An important anniversary

Ten years ago today - well, close, I believe that it was on Monday, January 11, 1999 - I started the job that I still have now, although, as you will see as you read this, my work conditions have both greatly improved and, in some respect, worsened.

Back in the fall of 1998, I was working (I should write "struggling") with my doctoral dissertation. I had just completed an academic year on the fairly prestigious University of Pittsburgh Mellon Fellowship, during which I had managed to write the first two chapters of that opus. Sometime in the spring of 1998, my department chair had offered me a one-year only position as Lecturer and Teaching Assistants' Coordinator. Since I was out of funding, accepting that position was a no brainer. So, during the fall 1998 semester, I fulfilled the duties of French T.A. Coordinator in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, where I also taught two French classes (I frankly forget what those classes were, but one of them must have been French Conversation.) I also went "on the market," and applied to about 30 schools for a tenure-track French teaching position. Not having a Ph.D. in hand was an issue, and I scored only two MLA interviews (the Modern Language Association Conference is the official meat market for those looking for jobs teaching English, linguistics, or foreign languages, literatures, and cultures.)

That year, the MLA was held in San Francisco, and I had to face the cost of schlepping myself to the West Coast. At the time, we were extremely strapped financially, and Rick told me that I could go to the MLA for my interviews only if I could get some financial support from my department to do so. This was a really silly ultimatum, since going to the MLA for an interview meant that, perhaps, I'd be able to score a job, and finally gain financial independence from him and move away. So, I went to beg my department chair for such assistance, and he did nothing short of humiliating me by telling me that Rick and I had very serious money-management issues if I had to come and beg for financial aid to go to the MLA (years later, when I could afford it, I began donating money to my old department, specifically to help fund one graduate student to attend the MLA if he or she had scored interviews there! At the time, I did tell that chair that I was doing this because of that one day when he had so blatantly humiliated me, in spite of the fact that he knew nothing about our financial circumstances.)

But, to make a long story short, I never did go to the MLA. Around mid-November, my supervisor told me that he had received a call from the man who is my current department chair at the school where I teach. The Department of Modern Languages and Cultures was in dire need of a French instructor - the department chair, who taught French, had just passed away after a long battle with cancer, and someone was needed fill her position. This position would be temporary, but guaranteed to last until the end of the 1999-2000 academic year, and would most likely turn tenure-track. My supervisor strongly advised me to apply, reassuring me that the Pitt department chair was all for it, and that the department would deal with the situation if I were to land that job (i.e., they'd find someone to replace me at Pitt for the spring 1999 semester.)

I did send my application materials, and went for an on-campus interview sometime after Thanksgiving, probably in early December, 1998. The interview was pretty summary - I had a discussion, in French, with two faculty members who taught French (one was a native French speaker), and with the Department Chair, but I did not even have to teach a class. My assumption is that those people were incredibly crazed (I realized later on that one of the French instructors who had interviewed me was teaching two overload courses, which she had taken over after the Department Chair had passed away), and that they were just quickly interviewing a couple or three candidates for this position, so that they'd have it filled by the beginning of the spring 1999 semester.

Around December 18 or so, I was offered the job - again, a temporary position, guaranteed until the end of the 1999-2000 academic year, with a good chance of turning tenure-track thereafter. The Chair was urging me to accept the position then and there, but I asked for about 48 hours to think about it. Rick and I discussed the matter, and decided that I should accept the job. After all, it was at a school located only about an hour and a half from Pittsburgh, and the job had a strong chance of becoming permanent. So, I accepted it.

The next thing is that this meant that I would now be separating from Rick for good, and would take Claire with me. Claire did not respond well, at first, to the notion of being uprooted from her home and school, and living away from her father (although the true nature of what was going on in our marriage was never discussed with her - in fact, the most nutso part of this entire deal is that it's never been discussed - she inferred a lot over the following years.) When, on a late December day, we went to look for a place to live, Claire was in tears for the entire day. I was lucky enough to find a fairly cute - and brand new - two-bedroom apartment located just a couple of blocks from campus. I signed a lease within a day, and got ready to move.

The move itself proved a bit problematic, because there was an ice storm that prevented us from driving the U-Haul truck that we had rented for a couple of days, so I ended up moving into my new place on the Friday or Saturday before Monday, January 11, the day when classes started. I showed up for my first day of classes with no syllabi (I had not been able to get a hold of my textbooks until my arrival, and my computer was still unpacked.) However, things went quite well, and the teaching was no problem at all, in fact, it was the easiest part of the job.

Miraculously, Claire adjusted extremely well to her new life in rural Western Pennsylvania. Her new school (a public one, she had been in Catholic schools since kindergarten) was much more relaxed than the rather punitive school that she had attended for her 6th grade and the first half of her 7th grade. She turned, from a rather shy kid with a lot of school anxieties, into a confident social butterfly who got involved in a zillion extra-curricular activities. Of course, there would still be moments of teenage funk, but, for the most part, Claire was a very easy teen to live with and parent - and she was always tons of fun to boot.

On the professional front, things went well. My Chair informed me that, should the Department be authorized to convert my position into a tenure-track one and run a search the following year, I would have to have that Ph.D. in hand by the time I would apply for it. Thus, I spent the entire summer of 1999 finishing the damn dissertation. All I can recall from that summer is that I would sit at my computer around 8:00 a.m., and sometimes work until past 10:00 p.m. I only took a break to go to Boston with Claire for three or four days. But the big reward was that I got it done, defended my dissertation on November 19, and received my Ph.D. in December.

It was actually not until the 2000-01 academic year that my position was authorized as tenure-track by the administration, and that my department was able to run a search to fill it. Of course, I was the "internal" candidate, and was quasi guaranteed the job (a funny bit is that a woman who had been a graduate student at Pitt with me, and who had played a dirty trick on me during those years, had applied for this position, she did not get it, of course, but was hired as a temp by my department, and it did not take long for those who had decided to hire her to regret bitterly having done so. She lasted two years here, and we got along well the entire time that she taught at my school.)

So, I finally got hired as a tenure-track faculty beginning in the 2001-02 academic year, but was given some time toward tenure. I got tenured in the spring of 2004, and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in the spring of 2006. So, my working conditions have greatly improved. My salary is quite good, and I have a good deal of job security - I feel enormously grateful to have a decent job in my field, in which tenure-track positions are rather scarce.

However, my school underwent fairly nasty financial circumstances between roughly 2004 and 2007, and, as a result, close to all temporary faculty positions were eliminated. As a result, I am now the sole French instructor at my university, which makes it really challenging to maintain a French major (not that we have a whole lot of students majoring in French - we do have a good number of French minors, though.) We make do by sharing classes with another school via ITV, but I sometimes question the soundness of this type of stop-gap measure.

But I am very satisfied here, although it is kind of tough to live in hick-town, Western PA - no good restaurants, no good movies, no decent entertainment, you have to rely on friends, on home-cooking (you must purchase your more exotic ingredients in Pittsburgh, though), and on Netflix. I do not have many folks here whom I consider real "friends." In fact, the only persons whom I do truly consider my friends here are my colleague Mary-Jo, who is an exceptional woman, and my now ex-student, Jonathan. My colleagues are not really my friends, for many reasons* (one is a borderline friend, I do trust her and find her solid and wise, but she does have a husband and four kids, and is very busy with her family life.) So, yeah, life here is a bit lonely.

I will most likely retire from the institution where I now teach. For one, it is a place so focused on teaching that one's scholarship suffers from the commitments one has to make to teaching and to university service (i.e. committee work.) Since my scholarly work has been so lacking over the past few years, I consider myself virtually unhireable at any school that is not very similar to mine, and it is unlikely that any school could ever match my present salary, and, anyway, I would not be hired with tenure. Thus, there is absolutely no need for me to try to leave. I actually do like my school. The kids may not be ivy-league material, but they are very nice and highly respectful of the faculty for the most part, and some are actually very bright. And I kind of like to be able to make a difference in the lives of those kids who are first-generation college goers, come from very modest family backgrounds, have lived very sheltered lives on the intellectual front, and have had no exposure to the world at large. I have said it here many times, I love my students to bits. I have only met one student whom I have disliked intensely since I started working here.

Faculty members are what faculty members will be - most are very dedicated (both to the school and to their students) and hard-working. But academics are a quirky bunch - many are utterly socially inept, and it's kind of "interesting" to have to deal with that aspect of working and co-existing with such folks. This maybe another reason why I have not really made many friends here - I have very little patience for those people who have no social skills and can be rude to others without even realizing that they are.

Anyway, my life has changed tremendously, and for the better, since I landed and started this job. Again, I consider myself very lucky to be here and to have a job that I truly love.

Finally, a short list of my most precious memories/legacies of those past ten years:

On the professional front:
- My French 4 class applauding me on the last day of class, at the end of my second spring semester at my school.
- An intensive French class (of which my now friend Susan was a member), which bonded like no other. That group was very special. I think that it was during the 2000-01 academic year.
- Revamping some courses that badly needed it, and creating a few. I am teaching, for the first time since the spring of 2004, a French literature survey class (from the 18th century to the present), and, when revisiting what I had done for that class back then, I couldn't believe how much work I had put into it at the time. Of course, it makes things a bit easier the second time around.
- Going to France with a group of just four students. It was absolutely grueling, because we never stopped moving, and were absolutely exhausted by the time we reached our last stop, which was Cannes. There was one more excursion to a perfume factory, and my students begged me not to go. We didn't, and went to the beach instead, and then cooked a pasta dinner in my little hotel suite.
- A few top-notch students who are now my friends: Mandy, whom I visited in Brussels last June; Susan, who now lives in Northern Ireland, where I visited her back in 2006. Josh, who taught English in Taiwan for a year after his graduation, and who usually calls me when he is in town. Austin, probably the most brilliant student I ever taught, he was amazing. Amanda, who was also incredibly bright, but who was always doubting herself - she went on to get an MAT in Rick's program at Pitt, and was his best student for that year. Andrew - cute, cool, smart, and sassy, I love him, and try to get together with him at least once a year in Pittsburgh, where he lives. Adam, who graduated last year, and now teaches in Virginia - he loves good beer even more than I do. Jonathan, who met his girlfriend (with whom he has a 14-month old son) in my French class, back in the fall of 2004 - his passion for politics and literature is contagious (he is also my housekeeper and plant-waterer whenever I am away.)
- Getting my PhD.
- Landing the tenure-track job.
- Getting tenured.
- Ranking #1 on the list of candidates to the rank of Associate Professor in the spring of 2006.
- Chairing Faculty Senate.

On the personal front:
- Seeing Claire thrive here, being in many school concerts and shows, and also in two University theater productions.
- Seeing Claire go through four years at Pitt (well, her last semester was in the Bay Area, but it was for two college internships) and doing extremely well there.
- Seeing Claire reading her poetry at least twice.
- Seeing Claire get admitted to the most two prestigious MFA programs in poetry in this country.
- Meeting Marty, in a town where worthwhile eligible men are few and far between.
- Forging, and maintaining, a very solid friendship with Rick.
- Becoming friends with Mary-Jo. I can't really remember how we began to bond, but she did take one of my advanced French classes for a good number of semesters, and that's probably how it all started. She is definitely one of the very best friends that I have, and we will remain friends for life.

On the domestic front:
- Becoming financially independent. Well, actually, Rick did paid for the car that I now own, but it was in lieu of child support. He also paid the insurance for said car, but I no longer get any kind of financial help from him (we still pay Claire's rent, and share that bill every month.)
- Moving to the place where I now live in the summer of 2001. My first apartment was a little two small - only two bedrooms, and my desk had to be in my bedroom - and the building was one of those prefab jobs and it was very flimsy at best (and the sewer system would constantly clog up, once causing a nasty flood in basement storage room.) Even though my landlords are very quirky and overly nosy, as is one of my neighbors, I do love my place, although, some day, I may consider buying a house. This is the one thing on which I cannot bring myself to making a decision, because home ownership scares the hell out of me.
- Being able to decorate my place as I see fit and to my taste. When I lived with Rick, he basically made every decision related to home decor.
- Being able to make a yearly trip to France/Europe.

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* As an aside, I will mention my friendship with a very crazy woman who had been hired as a temporary instructor at the very same time as I had begun working at my school. This woman actually lived across the hall from me for the first semester that I taught here, and remained at my school for two-and-a-half years (she quit, but would probably not have been rehired, because she was not exactly responsible as an instructor.) This so-called friendship turned rather sour, as this woman's favorite pastime was to belittle me - most likely because I managed to finish my dissertation and she, after ten years, had not made a stitch of progress on hers (she once told me that I had been able to finish my dissertation because Pitt was less rigorous than the University of Michigan, where she was getting her doctorate - which, I far as I know, she never got.) I have learned to be very cautious about befriending and becoming too close to people who are my immediate colleagues.