sunset taken from the university.
After my attempts at working in Village failed, and I decided it was not worth spending any more of my life on, I headed in a different direction. I faced some pushback from my committee chair, but had support from another committee member, who told me that if necessary, he would take over as chair, but politically it would be better for the current chair to remain, so he and his wife, also a committee member, would work together to steer the next meeting in the way I wanted it to go. They did and I was able to proceed.
Things did not run smoothly, though. I faced pushback along with some crazy behaviour on the part of supposedly mature tenured professors. I was finding satisfaction in teaching, and I felt I was good at this (my course evaluations backed this up), but other aspects of academic life were becoming less and less satisfactory and teaching is the least valued part of what is required. The thing is, I really should have known well before then. Well, the truth is, I did know, but I tried to rationalize this knowledge away.
When we went to Fairbanks to look for a place to live, the semester was over, but I called in at my new department anyway, and introduced myself to the two admin women in the office, one of whom gave me a tour. My heart felt increasingly heavy, and when we went back to the rental car, I got in and burst into tears, much to Bill’s surprise and dismay! ‘It’s horrible!’ I spluttered through my tears. He kept trying to assure me that it was just because it was new and it’d be better once I got used to it. Time would prove me right in the end. It was a horrible department. It was colonial and exploitative. I soon learned that focus was turning away from Alaska Native communities and towards Russia, because the former no longer wanted to play along, as I found out. Even on a personal level, the behaviour of some people was appalling. For example, when I told my advisor that I’d been given the name of my teacher’s sister, her response was, ‘Ooh, you’ll be able to get lots of information now!’ When she asked where I got my parka and I told her my teacher made it for me, she literally rubbed her hands together and said, ‘You’re definitely in now.’ I was repulsed. I later learned that both she and her husband had experience in being opposed by the Native people they were working with. In both cases, statements were made in books (before publication) that the Native people felt misrepresented them. Instead of fixing these mistakes, they opted to ignore the concerns and publish anyway. This was a lesson to me about what kind of work would be expected of me if I continued. I tried to thread the needle for a few years altogether, looking for a way to satisfy the committee while still remaining ethical, but I wasn’t having much luck.
There was some ridiculous stuff, too. I was doing an independent study with a guy Bill worked with and we were sitting in his office when he decided to start baring his soul. He was well aware of my feminist ideas, that gender was one of my main areas of interest, and that I was teaching the Gender in Cross Cultural Perspectives course, so when he started off with, ‘I probably shouldn’t say this to you...’ I was already thinking, ‘Yeah, probably not. Stop talking now.’ But he didn’t and proceeded to tell me that he felt that his job was far more important than his wife’s job. I was thinking that since he didn’t do very much, and what he did do was underwhelming, this was a delusional statement, but this was the same guy who was having a temper tantrum one day when Bill and I walked into the office—he was angry because he’d forgotten his email password, so couldn’t access it. This was somehow the fault of the tech people. So I wasn’t expecting much of an answer when I asked him why he thought he was so much more important than his wife. He replied that he got paid a lot and was proud of bringing home the bacon. He said he would sometimes think, ‘Wow, look at all that bacon.’ I burst out laughing in response and it took me a minute or two to be able to respond. When I did, it was to poke holes in his theory. I emailed Bill when I got home and was telling him about this episode and starting laughing all over again. From that day on, we called the guy Bacon Man.
The same guy commented on how much ‘service’ I was doing—more than was usual for someone in my position. He was right about that and one of those projects was what finally brought things to a head. I was on the dean search committee and we were going through the normal procedures. We made our choice, which was not a person from inside the university. This angered some people in the communications department, where their head had applied—and not made the final three. Things got quite nasty. One member of the search committee got threats on her voicemail. We all got a nasty email from a professor in the communication department. This hit my last nerve and I replied, basically ripping him a new one. He apologized to all of us and to me personally, admitting that he should not have sent the email. Others on the committee thanked me for doing what I did. But I’d had enough.
When that year was done, I went home to make sure, but I pretty much knew I was done. When the next academic year started, I informed my committee that I was withdrawing. They tried to talk me out of it and my chair had me in her office, reading a letter she wrote when she was a new anthropologist, expressing some of the same concerns I had. ‘See,’ she said, ‘We all go through this. Please reconsider.’ I told her that in spite of her misgivings, she decided to go ahead anyway and to ignore her concerns, but I couldn’t do that and I knew that if I went ahead and ‘got the piece of paper’ as some were encouraging me to do, I would feel ashamed of the degree. I am proud of the work I did as an undergrad and in my MA program. I would not be proud of this. So I walked. It was hard and I went through a tough time afterwards, even though I never doubted that it was the right thing to do. I’d spent most of my adult life up to that point in academia and I wasn’t sure what would be next. But I knew what I shouldn’t do and that was a start.
