A desert -- not a wasteland -- of the mind

Mary M. McGlynn

IF INSIGHTS AND BREAKTHROUGHS were trees, the topography of last semester would look for me like the west Texas desert where I grew up -- flat and lonely, the occasional struggling mesquite bush the only variety on the horizon. My dissertation turned recalcitrant months ago, to the point that I can hardly claim to have progressed at all in my investigation of the politics of experimental prose. I'm told that the guilt, self-loathing, and unhappiness are part of my job description as grad student, but I don't know how I would be surviving the trials and setbacks of producing my first book if it weren't for teaching.

Ah, teaching: the wildflowers and prickly pears and buffalo grass in my wilderness of thoughts; the reality check when my work seems abstruse; the activity I can point to at the end of a semester with a sense of accomplishment: "No, I didn't write a chapter, but I graded 400 papers . . . ." Wait, four hundred essays? How long does that take? No wonder you got no research done, darling, you were planning classes 'til 3 a.m., grading in the subway, meeting with students in your office every week. If your mind is a desert, these greedy little weeds sucked all the water of intellect away from your tenure-track tree.

Teaching or research? It's like being forced to choose a favorite child when both are mewling and puking, squawking for attention. But teaching is definitely the squeakier wheel, the immanent, the hand-to-mouth. Given a limited amount of time, the reading, reference checking, and writing slide. Nobody but me suffers in the short term if I deviate from my dissertation schedule, but it's torturous and unethical to arrive at class unprepared. So I'll grade one more set of papers, thinking with petulant longing of my lonesome, overheated study carrel.

With increasing specialization and narrower fields of expertise, publications by professors often seem to be more and more removed from the fundamentals of their fields. Teaching involves explaining the basic, the general, the introductory. Either you're breaking new ground in your research, or you're explaining to others where you've been through teaching. So it's easy to extrapolate another dichotomy: Research is creative, while teaching is transmissive. As a consequence of this, the hierarchy of higher learning generally ranks the research university over the teaching college, a leveraging that seems axiomatically to validate research over teaching, to see the latter as an imposition on the former. Even if I may not like it this way, the tenure system and the opinions of colleagues do seem to function with these assumptions.

Often I let my mind grumble this way about the polar pulls of teaching and research. But then three years of teaching first-year writing force me to recognize the logical fallacy, the false analogy. How logical is the way we usually structure our assumptions about a professor's obligations? An analogy only works if it functions on numerous levels. The teaching/research binary that I set up ignores the fact that quantitative tensions do not necessarily equal qualitative ones.

In teaching my writing students to look beyond false binaries, I encourage them to generate a number of possible alternatives. Applying this to the teaching/research issue, we can explore several ways to restructure the debate. We can deny that the dichotomy exists, positing inste ad a theory that teaching and research are essentially aspects of the same practice, equally creative. Alternatively, we could argue that the research is of equal value to teaching, that the methods and practices may be different, but the two are dependent on each other for insights and balance -- that good researchers make the best teachers and vice versa. The first option abolishes the dichotomy, while the second acknowledges the split but denies its implicit hierarchy. Either way, time spent at one activity enhances the quality of work in the other. Yes, time is limited, but focusing on how I must use Peter's hours to do Paul's work ignores the symbiosis, the synergy.

Then there's the psychological aspect. I never feel more in love with my dissertation than when I have a huge stack of midterms at my side. A semester without teaching feels isolated and remote, like writing letters and not mailing them. There's a perverse reverse psychology at work, binding my teaching and my dissertation.

Back to my desert mind: Maybe teaching and research aren't so much desert plants as desert animals, baking in the same sun, eating the same plants...eating each other? Whoops, problems with analogy again. How's this: the mind as the entire ecosystem. Sure, certain organisms compete with each other for limited resources, but the system itself thrives, cycles endlessly forward like a giant west Texas tumbleweed.


MARY M. McGLYNN is a doctoral candidate in English and comparative literature at Columbia and an instructor in composition and literature.

PHOTO CREDIT: Corel Image Library.