What's Good Enough? And Who Am I?

Welcome to the very first episode of “The Good Enough Professor Podcast.” I am so delighted to be here with you for my first episode of this new podcast.

“The Good Enough Professor Podcast” is devoted to exploring our lived identities, our lived experiences as professors and faculty members, and how our identities as academics intersect with our other multiple identities and our rich, abundant lives. Together, we'll practice how we can be more fully present, how we can more fully express our multiple ways of being, and how we can access our humanity within and beyond our campuses.

This podcast is intended as a counter to the do-more, excellence-obsessed, precarity-based, and yes, white-supremacist culture of academia. I believe that you are always, already good enough. The research you do: good enough. Your leadership on campus: good enough. And you're teaching, your connections with students: good enough. It's who you are, not only and not even what you do, that represents your most important, most meaningful contract contribution to your communities. My hope is that through this podcast, and our reflections on our lives as professors, on and beyond campus, we can begin to create a more sustainable, more supportive, and more humane academia.

So “good enough,” this is a multivalent idea, and this is why I love it. First, good enough is a kind of minimum level of acceptance, right: “stop working because it's good enough!” And at the same time, it's also a kind of celebratory goal: “I'm good enough to have a PhD, I am good enough to have a job as a professor, I have arrived!” Built into my concept of good enough is that we are always learning. Perfection is not the goal. Instead, it's experience, experimentation, failure, all of these things are part of being good enough. The ongoing ups and downs of ordinary daily life as academics are valuable and meaningful. So you'll hear me really focus on process and being over products or conclusions. And we'll talk a lot more about this in future episodes.

So I invite you to consider for a moment. How are you already good enough? Think about your professor life. How is your good-enough teaching already enriching and supporting your students? What's good enough about your leadership on campus? What about your scholarship? Your daily navigating of everyday life? The ways that you take care of yourself and others? And what are some areas of your life where you might be able to bring more self-compassion and remind yourself that now, as you are, you are good enough? Where could you maybe step back and let your good enough be enough?

So who am I? I'm an art historian. I'm an associate professor with tenure at a small liberal arts college. I'm a parent, and I'm also a life coach. I came to this place, to these ideas about the Good Enough Professor, through a couple of influences, and I'll name just three here.

So first, as an art historian, I study radical performance art, which connects me with methodologies and approaches from performance studies, trauma studies, religious studies, and more. So my scholarly work is really at the intersections, and deeply concerned withthe visual. But not only the visual, also with action and relation as a deeply ethical meaning-making set of activities.

My interest in performance and collective, collaborative, relational ways of being led to the direction of my leadership on campus, which has been focused for many years on faculty development. And eventually to support that work, I became a life coach.

And then three, this idea of good enough came directly out of my experience of chronic illness. And this is really foundational to my critique of academic culture from within. I had a fairly significant health crisis in graduate school that became a chronic illness. And it's a chronic illness that responds to stress. So for many, many years, I worked on unpeeling the layers of the expectations of myself that would lead to overwork to burnout again and again. It took me a long time to understand how deeply important self-compassion is to sustaining a livable life in academia.

In this podcast, you can expect that I will follow the rhythms of academic life, the ebbs and the flows of times in the academic year that are challenging or fun, or something we anticipate, all those ups and downs, these times that demand particular kinds of attention that we're not always able to give to these moments because we are so embedded in the rhythm itself. So we'll talk about these rhythms of academic life. We'll talk about the tensions between the privileges of life as a professor and the very hard realities. I'll offer reflections on what I'm noticing throughout the year, and also my ongoing thoughts about good enough.

In this podcast, you can also expect that I'll be talking about the ongoing work that I'm doing to unpack white supremacy. Over the past few years, I'm intentionally exploring how so many aspects of academic culture, so many of these elements of our experience of academia that are damaging, come directly out of white supremacy, culture, perfectionism, urgency, right or wrong thinking, hierarchy. The things that can be really toxic in academic culture are rooted in white supremacy.

I will also talk about my experiences and my struggles as they happen kind of in real time, particularly now in this year, I'm starting out this year as a Mellon New Directions Fellow at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. I'll be taking graduate classes connecting art history with Deaf Studies. And all the classes I'll be taking are in American Sign Language. So I'll be sharing my experiences becoming a student, using a different language, sitting on the other side of the table, and how that is creating new new observations, new insights for me that I'll share with you all.

Thank you so much for being here. I am thinking of you in this season of new beginnings, and I am so looking forward to continuing this conversation.

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