Spring 2023, in a nutshell

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like writing. I have a lot to write about, but the last few months have been rough. Shortly after we got back from spring break in Thailand, I got sick with a bad case of the flu, and I’ve been sick on and off ever since. I am mostly recovered from the last cold, which started the Friday before finals week in mid-June. All I can think about the near-constant illness is that I’m worn out. I’ve been feeling burnout coming on for a while now, and things aren’t getting easier.

One major issue is the change in workload at my university. Like universities everywhere, MIU is trying to cut costs. We’re dependent on student tuition as well as private fundraising to cover all of our expenses, and the pandemic was a significant hit in the budget. I haven’t been part of the higher-level discussions of what is happening, but I’ve certainly noticed the effects. The administrative staff of the university has shrunk, and quite a lot of the work has shifted onto the faculty. It hasn’t helped that we have high turnover among the staff as well, so every year everyone is learning how to do things all over again.

This spring was particularly busy as faculty and international staff generally played a bigger role in student recruitment. I ended up working several extra days because of events scheduled on Saturdays. The events themselves were quite fun, but piled on top of the usual workload with not enough downtime to recover from each week meant I was getting more and more exhausted. Also, it’s not entirely clear what the benefit is for these events in increasing student enrollment numbers. But we do them anyway.

One of the biggest was a university fair at Ulaanbaatar’s large indoor exhibition hall, called Misheel Expo. It felt like we were preparing for it for weeks, rounding up and scheduling student volunteers, writing brochures, and consolidating information about our departments. There was an expectation that faculty from every department would be there for each of the four days of the Expo (Friday through Monday). Since at the time I was my department’s only full-time faculty member who had been at MIU longer than a month, it fell on me to attend. Initially, that Monday and Tuesday were supposed to be our spring break, a much-needed respite from the routine of classes for both students and faculty, so I was planning to attend all four days, with the expectation of having Tuesday off from teaching. But some time earlier, the Ministry of Education had informed MIU that there could be no breaks from school that aren’t connected to a Mongolian national holiday, which means we will no longer have fall or spring breaks at all. We were only notified of this a week or so before. So, we were supposed to hold classes on that Monday of the Expo, anyway, though the administration decided that we could cancel classes in order to go to the Expo and promote the school, and any student volunteers should be excused from classes as well.

The Expo consisted of several dozen booths run by universities and other organizations connected to higher education (scholarship and study abroad services, for example), as well as hundreds of prospective students going from booth to booth, collecting swag. In previous years, the MIU contingent at the Expo consisted mainly of the staff of the Admissions Office and student volunteers. This was the first time that faculty were required to be there. Our job would be to answer questions and talk to prospective students about studying at our university and in our departments. I sat for nearly two full days and spoke with a few high school students who were interested in Media and Communication, but they weren’t confident enough with their English to not panic while talking with me, so we ended up needing interpreters. I think my main role at the Expo was to look American, since MIU’s main selling points are international faculty and 100% education in English.

It was definitely an interesting time, especially seeing how other universities presented themselves (I went on walkabout a few times to keep myself alert), but it was also completely exhausting, so I decided not to attend on Sunday. And it didn’t make sense for many faculty to be there, anyway, since students were better at telling prospective students about life at the school. But there seems to be a feeling among the administration of MIU that the faculty don’t work hard enough, and more and more work is being shifted onto us, on top of our teaching and any other activities we manage to engage in. We were also asked to participate in MIU’s Open Day a couple of weeks after the Expo, when high school students and their parents are invited to come to campus, take a campus tour, and learn about the different departments and what they offer. I’d given Open Day lectures to prospective students before, both in person and online, but this time it seemed to be expected that we would be there the whole day. So another weekend day was spent promoting the university.

My time at Misheel Expo was cut short, anyway, by a required Mongolian teaching certificate course that was suddenly announced. It would run from Monday to Friday from 9 am to 4 pm that week. So not only were we not going to have spring break, but we were expected to figure out a way to attend a full-time course in the middle of the semester, while continuing to teach our classes. The certificate is required by all university instructors in Mongolia. MIU faculty were supposed to take it last fall semester, on 5 Saturdays in a row, but the Ministry of Education decided that there weren’t enough people to offer it, so they canceled it. Now, we suddenly got an email that it was being offered and we had to take it to continue to work in Mongolia. We were lucky, because normally it would be a 30-day course that we’d have to attend full-time in the education university downtown, but they were offering a condensed, one-week version to MIU faculty on our campus.

The workshop ended up being a great experience, and we learned a lot about Mongolian education and education history, as well as how the Ministry of Education was expecting us to teach. It was very much “do as we say, not as we do,” because our teaching is supposed to be student-centered and so on, but most of the presentations were lectures in Mongolian translated into English by an amazing interpreter (an MIU faculty member fluent in English and Mongolian). It was intense, though, and between recording lectures to my students, grading midterms (which I was still doing) and attending a full-time course for the week, I found myself completely depleted by the end of the week.

And I’ve pretty much felt that way ever since. Which is why Two Vegetarians in Mongolia has been sadly neglected. It’s not that I have nothing to write about. It’s that I have had no energy to write. This is the first time I’ve woken up in the morning with something in my head that I felt like I could actually type, and it’s only because I’m a week into our summer vacation. We are now back in the US for the summer, mainly to visit colleges because Devin will be applying in the fall. It’s not a relaxing vacation, but it’s a change of routine. What I really need is an extended time doing absolutely nothing, but I’m not going to get that. We’re in the US for a month, and after ten days in San Diego mainly visiting friends and running errands (Devin’s doctor, our dentist, that sort of thing), we’ll be heading to Kentucky for a long weekend to visit family, and then on to New England to look at colleges. For about two weeks we’ll have a campus tour nearly each weekday, which is what I figured Devin could cope with. They are all schools they’re serious about applying to, and we’re excited about that part of the trip.

But all I really want is to do nothing in a beautiful place. Or even a somewhat nice place. I’m deeply exhausted from a difficult academic year or two. During my first year back in Mongolia, I was teaching four courses a semester and figuring out how to manage the Media and Communication program, which I found out I was going to be in charge of a few days after we arrived in Ulaanbaatar in May 2021. I barely survived that year. This year, I was hoping to reduce my courseload to two courses (what my predecessor had taught as department chair), but ended up teaching three courses each semester, including an entirely new course on research methods. It was a lot. And working several Saturdays out of the semester might not seem like a big deal, but when you’re already exhausted and need time to recover from the week, get caught up on housework, and pepare for the next week, losing weekends like that takes a toll. But that’s not even all.

Moving forward, the university has made changes to faculty workloads that look to be permanent, until they realize no one will take jobs here because of the workload, and they will need to make another adjustment. Full-time faculty are expected to teach three courses each semester, even if they are department chairs, as well as publish at least one academic article a year. This has been added on to address the Ministry of Education’s criticism that MIU faculty don’t publish enough. We also don’t get sabbaticals or any kind of course relief for doing research, so expecting us to actually publish annually is a bit ridiculous. We are also now required to be on campus nine hours a day, four days a week. When I pointed out that this would prevent me from doing any research (how could I conduct interviews or participant observation if I’m sitting at my desk all the time?), the administrators nodded but went ahead with the policy anyway.

Personally, I can’t do it. The nine-hour day thing, the one article a year thing, the teaching three courses while being department chair thing. It’s all too much. I told my dean and our international recruiter that I’m leaving MIU in June 2024, when Devin graduates from high school. It gives them a year to find a replacement for me. I am also not going to change my working hours (I get to campus around 7:30 am and I leave around 3:30 to get home in time to cook us dinner, and I try very hard to stay home on Fridays, when I don’t teach). Our official workdays don’t include much of our work as faculty – the time we spend at home preparing classes, grading, and corresponding with students. I often accomplish little sitting at my desk in the office, anyway, because people are either talking with me or around me (our whole school shares one office, so there are now three full-time faculty, the administrative secretary, and assorted student workers in one big room). So sitting at my desk more hours a day will not lead to more or better quality work.

If the concern is increasing faculty productivity (the administration’s stated goal), what I need is less time at my desk and more time being in places where I can get things done. But the concern isn’t about productivity. It’s about control. Some of this is coming from the Ministry of Education, which is cracking down on private universities in Mongolia (they have closed dozens of them), but some of it is also coming from MIU’s administration. I don’t think it will make a better university. At our last all-campus faculty meeting, people were tired. And angry. I’d never seen that before. Usually, faculty meetings are times to see people, catch up on what is happening, and talk about the current or next semester, and I always looked forward to them at the beginning and end of each semester. But times have changed at MIU. And few of the changes have to do with genuinely improving teaching and learning. If the work is no longer about that, I am not interested in it.

I’m also personally worried about burnout. I have ended up needing more and more time to recover from each semester, to the point where I’m no longer ready for the next semester to begin because I’m still recovering from the previous ones. MIU has a long break between fall and spring semester – nearly two months. And a two-month summer break. But I don’t think I’ll be ready to teach again in September, either. I hope that I can pull off one more year. I now have two colleagues, one to teach the production courses and one to teach a mix of the marketing and general communication courses. That helps tremendously. If we can hire one journalism professor and replace me, the department will be in very good shape going forward.

But I don’t think I will be. Teaching requires so much energy. Living in Mongolia requires so much energy. Being the parent of a disabled, chronically ill kid requires so much energy. Doing all three together requires more than I can handle. And I’ve known for a while that teaching only works for me if I’m in the right sort of environment, which MIU isn’t anymore. As for this blog, I want to carve out more time for it. I have a lot of updates on a lot of things. I will try to get more written this summer, at least, and aim for a post a month after the school year starts up again. I am not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I am hoping to give myself a sabbatical and work on my writing, because I think that will define the next stage of my life, whatever that ends up being.