More Help?

This would seem to be the Year of the Workshop to Help Faculty.  Today's help comes in the form of a workshop I can attend if I so desire with the wince-inducing title Staying Alive, which is not as the Unwary Reader might suspect, conducted by John Travolta.  No, instead we get a guy of whom nobody has ever heard whose biographical blurb tells us that he is, and I quote, "a literary coach and educational consultant, working with faculty on projects for university presses and with organizations interested in nature, culture, and the human journey."  This seminar promises to help me, the poor, deprived faculty member:

"This workshop focuses on living a healthy and creative life in academia, where much quiet desperation arises from confusion about what is really going on.  At every stage, three fundamental factors come into play: the person, the profession, and the institution.  We will explore how they operate across the arc of an academic career using Erik Ericksons model of adult development correlated with the traditional Indian stages of apprentice, warrior, householder, and elder."

Now this is a seminar not to be missed--we get to play Cowboys and Indians!  I wanna be the Warrior Professor--you have to be the Householder Professor [insert snickering].

Being an "educational consultant" is obviously an even bigger racket than being a professor.  American Professors have easily the most privileged job in the world--with tenure, we can't be fired no matter how lousy we do our job, most of my colleagues don't even bother to show up for work more than half-time (if you count the summers when on an average day there are only two members of my 10 member department actually in the office) (the school year is only a bit better, by the way (on Friday afternoon, for example there are the same two of us around)), and we have no actual boss to tell us what to do, so we can do whatever we want.  Ah, but we are of course quietly desperate from being confused about what is going on.  So, here we have theoretically relatively bright individuals (we all have Ph.D.s after all) who cannot figure out the easiest job on the planet to figure out.  So, we get an educational consultant to come in to tell us all about Indians and adult development, after which we can all feel better about ourselves.

Seriously, it is impossible to write a satire of the modern American Academy.