Invisible Adjunct is calling it quits, both leaving the academy and shutting down the blog.  Having given herself a deadline for finding full-time employment, and having been failed by the job market once again, she is following through, and moving on.

Reading IA has been an important aspect of my blog-life this year, and her departure will leave a significant hole there.  I’ve had a hair-raising year, but reading her always trenchant commentary on the contemporary state of the academy has never failed to remind me that I have the luxury of griping about things, in this space, without fear—under my own name, for the most part, with my students reading, in the safety first of a tenure-track and now of a tenured position.  And reading the conversations of her commenters has made me more carefully assess why it is I do this job, why I continue to value it, and, not least, that at times someone else is forced to bear the costs of my success.

My fondest hope, tonight, is that we’ll soon find the Invisible Adjunct in the blogosphere again, no longer adjunct to anything, but central, and completely visible.

Gee, it’s nice to be in the news for something other than hate crimes or hoaxes thereof.  This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] has a lovely consideration of the beauty and impracticality of our relatively new campus center.  Designed by Robert A.M. Stern, the building is gorgeous but uninviting, somehow untouchable.  It never ceases to remind its constituency that it is a “campus center,” not a “student center.”

“Conservative” is the perfect word for the campus center, and that may be the root of its difficulties. It’s easy to imagine trustees oohing and aahing as they walk through on tours, but not high-school students. It’s also easy to understand the dilemma facing the architects hired by colleges to plan buildings for their 19-year-olds: The people approving those plans are not regulars in game rooms or at parties with hip-hop and trance—they are deans and presidents, lawyers and bankers. The irony of the Smith Center is that it does have one room that would be perfect for late-night parties. It’s known as “201,” and it has vaulted ceilings and cozy niches. It would make a great club, if it weren’t the room reserved for trustees’ meetings.

One of the issues that has come up repeatedly in the discussions of campus “climate” over the last few weeks has been the near-total absence of a public sphere here at Pomona; our quads are generally deserted, and our students gather in atomized clusters rather than in public spaces.  A colleague of mine has asked several times, and quite pointedly, whether there can be any viable political discourse in a place this devoid of real public centers for that discourse to take place.

It’s a challenge, I think, to make a campus designed by architects and administrators work for students whose interests might run counter to those of the powers that be.  At my undergraduate institution, students had taken over an area in front of the student union and rechristened it “Free Speech Alley,” an area where political speechifying and public organizing of all varieties took place.  The space didn’t seem amenable to such organizing—it was all concrete, with nowhere to sit.  But it was in a heavily-trafficked pathway between the main academic quad and the union, and it became, gradually, because of the persistence of the organizers, a real public space.

I’m left, today, looking around our pristine campus, wondering where such gathering places might be, where students might begin spontaneously to create a culture of debate and discussion.  It can’t be made for them; no amount of comfy furniture will make the space genuinely theirs.  And it won’t happen overnight; such adoptions require the passing of time to become tradition.  But I’m holding out hope that some group of students, motivated by our recent conversations, will seize upon a spot on this campus where they might create their own Free Speech Alley, outside the restrictive visions of architects and trustees.

Today, on Salon [subscription or ad-viewing required], the travails of the mid-list author in contemporary publishing:

If you don’t want to hear about the noir underside of publishing—if you’re a writer longing for a literary career, or a reader who’s happier not knowing that producing and marketing a book these days involves about as much moral purity as producing and marketing a pair of Nikes—I suggest you stop reading now.

If, on the other hand, you want a sobering view of the publishing industry’s focus on the bottom line, go read the full article.  I’m left even more convinced that many writers—and not just those writing for a scholarly audience—would be well-served by a move back toward a gift-economy model of publishing.

Or perhaps it would be best just to cut our losses, hold our collective breath, and just plunge on through.

Really, I’ve never been one to look longingly backward in time.  I wouldn’t go back to my childhood, I’m fond of saying, not even for cash dollars.  The good parts of the past come along with way too much bad, and there’s no guarantee that a do-over would include the kind of knowledge necessary to avoid the bad parts the second time around.

So, okay, this semester has been way too painful to want to repeat it.  No mulligan.  What I need instead are strategies for getting through the second half without succumbing to the stress produced by the quantity of overdue work surrounding me or the despair that is pervading the campus this week.

It occurs to me, though, that the academy is—or maybe it’s just the academo-bloggers I read—living through some kind of protracted Friday the 13th/full moon/millennial-type period.  There are scandals afoot everywhere I look:  a university president accused of plagiarism, another firing tenured faculty on spurious grounds.¹

Perhaps it’s simply, as I opined at Invisible Adjunct last year, that having found myself in the midst of an academic community in crisis, such crises are all I can see.

So:  breath held.  Plunging forward.

¹Scott has been following this story in remarkable detail.

The Claremont Police and the FBI have released a statement saying that they have concluded their investigation into last week’s apparent hate crime, and in so doing have announced that the victim is now the primary suspect:

According to their report, two witnesses have come forward to positively identify Professor [name deleted] as the perpetrator. Furthermore, the announcement said that interviews with the alleged victim revealed inconsistencies in her statements regarding the incident.

My brain—or perhaps it’s my heart—is furiously resisting this result:  if something like this happened to me, I’d be mighty inconsistent about it… who are those eyewitnesses, anyway…

So far, the only response that makes any sense to me, the only response that gives me any hope, comes from the president of one of the other colleges in town:

Professor [name deleted] is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Nonetheless, news that the victim of an alleged hate crime on our campuses is now a suspect in that crime is shocking to all of us. While each of us is dealing with our emotions in our own way, we should also confront this recent news, as we confronted the vandalism, together. We will be setting a community meeting early next week, when all students are back on campus following spring break.

Above all, we must focus on this: even if the vandalized car and slogans were a hoax, our responses last week were right and appropriate….

However painful and confusing this latest development is, we cannot forget the reasons we were outraged in the first place; we cannot avoid the challenges that hatred poses to our community, to our country. We will continue to work to make our campuses welcoming, open, diverse, and productive so that all of us can freely teach and learn to the best of our abilities.

The question that’s haunting me now:  What do I say to my classes on Monday?  How can we talk about this in a way that rejects the reactionary “you guys totally overreacted; allegations of racism here are all part of a liberal plot to make us feel bad” response that is already building around here?

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, March 16—The White House continued its attack today over Senator John Kerry’s recent claim to have international support for his presidential campaign.

In a short session with reporters in the Oval Office, President Bush challenged Mr. Kerry to identify whom he is talking about when he asserts that some foreign leaders privately support him over the president.

Worry not:  I have right here in my hand a list of 57 known foreign supporters of Senator Kerry.

HATE CRIME INCIDENT ON MARCH 9TH, 2004

Detectives from the Claremont Police Department and Agents from the FBI are continuing to follow-up on many leads regarding the hate crime incident that occurred on 3-9-04 at the Claremont Colleges.  As a result of the continuing investigation, several witnesses to the incident have come forward and provided significant information.  The Claremont Police Department is urging any additional witnesses or anyone with information relating to this incident to contact either Lieutenant Stan Van Horn or Detective Eric Huizar at (909) 399-5420.

It’s spring break here.  I’ve got a conference paper to write, and some sleep to catch up on.  Things may be quiet around these parts this week, but rest assured that there is much thought going on beneath the surface.  As Ralph Ellison suggests, responsible hibernations are only preface to renewed social action.

I’ll be back.

Yesterday, Pomona College held a teach-in on Marston Quad, a usually-deserted lawn in the center of campus.  Faculty from across the curriculum had been invited to speak, and after their brief talks, the mike was opened to anyone else who had something to contribute.

I’ve spoken a lot lately, at a series of faculty forums, and frankly, I’m a little tired of listening to myself.  I wanted to hear from my colleagues yesterday, and then from the students, and so I didn’t speak, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I need a sort of public expiation of the guilt that I feel for not having spoken up, not just yesterday, but every day leading up to now.  If I had spoken, I’d like to have said something on the order of this:

My name is Kathleen Fitzpatrick.  I’m an assistant professor in English and Media Studies here at Pomona College.  I’m standing here before you today because I want, loudly and explicitly, to take responsibility for what happened on our campus last night.

I didn’t smash the windows.  I didn’t slash the tires.  I didn’t hold the spray paint.  But I hold myself responsible nevertheless.

I’m responsible not because of what I did, but because of what I didn’t do.  One of my classes and I spent time discussing the events that have taken place on campus this semester—the cross-burning, the photo scavenger-hunt, the online threats against a student, the defacing of a calendar, the graffiti in a dorm shower—and I was proud of all of us for having done so.  But we did so because it was easy; the material we were studying at the moment folded well into a discussion of the events.

I failed, however, to address these issues in my other class this semester, because I couldn’t find a way to make a connection to the material we were studying, because such a connection would have been difficult.

And I failed, in the class with which I did address these issues, to take a moral stand, to express my outrage, to label, in no uncertain terms, these “events” as racist and homophobic, and utterly, utterly unacceptable in this community.

I now know, painfully, the results of such a failure.

Every time a white person of conscience fails to speak out against racist remarks, racism is made to feel at home.  Every time a straight person of conscience, a man of conscience, fails to speak out against heterosexist or misogynistic comments, hatred is made comfortable, made to feel as though it belongs, made to feel as though it has a legitimate place in our community.

I am responsible for the pain visited on this community.  Today, I am owning up to that responsibility, and to my responsibility for ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.

Many of us have been very careful, perhaps too careful, to avoid making others feel unduly guilty about these events this semester, trying to assure one another that we don’t think we’re racists, that we don’t think we’re sexists, that we don’t think we’re responsible for what has happened.  I want to see that stop today.  I want us all to examine our consciences, to find the ways in which we are all racists, all sexists, all homophobes, all responsible for the fear that others feel on this campus today.

It is only in taking such responsibility that we might be able to grow, to overcome these failures, to become a community worth living in.

Coverage of events here from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Jose Mercury News.

(And, in case you’re curious, the investigation has been taken over by the FBI.)

More to follow, no doubt.

[UPDATE, 03.11.04, 1.27 pm:  More, indeed:  Today’s print edition of the L.A. Times.  We were also the lead story on all the local news feeds last night; footage is available out there, though I (alas) don’t have time to track it down now...]