2020: The End Is the Beginning, and Yet You Go On

March

First it's the weight of what is coming that crushes me. The university will close, of course it will, but when, and how long do we have to prepare, and will anyone think to tell us first? I'm consumed by building resources and by late-night direct message threads with my boss, planning everything and nothing, because we know way too much and not enough at all.

Then it's the size of the task that is so astonishing that it doesn't seem-possible: move five hundred faculty, at least half of whom have never used a digital teaching tool, to fully online delivery in one week. No one can possibly expect this to happen. Can they? And we must do it in a way that centres care, that acknowledges the stress and strain of our moment, that makes the digital humane: no one specifies those things, but they become central to my institutional purpose. The gulf between what the institution prioritizes and what I know is right expands, but I don't see that yet. I only see the task at hand: we will get people through this, and we will get them through this whole.

Seven months before this moment, I leave what had been a bad fit working in an English department for what is becoming a perfect fit working as a faculty educational technologist. My timing, like every aspect of my academic career, is flawless. I love my job from the moment I arrive and I make plans—a lot of plans. But it's not long before all of those plans are on hold, before we are talking in hallways about what will come next, before we're fielding questions we can't answer, before we're running massive last-minute drop-in sessions, before we're moving our extra monitors home.

And it's on.

April

Suddenly I'm quoting Beckett. A lot. I don't even like Beckett. I can't go on, I'll go on. I can't go on, I'll go on. The work is intense and everyone is anxious and I absorb it all. My colleagues want desperately to do right in a system that is failing, flailing, and I live at the intersection of their desires and our capacities.

When we think about the life of the mind, we don't talk about how the pursuit of it destroys us, scalds our nerve endings so that we no longer feel, extracts our labour so that we no longer rise. Every single day in April, the university extracts care from me—care that it has no intention of reciprocating, because it can't, because it won't, because budgets. And so I am learning, in this moment, about the futility and inescapablilty of care. It is Sisyphean. To do my job well, I invest fully in people. Because I invest fully in people, the university doesn't—it doesn't have to. Because the university doesn't, I invest fully in people. And on and on and on.

And yet in April I cannot see another way. The radical among us call for us to let it break, and I want to think of myself as radical but I cannot bring myself to let it break. The thing my role teaches me too well is that there is a human being—a struggling one—at the end of every institutional tool or practice that has been left to break. Ultimately, the only things the institution will let break are its people.

The semester is over and another one is coming and I catch my breath long enough to hope that this time when I try I will fail again, fail better.

May

They tell you, in graduate school, that the institution cannot love you, and you laugh because obviously—but also when it happens for you, when you land that tenure-track job, you won't care. You'll be so fulfiled, you won't need the love from the institution or your discipline, love...