Saturday, October 29, bumps and glitches and making refuge. REFUGE symposium in progress, as photographed by Alexa Huang by J J Cohen Sometimes I get into a funk about the devaluing of the humanities, the proliferation of bureaucracy within academia, the mania for assessment as a box-ticking exercise over the cultivation of superb pedagogy in its varied forms, the transformation of higher education into a service economy structured around quick, underpaid gigs rather than the longterm cultivation of shared endeavor Within that larger picture directing an institute has grown each year to be more of challenge, since the support mechanisms something as ambitions as GW MEMSI requires simply are not there.
On the positive side I have learned to be quite a travel agent, reservation maker, financial form filler out, social media advertiser, and so many other skills I did not ever think I'd need.
Since it is so important to me that MEMSI guests feel welcome from the moment they arrive I put a great deal of effort into small things -- and have learned for example to stop by the hotel in person the day before to ensure that everything is in place, to double check with the library that the proper guest list has gone to the front desk, etc.
And: never a guarantee that the best plans are not going to encounter bumps of all sorts. I often think about what I could do if I had better structural support and I am so grateful for the graduate students and faculty colleagues who consistently step up to the plate to help me. This week has felt especially hard because I did something I almost never do: I gave up. I finally waved a white flag when an introductory, undergraduate course so important to me and to the engaged humanities I want to enact was nibbled to death by two years of administrative and then resource-related pressures.
I just could not write one more email defending something that had proven so successful I have the assessments from last summer to prove it! As you can no doubt tell, I am also being hard on myself for having done this and am hoping it is not a sign of things to come. But there is a part of me that is kind of relieved that the clock is ticking on MEMSI: the Institute's internal funding expires next year, after a ten year run. OK, that's the gloomy part. Here's the radiant part.
