A little Kum-ba-yah couldn't hurt

I woke up grumpy this morning after interrupted sleep, and all morning my interior monologue has been grumbling through a long list of annoyances: The UPS guy who's scared of our driveway and delivers packages to inappropriate places! The lack of bowls for yogurt and fruit at this morning's breakfast meeting! The person who thinks it's cool to announce an important meeting a mere three hours in advance! Ah, the humanity!

 I could go on, but just thinking about all those annoyances makes my blood pressure rise and I don't want such a beautiful day to be tainted by rage, so instead I'll think about things that make me happy, like the aforementioned gorgeous weather, the swath of brightly colored tulips blooming just across the street, the Creative Nonfiction students dutifully commenting on their classmates' drafts, and the finalist for an administrative position who, in the midst of a talk suffused with data and outcomes and appeals to reason, said she wants to help us restore the joy of working together.

Which made me wonder: where did it go, all that joy? I know we had a healthy amount at some point, because I remember years ago accompanying a group of my colleagues to a curriculum workshop where we interacted with teams of profs from other colleges who kept telling us that we made Marietta College sound like a fun place to work. And it was! We've always had our issues and obstacles, but—not to get all Kum-Ba-Yah on you—we used to be able to join hands across disciplines and make meaningful stuff happen.

When did we lose that ability? It would be easy to blame Covid and the stresses of pandemic pedagogy, but cracks were starting to show well before 2020, and since then we've had budget crises and cuts to positions and administrative challenges, and at some point a massive gulf opened up between the faculty and other constituencies on campus so that it's hard to feel like part of a team working together toward any purpose beyond sheer survival, like shipwreck survivors in a crowded lifeboat wondering who's going to get pushed off next or who will be first in line for dinner when we're forced to turn to cannibalism. Not fun!

I'm not sure a new administrator can solve that problem, but I can get behind a candidate who acknowledges that an emphasis on data and outcomes should not preclude the possibility of joy. You can feed an Artificial Intelligence Prof on reams of data, but we mere human beings function more effectively on a diet of purpose and passion and appreciation.

So that's what I'm holding on to today: the possibility of joy. Let it come soon, because the lifeboat is taking on water and the sharks are circling and I don't want to be anyone's lunch.