For many of those who dream of going to university and who dream of being an academic someday the academic life is often surrounded by and encased within a web of romanticism. The problem with this is that many of those who romanticise academia have a Californicated rather than a real view of university life and of the professors they hope to study with. In actuality, the academic life is very different from the fantasies that fill the minds of those academic wanna bes who romanticise higher education and the academic life. In fact, academia is closer to Peyton Place crossed with The West Wing if The West Wing was much ado about very little if not nothing, than to the fantasy world of mediaeval romance and chivalry which was never really real in the first place.
When I was young and naive I was one of those who romanticised higher education. These romantic illusions and delusions about academe were largely maintained during my undergraduate years thanks to my limited knowledge of and experience with the more Peyton Place and The West Wing aspects of life within the ivy-covered sometimes gothic walls of higher education. Fortunately, this romanticism did not survive my postgraduate years thanks to a number of smacked by reality moments during my postgraduate sojourn including professors who blackmailed female graduate students into having sex with them, its more powerful professors leaving their wives for the less powerful client younger graduate students they worked with, and its ultimately petty political and ideological machinations.
My most intimate experience with the petty political and ideological machination side of academe happened around 1997. I was hired to be one of, if memory serves, six teaching assistants working with six faculty members for a new academic programme at the University at Albany in Albany, New York, Project Renaissance. While I no longer remember all of the dramatis personae in the Project Renaissance saga thanks to the passage of time, I do recall that Project Renaissance was the brainchild of Lil Brannon, who had a doctorate of education from from East Texas State University (one of the many teacher's colleges that became universities in the post-World War II era and now Texas A&M- Commerce), the head the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, CETL, at the University at Albany at the time.
Project Renaissance's goal was to provide a multidisciplinary living and learning educational experience for selected students. All selected students were assigned to Mohawk Tower, the 22 storey skyscraper in the centre of Indian Quad (now Indigenous Quad), one of the quadruplet quads on the University of Albany campus. At the heart of Project Renaissance's educational focus was a course called Human Identity and Technology, a course that all the students had to take and a course which fulfilled the University of Albany's general education requirement, something that made it more appealing to some students. The goal of these courses--there were eight sections of the course--over the two semesters was to explore how individual identity was impacted by groups, cultures, and institutions, how human identity was impacted by various technologies, and how human identity was impacted by nature, religion, the arts, literature, society, genetics, gender, race, and ethnicity
Six faculty members and six teaching assistants were hired to teach this course and its course sections. The faculty and graduate assistants were assigned to two groups with each group putting its own spin on the class.. The course I was assigned to, which included V. Ng, some bloke from the mediocre Religious Studies Faculty at SUNY Albany, and another chap whose name I don'tt recall, decided to put a historical spin on the class, something I was not particularly comfortable with given that it seemed to me to replicate the world history courses that were already offered in the History Faculty at the University at Albany. I thus decided, in my discussion section of the course, a section that supplemented the larger course taught by the faculty to at least one hundred students, to be more topical emphasising identity--class, ethnic-racial, gender, sexual/gender identity--in my section. Needless to say, this was a course massively unworthy of the name Renaissance. By the way, I was also uncomfortable with the large size of the generar class meeting--100 students--since it seemed to me to undermine what I thought was one purposes of Project Renaissance, to wit, to provide greater student-faculty intimacy in both its courses and its interactions
I made my concerns public at one of the planning meetings for my group. As a consequence within a few days I was taken off the project at, I was told, the request of the faculty members that ran my group. They didn't even talk to me about this issue before they did the you're fired rag. They simply branded me a heretic--I was told there was concern about my general focus on identity and sexual/gender identity in particular--and ingloriously dismissed from Project Renaissance. They apparently wanted nothing but yes men. Needless to say I learned a valuable and important lesson in how petty power and petty ideological politics play out in the postmodern American university that day.
My ignominious dismissal was, to say the least, a serious problem for a graduate student like myself as I no longer had an assistantship and hence no longer had financial support for the school year. Project Renaissance, perhaps as a result of History Faculty lobbying for me, gave me an administrative assistantship. This lasted a semester instead of the school year as promised. I was summarily dismissed from my administrative position at CETL and Project Renaissance claimed that they no longer had the monies to support me for the next semester. It turned out, of course, that this claim of poverty was a lie. Just before the end of the term I discovered a letter that said that Project Renaissance was planning on getting rid of heretical me and giving my monies to someone else instead.
I contacted the Graduate Student Union of which I was a card carrying member about this injustice and provided the union with a copy of the letter detailing the fact that the powers that be were giving my money to someone else and thus unfairly dismissing me, and filed a formal complaint with the union. The union representative met with Brannon and, at least on one occasion, with Brannon and me. Brannon continued to claim pennilessness throughout the meeting. This experience with the union complaint process provided me with yet another valuable lesson which I have never forgotten, a lesson in the limited power of unions, and in the limits of unions in general. The union was of absolutely no help to me. In fact, the union rep seemed to be more interested in pleasing the powers that be than in helping me in a case where the powers that be were clearly dissembling. As a result, I was only able to continue my doctoral education thanks to
the History Faculty which provided me with an adjunct position so I could
continue to pay the rent, buy food, and pay for and take classes. By the way, this lesson would be replayed several years later when I taught at SUNY Oneonta where the union conceded to the bureaucrats the right to hide the classes of adjuncts during the pandemic making sure that students could't enrol in the class. a situation that made it impossible for me to continue to teach at Oneonta given that it meant that I would only have one class and would thus not have health insurance and that my pay would be halved, both of which made it impossible for me to continue to commute to Oneonta from Albany to teach given the associated costs. So I retired.
Project Renaissance did not last long. My sense was that many administrative personnel and faculty members at the University at Albany were sceptical about the programme and raised questions about the it during the reevaluation phase despite claims by Project Renaissance that it aided student retention, something increasingly important to the increasingly neoliberal bureaucrats who run second or third level research universities like the University at Albany given the declines in state financial support for higher education. Additionally, the founder of the programme was no longer there to fight for it. Like so many faculty and educational bureaucrats in American universities these days Brannon seemed to be more interested in moving up the corporate ladder to better paying and higher status academic bureaucratic duties and used Project Renaissance to help accomplish this upward mobility bureaucratic feat. Brannon moved to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1998 where she initially coordinated that university's master's programme in English Education and later became the director of Charlotte's writing programme and the dean of the College of Arts, a position she currently holds at UNCC.
As for my romantic illusions and delusions about academia, they died the day I was wrongly made redundant. I was, as Nick Lowe says, nutted by reality, the reality that academia is just like any other modern corporate bureaucracy in the core nation world and the reality that academic bureaucrats are just like other modern bureaucracies coloured as they are in Niebuhrian grey. The soap opera that is academia is actually, and one should be surprised by this, a mirror of life in general. It. like them, is full of petty
rivalries, petty back stabbings, petty blackmailings, petty adulteries, and petty kafkaesque soul stealing bureaucracies. While I am not sure that that old proverb about the less important an institution is the pettier and less important its politics is is true, I am sure of that academia, which is kind of an alternative counterculture that gives academic administrative personnel and its academic faculty a degree of limited and limitedly important power, is, in the final analysis, filled to the brim with a lot of petty power games that mirror those, if in much less important and impactful form, how governments operate, how economic corporations act, and how humans typically behave. And that ain't romantic at all.
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