Off-off-Ivy: On Life as a Pseudo Academic
Still, “Off-Ivy” doesn’t quite capture it. The Off-Ivy-Leaguer may not call 600-year-old institutions their home, but they still fight over the same bunch of valedictorians as the Ivies, and they work on the same sort of destination campuses that feature prominently in charming university towns.
Here at Albany State University, by comparison, as it is with all low-to-mid-tier public and private universities, I suspect, I am Off-off-Ivy. We cater to a demographic of student that, by its very definition, didn’t exist before yesterday: the first-generation college student. We are the diploma mills that Stan Aronowitz and other radical educators have condemned, but schools which have become more and more essential now that college degrees have replaced high school diplomas as basic signifiers of employability.
The Off-off-Ivies are the schools that are recognizable only within a 100-mile radius or by the odd out-of-state alumnus. They’re tucked away in small to medium towns across the country. Towns like Niceville, FL and Glen Ellyn, IL.
It is confusing to refer to Off-off-Ivies using shorthand, as in, “I’m going to state.” You have to be more specific. Any given US state has 10-30 schools that satisfy this moniker. “State” should have at least 80,000 students, I think. That way people know what you mean if only by sheer probability. Off-off-Ivies, however, are shy of this population figure by a magnitude of ten or fifteen. Acronyms are off limits, too, because in all likelihood they’ve already been taken. “ASU” refers neither to a school in Albany, GA or one in Angelo, TX.
I’m not complaining. Really, I’m not. Life Off-off-Ivy has its perks. Sure, I don’t get any sort of research assistants, nor do I enjoy single-digit annual teaching loads. But my office hours are hardly ever overtaken by inquisitive students. This means an extra 8-10 hours each week where I can work on whatever it is I’m writing. And it doesn’t matter where I publish or if I publish at all. Years ago I wrote a book review that went out in a digital newsletter. In other words, it was hardly something that might be called a “publication.” But this review turned just as many heads at my school as the mid-tier articles and books I’ve published over the years, which is to say that nobody really noticed. And why should they? I’m not writing about curing cancer or helping struggling parents give up addictions to gambling or alcohol. I write about philosophy and theory in a department of psychological science. And I earned tenure!
In my early professor days I reached out to a fellow traveler in the obscure field of theoretical psychology. I was obsessed with a book of his titled—well, the title was rather long and it took up the whole cover of the book. But in all those words there was nothing that remotely resembled experimental psychology. The problem for him was that he taught in a department of psychological science at then City College of New York, a sort of urban Off-Ivy with loads of history and prestige. His colleagues kept giving him a hard time for his work, because he didn’t keep cages of pigeons in his office or use expensive brain imaging machines. He was too busy writing long-winded essays about impossible figures from quantum theory such as the Klein Bottle. Those didn’t count towards his tenure, he told me.
This scholar was forced to straddle the fence, so to speak. He wrote the kinds of articles that would eventually earn him tenure, and he wrote the books that enchanted him. Had he been at an Off-off-Ivy, such as SUNY Maritime on the far Eastern peninsular edge of Manhattan, he may have earned tenure without publishing so much as a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. What I mean is that Off-off-Ivies tend to pay more attention to teaching than writing or research prowess. Faculty at my school have been known to occasionally earn tenure without a single article to their names. We don’t exactly put that in our faculty handbook, but it happens every once in awhile.
And the ball is relatively low for what students expect in the classroom. I’ve learned that all I have to do in order to get top student reviews—these being the most valuable kind of currency at Off-off-Ivies come faculty evaluation time—is 1) show up for my classes when they’re scheduled and 2) follow the list of activities promised in the syllabus. That’s it, and I’m not entirely sure about number 2. I follow schedules and lesson plans the way anarchist Emma Goldman followed genteel social convention. This past semester, for example, I completely forgot to give students one of only four scheduled quizzes in a class. I was tallying final grades and couldn’t figure out why a big chunk of the points were missing. Not that anybody noticed. I’m not teaching at Dartmouth or Columbia.
For years I worked at finding my way into an Off-Ivy school. Actually, I once got a letter of interest from an elite liberal arts college—a sister school established back when women weren’t permitted to attend the Ivies. The department was considering me for a limited term position, but I hadn’t identified my area of specialization within psychology. They wanted to know if I studied Social Psychology or Emotions and so on. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I was a theoretical psychologist, and I wasn’t sure I could tell them what that meant should they have asked. And so, I never responded.
Ivies and Off-Ivies have extremely specific job advertisements. They don’t want “Someone who can teach general psychology and statistics,” which is how our adverts always read. Ivies want “A cognitive psychologist with specialization in neuroethics of foster parenting,” for example, or “A clinical psychologist with an established research program in palliative care with widowed ex-cons.” In fifteen years of searching, I’ve never come across any ads looking for “Psychologist with passing interest in existentialism, ed psych, antipsychiatry, and distance running. Experience teaching online graduate students a plus.”
To solve my fitment problem, I sometimes pretend to do something more substantive and less abmiguous than psychological theory. For example, for two years I did health psychology research with the hope of opening the door to teach in medical programs. But then I went and spoiled my newly established reputation on articles titled “Existential Biology” and “Falling Out of Time.”
A few times each year my wife and I are stopped by a stranger in Sam’s Club. It’s never Bennigan’s or the local brewpub; it’s always Sam’s Club for some reason, and I’m always wearing muck boots and have hay in my hair. “Are you doctor Whitehead?” the stranger will ask. Erica and I become spontaneously animated, smiling with kind but feigned familiarity. “Uh huh,” we say in unison, unsure of which Whitehead they’re referring to. “You were, like, my favorite professor,” they say.
As Erica goes back to checking off items on our list, I’m wafted away into the clouds. “Was I?” I say. “That’s so kind of you to share.”
Afterwards, the meandering children and traffic jam of carts at the checkout aisles no longer bother me. I suddenly have all the time in the world. My eyes stop on a pair of flatbed carts with meat, chips, buns, and cans of soda stacked five feet high. I imagine the party they’re getting ready for, and whether their kids—or their kids’ kids—will wind up in one of my classrooms some day in the future. Erica and I don’t have to argue about who pays, as I’m feeling charitable.
When we get to the parking lot, I admit that I don’t remember the student. “Maybe they took me online,” I say. I pretend that it’s no big deal: just another day of running errands in my anonymous rural Southern town. But I feel like a freshly baked tray of cookies inside.
Comments
Post a Comment