Published on DEC.12.2013
In the small
Midwestern university town where we attended graduate school the dominant
calendar was not Gregorian but Academic. Around December 18th our town became a
ghost town— everyone disappeared. It was as though the town's sole reason
for being was its university. We were
surprised to see that not only the undergraduates' dorms were empty, but all
the American graduate students left as
well. Moreover, it was quite unsettling to discover that most of the faculty
members went away on the last day of the semester.
At the beginning of the school year, one of my favorite
lecturers, a young assistant professor, invited us to his home and showed us his
study. It was a scholar’s dream:
beautifully lit, hardwood floor, bookshelves up to the ceiling, and next to
them stood an elegant ladder, like the one you could see in old fashioned
libraries, or in the movies. I remember thinking that he was the luckiest man
on earth to have such a study. When I heard that he too left town during
Christmas, I couldn’t fathom why anyone
who owned such a study would choose to spend the holiday away from it. Those
two and a half weeks at the end of December seemed to me a perfect opportunity
for doing lots of reading and writing in that exact study.
We spent our first Christmas in Columbia Missouri together
with the other foreign students who could not go home; most of us did not
celebrate Christmas. The locals stayed in town as well since this was their
only home. At that time we have been in
the United States less than six months,
and watched the reality of our new life through the prism of our old culture.
As universities in Israel were only in the cities, we were not familiar with
the concept of a university town and the Academic calendar.
Two years later later my husband got a teaching position at
the University of Iowa, another small university town. We already had our first
baby and Iowa City was an ideal place to raise a family. But there too we found
that the ruling calendar was the Academic one; every Christmas break, together
with the students, our friends and colleagues left town .
It is clear why university students would go home to their
families for the holidays, but I used to wonder why our faculty members fled
away at the end of the semester. Today we often see people sitting together
supposedly having a conversation, but instead of talking each checks his /her
smart phone. It is as though they are in two places at the same time,
emotionally they are not committed to being where they physically are.
I feel that this was the case with many young faculty
members in those small communities, they
could not commit themselves to the town. They were devoted to their job, and
had obligations to the institution, thus they gladly stayed there during the
semester. But as they viewed their stay in town as temporary, they had no ties
to the community: it was not their home, their “real” life was somewhere else.
At this time of the year I usually remember our Midwestern
experience, we were also young but viewed both towns as our home, and also we
had no where else to go. That was a while ago, I can only hope that today when
it is much harder for PhD graduates to obtain a university position, they would
regard the [small] town where they land a job as a prize rather than an exile.
