Cosas del palacio, siempre despacio

I am slowly being absorbed by the department of "Filología Inglesa II" at the Complutense.

Who knew the mysterious "El Barto" made it all the way to university?

Today was one of those days when on the one hand I accomplished little, and on the other, various absolutely necessary things happened.  Basically, I went to the Complutense, and met with the head of the "Filología Inglesa II" department, and (even more importantly) with the department secretary who wrote a letter saying that I was a "profesora visitante" and kindly walked down with me to the personnel department where I filled out a "ficha" (having fortunately brought along my passport for photocopying) and the ladies there said they would "tramitar" everything after being reassured that this wasn't an actual appointment letter, which would involve paying me anything.  ("Será para el futuro," one of them assured me kindly.)  This is important (even though I'm not getting paid) because it will enable me to have a university ID, which will enable me to have a university email, but more importantly will enable me to connect to the university WiFi, and also to use said email and WiFi ID to connect to EduRoam networks anywhere in Spain, including presumably the Biblioteca Nacional.  (I tried connecting with my Columbia ID to the EduRoam network at the Complutense.  No dice.  The department secretary explained that this was because you have to download and install a specific program before you can connect to EduRoam.  Which you can't do unless you're connected as a regular user.)  In theory, I should have my email address by now, but I've received no mails, so I'm assuming that it will come tomorrow.  Or Monday.  Cosas de palacio, siempre despacio.

The entire process reminded me (in a more or less fond and happy way) of working for the Department of Education.  (Granted, it was fond because everyone was nice, and also because I didn't have to do it at 8:00 in the morning.)  Some of that undoubtedly has to do with the architecture of the historic "Edificio A" of the Facultad de Filosofía, which really looks like an elementary school.  (I have learned that the floors are color coded by horrible tiled wall.  The first floor has the blue tiles pictured earlier on this blog (in "Of Parrots and Pescaderías"), and the second floor has gray tiles, and the third floor has green tiles.  I'm sure the original noble intent was to symbolically represent water, stone, and grass, or something like that, in a bright and hygienic way, but instead it recalls pescaderías, parking lots, and parrots.  (I was going to say something less kind than parrots, but the tiles are parrot colored, and my briefly upset stomach this morning has gone away.)  After meeting with the extremely harassed but friendly department chair I was given a key to the staff lounge, which looked exactly like the old, much-lamented UFT Teachers Center of my first job, with old desktops set around the walls of a room with pretty views of trees, and big conference tables pushed together in the center.  It was deserted and the computers were off, so I don't know if the printers and scanners next to each of them lacked toner and paper, like in the Teachers Center, but the copy machine in the foyer before the staff lounge was working fine (it was in use), and there were the cubbyhole mailboxes that are the province of academia everywhere.

The nice department secretary showed me around, and explained the numbering system of the rooms, which is a bit odd, since the building is essentially an H, and even numbered rooms are on one vertical side of the H and odd numbered rooms are on the opposite side, so 301 and 303 are on a different corridor from 302 and 304, with mysteriously differently numbered buildings forming the crossbar of the H.  I am assured this is convenient because depending on even or odd you automatically know which side of the building to go to.  She was also the one who explained to me about downloading the software for EduRoam, and added that the "tecnología" people in the basement (because of course they're in the basement, sandwiched between the bookstore, the bathrooms, and the cafeteria) could help me.  She added a bit apologetically that their office was tiny "comparada con una universidad americana" and I told her (honestly) that I thought most of the real work of any organization gets done in the tiny offices (usually in basements), and that the big ones with views are just for show (or to be occupied by outraged students who are protesting the world's injustices, if you have those sorts of students and don't want to discourage their sweet enthusiasm but don't want to be inconvenienced by it either).

I should simply say that the administrative side of the Complutense is more like what I remember of the DOE high schools than like Columbia because it shares with them being a public institution, which is obviously operating on a shoe string budget.  But the architecture really does irresistibly recall a high school.  And since there are no non-traditional older General Studies students as there are at Columbia, and few graduate students since the researchers in the sciences have their own buildings and in the Humanities tend to head to the Biblioteca Nacional, the students all seem uniformly young.  Not perhaps as young as real high school students, but definitely younger than the actors who play them in movies, which combined with those tiled walls....  I kept expecting bells to ring for class.

The problems of having more students than money instead of the other way around display themselves in the usual way (beyond Spartan, uncarpeted floors, and unpadded seats in classrooms) familiar to me from the DOE as well: namely, according to some students I've talked to there are several classes which have full rosters but do not yet have (or have only just received) professors, even though we are now in the third week of classes.  Some of this has to do with having only just done the "trámites" to sign contracts for the "professors" (who are obviously adjuncts on one year contracts which seem to begin a bit later than the actual semester).  Some of it is probably just being understaffed.  Under the circumstances, I didn't feel I could complain when the kindly but extremely frenetic department chair asked if I'd mind supervising three students final projects.  The department secretary assured me that they were only fifteen pages each, and that while the normal thing was to prepare an "informe" or summary of how they had worked for the committee of professors who read them, I wouldn't be responsible for giving actual grades.  (I would feel unethical giving grades to students here without being an actual employee, and also without any idea of how the grading system works here or what the rubrics are.)  On the one hand, I'm quite aware that I'm being exploited as free labor.  On the other hand, I feel sorry for the harassed and overworked people who have uniformly generously welcomed me as colleagues in spite of being busy, and for the unknown students who have paid something (not as much as they would have at an American university, but still, something), and who need senior thesis advisors.  And three fifteen pages papers isn't much.  Besides, I like students.  And the hypnotic high school atmosphere took me back to the days of being exploited for unpaid labor.  (I know it's an irony to say that when I took a huge pay cut to go to grad school, but the fact is that I did a lot more as a high school teacher, and a lot of it was not technically paid work.)  Besides, it counts as resume-building for the academic world, and perhaps making contacts for future (paid) work in this very lovely city.  (After all, if people wanted me to stay after I finished the PhD, and offered me a salary to be in Madrid for six or seven months a year....)  I suppose I could insist in a principled way that the work go to a paid adjunct who needs the money, but again, years of dealing with the public system makes me suspect that the position would simply go unfilled.

I sampled the student cafeteria for lunch after meeting the personnel and payroll people, and filling out my ficha.  In a nutshell, the food is edible, and the coffee is unfortunate.  I can't believe that a university has bad coffee, but I am discovering that drinking coffee in the mornings or to stay awake when sleepy is a distinctively American trait.  It's not that Spaniards don't have (excellent) coffee.  It's that I don't think the students here are very pressured about staying awake, and since coffee is traditionally a substitute for dessert anyway, they've somehow learned to ignore the caffeine and drink it and then snooze.  In a more general sort of way, the cafeteria is like most student cafeterias -- cheerfully noisy, and fairly ugly in the way of airport lounges and places that people use to kill time between more important things.  The (molded plastic) chairs are all branded with Coca-Cola Light logos, for which I sincerely hope the university has had its budget duly enhanced.  As far as I could judge from observation the students seemed calm and cheerful and more or less contented, but large amounts of hot food at reasonable prices generally make late adolescents calm and contented, so it's hard to tell.  (It is probably easier to find 16-22 year olds brave enough to stick flowers in the rifles of soldiers than it is to find people in the same age group with the fortitude to turn down free pizza.  They're too young to believe that they'll really die, but they know that they're really hungry.)

I am returning to the Complutense on Tuesday, when I will hopefully have both my UCM ID and also be able to pick up my carta de investigadora for the Biblioteca Nacional and finally get into the really big archive I have not yet explored.  So today felt like a being a "teacher" day, but it really was also a small but necessary step in my being a researcher.