We Teach Nipissing?
I want to take some time today to acknowledge two other websites that were very influential in helping me to come up with the concept for We Belong At Nipissing. We Teach Carleton and We Teach Laurier are visceral and unflinching in their portrayal of what life is like for CAS at those schools; they are well worth checking out.
The public has a tendency to lump together all the members of the ivory tower; they think that we all have tenure, are on the Sunshine List, and have summers off. The growing awareness about CAS is crucial in dispelling those ideas, because our reality couldn't be further away from those perceptions.
It would have been very easy to make a Tumblr called We Teach Nipissing. There are things that I could tell you about the way that the CAS at Nipissing are treated that would (I hope) make you deeply uncomfortable and/or angry: things about our working conditions, our salaries, our benefits, our "collegiality", our recognition. It would have been so easy to do that.
I wanted to try something a little different, so instead of looking at all of the things that are wrong about how we are treated, I thought we should look at what we actually do. I wanted to celebrate those accomplishments for what they are: they are impressive, worthy contributions to our academic community, doubly so because we do them for their own sake, as volunteers. The university won't acknowledge the benefit that it receives from the work that we do. This is the first step in acknowledging it for ourselves and each other.
We don't just teach Nipissing. We belong there.