“There is no hope and the future sucks!” you joke. Actually, you kid on the square because humor keeps you from losing your damn mind. Like in the wake of your father’s death, you rather wish you could lose your damn mind. The idea of it seems relieving but for the inconvenience and, worse, distress that your mindless damnation would cause the Eminent Historian and others.

You are also rather shocked at how humor places such a cushion around your mind that even you cannot tell how much of it is lost and how much of it is real. What is kidding and what is square?

After you write that, you have to leave to meet a colleague for socially-distanced coffee. On the way, a sense of grief wells up. You want to cry. Why do these moments always come when you are driving, and you so seldom drive anymore? Because they are the moments when you actually have solitude, and you so seldom have real solitude anymore.

When you have the solitude, the resistance lifts. The need to appear not so bad, the “kidding” to reassure that the “square” isn’t so sharp recedes. Unfortunately, driving must occupy your attention. Then, you arrive at the coffee shop.

This incident is relevant in that the conversation over socially-distanced coffee further reveals the invisibility and devaluing of faculty whose work is completely relevant to current events. Once again you are caught in the gray area between the 1 and the 0 of a binary.

A staff member, recently-hired and recently-appointed to be Co-Head of Diversity Whatever, told faculty that their research and teaching on matters about race don’t matter, that they need to take bias-training seminars and educate themselves on race,. For thirty minutes. In a faculty meeting. Where she was not on the agenda. Then, she sent out various “woke” articles from popular, unvetted websites that half of the faculty could have written as undergraduates. When the faculty of color, and the faculty who do teach and research about race, objected, they were told, in so many words, to be quiet.

When those same faculty tried to apply for newly-appropriated funds to further their teaching and research, they were told that the newly-appropriated funds (let’s not forget that this is in a year when you are all taking a pay cut, receiving no contributions to retirement, and have been told that, crisis or not, your health benefits are on the chopping block) will only go to such 101 types of initiative as starting a group to read White Fragility or the work of Ibram X. Kendi (who, by the way, does not cite scholars — some of whom work at your college — on whose research he bases his conclusions).

In other words, all diversity initiatives and money go toward the newly-woke, and you can’t say anything critical because everyone is so WOKE and you are supposed to pat them on the head and give them cookies for being WOKE. Meanwhile, everyone who has something to contribute are all ignored, so much so that when the Office of Communications puts out a statement on something so simple as Juneteenth or the death of John Lewis, they don’t think “hey, we have a history department, maybe someone down there teaches U.S. history and might know a little something about this.” Instead, they go to one of the Heads of the Diversity Whatever. Neither of whom are historians nor know anything accurate about either. This, after being told to shut up when pointing out that the students who protested lack of classes on race or African American history were factually wrong.

By the way, their leader admittedly knows those classes exist and has actively avoided taking them. Their leader said this to your colleague as she sat in your colleague’s office complaining about the lack of the very same classes that your colleague teaches. “I teach that class,” you colleague, who is not white, told the student. “Sign up for it.” The student did not.

The binary here for faculty means falling into either the college-sanctioned Diversity Whatever, regardless of expertise in the subject, or the Nice White Object of the Diversity Whatever. You are either one of about three people that the Administration likes because you will tell them what they want to hear, or you are part of a newly-woke white mass waiting to receive, willing to simultaneously self-flagellate and self-congratulate. You can’t be a scholar with expertise on which anyone could draw.

But that was more than you wanted to write about that. That was a venting. Going home you felt less alone, but more demoralized. The philosopher Head of Diversity Whatever you have worked with. She knows better than this. She knows the faculty and what they do. Yet, she goes along with this assumption that all the faculty are of a type and doesn’t see how those who don’t fit that type are more and more infuriated that their lives’ work gets shunted aside and ignored except for those students who actually do take your classes.

The administration sees you as skilled labor whom they suffer because of the skill, yet they know nothing about nor see the added value of that skill to the institution. The vast majority of students see faculty as an impediment to their futures, unless they are in your majors, then they learn how little the majors are valued unless they involve business or the professional school. The activist students don’t even bother to find out if the classes exist, and then they reverse engineer a reason that faculty are a problem to cover their lack of research. And you can’t help but wonder if the students might respect faculty more as experts in our field if the administration showed us more respect as experts in our field.

You start to wonder what the point of remaining sober might be. You start to wonder what the point of education might be if all you do is grade freshman papers and fight with Canvas all week. You start to wonder what the point of gaining expertise in a field might be if the people you work for don’t recognize it, if the white guy (in spite of his own efforts to help you) gets the credit, if doing anything less than radical puts a target on your back, if voting will not matter because Trump will not leave office, if fascism and authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism have become virtues that have allowed a faction to gain enough power to hold on, if the last best hope of the future lay in the survival of a frail, 87-year old, cancer-ridden, brilliant woman.

And, now she’s gone.

There is no hope. The future is doomed.