The Good Enough Professor Manifesto

Hi professors! This is Karen Gonzalez Rice, art historian, professor and life coach for academics. You are listening to the Good Enough Professor, the show that reimagines academic life for overwhelmed professors. Let's create a more supportive or humane academia, one small, intentional choice at a time. Listen on for how we can do this together.

We're going to be talking today about GOOD ENOUGH. What does it mean? Why have I named my podcast “The Good Enough Professor?” What are the key tenants of my concept of the Good Enough Professor?

I want to start out by sharing my Good Enough Professor manifesto. Now, the manifesto form of writing is very close to my heart as an art historian. Many, many artists have used the form of the manifesto, perhaps my favorite being Mierle Laderman Ukeles in her “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” all about how the labor of everyday life is art – she is an amazing feminist artist. I will include a link to her work in the show notes. This is a very familiar kind of intellectual form, in my discipline, and so when I was thinking about my ideas around the Good Enough Professor, I decided to draft a manifesto, to create a manifesto around them. I want to share my Good Enough Professor manifesto with you.

One quick little note before I start, this particular manifesto is inspired by Claus Oldenburg’s manifesto. The form that is repeated throughout his manifesto is “I am for an art that…” The line that always sticks with me is “I'm for an art that does more than sit on its ass in a museum” - an amazing line that always gets a laugh from my students! But it's also just such a beautiful encapsulation of the kind of radical political and ethical statement that he is making about the role of art the role of museums.

Okay, so the Good Enough Professor manifesto!

• I am for an academia that nurtures process and becoming over perfection and competition.

• I am for an academia that prizes wandering, wrong directions, dead ends and failures as the basis of lifelong learning.

• I am for an academia that embraces an ethics of kindness, and empathy.

• I am for an academia that invites us all to be good enough, rather than requiring excellence at any cost.

• I am for an academia that replenishes us with rest rather than demanding ever more labor.

• I am for an academia that rebuilds itself to solve the pain of its community members.

• I am for an academia that sprouts HELLOs in the hall, lunch dates, walks on campus, unexpected collaborations, and passionate disagreement.

• I am for an academia that divest itself of greed, and exploitation in all its forms.

• I am for an academia that welcomes our personal lives and full emotional selves, as central facets of our wisdom.

• I am for an academia that apologizes when it's wrong, that learns to do better while righting the harm it has done.

• I am for an academia that remakes itself in the image of the global majority.

• I am for an academia that initiates its own destruction, in order to regenerate itself as ever more just.

• I am for an academia that invites us to build a radical vision together.

• I am for an academia that nourishes our entire collective being.

I'd like to elaborate on some of the concepts I mentioned in the manifesto. So much of what we hear from universities and colleges right now is this marketing around excellence. I think it's exactly that: it's a marketing strategy. And I think it's damaging, I think it's damaging to faculty members, I think it's damaging to students. Because what we really know about learning is that failure, and experimentation, and mistakes, and reiteration are crucial to the learning process. So if we rebrand excellence as failure, then I'm all aboard. But this idea of excellence, I think, is part of what drives us into burnout.

Academia is a world of constant evaluation. There's a culture of hard accept/reject culture, whether that's grades, or comprehensive exams in graduate school that we all went through, or the yes/no of tenure. These kinds of hard boundaries create a real sense of precarity and urgency. These realities shape the way that we work and the way that we think about our work.

Last year, one of the faculty members in a workshop I was teaching used an amazing phrase. She talked about how the work we were doing together in this workshop felt like creating a “counter-academy.” I love this idea! I think that my coaching and my approach to the Good Enough Professor is really built around the belief that we can together create a counter-academy, the kind of place detailed in the manifesto, a place where we can do what we love, where we can follow the joys of research, where we can work with students in a way that honors our humanity and theirs, too. That is my fervent belief. It's the foundation of my coaching. It's the foundation of this community here with the Good Enough Professor Podcast.

I'm curious about what resonates for you with the manifesto and with the concepts I've talked about today. What really resonates with you? What fits your experience? Where have your experiences been quite different? I would love to hear from you.

In the Good Enough Professor podcast, I am going to be exploring, pulling apart these ideas, thinking about the privileges that we feel as faculty members, and how that interacts with the complexities of higher education in this moment, what that means for us, as individuals, and collectively.

This may feel like a lot to think about as the semester starts to get in gear and we start to get really, really busy - and I absolutely feel that as well! And I know that we can both have a kind of critical mindset and think about how we can make tiny changes with huge impacts. I hope you will continue to join me with the journey of this podcast and I will be thinking of you!

Thanks so much for listening to the Good Enough Professor podcast. If you want to release academic grind culture, and embrace your own Good Enough Professor within, join my email list. You'll get my reflections, gentle challenges and simple prompts, all aligned with the rhythms of academic life and designed to disrupt the assumptions that get us over committed and keep us overwhelmed. Because remember, you are already good enough!

Artist manifestos mentioned in this episode: Mierle Laderman Ukeles / Claus Oldenburg

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