For traditional academics, who teach only in the fall and spring semesters, the last days of summer are filled with a mixture of sadness and excitement. The classrooms are empty. The students have not yet moved back to their dorms, but we know that somewhere they are packing.
The first day of classes is looming on the horizon of our datebooks, and we know that our quiet, orderly lives of reflection and writing will be replaced overnight by the relative chaos of teaching, advising, and attending meetings. For about nine months, all you can do is keep your head above water until you wash up, panting and exhausted, on the shore of the next summer break.
That is not to say that I don’t enjoy teaching, but at the beginning of every academic year I feel like a small, nocturnal animal, deep in hibernation, suddenly dragged into the morning sunlight, measured, inoculated, and tagged by jaded biologists with cold, rough hands.
They don’t seem to care that I’m an endangered species. And I’m too torpid to even snarl convincingly when they display me before a mob of screaming schoolchildren on a field trip.
Traditional academics have time to adapt to a new way of life during the summer. The change is physical as well as mental.
Freed from the discipline of the daily lecture, we lose the adrenaline that enables us to withstand the public gaze and think under pressure. We shed our formal clothing and forget about short-term deadlines, piles of ungraded papers, and the petty irritations of faculty politics. We lounge in bed an extra hour or two. We stay up late, revising scholarly notes in a T-shirt and bare feet. We’re able to inhale, and our thoughts seem to expand with our lungs.
It’s not surprising that academics make their New Years’ resolutions at the beginning of summer. Every fall I’m impressed at how healthy my colleagues look after only three months away from classes. Summer is the font of academic rejuvenation.
For many of us, academic summers are the compensation we dreamed about when we first decided to be good at school. We would escape the daily grind of the corporate office or the factory job -- the two or three weeks of vacation a year -- by foregoing the more common joys of adolescence and young adulthood.
Young academics are always striving to seem older, but older academics often seem younger than their real age. And it’s the older academics who seem most of all to relish the freedoms of summer. I imagine my senior colleagues cruising the Greek Islands, biking through Provence, diving off the Great Barrier Reef, meditating with the monks of Lhasa, guzzling beer in the gardens of Munich, photographing elephants in Kenya, and sipping their way through the vineyards of Tuscany. Time is running out, and they have not yet lived.
Summer freedom as an adult is like a dream of eternal youth. I’m only an assistant professor. I don’t have enough deposits in the bank of academic achievement (or real money) for fantasy vacations. But I can remember lying in a hammock reading Middlemarch to the sound of rustling leaves as clouds moved overhead. For a moment or two it was easy to believe that my summer life was virtue rewarded, that God was an English professor, and that I worked in the best of all possible universities.
Possibly more than anything else, it’s that dream of summer freedom -- formed through childhood and the seasonal patterns of American education -- that draws so many people to compete for a declining number of positions as tenured professors.
Of course, we all work very hard during the summer. It’s when most of us perform the research and writing that are demanded for professional survival.
If June and July encourage us to relax a little and consider the bigger picture, August reminds us that every academic summer -- like childhood innocence -- must soon come to an end. Every year, since we first went to school at age 5 or 6, the end of August has coincided with a dramatic change in our lives, half longed-for and half dreaded: optimism about new adventures tinged by regret for the loss of our daily freedom.
There are rituals that must be performed before classes begin and our free time is reduced to a few exhausted hours in the evening. Obviously, most of us have to create or revise our syllabi. Some of us have Web sites to develop or update. Some of us prepare our handouts and lectures months in advance. The most experienced among us fly by the seat of our pants, relying on instincts, knowing that every class should develop beyond our capacity to plan far in advance.
It’s for this last reason that, more and more, my behavior in late August is more akin to nesting than academic preparation. I have to make my peace with the end of summer before I am emotionally ready to teach.
First, I get my house in good order. I attend to all of the pressing home repairs. I clip the hedges and mow the lawn extra low. I clean my car and take it to the shop for maintenance. I inventory my clothes, donate what no longer fits to charity, and order what I expect to need for the fall, usually from L.L. Bean and Lands’ End. And then I go to “The Headmaster” (that’s really the name of my barbershop). He calls it my annual “back-to-school haircut.”
Finally, just before classes begin, I will take a few days off to spend with my wife and three daughters. Maybe we’ll just go camping in the backyard, or go to the beach and have a cookout. I know we are going to miss each other when my work hours increase, and our weekend has the aura of leave-taking, as if it were sunset all the time.
I’ll draw on that memory for the next couple months when I am working late or sleeping in a hotel at an academic conference.
Usually, in between the first faculty meetings, I will put away the debris of my summer research projects. I file stacks of accumulated journal articles. I reorganize my books, making sure to leave a few inches on each shelf for new acquisitions. I clear one shelf for each of my new classes. And, then, on the way home, I stop at Staples or Office Depot, having given myself permission to buy anything I need.
The smell of office supplies arouses flashbacks of the “back-to-school” sales of my childhood: the Crayola crayons, Elmer’s glue, Bic pens, and Dixon-Ticonderoga pencils I bought with my mother at Woolworths or Kmart. They were all little symbols of hope, just like all the semi-useless stuff with which I fill my shopping cart today.
Is it too much to say that buying a new pencil cup is like building a monument? It links me to the utopian dreams of Western civilization. Every fall, I am like the Puritans building a city upon a hill on the virgin land of my desk. It takes a special pen to begin writing on the tabula rasa of the fall semester.
Do all academics have mythical visions of their lives reinforced by absurd rituals?
One thing I learned from all the summer jobs I held when I was a student is that our support staff members would not be sympathetic to the emotions I’ve expressed. They have been cleaning the bathrooms and maintaining the grounds while we were away fulfilling ourselves and securing our next promotion.
What about the adjuncts -- the majority of faculty members in many places -- who have been teaching all summer for $1,000 a course? I was one of them once, and remembering that time is one of the best antidotes for self-pity now that I am a tenure-track professor.
Maybe it’s time for us to get rid of the academic summer. Isn’t it built on exploitation? Isn’t it a legacy of the agricultural past that has no reason to exist when the vast majority of people live in cities? Isn’t it time we moved beyond the 19th-century vision of Huck Finn adventures and embraced the need for an accelerated and efficient educational timetable?
An undergraduate degree could be completed in three years if there were no summer breaks. And, whatever we think about that in theory, the end of the summer break is becoming a reality in practice. An increasing number of students and faculty members are keeping the classrooms busy all year long. American business got rid of Sunday as a day of rest years ago, and it seems inevitable that in academe, too, summer must be sacrificed to the god of the marketplace.
Somehow, though, I don’t think higher education will be more equitable or humane when summer break is finally eliminated for everyone.
There is something beautiful in the rituals of academic life, even if they are not above criticism. They bind together generations of students and teachers. And those traditions seem all the more poignant because they are almost certain to pass away soon. The last days of summer remind us of the evanescence of life and our most cherished institutions.
Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an assistant professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes occasionally about academic culture and the tenure track and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com