ABSTRACT
Perhaps I should not have been surprised when at the conclusion of our tennis match my senior colleague began asking embarrassing questions about how to handle his wife’s sexual dysfunction. After all, I had experienced a number of surprises since taking my “first real job” in an eastern public university whose mostly male faculty fancied themselves as displaced Ivy League professors. Life as a newly minted professor was not at all what I had anticipated, nor was it even as welcoming as the top-ranked university from which I had emerged—where one of my professors had likened the graduate student milieu to a “pure Hobbesian state.” This job made me long for the world of brilliant if conservative White male professors who had mentored me and nurtured my regard for the discipline. In the pseudo liberal environment to which I had come, I became nostalgic about my graduate experience, where opinions and theories regarding “the great unwashed” were far more explicit, thus, rendering them more easily challenged if not less offensive.
