They hired the handsome guy. The ABD, "promising star in the field," guy. Obviously much younger and less experienced than me, but most certainly very promising (see! he's a guy! he has no kids! he's young!). He's working on Brazilian TV writers -- pretty "sexy" topic. Sigh...
He's the one candidate I met, though, so I'm happy. We talked briefly and I liked him and felt we could work well together (we kind of "clicked"). But... we'll see about that.
How did I find out, you ask, given that no official announcement was made in the department and the two people I asked about the choice over email literally ignored my question?
I only found out because "new hire" emailed me
(The only reason I was able to design my own classes and syllabi this year was that they didn't have a TT person in place in my area. In this department everyone, except for TT faculty, teach with previously designed syllabi, even full-time lecturers. This is probably because they have graduate students who teach, but I always had complete freedom to design my classes when I was a grad student -- lucky me!!).
I have mixed feelings about all this. I probably need to steel myself to have this much less experienced and younger person be my "boss" in a way. I'll give it a year and maybe this time next year I'll be working things out so I can come back to "U#1" perhaps.
Anastasia's blog is gone (very very sadly, I really miss you, A), but when she recently wrote that tenure track people feel/think that they are superior to those of us who don't have TT jobs (and lots of people reacted very strongly and even viscerally against this notion/suggestion) this was an extremely simple issue for me. One that I will get to experience "in the flesh" in the year to come.
It doesn't matter to me what the people who are tenure track think of themselves or feel -- most of them (or you) are wonderful, nice people who treat the rest of us "marginal workers" with collegiality and respect. The fact of the matter remains, though, that feelings aside, they/you are superior (position-wise) to us. Full stop. You can't argue against that. And neither can we.
It doesn't matter that I have many years of experience, it doesn't matter that I spent this year planning and designing the classes on my own. I don't get to be the "program coordinator" because at U#2 this is a task for the tenure-track or tenured professors. And I wasn't the one chosen.
I get that and I can live with that, but it's tough. I have to think that this guy is just doing his job, that he doesn't have anything against me. But maybe I shouldn't have braved it and stayed. Because even though I'm valued for the work I can provide to U#2 and the department teaching, they don't want anything else from me, only my teaching. And that's how it's going to be forever. That's why I think that maybe I have a better shot at U#1, even if I'm not TT there.
And the saga continues!!
P.S. It's posts like these that made me remove my name from the blog and try to me more anonymous. I'm probably crazy to be blogging these things, right? Very few people read me, though, so hopefully I'm OK (for now!). And I was just thinking as I "wrote this post in my head" today while walking on campus that this highly inappropriate blog is one of the reasons why I'm not really "tenure track" material. Hmmm... nah... no. Some of you out there blog pretty openly as well. I guess it's just part of the low self-esteem complexes that assault me once in a while. Sigh...
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