New Faculty Search

On Wednesday, I met with the third candidate for the American Studies faculty position that's open. I'm really glad I got the chance to be on the student search committee. Aside from allowing me to meet the potential professors, it's made me think about what it is I appreciate about the professors I've had and how I feel about my choice of college in general.

One thing I've realized is that my professors and courses really are my favorite part about school. Yeah, the food is acceptable, and the dorms are great. But I could have found that somewhere else. Here, I have a certain structured independence, academically, that would have been difficult to find elsewhere. I remember looking for colleges and finding out that only about 200 in the country had official American Studies programs. My program here is both structured and loose, so even though there are 16 categories of requirements for the major, you can develop your own focus within them. (Oh, the beauty of an interdisciplinary major.) Contemporary Arts--it's a contract program, and I literally develop my own major, my own focus. And I can do both of these majors, still have electives, and graduate on time without driving myself insane. I wouldn't have been able to do that at any of my other potential schools.

As for professors...even though I complain a lot about several of them, I have to admit (grudgingly, in some cases) that most of them are excellent. Beyond that, there are definitely at least half a dozen professors that I've worked with individually on one project or another. These are the professors that never have a problem staying and talking a few minutes after class, or meeting me during the week regardless of whether or not it's during their office hours. They've taken an active interest in me as a student, and I feel like that's something I wouldn't necessarily get at another school.

Anyway, this third faculty candidate. One thing that I found really interesting about her was that she said she really made a point of reminding her students that history isn't just "Truth"--it's framed by someone's perspective, and therefore, it's open to interpretation. She also said that she really likes using primary sources, images, and other media to pinpoint the humanity in whatever it is that she's teaching. I got really excited about that, and I told her, I think it's really important to close the time gap and make history feel more immediate, because it's so easy to distance yourself and look only at the facts, when really, history isn't just dates and numbers and names--it's about people. History is a story. The word "story" is in the word "history", and stories are about people, they're part of being human, so dehumanizing history is taking away something vital from it.

I read a GQ article today that reminded me of that as well. Entitled simply, "The Garden," the article focused on the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery. These men dig thirty graves a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year. They saw the plane go down into the Pentagon on 9/11. They've seen the Kennedys come to visit their family's graves. They've talked to people about to commit suicide and they've found a body on the Eternal Flame. And now, every day, they bury bodies that come in from around the world. Most of them voted for Obama because they're ready to see an end to the conflicts in the Middle East--because they don't want to bury any more kids. It's so interesting. It's easy for us to forget about the war. For them, all the death is a brutal reality. Telling that story from the gravediggers' point of view--it adds an extra layer of humanity to a story that could easily fall into a barrage of numbers and facts. This way, though--it means more.

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Now playing: Band of Horses - Our Swords