As I head east today in the same little 2013 clown car that brought me out here exactly a decade ago, I wanted to share some final thoughts about the 2025 program cuts.
The last three things tacked to the bulletin board outside my office include a UNL-branded poster defining DEI (who else is old enough to remember when we worked at a university that supported diversity and inclusion?), a freedom to teach poster from an academic freedom rally in 2025, and one of the many stickers I received from Growable in my intercampus mail. It says letting go is growth and shows a snake shedding its too-small skin.
Each of these items has been an important reminder as I’ve dragged conference posters, articles, and books to the recycling bin. It was painful shedding the skin of a decade worth of projects and classes, some of which I won’t ever work on or teach again, but today’s post is dedicated to looking forward to the next stage of my life and career in the slightly bigger skin I more than earned this year.
Hey, guess what, I’m no longer scared to talk to the media. LOLOLOLZ.
Despite What They Took, I’m Still Me
In my last post, I mused, ” Who am I if not an R1 faculty member?” At 10 years, my stint at UNL is the longest I’ve been in any job, by fivefold. It’s not surprising that the length of time has shaped how I see myself. Not to mention, I’ve lived in Lincoln longer than I have anywhere else, including as a child.
But I get to leave UNL– which, as an institution, has never failed to communicate in all kinds of ways that who I am and what I do doesn’t matter–with my head held high.
I am a meaningful contributor in my field of rural education. I am a co-editor of The Rural Educator, the journal of the National Rural Education Association, read by educators and researchers alike. TRE is currently the only indexed journal in the field of rural education; as such, it ranks in the top 20 of Google Scholar’s list of Educational Administration journals and is a Q2 journal despite catering to a very small subfield of educational research (something like 3% of educational research produced annually addresses the 50% of schools that are rural and 9 million students that attend them). I was recently elected chair of the Rural Ed SIG of AERA, culminating my 13 years as an active member of that group, as well as my service on committees and as program co-chair. Turns out, no matter how much your land-grant institution doesn’t seem to care about rural education in a state where a quarter of students attend a rural school (a full half of all schools in the state), they can’t actually pry your h-index or your reputation from your cold, emotionally dead hands.
Speaking of, my h-index just ticked up again last week, but who is counting (definitely not me checking Google Scholar for updates every Monday as an antidote to admin telling me I wasn’t productive enough).
I am still an educator dedicated to doing better in how school leaders are prepared. No one can actually erase the experience of leading curriculum revision to that end, even if they are going to shortsightedly cut an exciting, innovative program poised to be an award winner in a few years. A program that a student just told me was clearly better than those that many of his peers at an Ivy that shall remain nameless attended. A program that in the words of another student, pushed him to think and grow as a practicioner. I am still active in professional communities that not only provide leadership preparation but also conduct research to improve it in the service of K-12 students across the country. I have an accepted SoTL paper on Ed.D. programs, one in progress, and another is ramping up for data collection this fall. But sure, fine, whatever, no one needs to actually understand how university programs can better serve K-12 schools.
Greener Pastures and Greener Mountains
It is thanks to being a triple threat– teaching, research, and service– that I’m landing on my feet at an institution that seems to know who they are and is simply trying to be the best version of that, in a department that saw a gap in their expertise and thought my rural scholarship would be a boon in their largely rural corner of the state, and where my colleague holds similar values of developing educational leaders. I’m already collaborating with a faculty member there, so for the first time in 10 years, I’m going to get to conduct research with people I work with. I feel profoundly lucky, actually. Even better, I already know faculty at four other institutions in the state. Oh, the collaborations I am dreaming of already!
When I started applying for jobs in 2015, I said I wanted to be at an R1, but make it land-grant, because I really enjoy research and I want to be of service to the people in the state where I live, wherever I live. But by the time I was preparing my materials for tenure and describing my plans for future work in 2021 (work that I had put not so much on the back burner as in the freezer to jump through the hoops for tenure, i.e. racking up publications and citations without care as to whether anything contributed to improving the lives of children and communities), I had come to realize I was actually better suited to a regional, student focused institution. I want to be an excellent teacher and I want the research and service I do to have actual impact and not just a citation count.
But my husband made clear he wasn’t going to move and then my parents moved out here when I got tenure. Since no one seemed likely to survive another round of that, I set myself to making my job one I could live with a minimum of moral injury. I applied for a Grand Challenges grant focused on anti-racism (remember when that was a category of grants the university funded, lol) and developing capacity for community-engaged research (remember when UNL admin cared about that too, lol). When that wasn’t funded, I took a small part of my idea to the Nebraska Department of Education, and they gave me some funding to start some school-based improvement work. I kept pushing to make the UNL EdD program an exemplary program, and I got to work for a year at a time with our Ed.D. students to develop their dissertation projects. It was such a privledge to work with students in that way because in higher education, we rarely get to see the slow arc of learning and growth and rarely get to see students bloom into new, better versions of themselves because it doesn’t always happen in 15 week incriments. The greatest joy I have had was seeing three cohorts of students develop meaningful improvement projects in all kinds of settings.
But now I get to be at an institution that already has an exemplary EdD program, where I will get to advise EdD students and teach master’s students, and that has clear expectations for direct work with educational stakeholders. They would like you to publish your good work, but hey, no pressure. And their tenure standards include explicit expectations for diversity, equity, and inclusion. I was so excited during my job talk to hear affirmative answers to my questions, can I say racial equity here? Can I say gender identity? OH MY GOD, ACADEMIC FREEDOM STILL EXISTS SOMEWHERE! Maybe more importantly, no one is rolling over and sacrificing the well-being of students who have been marginalized and poorly served by our education system to keep politicians happy.
So, I want to say thank you, Jeff Gold and Mark Button, for opening the door to what I hope is a much more fulfilling career and an institution that appears to value what I have to offer. Thank you for the ticket back to the East Coast and the opportunity to live in the mountains again, within driving distance of family and some of my oldest friends. Also the beach. I am excited to get to live in driving distance of the ocean again.
Except for the part where my husband divorced me, the part where I packed and moved my parents back to Virginia, and the part where I’m going to miss the many friends I made at UNL and in Lincoln, I feel like I won the arbitrary-shuttering-of-a-historic-department lottery.
Letting Go is Growth
It is my sincerest wish for every other faculty member dismissed without cause, based on faulty data and lies, that you, too, will find something better. I have high hopes for my friend Susan, who sent a screenshot of her new institution’s extremely functional tech dashboard. Really, after years of whatever the hell the travel platform is that’s worse than Concur, that seems pretty awesome. Except for the part where she had to pull her kids from the small but mighty Montessori school where they had been thriving, and I have been board secretary. And leaving a church where she feels at home and all of her friends. But she also sent me pictures of new neighbors helping unload her truck, two hundred pounds of locally milled flour in her trunk, and some other very regional food items. She’s not the only UNL refugee to land where she is. At least three other faculty members from UNL have landed there this year, including the Director of the aforementioned Growable. All of those folks seem like a huge loss for UNL. Other stats folks have landed at OSU and K-State. I have a very funny story about interviewing the day after one of them gave a talk on the metrics down in Manhattan.
I also have high hopes for my dear colleague Beth, who chaired my search and then had to live with that decision. J/K, I know she would hire me again; she told people that on reference check calls this fall. She’s found a remote job at an AAU university that suits her to a T. I hope she gets to enjoy her cherry tree for many years to come and no longer needs to find people to eat the output of her stress baking (although they are delicious).
I hope the rest of the “terminated” faculty will find their way forward with the least amount of pain and heartache and the most amount of joy possible. Although I know that the pain is inevitable, whether it is a knock to your professional identity, pulling kids out of school, or moving away from friends, the trauma inflicted on us this year will live on in big and small ways for a long time. But I hope all the faculty who weren’t given retention offers for unknown reasons find opportunities to seek greener pastures, or at least universities with functional software systems. Or jobs outside of academia; I hear that’s a thing. And our colleagues who were given retention offers for equally unknowable reasons: take your time finding that greener pasture, because surely it’s not at an institution that sees your colleagues as expendable sources of savings to be used for merit-based raises.
I hope others in departments not yet affected by this nonsense will find greener pastures too, like another friend, who now has a named professorship and, apparently, actual conference funding for the first time in a long time, at an institution where they felt wanted after feeling like UNL did not value their contributions for a long time. I’ve heard they’re not the only UNL faculty member to be wooed away by a university that rhymes with Blorgia. And two other members of their department have left for better offers at other state flagships.
Stay and Fight
I also hope that those of you who stay at UNL will commit to fighting for the university. Not just to make it a better place to work for yourselves and your colleagues, although you should do that, but because, as the land-grant university in Nebraska, UNL holds a special place in the state. I hope you will commit to fighting together and not let them divide you over piddly raises or ever-shrinking resources. If they destroy the university in favor of the med center or the football team, none of the other stuff will really matter.
I often think of Willa Cather’s descriptions of the university’s early days and hold hope that someday, UNL will be that place of learning that offers opportunities to the young people of Nebraska. Opportunities to study Classics and literature as well as to learn the most cutting-edge crop management. Opportunities to study art, music, history, and beef production. And opportunities to become teachers, principals, and superintendents in their communities across the state. Those opportunities exist because of the faculty. And because of our collective belief in the power of knowledge and learning for a better society. That is something worth fighting for, along with our own dignity and respect at work and our own material well-being. Free inquiry and academic freedom. Shared governance. Knowledge and learning.
Don’t forget that.
And Katniss, when you’re in the arena, don’t forget who the real enemy is.
