on academic temporality

Music: Happy Particles: Under Sleeping Waves (2011)

Last year I was at a meeting with colleagues to discuss our graduate admissions process. We were---and still are---having trouble balancing the way the graduate program has admitted in the past (admit more than we can fund) and the new realities of graduate education (the primary being, of course, the availability of jobs). I cannot recall the exact context, but when discussing advising loads a senior faculty member with whom I'm fairly close asked, quite earnestly, "you're not full professor yet?"

I remembered the question, but have forgotten just about everything from this meeting. Why? Because, first, the question is somewhat novel. I'll come back to this.

Closely related to the novelty of the question is that it's especially demonstrative of the perception of temporality in the academic environment. To me, it seemed like I was "in rank" as an assistant professor forever, a sense no doubt amplified because I had been functioning (in terms of service) as an associate for some years before I was promoted. I'm also prepared for experiencing an eternity until the next promotion. For me, there's no need to rush; it seems like full professorship is something like knighthood: soon afterward, you get a horse and then are asked to be an administrator of something [insert painting from Edvard Munch here]. Or slay some dragon (we used to call my chair at LSU, the incomparable Andy King, "the Dragonslayer"). Yet my colleague, fully promoted, administering, and carrying more responsibility than I can imagine, perceived things as moving much more rapidly than I did.

When my own self-interest is not involved, however, I'm noticing I have similar feelings about the academic temporality of others. When I arrived here in 2005, I befriended many of the incoming grads and we "grew up" together; the time seemed to have been much longer than the pace of recent years. In many ways, because the slowed experience of arriving in Aus-Vegas, I think my friendships with the folks I met in 2005 are stronger than those who came after. Anyhoo, case in point: when two of my advisees said they were done with coursework last fall, I had a mental jaw drop: what? You're already done? But you just got here!

What I'm describing, of course, is not unique to the academy, but just about any profession---and not reducible to that. As we age, it seems that "time flies." In a NPR story I heard last year---no, wait, it was two years ago---a number of scholars were asked about this common experience. Why does our sense of time seem to speed up? There is not consensus in answering. Some suggest it has to do with the aging brain. Others, the reality of death. The most satisfying explanation, seems to me, is the experience of novelty. When we are thrown into a novel context---or when, rather, we seize on the present in its uniqueness and panopoly of detail---are are more self-aware and conscious the swirl of "now." When experiences are routine or familiar, they feel more rapid or speedy. Routine, then, is the mind-killer: you don't notice routine. You notice the odd.

This feeling of time's speed is related, I think, to the experience of psychic or paranormal phenomena. Those who have studied this stuff refer to probability and the way in which we tend to remember the odd at the expense of the familiar: every time the phone rings a possible person calling may come to mind. I look at my phone, and lo, it is the person I imagined. I remember this match. But the fact remains the phone rings all the time, and the person I imagine calling is not the person calling; I forget the un-match, the missed guess. In retrospect, however, I can lead myself to feel that I have magical abilities. The same, uncanny experience happens in accidents: I can remember, quite vividly, the first car accident that I was in. The car spun around, it seemed like forever, and I literally had time to put on my seatbelt as the driver screamed to me, "Oh my god Josh! What is happening?" The accident took no more than ten seconds to total the car---and we both survived without so much as a scrape. But as we sat on the hood of the car, antifreeze spilling onto the pavement, me holding up a make-shift sign for passers-by that read, "Car for Sale," my friend and I talked about how interminably long the wrecking seemed to take.

All of these explanations rely, of course, on what Heidegger termed "vulgar temporality"---the impression time as a string of nows flowing into some eternal future. And there's lots to critique here, and Heidegger's analysis of an authenticity before death and the past-in-the-future (the experience of guilt, the posture of anticipation, etc.) still has a lot to recommend, at least ethically. Even so, that we nevertheless experience temporality in terms of speed is a reality, and it's an experience that bears upon our sense of life's many enjoyments and disappointments.

In the academy the experience of time is especially noteworthy because of the (seemingly never-ending) series of hoops that mark novel moments: an essay for publication gets published; one finally writes the dissertation; the degree is awarded; one gets a job; one gets a tenure-track job; one is promoted to tenure; and so on. Each of these goalposts mark incredibly rich, detailed moments that we remember. Older colleagues, who have long since past these goal posts, experience time as moving much more quickly and, perhaps, too readily assume a certain future when younger colleagues may feel like passing the next goalpost is taking forever.

I suppose the lesson here---if there is one to be learned---is that the temporality of our undergraduate and graduate students is experienced as moving much slower than it is for the faculty. What assumptions do I make, as an educator, based on my experience of "routine?" As a scholar?

Perhaps we might say that a vita is not simply a resume, but a map of how a given academic feels-out, or feels-up, time?