Cherry Blossoms

Washington is awash in colour – the pink and white blossoms of a precocious spring.  Actually, it feels much more like the height of summer.  The temperature and humidity remind me of my two-month sojourn here in the summer of 1992, and the ice cream vendors are doing a brisk trade.  Much has changed in those twenty years.  The downtown streets are clearly safer, since they are still thronged late into the evening.  The ice cream is now real Italian gelato, and the restaurant menus are much more interesting.  Life seems good.

I am participating in the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America – my first time at this particular conference, and probably my last.  Not that it is in any way uninteresting; indeed quite the contrary.  There is much for everyone – and the conference program is a weighty tome of some 546 pages.  I even run into quite a few people whom I know, a Carleton colleague among them.  But being a “medievalist”, and an “early medievalist” to boot, the RSA meeting falls outside my normal academic circuit, and I am unlikely to give it preference over the other meetings that have long since become fixed dates in my annual calendar.

The sessions which I attend are stimulating, and the discussions friendly.  People seem genuinely interested in exploring topics, and are not simply attempting to score points – marking a change from some American conferences that I have attended in the past.  My own paper seems to go well, and I am surprised – most pleasantly – at how many in the audience wait to speak with me about it afterwards.  Everyone is grumbling at the exorbitant price of rooms in the chosen hotel, for it seems that fewer and fewer institutions are assisting faculty with the increasingly onerous costs of conference travel.  And in this country of supposed informality, I shake my head in wonder at the number of male speakers who are kitted out in suits and ties.  I definitely won’t be joining them in that, and especially in this weather!  

I feel particularly sorry for those who are attempting to parlay a brilliant performance here into a job offer.  Jobs are few and far between in this “land of opportunity”, especially for those whose academic interests lie in a world which existed half a millennium in the past.  I learn that even the highest ranked programs are having difficulty placing their students post graduation. It is not simply a funding crisis, although their budgets cuts are both real and significant; but there is also a growing sense that academia is itself turning away from the humanities, that what one does is no longer valued – and hence the importance of events like this where that validity is absolutely beyond question, indeed taken for granted.  There is a strength in numbers, but I also detect a palpable sense of vulnerability.  Here one is safe, and there is never any need to apologize for what one does.

The flight home is blissfully uneventful.  It is good to go away, but even better to return.  Sometimes the grass looks greener in someone else’s backyard, and it takes a visit to discover that there is an enormous difference between illusion and reality.