Sabbatical, p.1
Sabbatical, page 1
SABBATICAL
CURRICULUM VITAE
BOOK 2
KATRINA JACKSON
Copyright © 2022 by Katrina Jackson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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CONTENTS
Spring
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Summer
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Fall
Epilogue
Other books by Katrina Jackson
SPRING
CHAPTER ONE
“We don’t need another poorly attended conference,” Leonard Hsu said, trying to hide his aggravation. “Sorry, symposium,” he added sarcastically, effectively sidestepping Susan Beard’s only real contribution to this committee.
Toni glanced at the other woman, her index finger in the air, a triumphant smile dying on her lips. Susan never missed an opportunity to suggest a symposium at their meetings. She’d been at the university for almost a decade and was still searching for a way to create a “signature annual event” — one that would look good in her merit file but require very little work for most of the year. Leonard had caught onto her very quickly, and every meeting, his ability to hide his disgust at her self-serving search for one more event frayed ever thinner.
As a person, Toni found the drama between Leonard and Sue riveting, some of the best entertainment of the month. She also happened to agree with Leonard. The last thing her calendar needed was one more conference or symposium clogging up the last few weeks of spring semester. But as chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Belonging and Inclusion, she had to pretend to be diplomatic or, at the very least, stop the argument that had been brewing all academic year.
Preston Marks beat her to it. “What about an essay contest?”
Margery Pham sighed, and internally, Toni sighed right along with her. Externally, Toni smiled in Preston’s direction.
“Preston, this is the end of your first year at the university, right?” Toni hated asking questions she already knew the answer to, but sometimes she had to walk people — students and colleagues alike — through a lesson from A to Z.
“Yes,” he said, sitting up straight in his chair, beaming at her.
She smiled, feeling a sense of warmth that was only tainted at the edges by a deep exhaustion she hoped he never felt but knew he probably would. Preston reminded Toni of Deja during her first year. The ones who came straight out of grad school always had a certain naïve optimism that was as inspiring as it was heartbreaking. They always thought they were on the verge of changing the world. It was devastating watching reality hit them hard and change them. Whether it beat them down or taught them that selling out was much better than sticking to your morals, at least in the short term — no matter which road they chose — it was painful to witness.
Toni couldn’t remember being so green. She didn’t think she’d ever been naïvely optimistic. She’d walked out of grad school with a prestigious two-year post-doctoral fellowship, but when it had nearly killed her with microaggressions and overwork, she’d expected it. And when she’d left her last institution because her old department wouldn’t grant her tenure, a part of her had expected that as well. What other outcome could she imagine after reporting the chair of the department for sexual harassment and racial discrimination? Especially when the College had brushed her complaint under the rug? If there had ever been a time when Toni hadn’t felt rubbed raw by her job, she couldn’t remember it.
“Do you assign a lot of writing in your classes?” she asked Preston.
“Oh, yes,” he said, beaming at her across the table. “It’s so important that students get to practice writing and get ample feedback and guidance at the same time.”
Someone in the room groaned. A few of the senior faculty shifted uncomfortably in their seats. She couldn’t help but wonder where all this enthusiasm went. Did it start to fade after day one or the first year? In her official and unofficial roles as a mentor to junior faculty, Toni spent an uncomfortable amount of time fighting bitterness as she watched the university sap the energy from her younger colleagues. She tried to sit as a bulwark against it, but even she knew that most of her efforts were only a temporary solution to systemic problems — systemic problems no one with any real power seemed willing to address. Thankfully, Toni had learned early in her career how to push her own emotions aside to get the work done — because the work was what mattered.
“I agree,” Toni said, smiling patiently at Preston. “But if you can, imagine the students you’ve had this year writing an essay on the importance of diversity on this campus.” She took a breath and consulted her notes. “Let’s be generous and imagine that they have a one-month turnaround from our prompt going out and submission. Imagine the state of those drafts. Imagine the time it will take to give them the feedback and guidance they need before presenting at a symposium of some sort. Imagine doing that right in the middle of spring semester.”
On the other side of the table, Susan had started at her favorite word and then shrunk back as Toni kept speaking.
“How much time would it take them to write it?” she asked Preston. “How much time would it take us to review them, deliberate, and decide on a winner?”
Even though there were people in the room who believed otherwise, Toni derived no pleasure from watching Preston deflate as she spoke. Unlike some of her colleagues, she didn’t find it entertaining to watch people she respected shrink in on themselves. But she did think it was her job to be honest and set boundaries younger colleagues could not, would not, or didn’t even know were possible. Even when she was not mentoring, she modeled what she hoped was good behavior. And taking on more needless busywork was not good behavior.
“I see,” Preston muttered, sitting back in his chair with a frown. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said, still smiling warmly at him. He gave her a half-hearted smile, and then Toni turned to look around the small conference table. “Look, we don’t have to make any decisions today. In fact, it would be foolish if we did.”
She made meaningful eye contact with the members of a committee she’d been conned into chairing for the last two years. These weren’t her people per se, but one of the problems with Toni’s personality was that everyone, after a while, became one of her people. It was a trait she’d inherited from her grandmother; they both had big, soft hearts and sharp tongues. Toni had loved this trait in her grandmother, but over the years, she’d come to believe that, for her, it was a liability.
“Anyway, it’s the end of finals week. Spring semester is almost over,” Toni said, thrusting her fists into the air in victory. “We’re almost free.”
Leonard made a tiny fist bump motion that made Toni smile.
“I suggest,” Toni said sagely, “that you all take the summer and forget all this nonsense. Rest. Take a vacation. Binge-watch a Swedish crime drama. Plant a garden. Do literally anything else. Don’t worry about this event. Chances are we’ll come back in the fall, and the provost will have changed direction on Student Belonging Week anyway. Why don’t we just wait and worry about it then?”
“Not we,” Leonard interjected.
“What?”
He grinned at her across the length of the conference table. “We’ll come back in the fall, but you will be on sabbatical.”
At that last word, the table erupted into something that couldn’t be described as anything other than a titter. The only word that inspired more interest at a university than ‘tenure’ was ‘sabbatical.’ If tenure was the thing that convinced you to buy into the system, then the sabbatical was the thing that made you stay even when you wanted to leave.
Usually, sabbatical came right after tenure, but Toni hadn’t been at the university long enough to apply. But now, her time had finally come. For so many semesters over the last five years, Toni had worried she’d never see this day. She was so happy that she beamed as she looked around the room one more time. “I forgot,” she admitted in an uncharacteristically gentle voice.
“How could you forget?” Leonard asked bombastically. “Your sabbatical is the best part of all this.” He gestured around the nondescript conference room they’d been meeting in for months. Most of the people in the room had been at the university longer than Preston, so they knew that Leonard’s enthusiasm had little to do with Toni’s sabbatical and more to do with his.
Leonard had been the chair of the Classics Departm ent four years ago. He’d left for his sabbatical a tired, stooped, and angry man. A few graduate students had placed a bet on the likelihood Leonard would return from his sabbatical or just say fuck it and email his resignation. Toni had seriously considered getting in on that action. She could have made an easy hundred dollars because everyone knew Leonard hated his department, the university, and their small town with the fire of a thousand suns. In fact, the only thing that had stopped him from quitting was that sabbatical; he’d earned it and a prestigious grant to co-lead an archeological dig in Ethiopia. He returned a year later, tanned, smiling, and married to an Ethiopian scholar with an application for a spousal hire locked and loaded for submission. He’d returned from his sabbatical a changed man.
Leonard and Desta Hsu were the fairy tale overworked academics told themselves as they revised their sabbatical applications. The Hsus were the promise of what a sabbatical could be. Toni wasn’t among the cohort of colleagues who needed that kind of inspiration, but she appreciated Leonard’s enthusiasm all the same.
“It’s been a long semester,” she reminded him. “But in any case, you’re right. I won’t be here in the fall, so whatever the Dean has in store for you, Margery will guide you to success.”
Toni nodded in Margery’s direction. The other woman beamed at the table. Of all the junior scholars who’d flocked to Toni over the years, Margery was the most self-assured. She’d come to the university much like Toni, with a few bad years at another university under her belt and a healthy dose of cynicism dripping from her words like sarcasm burned to ash. But, also like Toni, Margery had a fire burning under her to do what needed to be done. As soon as Toni’s application for sabbatical had been approved, she’d invited Margery for coffee, ready to convince her to take over this committee she had never wanted, but of which she was protective. And then she’d found that Margery had been waiting for the opportunity. Passing the baton to Margery now gave Toni that elusive feeling of a weight being lifted from her shoulders. And apparently, she wasn’t the only one who approved of the committee’s new chair.
“Excellent,” Leonard said with a bright smile and an eager nod. The only person on the committee more opposed to Susan’s symposia ideas than him was Margery.
“I’m happy to leave you in very capable hands,” Toni said with genuine excitement. “But before I go, I would like to remind you all of one simple fact.” Most of the people around the table leaned in, but none more so than Margery. “In your contracts, service is no more than twenty percent of your allocation of effort. Do not give any of your committee work more time than that. Please.”
Toni watched as Preston, in particular, took this in. She gave this simple bit of advice every semester, more times than she could count. She kept hoping for the day when her audience would nod sagely, even dismissively, because they knew this already, but each time she said it, she watched as people seemed to learn it all over again, and it made her chest clench. But no one knew more than Toni that she couldn’t save everyone, and she couldn’t make her colleagues prioritize their well-being before they were ready.
“I think we’re done for the semester,” she said. “Happy grading and enjoy your summer.”
Her colleagues murmured their goodbyes and stood, rushing from the room.
Toni remained in her seat until they were all gone, one step closer to the start of her sabbatical.
It didn’t feel real just yet.
Every semester, someone teaching an intro class assigned their students to find a professor in their major for an interview, and every semester, Toni set a hard cap of no more than three. And at every interview, the student asked why she’d chosen this job.
It was such an expected question that Toni had a small coterie of answers that ranged from joking to very professional and serious, depending on how well she knew the student and the tone of the interview thus far. All of the answers were true, but none of them were completely honest. Because if someone were to ask Toni right now why she’d decided to become a professor, she would have said it was for the physical environment.
Toni loved being on university campuses; she’d never met one she didn’t like. As she left her final committee meeting of the academic year, she heaved her leather satchel bag onto her shoulder and began to stroll across campus to her office, enjoying all the sights and sounds, and even smells, she normally missed as she rushed to her various classes and back.
She was always rushing, if not downright running, to get where she needed to be during the semester. If she wasn’t late for class, she was late for a meeting. If she wasn’t power-walking across campus to pick up a book at the library, she was sprinting in the opposite direction for a student presentation. Always, always, always in a hurry.
But that rush cost her the beauty of a leisurely stroll through the university oval in spring. She missed sitting on a bench on the east campus, watching the leaves turn yellow. She didn’t have the privilege to bundle up in her warmest coat and watch the first snowfall from the observation deck in the science building. Toni loved the wonder of campus, but she so rarely got to enjoy it because if her students spotted her out on a walk or sitting on a bench, they assumed she was holding impromptu office hours. If they spotted her sitting still, they — like her mother — considered her calendar open for more work. And god forbid some administrator spotted her gazing at the sky before her evening class or reading a novel by the lake near the commuter parking lot because they, too, would stop to discuss her committee assignments, mentorship programs she was a part of, mentorship programs they wanted her to join, or her potential future as an associate dean. Which is all to say that during the semester, Toni never got to enjoy the campus.
To be Black, female, and tenured was to be forever visible, always in service, never at peace.
But there were moments like today, usually right at the end of spring semester, when Toni got the chance to enjoy campus. When her classes were done and students were elsewhere, celebrating the end of the semester in the most irresponsible way possible, Toni often strolled through the south oval. She tilted her head back and let the sun warm her face. She took in a deep breath and, for once, enjoyed the smell of the willow trees framing the campus pond. Without the stench of cigarette smoke, vape pens, or exhaust fumes from people desperately searching for parking, Toni could finally detect the smell of moss and hydrangeas. Without the crowd, Toni could hear the ducks honking quietly to one another and birds chirping in the trees. Moments like this almost made all the hassle of the academic year feel worth it.
Almost.
“You look happy.”
Toni startled at the sound of Mike’s voice as he fell into step by her side. Her eyes darted around, wondering where he’d come from, but Mike had a way of just popping up when Toni least expected him. For the past year, at least, Mike seemed inescapable. She turned around in the faculty dining area to find him paying for her lunch. She looked across the auditorium during the Arts & Sciences Council, and there was Mike, waving his hand and gesturing toward the empty seat next to him. And that didn’t even count all the dinners at Alejandro’s house, where it always seemed to be Mike who opened the door for her.
At some point, she’d gotten used to his presence.
“As it happens, I am,” she said with a shrug.
“Last final?”
“Nope.”
“Done grading?”
She smiled. “Lord, I wish.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Toni saw Mike turn to her. She watched him watch her — with a little more intensity than was necessary, she thought — and waited for his next question.
