i am 32 years old, but this fall marked the first in my long academic career in which i fully moved round to the other side of the desk. no longer a student; students now in my care. i officially received my PhD on a friday and began teaching at ut austin the following wednesday. i have had to hustle. i’m usually pretty healthy, but this semester, i’ve been sick a lot, & tired. but consideration for those students it was my job to teach demanded i keep up and keep going, that i fake it ‘till i make it.
this year’s presidential election campaign and outcome are, of course, unprecedented, and so it has been a challenging mash-up: first time faculty member & a new world order. i’ve done my best. with more experience (as a teacher or in an autocracy), i’m sure i could have done better. i modeled in front of the classroom a faith in words articulated out of careful study and thought, and hoped if nothing else, they’d learn from me to be kind and compassionate and critical. i don’t know, maybe a couple did. but then those ones didn’t need me for that; i learned a lot from those (girls) too.
back in september, when we were all so mercifully unaware (in denial?) of what was to be, my students came together to draft this manifesto (collaged out of those written by avant-gardists in europe in the interwar period). they set the type by hand, and pulled the prints on an old vandercook. each student proudly signed the finished project. by the end of the semester, some of those same students were no longer able to work together, but just a few months ago they made this document, collectively.
freedom, education, consciousness: what they all wanted and, i imagine, want still. it’s what we all deserve, no doubt.
written and printed by students at the university of texas at austin.
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