guyjantic has moved!CW: Employment self-pity.
My #university #faculty #job has not worked out as I'd hoped for the past decade (USA, not a red state, FWIW). I'm still in an objectively good place, but subjectively it's been a struggle. I'm cleaning out my old research lab today for new faculty who are awesome, and every item seems to be a token of lost hope:
Tablets, stands, room dividers for a research project that wasn't feasible as our administration piled on the teaching and advising.
Boards I made so students could present their posters at an in-house conference experience.
Battle maps for a #DnD style gaming implementation of a child psychopathology course.
Big poster of #scifi genres for a psych/sci-fi course.
A/V equipment for innovative teaching cut short by student complaints (it took me a while to realize that almost anything innovative would prompt complaints from students resulting in administrative censure).
Materials from my two consecutive sabbatical applications summarily denied by the provost after strong approval by everyone else.
Badge from a faculty governance workshop I drove two hours for, when I didn't realize that "shared governance" is not a thing here, and I'd eventually get so burnt out fighting for basic, reasonable things that I'd need to take a mental health break from that.
Card with username from my attempt to involve faculty in data collection to compare experiences and create institutional memory of ongoing policy changes.
Bits of evidence of my attempts to survive my first few years with a tenured bully who decided I should be fired at all costs (I managed to hang on, it seems).
A small stack of research on effective assessment from when I believed I had been appointed to the Gen Ed #assessment committee to actually suggest ways to assess Gen Ed.
An issue of the bilingual border-issues journal representing international research collaborations that disappeared when it became clear that this school will never allocate the resources necessary to support the project.
Notes from two summers I spent (wasted?) on NSF grants for innovative teaching models, rejected largely because the NSF didn't believe for a second that this university could or would support a grant.
Materials from inter-institutional collaborations for research projects that died with the teaching and advising pressure.
Notebooks from #dataAnalysis and #ProgramEvaluation consulting with a poverty relief agency that destroyed my sleep and all my limited free time after my chair and dean made it clear that "course release" was something that they would never approve in real life.
Everything is a hope I had, that I had to (or still need to) let go. Hopes for teaching, hopes for research, hopes for meaningful representation of #labor with anti-labor management. Hopes for educational experiences with students beyond "Made me read the textbook on my own; worst #professor ever."
Some positives, too: so many posters from student research collaborations. Best part of my job. My favorite way to teach.
But mostly I'm sitting in my office feeling loss and grief. It's been an ongoing process. I need to move on. I need to move to an organization where my efforts have a chance of making positive change, instead of being unfunded and disincentivized, or criticized for being different from business as usual or for being a success that somehow makes people who have been here 30 years feel bad.
Gene Shackman
Canadian Association For Food Studies
Andrew Heiss 
Kate Mulligan
Curtis Jefferson
Sammehoke