This Orientation Brought to You By Starbucks

Okay, sorry about the recent outburst. Last week was something of a low point, but I've turned the corner, seen the light, and come to Jesus. Kate got in on Sunday and, designated with the task of making everything better immediately, proceeded to do just that. Among other things (most of which, frankly, aren't any of your business), she found my coffee maker, which some fool had shoved in a drawer in my nightstand. Once I find out who packed all this junk, there's gonna be hell to pay.

I also now have home internet service, which is currently enabling this very blog post and will make the rest of my life much, much easier. Although it does mean no more trips to Panera, ever. Which is a bit of a drag, actually, as I was growing quite fond of their pumpkin muffies. More to the point, it turns out one of the Jonas Brothers was spotted Monday night at my Panera, the very one where I've been spending countless hours doing tedious textbook work and munching on muffies. Oh, to have been within spitball distance of such tousle-haired greatness would have sent me, quite literally, over the edge. And onto the floor. Into a pool of muffie crumbs.

(Actually, it's one of my persistent fears here in Nashville that I'll be eating dinner or drinking coffee right next to a bona-fide popular/country music celebrity and not have the slightest clue about it, so detached have I become from these things. The corollary of this is that I often assume that everyone I see is a popular/country music celebrity, a tendency that's facilitated by the large number of people around here who dress like they could be celebrities but are probably just starving singer-songwriters who spend all their disposable income on celebrityish clothes and accessories).

I have also been spending some time this week getting to know my new school. It's a much different place than I'm used to - a large, cash-strapped state school serving a regional studentship who are frequently the first in their families to attend college, and are doing so while working part-time, living at home, etc. There are good and bad things about this. The good mostly involves the greater impact I think I'll have by teaching students who are really working to be there, instead of affluent kids with a sense of entitlement for whom a college education was always a given (note that I'm generalizing grossly, in both directions). The bad mostly involves the lack of money. It sounds like things are pretty tight here even at the best of economic times, which these most certainly are not, and so many of the things I'm accustomed to having or would like to have - fully wired classrooms, attractive facilities, a living wage - are either entirely missing or in very short supply. Still, they make due pretty well with what they've got: the library looks great and has lots of online doohickeys for me to play with, I've got a small travel budget, and there are pretty good state-sponsored benefits, for instance.

At times, however, the school's desperate need for cash manifests itself in a sort of crass commercialism that is deeply obnoxious to my sophisticated, blue-state sensibilities. The fast food outlets in the dining hall are one thing - I encountered these at Tulane, too, a school which was by no means poverty-stricken - but the corporate-sponsored new-faculty orientation is quite another. I have to be careful here since, as I learned from my recent posting about Comcast, some corporations employ people to search through blogs looking for references to their companies - let's call them the brand police - and it would therefore be fairly easy for this particular corporation to track me down and kill me if I named them here. So I'll just say that, after three hours of power-point presentations about things like "the student culture" and "research and graduate students" - three hours in which countless administrators told us all about their giddy, almost unnatural love for the school, most of them working hard to outdo one another by bragging about how long they'd been there (one of them practically boasted that she'd been conceived right there on campus) - after three hours of this, we were marched over to the athletic stadium for lunch, where we were ambushed by representatives of a large regional bank

As we arranged ourselves around our tables we were told that we should leave one seat open for a banker - I repressed an involuntary quip that that's precisely what the entire country had been doing for some time now - and then we were all given personalized folders telling us what this wonderful regional bank could do for us. Then, as we tucked into something that looked like lasagna or maybe chicken parmesan, we listened as each of the bankers introduced themselves and urged us - pleaded with us, really - to come by their office and chat about anything at all, bank-related or not, anytime of the day or night. And then we had to listen while one or two administrators praised the bank, and the school's "relationship" with the bank, with an intensity that bordered on the unseemly. And then, after the speechifying was over, we all trotted over to collect our "goodie bags" full of candy, local maps, and a plastic device that looks like what would happen if a chip clip got into a menage-a-trois with a tablespoon and a fridge magnet.

At least I can say that the map, at any rate, is the largest item of its kind I've ever seen:



As another example of this sort of crassness - or, to be charitable, let's call it a collective tin ear for how such things appear to ubersophisticated newcomers like myself - I'll just point out that the one book every incoming freshman is being required to read is not, as it was at BC some years back, Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctor's humanitarian work in Haiti, nor is it any of the thousands of other books that can impart important life lessons in a thoughtful and provocative way. No, the one book all incoming freshman are required to read is How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill, who will be speaking at this year's Convocation. Now this is a book that I haven't read, so I might be way off the mark here, but from all the reviews I've read, the book - which tells the story of how a wealthy man, Gill, loses his fancy corporate job but finds redemption slumming with the lower orders while working at a local Starbucks - is essentially a love letter to the Starbucks corporation. Right there on Amazon's homepage there's a review from Booklist that says, "Other corporate giants can only envy the sheer goodwill that this memoir will inevitably generate for Starbucks," while Publishers Weekly says, "The book reads too much like an employee handbook, as Gill details his duties or explains how the company chooses its coffee. Gill's devotion to the superchain has obviously changed his life for the better, but that same devotion makes for a repetitive, unsatisfying read."

So this is the book they went with? Of all the millions of books that could have imparted essentially the same message - hard work, not wealth, creates happiness (never mind the dubiousness of that assertion) - they chose a poorly written paean to a multinational coffee company? Maybe he was the only Convocation speaker they could get. Or maybe they're getting a bit of consideration from the Starbucks corporation itself, which, incidentally, does have an outlet on campus.

In any case, I can see that I have my work cut out for me.