowledge of how to possess knowledge despite the clear fact that I was the proverbial "tabula rasa". I told myself that this was not necessarily indicative of the climate of the department, that she may simply be one of those not so great staff members who is suffered to continue in her position out of a mixture of pity, convention, and seniority.

I was wrong.

It turned out that the secretary was just one of those people who blandly followed the orders and directions she was given. None of the faculty or current grads had made a point of reaching out to incoming students to orient them to the new department. Therefore, the secretary's attitude reflected this. At one point, the secretary mentioned that I would have had more information if I had been admitted as a graduate assistant (GA). It seemed the grad assistants received a letter of some sort that explained things, according to her. Before learned just how little information was in the offer letter the GAs received, I was pretty pissed. I had been excluded from consideration of an assistantship because I was married to Dr. Bob at the time, and the sexist faculty member who was in charge of departmental assistance (money) had erroneously assured me that spouses of faculty (which Dr. Bob was going to be) had an automatic tution waiver. I felt doubly screwed then, since not only did I not get any funding my first year, but I also didn't get any information that an incoming student should get.

I came to realize that many students in my class were as confused and befuddled as I was, GA or not. The offer letter that the GAs got included only a little information, the most useful of which was the date for the university GA benefits fair where the GAs were able to interact with students from other departments where they actually took the time to inform their incoming graduate students about things like course registration, credit limits and requirements, photocopying accounts, plans of study, ID cards, setting up e-mail accounts, changes of address, and at least some of the details you need to get by even your first week in grad school.

What happened to me was not a localized problem. As I spent more time in my department, I saw other manifestations of a sort of pervasive academic rot. The same year I transferred out of that department, the "big name" tenured prof (30 years?) quit and moved to another university. This place was falling apart, the academic departmental equivalent of the House of Usher. It seemed to be rapidly moving toward a shitty reputation for the department and school, and ultimately my degree would suffer. "A PhD from Other State U.?" people would ask in horror. "They actually have a PhD program?".

Further, this was not just a problem in my department. There were a couple of other programs which looked to be going down the same treacherous path. The tenured faculty can hang on, delluding themselves into believing that things are going ok although junior faculty flee like rats from a ship and undergrad enrollment is (at best) a few thousand bored kids if the department is lucky enough to teach a general studies course. But you can see the effects more rapidly in the disaffected and haunted faces of the grads. In my department's case, the undeniably harsh effects on the graduate students seemed to come from a (theory oriented) department stuck in the middle of an identity crisis that transcended even this university. The old "apprentice" model for graduate training and education does not fit anymore, and yet there is a strange nostalgia for it in some programs. This allows retention of some of more dysfunctional aspects of graduate education and training. The obstinate refusal to adjust the "good old days" of grad life to the modern day reality of post secondary education (the corporate model that is rising in universities around the country) results in a pretty shitty role for grads in any department on any campus unless there are mediating factors like a good chance for private sector job placement in the field of study, a specific faculty effort to reach out to grads (through professional training opportunities or eve just social events), or a rich and vibrant surrounding community to fill in some of the gaps left by the academic one.

Some of this was apparent at the time. Some became clear only much later, after I had changed departments and had found the space to think about and research this issue more carefully. What I knew back then was that it sucks. I don't like it. And I wanted to change it. Of course, I know that I can't. The scope of the problem is massive. I can't make sure the attitudes in higher education will not move so far in this overly capitolist (and now fundamentalist/fascist) direction that there will be no job security when I and my peers have our PhD. I can't make sure that my theory oriented training will actually be relevant even in a contingent, profit driven, applied skill academic labor context. But I believed (and still do) that we each have the ability to help change what is immediately around us. It didn't need to be as bad as it was in my old department when I first got there. All that was necessary was a push in the right direction...the establishment of even a loose community. And to get there we needed better access to information and a forum for informal communication of and about that information. So I decided to work towards those goals. By the end of my first year, I had volunteered to put together the "welcome letter" for new students in my department. By the end of my second year, I had recruited the assistance of several other grads and we were including information about the area and non-campus based resources. By the end of my third year, I had started a yahoo group for grads at my university which now has over 100 students from about 15 different departments (given the decentralization of graduate study at This State U, this really is an amazing feat). I have fliered and stuffed mailboxes. I don't expect that everyone's life is better for it, but I do believe I've helped to set up resources so people can help one another and themselves better than they could when I first came here.

Now that I am in a much more organized and graduate friendly department, I don't have as much to do on the level of orientation and basic information. My department takes care of that. Nearly all of the students are funded, thus the general morale is better. There are social events and even some professional development opportunities. The faculty in my new department do not feel as threatened by the changes in higher education since they do research and therefore are not all and only theory based (for better or worse). In general, things are as good as they get at Other State U. in my current department. But the faculty character in my division of my current department is in a state of transition and it is not as good as it used to be. The old guard changed not too long ago, no one is really stepping up to replace them, and there is a slowly emerging split between the two areas of concentration in my division. I hope it does not turn into a rift, but in the meantime, the students are faced with some rather uncomfortable realities of funding confusion, inconsistent academic policies, unclear degree milestones, and a faculty/student disconnect.

As a result of this, some of us established grads have decided to be somewhat more accessible to the incoming and new students - providing them with information that is absent from, glossed over, or wrong in the limited interactions they have with our new division head (or with their advisors, who get their information from the often wrong new division head). We have also tried to do things like encourage involvement of new grads in social activities such as colloquia dinners and other get togethers. On the other side of our division, the faculty are responsible for this encouragement. Their students thrive in an inter-connected, collaborative environment. On our side of the division, it falls to the grads to do this for one another or live in isolation in our labs, sometimes to the detriment of our research or academic goals (e.g., the "connected" grads have more funding opportunities, more publications, better travel resources for conference attendance).

To be continued.....maybe. Someday.