Barely promoted

Thank you, President Summers, and may you inspire many others

Wow! This is fabulous news:

Aiming to get more low-income students to enroll, Harvard will stop asking parents who earn less than $40,000 to make any contribution toward the cost of their children's education. Harvard will also reduce the amount it seeks from parents with incomes between $40,000 and $60,000.

"When only 10 percent of the students in elite higher education come from families in the lower half of the income distribution, we are not doing enough," said Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard, who will announce the financial aid changes at a meeting of the American Council on Education in Miami Beach today.

I've never been sure where I fit into the class system. Once upon a time my grandparents bought a house in snooty Weatherwood; my grandfather went to college, as did my grandmother's father. But their own crises and the continued dependence of their children wore them down. By 1982 or so, they were living in a two-bedroom apartment with two of their children and me, with no savings and only my grandfather's income to support us all.

My mother tried to work. Each year she'd have a succession of aggressively part-time jobs. Modeling for art classes and telemarketing were the two biggest categories. Seasonal retail from time to time, but those jobs really went fast. (Once I tried going in to the gift shop of a museum where she'd gotten a Christmas job; she'd told me to call a certain number to verify her employee discount, if I wanted to buy anything. I picked out a Georgia O'Keefe poster and had the clerk call. Annajane had been fired that morning.) Absolute max of ten thousand per year, and usually much less.

Because Annajane had custody, and because my situation was so much more complicated than the divorces the financial aid system is designed to ferret out, she was the only person whose income got listed on my financial aid forms for Impressive. I qualified for a lot of financial aid. (I don't think it would have been very different if my grandparents had been included, given their non-existent assets and many dependents.) But I always had to scramble to eliminate the last $500 or so each semester: essentially, the family contribution.

At Harvard, the idea of eliminating the parental contribution grew out of focus groups with lower-income students last fall. University officials found that many of the students were paying some or all of their parents' share themselves.

Annajane was very proud that I was going to Impressive. But she resented every request made by the institution, even ones that were strictly paperwork. One year she refused for weeks to send me her tax returns—she had 11 W2's, and it was just going to be extremely difficult to photocopy them all.

Annajane was, of course, crazy. It's fascinating, though, to learn that my underresourced family wasn't alone in pushing most of the "family contribution" onto the student. When you're poor, and your kid's at some fancy school, both scraping together even the perhaps very small amounts of money requested and assembling the yearly documentation can be very difficult things to do. First of all, you probably don't have the money. But also, maybe you're not used to keeping those kinds of records, or you don't like thinking about how badly off you really are (let alone telling other people about it in excruciating detail), or you resent the child's success.

It was a little unreal. I knew perfectly well that my classmates' families were paying four-figure bills, and that some of them were making huge sacrifces to do so. But just a few hundred here, few hundred there, and the yearly effort to document the continued need, were a struggle, one which ate weeks of my emotional energy every year.

Parents who earn less than $40,000 are now asked to contribute an average of $2,300. That figure will drop to zero under the new plan, which begins in the fall. Parents with incomes of $40,000 to $60,000 will have their contributions cut to an average of $2,250, from an average of $3,500.

According to the 1999 Census, 47.4 percent of the population had a household income below $40,000 and 67.1 percent had an household income below $60,000.

Harvard officials said they expected the new initiative to cost about $2 million next year and to help about 1,000 of the 6,600 undergraduates.

Think about how cheap that really is, compared to an anticipated total of $80 million dollars in grant aid next year. Think about how few students from these entirely normal backgrounds are at Harvard.

There seem to be some associated recruitment initiatives going on. Whatever. But thank you, President Summers, for putting that money on the table.

Ghosts! (Not mine, for once.)

Go read Belle's True Story.

(You probably already have, since she linked from Crooked Timber, where she's guest-blogging. But if you haven't, go do it now. Duck under the Spanish moss out to the swamp and hide from the grownups for a little while.)

One reason I teach at a college

Sometimes it's rough being at conferences without my old Impressive University badge. Especially when meeting foreign scholars, most of whom seem to think that "college" means "private high school" (as it often does, I think, in Commonwealth countries?)

And, okay, I applied for a lot of post-docs, and didn't get any. I salve my ego with an awareness that my recommenders knew my long-term goal was to work at a college and probably slanted their letters that direction.

But a liberal arts college job was, indeed, my long-term goal (plus, back then I didn't know that it would actualy be easier to get such a job straight out of grad school than after a post-doc), and there were reasons. Like the balance issue. Teaching is going to be part of any position (stop sniggering!), and I wanted to be someplace where the students were good enough to make it fun and where it wouldn't be viewed as wasted time. I wanted to be someplace where research was expected too, and where the teaching load wasn't so rough as to make it nearly impossible.

I have to admit, though, one of my biggest reasons for wanting to work at a college—one that rose screaming from my subconscious during a recent conversation with a friend at a research university. She was bemoaning the extremely narrow intellectual interests, poor work habits, and grandiose career expectations of her first graduate student. How blunt should she be about the record he will need in the current job market? Should she ask pointed questions about lack of apparent progress? And how firmly should she suggest that the student try reading a new book once in while?

I don't want to advise graduate students. I have a rough enough time figuring out my own life and my own scholarly agenda. Back then I feared having the power to change the direction of students' lives, too.

Now I know that undergraduate teachers can have a huge impact on student's choices—especially at schools like Granolan where we have so much contact with students. (One of our seniors is about to head off to Antediluvian, where I strongly encouraged him to apply. I wonder, though, whether my pointing out Claritin's over-the-counter availability might have had an even bigger quality-of-life impact.) But I still I don't want responsibility for others as they pass points of no return. At college graduation, few roads have been closed off. Our students still believe they can go follow new dreams, and it's usually true.

A distinguished guest illuminates our bubble

Two vignettes from the recent visit of a respected scholar to my department:

First: Our guest has aggressively managed his department's recruitment for many years. He believes that in the currrent national budget climate, any school with even pennies to spare should be trying to steal faculty who are dissatisfied with their pay. "If there's someone you've had your eye on for a few years, this is the time to try to get 'em! Time to build!" Meaning departmental strength, of course.

This is a foreign point of view at Granolan. How foreign? A colleague, who had spent most of lunch sitting next to, but ignoring, the visitor, responded, "Yes, we've been trying to build dormitories, but..."

Second: At dinner, I sat next to the guest. At a conversational lull, he turned to me. "You're a woman! Tell me, what happened on Sex in the City?" (Thank goodness I don't own a television.)

As we were packing up to leave, I left my purse hanging on the chair as I put my scarf on. "Don't forget your purse... I always leave mine behind, of course! [wink]"

And I realized: there are many male faculty of the same generation at Granolan. Whether through their own enlightenment, or thanks to vicious correction by my female predecessors, I can't say, but they never, ever, ever say things like that. I can't remember a single similar remark here. Not that there isn't an occasional leer. But they basically can handle having professional conversations with women much younger than themselves. This is how PC was supposed to turn out, right?

While we're on gender relations gone wrong, two brief and deeply irresponsible reactions to the Naomi Wolf/Harold Bloom discussion: first, who hasn't been patted or pinched by someone world-famous? (Okay, I admit, the surreptitious spank in a public hallway I once got is pretty different in, um, impact from the kind of incident she describes.) Second, an immediate reaction of vomiting instantaneously? Wow! You go, girl! That must have hit his, um, ego pretty hard.

Where will Annajane go?

There's good news and bad news about Annajane. The good news is that I talked with her yesterday, and it was a real conversation. I told her about the tenure decision. She understood, and wasn't surprised. She asked about my friend who had been about to have a baby back when I visited. I'm amazed she can remember anything from then. I didn't have the guts to ask directly what the very bad period had been like for her.

(She added, "It's strange how you and [friend] are so close, but you're so different. She has two children now, but you've never shown any interest in that at all." That's right, I'm not telling my family anything about the baby effort because I don't want to upset them—and because Nanna's a pre-Vatican-II-style Catholic! I'd almost forgotten myself!)

She was cheerful and laughing, but her consonants were a bit thick. Overall, she sounded like she usually does when she's being medicated out of a manic episode. She says they're planning to release her on Thursday. Which might be true, might not be true—she always thinks she's about to be released. I'll have to talk with someone at the hospital to know for sure.

The bad news is that there isn't any obvious place for her to go next. Right now she sounds way too together for the dementia unit of a nursing home, which was her last out-of-hospital bed. But I think she's lost her place at the adult home she's been in for the last two years (even though they're demanding payment for February, becaause they didn't get 30 days notice that she was leaving). She was suprised to hear that Tom-her-case-manager had picked up her belongings from the adult home and left them at Nanna's.

But, would an adult home be the right place? What level of care will she need? Do any of the medical professionals understand what happened a month ago, or have any idea whether it could happen again?

Time to make a lot of phone calls. (Her doctor at the new hospital has not yet called me back, even once.)

Gradual progress in the UK

The Guardian (or should I call it the Observer, since it's Sunday?) reports on changes in NHS coverage of IVF: Infertile couples to get just 'one shot' at IVF treatment. An oversight agency has apparently suggested that 3 cycles should be covered. Currently, some local authorities don't cover IVF at all.

Doctors also want the NICE guidelines implemented in full. Richard Kennedy, secretary of the British Fertility Society, said: 'One cycle of treatment - which is by and large the sort of level of provision now - provides an opportunity to get pregnant but does not provide a reasonable chance of a pregnancy.'

Today's paper also includes an aggressively illustrative case study (two covered cycles failed, but the third, self-pay, succeeded).

Kicking the stork's butt

Dawn at This Woman's Work, who is getting her book underway (yay!), has up some links to infertility books. From the Amazon entry for The Elusive Embryo:

Well, maybe it's just funny for those of us dealing with really severe male factor. But still.

My cup runneth over

Over a year ago, I had to apply for the sabbatical I'd be due in 2004-05—contingent on tenure, of course. It was disorientingly early. The "research plan" I wrote was pathetic nonsense.

This fall, while I was preparing my case, was also when I needed to be applying for anything I wanted to do during the sabbatical. I let many deadlines slide past—of which I most regret the ludicrously early October 1 for the Radcliffe Institute. In the end I only sent out one application. The Nirvana Ergonomic Research and Development Institute (NERDI), in Nirvana, California, will be having a special program in an area that's not quite mine, but is hot and which I'd like to move into, in spring 2005.

Applying to NERDI forced me to confront a lot of things I don't like to think about: does anyone in my field respect me? Am I capable of doing research? Et cetera. Most of the people I asked for letters were quite junior collaborators of mine (well, okay, a couple of them had collaborated with organizers of the special program, too). I had to get back in touch with my doctoral advisor, with whom I, like many of his students, had a volatile relationship. That week, he liked me, although I don't know for certain whether he sent a letter.

The center of the application was a one-page statement of research plans. I closed my eyes and thought about what work I'd really like to say I'd have done, two years later. I didn't have time to check the literature in this fast-moving area to see if it had been done—a big risk. I said a bit about my background and prior work—why there was at least a tiny chance I'd be able to pull off what I proposed. A couple of short paragraphs whined about my geographic and intellectual isolation at Granolan and pointed out that the post-tenure sabbatical year was a perfectly-timed chance to address both issues.

(The work that went into writing that application essay paid off later when I had to write an "explanatory statement" for my tenure documents.)

NERDI had promised a reply by January or February. Nothing came in January. As February crawled along, I approached my mailbox with fear each morning.

The letter came Tuesday, in a small envelope. "This is going to be bad news," I said to the secretary, as soon as I saw it. (And, the day before the damn phone call, I really didn't need any bad news!) But, when I picked up the envelope, it was too heavy to be just one sheet. I opened it and read that they've invited me for the entire program, with some funding! I jumped up and down and shouted, "I'm going to NERDI!" Everyone poked their heads out of their offices and stared.

An obvious question, at least for those who know the whole story: what about the baby project? How will moving cross-country for half of next year fit in? Well, as Beaker put it: "If we get more good news, we'll deal." And, if we don't have more good news by the time we're out there, there are more and better clinics around Nirvana than there are within 50 miles of Granolaton. So, I think all systems are as just as go as they were going to be.

Yet another mommy track?

I was vaguely offended by a recent Chronicle Careers section cover story praising LPUs ("least publishable units"):

Professor Up-and-Coming is, as I was, a young woman in her first tenure-track job, with two small children at home. Her husband, unlike mine, is also an academic in science, but at a different institution. She trained, as I did, in some of the best labs in the nation, with some of the biggest names in her field. Now she's working, as I was, at an institution very different from the ones where she trained, in a department that contains both friends and foes, and in a tenure system that doesn't allow much time for getting on your feet...

How is she supposed to balance all those conflicting factors?... How does she learn to love herself in her role as a faculty member/mom/wife/person in the larger world, without measuring herself always against the harsh standards of others?...

I submit ... that for Professor Up-and-Coming, the LPU can be a means of building self-confidence and self-worth as well as of building her CV and her tenure package... Writing that LPU can be a refuge from an angry spouse, a crying baby. An LPU, honestly produced, will stand as a symbol of progress.

It's not that I think there's anything wrong with LPUs, or with the pragmatic concerns generally used to defend them. (And yes, there's an egregious one in my dossier.) But why is so much of this piece about being female, being a wife, and being a mother?

I did an excellent job of wallowing in perfectionism and self-doubt at a disorienting new institution. Without any poopy diapers at all.

"I'm calling with good news"...

... the dean started off.

How does the stylish professorette spend the first hour after learning she'll be tenured?

This one is spending it reinstalling Panther on the brand-new-super-fast-shiny-big-brained Powerbook Beaker pulled out as soon as she was off the phone. (See, it thought it was living in Japan when it got booted up.)

But we're about to go get some champagne. I promise.

Coming soon: new title, updated user-friendly layout, and posts with content.

I promise.