On episode 2 of season 3, I talk with Dr. Lauren Cagle about flexibility, academic labor, and speaking truth to power.
On episode 2 of season 3, I talk with Dr. Lauren Cagle about flexibility, academic labor, and speaking truth to power.
RPR: This is season 3 episode 2 and today I speak with Dr. Lauren Cagle about flexibility, academic labor, and speaking truth to power.
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Hello listeners. Welcome to the agile academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. This season I talked with my special guests from all over academia, about purpose, values, and what it means to be an advocate in higher ed, for students, for labor, for kindness, and for balance and self-care.
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RPR: Hi, Cagle. Thanks for joining us today.
LC: Hi Rebecca. Thank you for having me.
RPR: So before we get started, why don't you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
LC: Sure. I am currently an assistant professor of writing writer in digital studies at the University of Kentucky, which is in beautiful Lexington, Kentucky. Um, I did my PhD at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Before that I did my masters at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and I had a sort of, um, patchy undergraduate career. I ended up graduating with a degree in poetry writing from Rhodes College in Memphis. And then prior to that, I had been an undergraduate student at the Olin College of Engineering, which is in need a mass right outside of Boston. My claim to fame is, uh, it was a new school when I enrolled. And so I'm the first person to ever drop out of that college and then had taken a few classes here and there at other places, including at Olin, um, had taken cross registered classes at Babson and Wellesley Colleges, which is how I developed an interest in, in writing at the time creative writing.
Uh, I'm a military brat. So all of the moving around for higher ed was sort of par for the course for me. This is my now sixth year in Lexington, and this is the longest I've ever lived anywhere in my entire life. So I grew up sort of moving around mostly Europe actually. So I grew up going to German schools and then moved to the us, um, in 97 for high school, uh, ended up in, in Alabama. So I have all these interesting Southern roots and European roots, but also have lived in the Northwest and the, or sorry, the Northeast and the Southwest. And yeah, so I feel like higher ed is. Uh, the, the sort of roaming that is inherent to being a professional in higher ed is, is very familiar to me. And it definitely informs a lot of how I think about the work that I do.
RPR: And I assume though, with the way you think about the world,
LC: Yes, definitely. I mean, there's a lot of benefits to growing up in different places in different cultures. And so as a military brat living in first England and then Germany, and then the Netherlands, um, a lot of my peers, so my, um, American children of military personnel attended schools run by the department of defense, usually on base, um, often lived on and we never did. So my family always lived off base in local villages and starting in kindergarten, my sister and I attended German schools. Um, we didn't speak German. My parents were just like, you'll figure it out. It'll be fine. Um, and it turned out it was, we did in fact figure it out. Um, your brain is pretty elastic at that age. So it definitely was culture shock moving back to the us, but I I'm incredibly grateful for that exposure and early life to a lot of different ways of thinking about the world and also the, the kind of flexibility and resilience that it, it taught me. I mean, it's just, that's just a way of being, you have to be okay in lots of different circumstances. That's always been my life.
RPR: In what ways do you kind of bring that into your, into your classroom and into your, your research work?
LC: I think that the, the flexibility that I learned very early on as a child is definitely, um, informative for me. I'm really good at just talking to lots of different people. And that came from every three years. I think it came from every three years, you pick up and move and you have to make new friends and you have to learn in some cases, a new language. And so I am very comfortable walking into a room with people I don't know, and getting to know them by starting from a place of, of assuming that I don't know them yet, that, that, um, that it's on me to sort of listen and, and figure out where I fit into this Milia. And that that's been, that's been something that, uh, shows up in my teaching. I think, um, the fact that I, uh, when I'm working with students to assume that they have a whole rich experience, uh, existence that I don't know anything about.
And, and it's up to them to decide how much to share with me and how to invite me into that in terms of research, it means that in a sort of more metaphorical way, I am able to, to develop collaborations with people who speak a quote unquote different language from me. So scientists in most cases. Yeah. I, I, I think it, it helps me assume that I'm never the authority in the room, even when I technically am in a position of power, that, that makes me be authority in just one particular way. I mean, additionally, there's resilience, right. Of just being okay with, you know, sometimes things don't work out and sometimes that person, you thought you were gonna be friends with you, you don't end up being friends with. And so it's, it's part of, I think, just being a person, it, it really impacts the way I move through the world personally, as well as professionally. But, but professionally, I think I'm able to articulate it professionally, maybe pretty clearly. I've never really said this that loud before. This was really interesting.
RPR: Glad to help.
LC: Thank you.
RPR: Yeah, I think it, you know, when I'm part of what I'm taking away from that piece is, is just the, the whole person, um, in, in being really cognizant of the whole person in all of your interactions. And that can be really challenging, especially for faculty members, maybe who were, aren't trained to teach, or aren't used to teaching how they can, you know, and, and we've, we've talked just recently before we, you know, turn the mic on about things like lockdown browsers and surveillance, techn technology and, and how that seems like a solution in some ways. But really if we think more about the flexibility of what we've learned in the pandemic and how do we trust our students more and how do we treat them as whole people? How do we show up as whole people for them? Um, yes. Can be really, it can be a challenge for folks, but it's, it's just so important.
LC: Yeah. It think one of the, the themes in my teaching evaluations, which, you know, I'm gonna bracket the whole conversation about how teaching evaluations are really flung metric for assessing actual teaching. But there is a, a theme that runs through the teaching evaluations that has gotten stronger as I have become more comfortable and confident as a teacher, which is that students, invariably, every single semester, I have a handful or more of students on their evaluations who explicitly comment that they, that I treat them like a person that I treat them as, you know, an adult worthy of respect. They note that I, I seem to care about their success, um, not just in the classroom, but beyond it. And I think it's, it's indicative of that attitude. And it isn't, I think it's hard to talk about sometimes in, in the context of training, as you said, because it isn't a matter of a sort of checklist of, oh, you know, to demonstrate that you respect your students, make sure that you do X, Y, Z.
It really is about a sort of attitude that you bring to every interaction with students. And that includes asynchronous interactions. So like writing your syllabus in second person. So you're actually speaking to them first and second person. So you're actually speaking to them as humans and individuals, and sort of a, them as a reader, an audience. I mean, that's just one small example. And so I, I, I could list a lot of different ways that you can demonstrate respect to your students, but it, it really is about a mindset that they can then inform every interaction, not just a, a sort of preset list of actions you take. So
RPR: Building on, on that perspective, what would you say is your purpose in higher education?
LC: That is such a great question. Um, I think it's evolved over time. My purpose right now is to help in terms of my disciplinary purpose. So the things that I teach are always writing a oriented or, or rhetorically oriented. Not that those things are different. I think, I think of some of my classes are more oriented towards developing particular writing skills and knowledge, and the other ones are more oriented towards developing ways of thinking rather than the ability to produce certain kinds of writing. So disciplinarily, my purpose right now is to have help students understand writing and thinking as networked activities so that when they are reading a text and thinking about it, when they're thinking about an experience that they've had, when they're writing about anything, when they're writing a document in a genre that's intended to accomplish some particular action in the world, that that's always happening in a, in a bigger network, it's never about, you know, the loan writer or thinker sitting in a room by themselves, divorced from everything else.
And that is a really, really different way of thinking about writing than a lot of writing instruction rooted in testing, standardized testing and assessment has led them to believe. And so, no matter what class I'm teaching, if students leave understanding that their writing and thinking activities are always already thank you. Darda, uh, connected to lots of other people and texts and, you know, ways of being in the world than I've done my job, the, the bigger picture, what is my purpose in the higher education? I'm actually in a space right now where I, I don't know. I think I don't have a ready answer for, for that question in part, because the pandemic has laid bare many of the hypocrisies at the heart of higher education as a business, as an institution in the United States and particularly for, for public institutions, which is I work at, you know, the largest flagship in university in, in my, and I might think I'm there for, you know, a lofty goal of producing the citizens of tomorrow, or I don't particularly love the word citizen in that context because of the, the kind of legal framework that it evokes.
But in some ways the university has made it clear that they think I'm there to encourage students to be there because that's how they make money. And so teaching is doesn't even crack the top five, maybe not the top 10 purposes of, of the university as evidenced, not by its, you know, public statements throughout the pandemic. And I, I mean the university as a, an institution wri large, um, but as evidenced by its budgets and by its decisions. So if teaching was actually the primary concern of my institution, we would be fully online right now, which we are not, we are all teaching in person and any given class, you know, a third to a half of students are out because of being COVID positive because of being in quarantine. And we have been told, we instructors that we don't have to provide, you know, hybrid or, or virtual options for students.
If they're out that we is be acting like it's any other semester, when a student misses a class, you work with them. If it's an excuse to absence, but there's a difference between, oh, a student here, or there has an excused absence here or there, and whole swath of students are out for weeks at a time. And so as an instructor, I was able to make the choice and I have the space to make the choice, cuz I teach it to too. And I, I have room to do this, to build the class from the get go so that students would have the opportunity to learn what I wanted them to learn, even if they couldn't be in class every day. And I tried to make it as easy and, and streamlined as possible for them. But I have a lot of colleagues who were not able to make that choice for a variety of reasons.
And nobody cares because the point is not to teach the point is to have the students register for in person classes and pay their tuition and live on campus and fill the dorm. So I feel at lager heads in terms of my sort of personal reasons for being in higher education with the larger institutional forces at play, and it has me questioning what my, my purpose is, you know, if what is the purpose, if it's not achievable and is it really achievable to make teaching a primary purpose in an institution that has so blatantly resisted, prioritizing that above all else? So it's not a fun answer. I'm sorry, Rebecca, but it's, it's honestly how I feel right now that I, I want to have lofty goals for higher education, but I, I cannot set goals for the institution that it does not set for itself.
RPR: Yeah, no, don't apologize at all. That's I mean, it's real right. And one of the reasons that I, I definitely wanted to talk to you for this season is because you have not been afraid to share those thoughts on social media to really put that out there is for, for that, for vaccinations, for climate awareness, for labor, right? You are, you are not afraid of putting those, those things out there even.
LC: Yeah.
RPR: So where does that courage come from?
LC: I have been thinking about this question a fair amount, even before you had invited me onto the podcast, because I have had the experience increasingly over again, the, the period of the pandemic where colleagues assume that I'm tenured because I'm outspoken and outspoken in, in a lot of different venues. So social media, I have a fairly large following on Twitter. So have been able to actually sure, the university administration, my university's administration, to, to answer questions about the pandemic response, to get them on the record. I'm also an active member of our union. So shout out United Campus Workers, Kentucky we're statewide wall to wall union. So it's not just faculty, it's faculty, grad students, undergrad workers, staff, facilities folks, healthcare, all of it in the same union. So as a part of that bigger organization, I've been really vocal. I'm also an elected University Senate, um, representative of the College of Arts and Sciences.
And then within that body, there's an elected much smaller group that forms the Senate council that sets the agenda for the, the larger Senate. So I was also elected to represent arts and sciences on that Senate council. So in all those avenues, I've had people assume that I am tenured because I'm outspoken and every time it happens, I have a sort of twofold response, which is one, oh, I'm so flattered, like, Ugh, aren't I amazing. And then my own brain pushing back against that going, you shouldn't have to, that should not be unusual. That should not be a surprise for someone to feel comfortable speaking out. Pre-tenure. I mean, that really is an indictment of the way that we have learned to think about tenure, that tenure, this idea of tenure as protection of academic freedom, um, has been sort of warped into a pre and post, right?
There's your life before tenure in your life after tenure, and that you get to be a totally different person. And after tenure, because of this, this job security that it offers. And that is I think a, a really dangerous view of, of what tenure is for and what it can do. And it's also a very, I think, frightening take on the process of tenure, right? That, that the idea being right, the implication of, oh my God, you're so brave to speak out before tenure, is that something bad will happen to you unless you have tenure. And if we're so concerned about, let's say retaliation on the part of the institution, like why is that an institution that we wanna be a part of? And so I decided early on, I remember having these conversations in grad school when I was getting ready for the job market of, you know, should you put your social media on lockdown when you're on the job market?
Like, should you be vocal criticizing your institution when you're on the, all these things about being on the job market. And I, in conversation with some of my classmates who are on the market, me shout out Ellie Browning and Zach Dixon, we were our little cohort decided, you know, if an institution doesn't want me, or if a faculty, a department doesn't want me, because I am who I am, then I don't wanna be there. Right? Like I don't wanna have to pretend to not hold the values that I do until it's safe to express them, because that sounds like a really lonely and frankly, difficult way to live your life. So in terms of like why I was able to make that decision, I mean, a huge part of it is privilege, right? I come from, uh, family background that I don't have any academics in my family, but I do have a lot of family members with post bachelor's degrees.
So I'm the first PhD in my family, but my dad has two masters and my mom has one. I have lots of family members with law degrees and, and masters in various things. And so I have that privilege of coming from a sort of highly educated background to where academia did not seem like it never seemed like the ivory tower. To me, it always seemed like something attainable, uh, getting a college degree and getting, you know, a, um, an advanced degree. Additionally, I have the privilege of having fallbacks, you know, like, okay, let's say I do get fired or like, uh, not get tenure or something. Like I can go live with my mom. She has a great house. Like she owns a house. So it, it isn't as though I'm relying on this job to, or this, this field to my primary financial, like avenue to security.
And so that's the other, one of the other pieces of it is that I am okay with leaving. Like, I, I think that one of the tricks that academia plays on us is to say that this is it, that this is all we're good for. And that, um, if we don't fit in here, if we don't succeed here, then we'll never succeed anywhere. And I'm not talking about like, oh, everyone should have an all to act backup career. I'm saying like, the idea of a backup career is ridiculous. I have friends in industry who work for nonprofit, who, whatever, who job hop to find the kind of job that they actually like and want, you know, and that's like a normal thing. It's not like if I don't succeed at this then, oh no, I might have to go do this other thing. Like what a privilege to have multiple things that you might enjoy doing in your life.
And I am per perfectly. Okay. I mean, if I let's say I, I was denied tenure, I'm up for tenure this year, I would certainly nail a whale and nash my teeth and rend my clothes and all that. And then I would go get a different job that probably paid more doing something else. And that would be fine. Um, I think part of that mindset comes from having worked for a couple years is before grad school. So I, I never, I didn't go straight through after I graduated from undergrad with, again, a reminder, a poetry degree, poetry writing degree. Like there's nothing you can do with that in terms of sort of parlaying it into a specific professional outcome. There are lots of things you can do with a poetry degree to enhance the richer life. Certainly, but I didn't wanna be a poet. I don't think I've written a single poem since I got a degree in poetry writing.
It was mostly a like reaction to not wanting to be an engineer. And so I, I managed a Starbucks for a number of years. And then at one point I stopped managing. I stayed on as a barista to keep my health insurance and taught TaeKwonDo almost full time for a while. And that was how I learned that I loved teaching and decided to go to grad school was having that experience training at Starbucks and training other people at Starbucks and teaching TaeKwonDo. So, I mean, I have memories as an adult of doing other jobs that I enjoy doing and love doing. Like I don't, I have no, no sense that AC it's academia or nothing for me. And then the last piece of the courage, I think, and this is, it's hard to figure out how to this, but I'm very good at what I do.
Like I'm, I'm very good at the job of being a professor in the way that I wanna do it. You know, some people would disagree. I haven't published a book. I haven't even started writing a book, but the things that I've decided I wanted to do, I, um, have worked hard to be good at. Um, and when you're good at something, I think there's certainly the sort of effect of, well, that probably means I'm safer because I have a good tenure case or something. But for me, it's not about that. It's about if you find the thing within the professorship or within higher education that you are good at, then that helps remind you that it, it's not, they're not doing you any favors by employing you, right. You're, you're good at what you do. You are bringing value to the institution. And that's really, I think the bottom line is just remembering that no matter what the tenure system, no matter what our narrow around like, oh, you have to be brave to speak out before tenure, no matter what, when you're a graduate student, whether you're teaching or not, whether you're doing a research assistantship or not even just being a graduate student, even just being an undergraduate student who works on campus.
I mean, I'm, I I'm even falling into this trap. I'm saying just right as though there's this like high being in any of those positions means that you are bringing value to the institution. And if that is the case, then you can bring value to a different institution. And we should not allow this institution to tell us that they're doing us favors by allowing us to be part of it, because we're the ones who make it function. The institution works because we do.
RPR: Yeah. There's so much in there to unpack. I don't even know where to start there.
LC: Sorry. Like I, I told you before we started recording that I had a lot to say about that one.
RPR: That's no, it's wonderful. I think one piece, you know, I wanna go back to the values piece of it. I also wanna go back to the, the sense that we're often trained to think this is the high highest level that you can achieve is to be a tenured or a tenured track faculty member. And to that, if you think about leaving there's failure there, or if you leave, there's some sort of failure. I know that when I was going through my burnout, I was eligible for full professor for two years and could not process going through that process at the time, because I was just so far gone, um, wrapped up in my burnout, trying to figure out what to do and how to be while going through that experience. And I ultimately ended up making a trans the transition, but there was absolutely this fear of if I leave higher ed, can I ever get back in?
LC: Yes,
RPR: Because for me that was, I, you know, I have a story where I failed in the professional world. I was in marketing communication for a and a half in California and I quote unquote failed. And there was a lot that was going on there that led to me quitting that job and feeling like a failure and going back to higher ed. But that was not me like, right, right. That was not who I am as a person. That was an experience that kind of threw me back in as if higher was the only place I belonged or the only place I felt like myself.
LC: Yeah. Which really reinforces that, that narrative. Right. I think that, um, the burnout piece is so indicative actually before saying something about that. I wanna say something the, that point you made about the fear. If I leave, can I come back? A friend of mine who I will not name in case they don't wanna be named, um, for having observed this, observe that that is the kind of language that you get from cults, right? If you leave, you can't come back. If you that's it, if you choose those other people over us, well, then you've made your choice. That is not the language that is not the, the logic of a healthy institution that has the individual thriving of its members. Foremost. That is the language of an institution that understands that people might opt out if they felt like they had other options to opt out too.
And that is really messed up. Like that is a real messed up way. And that's not to comment on the truth or falsity of the fear, right? The fear might be accurate in the sense that you leave and take an industry job for a couple of years. Will it be harder to, to get into the academic job market and get hired over a freshly minted PhD? Who's, you know, doesn't people don't fear are gonna leave again. I mean, yeah, probably, but also those fresh PhDs are also getting hired over people who have stayed in the institution as adjuncts or non-tenure track lecturers for a long time in hopes of maintaining that connection in order to move into this, as you said, the sort of like the goal of the tenure track or tenured position. So it's not about, you know, you as an individual making a choice to leave that's about the institution.
by incentivizing hiring committees to make decisions that I think are often flawed, right? Like imagine if a company you worked for Microsoft and the department that you were in, the unit that you were in, there was no upward mobility, right? There's a ceiling. And so you say, you know what? I really want to move up. I wanna get into management and I wanna get into a different kind research, whatever. And I can't do that here. I have to lean and go somewhere else. So you go somewhere else, you get that experience, you improve your skills, you change your skill set. And then Microsoft has an opening for someone with your new skillset and you apply with your new skillset to come back and offer that value to the company. And they say, no, no, you left once before we can't have you back because you might leave again, absolutely upside down way of thinking about things.
And I am not an industry apologist, like I am not a capitalist apologist, right. But it's clear that the incentive structure and the decision making processes of the university are, are not the only ones available. And so I think those comparisons could be a illustrative on the burnout front, right? Again, it's like, if you are, as in your experience eligible for promotion for several years and not able to pursue it cause of burnout, which again is not an individual failing. That is a function of the context. That's a function of the, the work that you have been forced to do without sufficient resources or support. And then two years go by and nobody says, boy, this person should have been promoted on already. Let's figure out what we can do to make that happen. Like of course we get burned out as individuals and are convinced that it's our fault as individuals because it's up to us as individuals to drag ourselves out of it, right? Like it's, it's all, it's, I'll say this they're consistent, right? Like the, the sort of institutional pressures are consistent. And so the pressure to treat all successes as a function of, of the institution and all failures as a function of the ins of the individual that is at least consistent,
RPR: It is, it is. And when we, even, the basic definition of burnout is a workplace based syndrome of not being able to deal with unrelenting stress. Not because you're not a person who can handle quote unquote stress, but because there's so much of it that just keeps getting piled on you, that you cannot process that in
LC: Exactly
RPR: Quote unquote reasonable amount of time. Right. And that, if it's a, if it's a workplace issue, that's a culture issue that is not an individual failing. So we can be part of the culture that causes things like that, those kinds of symptoms, and that pushes people out in that way. Or we have to figure out how to change that culture.
LC: Yeah.
RPR: And one of the only ways to do that is to speak out and that's the scariest hardest thing to do. Cause some of it, I mean, for me, it was a vulnerability. It was a real challenge to my vulnerability to be that public about what was happening to me because it was so hidden. And so shameful that I, I know that of other folks who, you know, are leaving or are considering leaving or looking across, is there anything else that I can do here where I feel like I can make a meaningful contribution in the ways I thought I could as a faculty member?
LC: Yeah.
RPR: It's, it can be really hard to have those thoughts and to have those conversations
LC: So hard. And, and even, even knowing that having them can be so beneficial, I mean, you being public and, and engaging, I mean, developing this podcast right. And, and inviting people to have conversations about themselves and, and making yourself part of that conversation. Like we know that's positive. We know that's beneficial. I hope that you have gotten feedback from people that your example has, has helped them. And yet even knowing that it's still so hard because it's so ingrained to think like, well, it's just me, right. If I say I'm burned out, I can't, I get up. And I look at my, my computer and I think I don't, I don't feel motivated to do anything. I don't know where to start. I don't want to answer any of these emails because there'll just be 10 more by the time I finish. There's always that fear that if you admit that publicly, I say, there's always that fear for me, my experience is there.
I have the fear that if I admit those things, publicly, someone will say, are you sure you are just lazy? Like, are you sure you aren't just selfish? Other people have hard jobs. And I mean, yeah, like I've had hard jobs. This is an easier job in a lot of ways than standing on my feet for 10 hours, serving frappuccinos in the drive through on, you know, uh, Wednesday afternoon in July in Memphis like that. Yes, that is, it was harder on my body in many ways to do that, but there are different kinds of hard and it doesn't make the, the burnout less real of, of what's happening now. And in some ways it's worse because of that hypocrisy that I talked about at the beginning with, with this question of, you know, purpose or motivation that when I was serving frappuccinos in the drive through, I knew what I was doing, you know, and, and there was a certainly there's, I think always a sort of corporate, you see this with a lot of union busting efforts, especially nowadays, and Starbucks is a great example because they just, um, the first unionized store, uh, just voted in, I think it was in Buffalo.
So there's an effort from, you know, sort of the corporate overlords to say, like we're family and we value you and da, da, da, but there's something really, maybe this is a, a sort of new materialist thing. Speaking of Frederick, like a material persuasion that happens when, in the course of your job, you're handling a lot of physical money that it's like, okay, no, this is about money. This is about making money. And then certainly as a, a store manager, you know, I was running budgets and, and doing labor and, and placing inventory orders. Like it was very clear that everything was about maximizing profits. There was a, um, a consistency between the, the, uh, uh, the things that I was being asked to do, and my understanding of the purpose of the Institute. Right. And, and that in some ways is a lot easier than being part of an institution where the things that you're being asked to do, like teach in person during a pandemic.
And I say asked with like the biggest quotation marks of all time, the biggest asterisk of all time teach in person during a pandemic use surveillance technology on your students, you know, except that you are making a salary that is not keeping up with inflation or the job market. So you're subject to salary compression, except that you are making less than you would. If you took your skills to a different industry or different context, we're being asked to do more with less, uh, we're being asked to accept that we cannot possibly pay our staff. So we're losing staff to provide the, the necessary supports for the institution. And yet the president of my institution just accepted a $200,000 raise, not by base pay, raise from the board of trustees, which brings him to making over a million dollars a year. We're being asked to accept that the healthcare wing of our campus cannot staff sufficiently to have enough nurses and doctors on hand, uh, to provide patients with the care that they deserve.
We're being asked, accept that our, uh, retirement contributions matching retirement contributions from the university had to be paused during the pandemic because of concerns about lowered enrollment. And when enrollment stayed steady, we were asked to accept that, well, that's gone and done. We, werere not gonna, you know, make up those lost contributions. We're being asked to accept all of these things and being told that it's worth it because we have a higher purpose. And yet none of those things serve that higher purpose. If the higher person is purpose is to educate, to serve the common wealth of Kentucky to provide. I acknowledge that can help others live better lives to inform our students so that they can go on to become productive and, um, informed members of a society. None of those things paying me less paying staff, less getting rid of staff, surveilling students, putting students health at risk, uh, increasing strain on healthcare workers.
None of those things actually serve any of those purposes. There's a disconnect. And that creates a kind of stress that's like really essential and is really different from the kind of stress I ever experienced in some pretty high stress jobs prior to getting involved in higher education. I mean, it's one reason that I am such a cheerleader for unionization, and it's because the union is the space where the goals, it's the space in my professional life, where the stated goals of the group and the actions of the group align perfectly. And part of it is because we, the group are both setting the goals and deciding the actions. It is a space where I get to feel like my whole self is, is heard. And that's not to say that like, you know, we always do what I wanna do, or we always take the action that I think is best.
But rather that I don't feel pressured to accept a narrative that doesn't feel true to me. And so I get to have whole real conversation with my colleagues in the union about what it is that we want, what it is that we deserve and how we're gonna get there. And that's just a really different environment. So if anyone out there listening is not yet unionized, please, please, please start a union, join a union. Talk to me, we're in a right to work state, building a union in a right to work state. That's really, really hard. And yet we're doing it. We have over 500 members in just over two years. It's yeah, incredible. And it creates, I mean, we also have real wins, right? We have increased minimum wage for full-time reg regular workers at the university of Kentucky. We have secured promises to, uh, improved, shared governance at the university of Kentucky. We've been working on pandemic safety at the university of Louisville and Murray state university. We have, we also have some wins around pandemic safety in the community and technical college system. So there are the sort of concrete material wins that we can point to. But the point, I guess I was just trying to get at was this like harder to Ize benefit of unionization, like part of the ability to be part of an organization and see what's possible.
RPR: It's so powerful to hear you talk about that. And I know that unionization, especially in, you know, in neoliberal culture is, is considered kind of anti-establishment and in some ways it always was. Um, but the, the, the idea that we can bring those labor movements into institutions because they are workplaces it's it's, we can, and I talk about this in the book too, it's that culture of academic capitalism in that sense that you are your productivity, what you produce for, you know, you've used the term value a lot, but you know, that that idea that production is core to what we do. And if we're not producing, then we don't, we're not meeting the quote unquote mission, this higher mission that the institution here that higher ed in general has. So really that sense of capitalism has just undergirds all of what we do, even though we do many of us still buy into that. It's a family, it's a higher calling, right? How do we, how do, how do we, I don't wanna say escape that, but how do we start dealing with that? Unionization is one way that, but what, what do you do when this work continues to be hard?
LC: That's such a good question. I personally dunno that I've had a lot of success pushing back in my kind of personal capacity. I mean, I mean, there is a real tension there between what you were saying about the, like us, particularly faculty, but certainly not exclusively faculty. I think the same is true for, um, staff and students, the sense that like we're part of this higher purpose, or we have a higher calling by, by being a part of higher education. Um, there is a real tension there because I, I do of work that I think matters. And so it is very hard for me to say, you know what, no, I'm not being compensated fairly. So I'm, I'm not gonna keep producing at the level that I'm I have been or have been expected to. Because at that point I feel obligations to, you know, my research collaborators, my students, my colleagues in the department to myself, in many cases to participants in my research, I feel obligations to, to be as productive on their behalf as possible because the work we're doing together seems, seems to matter, right?
Like I honestly don't know what it would look like to halfass teaching because I wanna be there for my students. And that's not to say I haven't done it, but I haven't done it on purpose. I mean, last semester I had probably the hardest semester personally that I've had in, since I started teaching in higher ed, I had a really bad year, a couple years ago, I got to of worse, but mostly that was over the summer. So the summer was hard, but I wasn't teaching at the time last semester, I had an emergency appendectomy the fourth week of the semester. And then my amazing dog of 15 years Margo died at the end of the semester. So about two weeks before the semester. And it, and, um, and so I was personally just out of commission, you know, surgical recovery is real grief is real pet loss is real.
And just, couldn't just had to like cancel class outright for, for those things. And even so when I was there with the students, I tried to be fully there and it's because I feel an obligation to them. It's not, cause I feel like I have to produce good teaching on behalf of the university. So there, I mean that, I don't mean to deny that that tension or the fact that many of us really do feel a calling. So I'm not great at it. Um, if I can offer like a small tip, like a real actionable thing to do to help remember that, that we are allowed to set boundaries, that we don't have to just produce, produce, produce. Um, I'm actually looking at right now on the wall, tap to the wall with like some really lovely, um, oh, what is the tape washy tape?
Like, it's got like a lovely pattern on it. I have a piece of paper tap to the wall. And at the top in Sharpie, it reads “Things I Said No To.” And then every time I say no to doing something, I write it on this list. And, and I think one of them is a research opportunity, like a research collaboration, but everything else is service. And probably two thirds of it is service within the university. So not like field service or national service. And so it's a reminder that, you know what I'm doing fine. I, I, I'm doing service. I'm doing lots of things for, for other people and with other people, but I can say no to things as well. And some of them were things that I was really drawn to do. Like I felt a personal desire to do it. Wasn't just some sort of O obligation.
But I looking at the list and so grateful that I didn't do things because I would've been a mess. You know, one of them was like a big external program assessment thing I was asked to participate in. And that would've been my entire month of May last year. And you know what I was doing in May last year, surviving a pandemic like that was sufficient also carrying in grades also probably law of other things. Oh yeah. Like collecting data for pro. Right. So I think if I can offer to anybody a tip, it's make a list of things you said no to, because those are things that are worth tracking and being proud of the same as anything that we produce. Right. Like saying no to something is also productive in the sense that it produce more time for yourself. And it also allows you to put your energy and attention and focus where else you wanna be. And so I think in the same way that our C CV is a list of the products that we've made, like we're allowed to list the things that we didn't do and, and be proud of those as well.
RPR: Right. We think of, of boundaries like that saying no is self care in so many ways. And I also appreciate the point that there are, there are things in higher ed that absolutely bring us joy or research our students. You know, it's not this pit of despair obviously, but you know.
LC: Exactly. Yeah.
RPR: We feel like that sometimes, but there's so much that does bring us joy and, and, you know, motivation and care that we just have to figure out what the balance is and be willing to fight for that balance. I think between, you know, the, the institutional neoliberalism and what we do love and what we power and the mission that we leave in. Exactly how Can we, how can we integrate those things? Or how can we bring those things together in a meaningful way?
LC: That is the point I'm at right now is how, you know, as I, as I think about the next five, 10 years of my career, how can I bring the things that I think are valuable about the institution in line with the way the institution actually behaves. And again, I think unionization is one really key way to do that because it creates a lever for pressure that didn't exist before. And to move something as, as big as an institution, you need big levers. And either, either you as an individual have been granted the power to make change by the institution. I know my, like Fuco friends will not, will be like, that's not how power works, but, or you, you build that power. And one of the ways you can do that is by having lots and lots of people on board sufficient to attract attention to, I don't wanna say scare, you know, scare decision makers and to, to, but I mean, sometimes I think it is it's scare, scare them into making decisions in the sense of like, you know, as a decision maker, is, is it better for me to just go ahead and make a different decision in, is that a less frightening prospect than let's say getting bad publicity, you know, and that's, that's how the power of the people works in, in many cases is actually just the power of the threat of bad publicity.
And I mean, this is another answer maybe to the question of like, why do I feel comfortable being outspoken it's because somebody needs to be. And even though I'm still pre-tenured, there are lots and lots and lots of people at my institution who are way more precarious positions than I am, including I'm not even necessarily talking about, you know, teaching folks in teaching positions. I mean, I think about the folks who work in dining services, on our campus, who aren't even employed by the university, they're employed by third party contractors and can be, let go without reason and, and have been, you know, our university touted that, that we haven't had any lays during the pandemic, which is true if you look at just university employees, but that statement does not apply to third party employees who work on campus and who rely on, on those jobs to support their families, to, to provide income, to support themselves, to feed income back into the community.
And so if I don't say something and create that sort of public pressure for change, like what I think they should do it for themselves. And like, you know, if they don't then like, well, that's on the, what, what that's ridiculous, right? Like I, all things equal otherwise. Like I am in an extreme position of privilege in the academy, even pre-tenure. And that's one of the reasons I love being in a union that that is wall to wall. So I, as a grad student was in a graduate student specific union. And that was great in a lot of ways, because you can really organize very directly around grad student issues, but being a, a wall to wall has really, I mean, we have members who work on as, as facility staff, you know, who are groundskeepers, who do janitorial work in the buildings who have been interviewed in national publications who have been interviewed on TV about the fact that they, you know, have worked at UK for 15 years and don't even make $15 an hour, or at least they didn't before again, we pressured the institution and to, to raising the minimum wage for our full-time workers, if they can do that, like, what am I doing, sitting in my office saying, well, I got mine, I'll probably be fine. I just need to wait and get tenure. Then I'll say something like, I don't think on a personal level I would have, and I'm not saying this is the right choice for, for everybody. And, and other people are, need to be concerned with job security for other reasons that I don't, I don't have, but for me personally, I would have a very hard time living with myself. If I saw that happening, saw people and much more precarious and underpaid positions advocating for not just themselves, but others. And I didn't bother to do the same
RPR: Great advice to leave us on, really think about your context and what can you be doing and How do you bring and empower others into these conversations.
LC: So exactly. Thank you
RPR: So much for joining me today. It's been great chatting. Thank you.
LC: Can I say one more thing?
RPR: Absolutely.
LC: The same point that you raised about the need to talk about burnout, despite the difficulty of it and the potential shame of it. I think that informs what I was just saying about the need to, to say something, you know, within the context of what you're able and, and you know, what your actual position within in, within an institution is. And that also applies to my other big or two big issues, I guess, that I flag on the internet, as you mentioned at the beginning of the interview, which is climate and vaccines. So my research focuses on the environmental and climate rhetoric. And I think, you know, people often ask me like, what can I do about the climate? I'm just an individual and the answer is be loud because that's the only way to create large scale pressure to make large scale change. And I am also loud on the internet about vaccines because I think that being loud can encourage other people. And so when I'm loud about vaccines is in a very different way from being loud about labor, which is in a really positive way. I'm very positive when people get vaccines and like rah cheerleader, I think just being loud is a tool that we often underestimate. And, uh, yeah. So I just wanted to mention that that is relevant to those other issues as well, and tie it back to my gratitude to you for being loud about a lot of these issues. So thank you for having me. Yeah.
RPR: Okay. We'll talk again soon. Take care.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the agile academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, Follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode, a transcript and show notes at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care, and stay well.