where I belong
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 While attending Catholic grade school, there was a continual focus on the finding of a vocation. It seems contradictory now as recent perusing through old Catholic school books reinforces an emphasis on sacrifice in a way which would encourage work in any field, irrespective of “calling”, that provided for the family. I can’t shake the memory of my 4th grade teacher, Mr. Feyas, writing on the green chalkboard on a snowy Erie afternoon, “Vocation [choices]…religious or lay,” with discussion of the various possible iterations of each. I knew from that point that I wouldn’t be happy in anything less than my “calling”.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 I entertained the idea of both a lay or religious vocation throughout my youth. The dualism seemed clear and comfortable to my younger self. In the end I chose lay and I chose teaching. Maybe I got it all wrong because how could one choose their own “calling”. It should have been revealed through a voice or dream or the words of another person. But I just decided and I started a path. The practicalities of the calling got distracted by love, illegal immigration, and disillusionment with the church I trusted to set up the dualisms that guided me. After some years of drifting, I stumbled back to the vocation.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 Gramsci conveys, “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say; but not all men have in society the function of intellectual” (304). The attraction of somehow being part of the amorphous process which watches an “intellectual”/potential intellectual become prepared to have “the function of intellectual” drew me in. The allure of the University has always been the opportunity for the propagation of future thought leaders who could surpass the current generation in all aspects benevolent. How can this space we occupy be more just, more compassionate, more livable for everyone? Education was the road I saw to human enlightenment. If only we can learn to see through others’ eyes. If only we could understand one another better, come alongside one another to support and comfort. A greater understanding of the world through a liberal higher education might move us along. The future would hold more teachers, engineers, doctors, philosophers, and writers who cared more for others than the situation we know at present.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 If education was the path to enlightenment, then I am now part of its “biopower” (Morten and Harney 103). In my current standing as an adjunct university instructor, I feel responsible to too many people. I need to do a good job to get asked back next semester so I don’t have to work a job I hate to provide for my family. I need to somehow stand out and prove I might be worthy of a full time position. I have content to convey to help students understand so they can be successful in their academic career. Mostly I am responsible to myself and my dream of the future where I believe(d) the university has a role to play.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 I’m not sure this dream fits with the University anymore, or not in the way I envisioned it would. This dream lands me in positions where a boss finds me “not a team player” because I stand up for the rights of students more than the convoluted procedures of administrative blahblah. I can’t be anyone but myself which leads me to say things like, “I’m concerned with the future of students even if their future doesn’t contain a finished degree.” This type of talk isn’t popular in a University system whose focus is on continued retention and expansion. Maybe the University isn’t the place to prepare the leaders of tomorrow. Maybe it is in the cellars of bars, the anarchist protests, the Discovery channel, and MOOCs.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 2 Or maybe my mind just has to change. Stake a claim in the University not as a politician, but as a terrorist – surviving in the “unsafe neighborhood” of the Undercommons (Morten and Harney 103). Adopt the Undercommons as my home. Not in a physical sense (though anyone viewing an adjunct office might find points of resemblance), but as an ambiguous state of mind, my structure of feeling. I am too old to be anything I’m not. My place may be under the obvious current, that desired, visible, secure, and fabled academic path.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 And so my “calling”, my vocation, has somehow broken the dichotomy put before me so long ago. I have no desire to be a religious leader, yet my lay vocation impassions me with religious fervor. It is more than a job, an interest, or a passion. It is something beyond that drives me and keeps me in a struggle that many days I don’t even want. It is in that labor that I enact meaning, not in the present, but for the future.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Antonio Gramsci, “Intellectuals and Education.” From An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935. Ed. David Forgacs. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. 300-322.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text 79.2 (July, 2004): 101-115.
It is probably a sign of my own slowness, but I was exactly 25 when I met someone for the first time who told me they had always dreamed of their job and had achieved fulfillment by attaining it. I honestly had thought that the concept of a “calling” was purely metaphoric and the experience utterly confused me. What beeswax had stopped my ears from hearing the siren call of my own destiny? What had gone wrong with me or was internally malfunctioning that I remained “uncalled?” The imperatives of subsistence, I think, are morally and socially confused with the imperative of existence.