[Robert Archambeau, from 'samizdat blog', July 23rd 2010]:
By this point in my life I’ve listened — as peer, as old friend, and now as Senior Guy Who’s Been Through It All; in faculty lounge, in office, at back-yard barbecue, on barstool, by Skype, — to a lot of junior faculty cris du coer from people at lots of different institutions, and the people who suffer the most seem to be those who look on the whole process as a set of hoops one is commanded to jump through. They treat everything as a means to the end of tenure, trying to get on the right committees to get noticed, trying all kinds of tricks to change their teaching (and sometimes their grading) habits so as to get higher evaluation numbers, and they try to write the sort of thing that will get published in the kind of journal they think will impress the powers-that-be. I get it: the job is, after all, on the line. But there’s a way in which all this is to get things backwards. The idea, after all, is to do one’s job and then stand back while others assess it, not to try to do one’s job by what one imagines will be the criteria of assessment. To go about it otherwise is to alienate yourself from the work that you love, and to end up like one of those embittered kvetches one sees writing so often in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Of course stepping back and just doing what you do — writing things that come out of who you are, allowing yourself to grow unselfconsciously into teaching better — doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to find some way to be inner-directed, rather than governed by the norms of those around you. And that’s where Byron (or, rather, the Byron of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) comes in.