I’ve been working for the same college since I was 22 years old. I started with a full head of hair (a ponytail, in fact) and an earring, as a tutor, and I’m now a bald (but in a strikingly handsome way) tenured full professor.

More than two decades in the same job–moving up through the ranks. I stayed there through a lot of life events–through marriage and parenthood. Through my brother’s death and through 9/11. Through a second MA and a PhD. Through the recent health crises. As little as five years ago I thought that tenure and promotion to full professor would be my ultimate goal–no need to ever ask for any more, I would be free to coast for the rest of my career–just relax until retirement.

Except it didn’t work out that way. I got involved in teaching with technology–using the web and new media to improve my teaching, and then training other faculty to do the same. It got me some recognition, both in the college and in the wider academic community, and about three years ago I proposed to the administration that the college really needed a dean of instructional technology. And I wanted to be that dean.

I put a lot of thought into that proposal, and I wrote it out very clearly. I realized that it would mean giving up teaching (which I loved and still love) for a career in administration. But I was interested in new challenges– having an effect on more than just my own students in my own classroom. I wanted to try to make changes and set policy on a bigger scale, to try to make a difference in the whole institution.

The VP of Academic Affairs (the person who really runs the college) agreed with my proposal–she did see that the position was necessary, and that it really needed to be a dean-level position (I actually thought it should be an AVP position, but I didn’t think that that would be politically possible). However, she said that the president “wasn’t ready” to create any new deans quite yet. So she assigned me to the job–almost exactly as I described it in my proposal–but as a director-level position. I was still a faculty member, but released from teaching to serve this administrative role. That meant that I had all the responsibility, but none of the authority. I got no extra money, no staff, no direct reports…but full responsibility for faculty development in technology, computer labs for students and classes, new projects and initiatives.

I had responsibility in the sense that anything that went wrong was my fault–but all my decisions had to be approved by her, and any recognition or credit for my accomplishments would belong to her. And even when I saw clear problems–issues that were affecting teaching and learning–I had no authority to tell any other directors, or any of the senior managers, what I thought should be done. I could only tell the VP and hope that she would agree or pass along my concerns.

I accepted this–mainly because the VP kept promising me that it would be temporary. That “soon” she would be able to create the dean’s position, and that it would be mine. So I was patient. I did my job–with a lot of success. I wrote a report each semester (sometimes twice a semester), explaining why (not just for me, but for the institution) the position required more authority, and the institutional structure needed to be altered to recognize the importance of technology–and the integration of technology into the teaching and learning operations of the college.

And each time she read those reports, the VP said, “you’re absolutely right. I agree 100%. I’m going to get to this as soon as I can.”

But it just didn’t happen.

Finally I realized that I was being exploited. She had no intention of ever making the dean position a reality. She knew that she could keep me doing a dean’s work, but without investing the political or financial capital that it would take to make a new dean at the college, and that she was willing to tolerate the fact that I was frustrated–and that I wasn’t able to even do the job as well as it needed to be done.

And worse than that, I began to see the real institutional and structural obstacles, which were entrenched and probably insurmountable, in this and many other areas at the college. Teaching with technology (and to some extent, teaching in general) just was not working as well at the college as it should. And it looked like it never would.

So I decided to start looking for something else.

It was a tough decision–it felt weird to think about leaving the only job I had had as an adult. It felt disloyal to think about abandoning the colleagues and the students who had meant so much to me over the years. And it felt very scary (and many people told me it was crazy) to think about giving up tenure.

But it’s done. I’ve been offered a new job–and as of June 1, I’m resigning from my current job. I’m giving up my tenure, giving up my rank of full professor, and taking the leap.

The new job looks fantastic–I’m very happy about it. I’ll be the Director of Technology and Learning at the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY–a special, very elite program. They take some of the most academically gifted students–students who might otherwise go to the Ivies, or other of the top private universities in the country, and give those students the very best that the City University has to offer–including free tuition, free laptops, interdisciplinary seminars, and study-abroad and internship programs.

It’s a small program, and a relatively new program, and my position will be a big one–even though the title is still “Director,” I’ll be pretty much the equivalent of a Chief Technology Officer for the college–certainly a dean-level, at least, in terms of the actual organizational structure. I’ll get to make some bigger decisions, I’ll have some real authority, and I’ll get to help build the program almost from the ground up the way I think it should go. And I’ll have some graduate students, instructional technology fellows, to work with–so I get to help shape future professors, too.

Sometimes (late at night, usually) I do think I’m crazy. “What am I doing?” I ask myself. I could forget all this ambition and just teach my classes, get my automatic raises every year, take my summers off to read and write and travel. Unless I commit some kind of serious crime, I could never be fired. I could keep the same job for another twenty years or so, and then retire, perfectly comfortable.

But I also think that while tenure is a security blanket, it’s also a trap. I’m excited about the new directions that higher education is going to take in the coming years–and I want to be part of that. I want to try new things, not just in my own classroom, but on that larger scale. And (maybe it sounds arrogant) I’m confident enough in my own abilities, my own intelligence, to think that I can do bigger things–and that I don’t need the assurance of a guaranteed job, I need the challenges and the rewards of a job where I can actually make things happen…on a scale bigger than my own classroom.

So as of June 4, Monday, I’m going to need to change some of the links on the main Mountebank page–the links that describe where I work and what I do. Those will be the most minor of the changes!

In all the reporting and discussion about the LAPD’s actions at the May Day Immigration Rally in MacArthur Park in LA, I came across a vignette in LA Times reporter Jill Leovy’s first-hand report:

At a press conference with Chief Bratton about 9 Tuesday night at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Park View, tensions between the informal press and the formal press bubbled over.

As the chief spoke, with Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger at his side, at least 40 people surrounded him, with six or seven squatting on the ground in front to hear better. About half of the group appeared not to be official members of the press corps, but rather, protesters and self-appointed journalists affiliated with the protesters. When it came time to call out questions — often a competitive moment among reporters from competing news agencies — the protesters held their own.

As questioners peppered Bratton with demands for answers, some seemed more intent on expressing their own views than hearing Bratton’s and there was confusion about whether those speaking were paid by an established news organization or were self-appointed.

A large man in front of the chief to his right, who had been heckling with words of skepticism throughout the event, repeatedly asked in a loud voice whether the chief planned to appoint a civilian panel to investigate the incident. He interrupted reporters. Tempers flared. Dave Clark, a well-known broadcast journalist with KCAL 9 and CBS 2, admonished him to be quiet. “We are trying to work here!” Clark said.

At one point, Bratton also asked this man to be quiet. The press conference was being held for the benefit of the official media, he said. The man responded by insisting he was a “citizen journalist,” but then backed down, professing his respect for the chief.

Increasingly, it seems, the “citizen journalists”–bloggers, amateurs, “protesters with cameras,” whatever you want to call them–are not just holding their own, but surpassing the “official journalists.” The coverage they provide is wider, more blatantly subjective, polemical, less professional, untrained…it’s a whole different kind of new medium.

I like this–I find it exciting, and I find the potential for a better-informed, more media-savvy public to be quite promising. But there are also drawbacks, of course. We need to learn a new vocabulary, and new critical standards for evaluating this new medium–it’s unfiltered, and while I would never say that it should be filtered, I definitely think that we need to develop and clarify our own filters.

But that’s something we should have been doing all along–the “official” journalism was really never any more trustworthy or objective (not at any time in history–rosy-colored nostalgia aside), and if the new journalism foregrounds that fact, it’s a very good thing.

Josh Wolf (the videographer/blogger who was jailed for six months for refusing to turn over his video of a demonstration) was asked (while he was in jail) “Are Bloggers Journalists?” His answer (in part):

The question has no simple answer, just as there is no easy way to respond to being asked, “Are Christians good people?” Most would respond that some are and some are not; certain zealots would proclaim that all Christians are good people by definition, and still others would argue that all people are good despite whatever bad things they may have done. A fourth group would claim that the very idea of “good” and “evil” is an entirely artificial construct and a completely irrelevant measure, and all of these arguments are a valid response to the question that is before us tonight.

The simplest answer is that some bloggers are journalists whereas others are not. After all, few would contend that the 16 year-old who writes about her daily exploits on her Myspace page is a journalist. But what happens when this very same girl manages to break a story on her principal’s scheme to embezzle from the school? Does she then become a journalist? When she returns to writing about the guy in chemistry, is this now journalism? In a recent essay, Bill Moyers cites Tom Rosentiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism who points out that “the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist but whether your work itself constitutes journalism.” Given the paradoxes inherent in tonight’s question, I’m inclined to think that Moyer and Rosentiel are onto something.

Can bloggers be journalists? Absolutely. A blog is nothing more than a medium. Sure, the cost of entry is cheaper than launching your own daily newspaper and the rules of engagement aren’t nearly as formalized, but when you think about it, how different is this than the development of any new medium? I imagine that when radio was invented there were plenty of newspapermen and a few newspaperwomen who were clamoring that radio-news was not real journalism. This same scenario likely played out again with the advent of television. Today it’s the internet, and like the journalists of yester-year many are quick to discount blogs as a viable medium for transmitting news and some probably feel threatened by the development as well.

Are bloggers journalists? Is it good for us to have “citizen journalists”? That’s probably not an important question. We have them. So the better questions might be how should we regard them? How should we use them?