I'VE BEEN IN SCHOOL ALL MY LIFE

This blog is evolving to illustrate my mercurial reactions to the changes I've watched unfold around me in my native climate: academia.  I've felt myself redefined and cast in varied identities as the university strove to maintain relevance in a confusing modern culture.  Efforts to forge any stable identity amidst such chaos has chipped away at my sanity but left me with first hand insight what surely must be the most dramatic revolutions in cultural understandings of professors, students, colleges, and learning since the decline of monasteries.  Currently an Associate Teaching Professor of English and History at my undergraduate Alma mater and hometown, Penn State, and holding a PhD from Cornell, I can walk from one conversation where I am discussed as an interchangeable cog in the machinery of faculty work to another where I am an out of touch scholar in an ivory tower, special, unique, and impractical.  I have little influence over the conversations, so feel them happening to me.  I understand that each day brings a new tiny assault on the dignity and respect I once cherished as an accomplished scholar; an apprentice who had honed their craft and would now create freely.  I don't always know what do do to challenge these indignities, but I know that, most of the time, laughing isn't a half bad idea.