1:52 PM:

It occurs to me that for that last entry to make much sense, you probably also ought to see the previous essay I gave the panel. Although you guys are probably all too aware of what last year was like anyway... Still, here you go:

Having told you about my plans for the future, I'd like to say a bit about the recent past. My first year here was a very bad year for me, academically and otherwise. In my entire undergraduate career, I had a total of two incompletes (both in the same semester, in which there were extenuating circumstances). In the past year, I had five. My productivity in most of my classes wasn't very high, either, and my grades reflect this. In fact, if this coming year turns out to be even half as bad as this past one, I won't have to be asked to leave; when May arrives, I'll depart Ann Arbor so quickly that the sonic boom will shatter windows across the campus. Fortunately, I don't expect that to be necessary. As I'll explain shortly, the particular reasons why I had trouble this past year will not be factors in the years to come. The domino effect has stopped, and I have every reason to expect matters to be better from now on. In retrospect, the year went down the tubes in September, when the Orthodox Jewish calendar and the university calendar collided. While I was able to avoid taking any classes on Tuesdays, avoiding all the Jewish holidays was impossible. On the days greyed out in the calendar on the right (starting at sundown the preceding night), not only couldn't I attend classes -- missing 15 hours of class time in all -- but I couldn't study, do homework, or otherwise prepare for school. This was a problem I'd never had to face before on this scale; the Queens College calendar takes the major Jewish holidays into account. So when I spoke to the relevant professors at the start of the semester, I made the serious error of assuming that I would be able to catch up. All our discussions were predicated on this assumption, with the only questions being when and how I would do so. In hindsight, I should have told the professors right off the bat that I wasn't going to be able to do all the coursework due to religious conflicts, accepting that this would result in a lower grade. Instead, I spent the entire rest of the year frantically trying to catch up, with the undone work looming over me the entire time. In March, I realized that my anxiety about the unfinished work was overwhelming me to the extent that I wasn't getting any work done, resulting in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. I went to the office of Counseling and Psychological Services and started getting help with my anxiety and procrastination issues. There were other factors at play, too. My apartment in New York was within ten blocks of four kosher pizza shops and several exclusively kosher supermarkets and groceries; it took some time to get used to living in a town with no kosher restaurants [Footnote: To answer the question everybody asks when I say this: no, Zingerman's doesn't even come close to being kosher.], in which getting the kosher staples I need requires longish bus rides to three different stores (Hiller's, Busch's, and Meijer). Finally, while I don't want to harp on the effects of September 11th, my entire emotional support network was back in New York, and I didn't regain the ability to concentrate on anything other than trying to contact my friends and watching the news until Rosh HaShana arrived. However, the domino effect has stopped. My work from last year has been completed. The High Holy Days will take place on the weekends for the next two years, so I won't miss any classes in the fall, won't lose nearly as much reading time, and won't fall behind. I've also gotten acclimated to Ann Arbor, and have learned important lessons about time management and dealing with anxiety. In short, there is every reason to expect that the years to come will be productive, and unhampered by the problems of the past.

No words yet on whether, if I do in fact leave the program, I'll have to do so at the end of December, or the end of May. Much to my amazement, it turns out that the Powers That Be aren't sure themselves; this will apparently be brought up at the full committee's meeting at the same time that they make their final decision about me.

Speaking of which... as suggested earlier, the decision isn't set in stone yet. While the full committee tends to follow the recommendation made by the panel assigned to each person, they don't always do so, and I was given the opportunity to submit additional evidence in my favor by noon today. I didn't have any more work to show them, but I did write an essay, addressing the concerns raised by my panel and trying to persuade them to wait until next semester before deciding. It follows:

A Supplementary Third-Term Review Essay My third-term review panel cited three reasons for recommending that I not be invited to pursue my doctorate at Michigan: I hadn’t demonstrated the necessary research skills, I hadn’t figured out just where my academic approach stood with regard to existing academic discourses, and I didn’t have a firm sense of the focus of my eventual dissertation. I do not dispute this assessment. I agree that these are important diagnostic tools. I agree that, under normal circumstances, two terms is sufficient to adjust to graduate school, get one’s bearings in academia, and get down to work. And I agree that, under normal circumstances, a student who could not meet the above criteria at the start of the third term would be unlikely to have the wherewithal to successfully complete the doctorate. The one assessment I disagree with is that circumstances in my first year here were anything close to normal. I assume you have the explanation I submitted to my panel (if not, please do get a copy-- it’s important), so I won’t recapitulate how the year got forcibly wrenched out of my control, and how the entire rest of the year was spent trying to get it back. There was simply no way I could have accomplished what a student ordinarily would in the first year. My challenge was simply to get everything done, rather than to do any of it well, and I certainly didn’t have the time, energy, or stability needed to figure out my place in the larger scheme of things; all I could do was deal with each crisis as it came, as best I could. My achievement was that I did finally regain control and finish my last incompletes, enabling me to start this year with a clean slate. For the past few weeks, I have finally been able to experience "normal circumstances" for a graduate student, and I can’t possibly overstate the difference. Yes, I’m working hard, but it’s manageable. I’m in control of it. I’m keeping up with the classes I’m taking, and my teaching has been off to a good start. Friends have remarked on my newfound optimism, and on the fact that, for the first time in about a year, I don’t sound both stressed-out and miserable. And I’ve finally been starting to get a sense of where I might fit in: both in this program, and in academia in general. I can only assume that this is what everybody else was able to do last year. I don’t quite know yet where I stand with relation to existing academic discourses, but I’m starting to get a sense of the outlines. For the past month or so, I’ve been sketching out an essay tracing the connections between my background in studying the Talmud (which employs a hermeneutic approach) and my critical approach to academic subjects, and I think I’m onto something important. What I do is take a number of separate academic discourses -- such as linguistics, neo-Marxism, and feminism -- and treat them as tools for generating interpretation. To some extent, this involves treating them as being more similar than they actually are. While doing so has interesting effects, many within those discourses wouldn’t agree that this can or should be done in the first place. I need to find a path that will respect and maintain the integrity of each of these discourses while also allowing me the freedom to productively use them in my own way. Given my progress just in the past few weeks, I have every confidence that, by the end of this semester, I will have the clear understanding of my place in academia necessary to fully engage in -- and with -- the existing discourses. Until now, my problem with regard to settling on a focus for my dissertation has not been a lack of ideas, but rather a surplus: I could rattle off a dozen without breaking a sweat. The problem, as you know, is that a dissertation needs a clear focus, and if one tries to do many things at once, nothing will actually get accomplished. My long experience in writing a weekly newspaper column probably helps with this: I am acutely aware of the need to pick one topic and stick with it, ignoring the myriad paths not taken. On giving it more thought, I’ve narrowed my topic to cultural constructions of adolescence. The exact instances to be studied, and the exact methods to be used are still to be determined; once I get a better handle on my overall academic approach, reaching the conclusion anticipated in the paragraph preceding this one, I expect to be able to establish the approach that I want to take with my dissertation. Members of the Committee, I put it to you: what you have so far is an absence of evidence on my part, and, under the circumstances, it was impossible for the necessary evidence to have been generated by now. There is every reason to believe that each of the salient questions can be settled this semester. My current coursework includes [a particular professor's] seminar in the English language, which is relevant to my future work, and which will involve a significant amount of research. I expect that my performance there will adequately demonstrate that I can, in fact, produce the quality of work expected of somebody embarking on a doctoral program. I further expect my performance this semester to demonstrate that I am perfectly capable of handling the normal graduate-student course load, managing both studying and teaching, without going to pieces, and that last year’s troubles really were an aberration caused by external circumstances. And, as already explained, I expect the other concerns to be settled this semester as well. I know that it is rare to grant probation for a semester, making a final decision with a fourth-term review, but I also know that there is more than one precedent for this, and it seems the best approach under the circumstances. Waiting one more semester involves a small risk, but I think the rewards will be well worth it.

The decision will be made on Monday, and will officially be reported a few days later. (I don't know when, exactly, I'll find out.) Stay tuned...

10:14 AM:

(Crossposted from The Usual Suspects)

It gets even better. Depending on how you look at it, the "M.A." portion of this program ends either at the end of the third or the fourth term. I'd had the impression that I'd be able to stay on through May no matter what. Apparently not; December is the end of the line. (Although I still have one more non-English course to take to fill the "cognates" requirement, so I don't know how that'll work. I'll find out today, I hope.)

Need I mention that my lease on this apartment runs through August, and that the housing market here is such that finding a sublettor in January would be extremely unlikely? (Not that, at this point, I'd have any idea where to go from here...)

12:28 PM:

Flowchart (highly abridged):

• Do I want to stay in this program myself?
  • If "yes," do I stand a chance of successfully appealing?
    • If "yes," then find out full range of appeal options and pursue them vigorously.
    • If "no," see below.
  • If "no," is it just this program, or am I not cut out for a Ph.D. in English at all?
    • If it's just this program, start looking into English Ph.D. programs elsewhere.
    • If I'm not cut out for an English Ph.D., how about a Ph.D. in something else, such as American Studies?
      • If I could fit into a different Ph.D. program, start looking into them.
      • If not, how about an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction?
        • If this seems like a more useful and plausible idea, begin researching such programs.
        • If not, begin looking into non-academic possibilities. In which case, figure out what to do, and perhaps more importantly, where to do it.

10:38 PM:

Okay... a bit more explanation seems in order. I didn't particularly mean to be cryptic; I was typing very shortly before sundown, and the past couple of days were the start of Sukkos, so the previous entry was all I had time for.

I still don't have much time -- I had a lot to do this week even without this, and I now find myself with a lot more to do -- but briefly, here are the main points:

• I'm okay. This wasn't really a surprise, and I'm not devastated by it. Just a bit disoriented, and trying to figure out where to go from here.
• Speaking of which, the official decision hasn't been made yet. My three-person subcommittee has decided to recommend that I not be invited to stay in the doctoral program after I get my Master's degree, but the full committee will be making the final decision on the 30th, giving me a few days in which to appeal. Part of what I need to figure out now is whether I really want to appeal.
• That said, the odds of any appeal being successful are fairly dismal, both because I don't really have any additional evidence to offer in my favor, and because the person chairing the full committee is almost certainly well aware of the fact that I think he has no business being in education.
• But we shall see. I need to speak to a bunch of professors and figure out what I want to do from here. While, you know, keeping on top of the classes I'm taking and teaching.
• I very much appreciate the sympathetic and concerned e-mail I've gotten since the last entry. If I haven't replied, it's really and truly nothing personal; I'm just a bit preoccupied by all this at the moment.