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  • Meeting the Virgin Mary
  • Jacqueline Doyle (bio)

Life on the mental ward was not what I expected.

You couldn't really tell the crazy people from the staff and visitors, for one thing. Everyone was dressed in normal clothes, no one was talking to themselves or rocking or drooling or anything. In fact after a week of daily group therapy, I began to wonder whether the patients were the only sane ones in their acutely dysfunctional families.

During the day we followed a comfortable schedule of private and group counseling, busy but undemanding, with breaks for meals and relaxation exercises and art therapy. We sat on the sheltered, seventh-floor balcony with other patients and shared our life stories. Doctors and interns stopped by to chat. I liked the privacy of my quiet room, the large window, the small, uncluttered desk, and the twin bed with chaste white covers, neatly tucked under the mattress with hospital corners. It felt almost like a religious retreat.

I didn't exactly meet the Virgin Mary there, but I'll get to that.

In my case it wasn't my dysfunctional family that put me on the Seven West floor of the downtown hospital over Christmas break. At least not in any direct way. My breakdown occurred after days of grueling department meetings over promotion and tenure for a large group of junior faculty members at the university where I taught. I'd just been awarded early tenure the year before, so it was my first experience of "closed," tenured-only meetings—closed because of the prohibition on talking about the meetings outside of the room. The strictures against communicating with others added to the pressure-cooker effect. I felt isolated and embattled, without the support I would normally enjoy from friends and junior colleagues.

The administration that year was requiring the departments to rank-order the candidates: one list of the most deserving of promotion, the second-most deserving of promotion, and so on; another list of the most deserving of tenure, [End Page 114] the second-most, and so on. All of the English Department candidates deserved tenure and promotion, so debates over the rank-orderings were bound to be heated and subjective.

The personal issues were complicated. One of the candidates was an African American senior hire who had come in through a diversity program—damning him already in the eyes of the "good ol' boy" senior faculty who dominated the department. One was a young woman who had been hired at a considerably lower salary than the other candidates, all male, including those hired fresh out of graduate school, as she had been. There was no reason for this. The chair who had hired her was sheepish, but some of the older male faculty members didn't hesitate to say that it was because she had a husband—though in fact he was an unemployed PhD, and some of the male teachers had working wives. The injustice was going to be compounded by automatically ranking her lowest because of her position on the pay scale. Another candidate was a melodramatically narcissistic, whiny, but well-published young writer who had charmed the older male faculty members by pacing the halls voicing his anxiety over the tenure process, appealing to their sense of authority and importance. The final two were also solid candidates. One was Mexican American, an Ivy League PhD with good publishing and teaching. He was already at a disadvantage, as many faculty members felt that minorities had already gotten enough breaks, thank you. The remaining candidate, also worthy, but probably the least distinguished of the bunch, was an untenured white male assistant professor who had just been elected chair of the department for the upcoming year, a job nobody wanted. Every senior male member of the department secretly or not-so-secretly believed that he was going to be the primary behind-the-scenes mentor when this candidate became chair. They believed that he should be ranked first, although his publications and teaching evaluations and university service didn't warrant it. No one doubted that the tenure and promotion meetings that year would be messy and protracted.

The English...

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