Mutiny!

I am writing from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, where we have just spent a few glorious days exploring the desert, and where I am now struggling with a Spanish keyboard, so forgive me.

Chile will have to wait until the next post. First I have to tell you about my ill-fated tenure as Interim Academic Dean. I had agreed to serve as such on the first week of the voyage, when David Gies asked me to take his place while he went off to the meeting of the International Association of Hispanists in Paris. He left from Ecuador, and I was to be in charge until he rejoined us in Chile. "Dont worry," he assured me, "you just have to go to a meeting every morning with the other dean types." Since David is a good friend, I agreed instantly.

Well, it turns out that every voyage has what one repeat faculty member calls the "mid-voyage crisis," and our crisis hit during the Ecuador - Chile leg, on my watch. It was triggered, I think, by the workload. This leg was the one when many faculty gave midterms, or assigned papers, and the students found themselves stressed out. Many of them had signed up believing that this voyage would be like other SAS voyages, light on the homework, only to find themselves on the business end of UVAs attempt to infuse the program with rigor. They rebelled, and their rebellion turned on the content of the one course required of everyone, variously called "Latin America Today" or "Latin America Between the Local and the Global." Some students circulated a petition complaining about the historical structure of the course, saying that too much time was being spent on the colonial period, and not enough on current-day affairs that students needed to master in order to approach their port stays intelligently. They wanted a change in the content. 180-plus signatures.

I remember now that one of the folks in the study abroad office back home had warned me that strange things happen on ships. Rumors circulate quickly. Emotions become contagious. Discontent soon turns into anger and frustration. And you cannot get away from any of it. For two days or so, it seemed that all anyone would talk to me about was Latin America Today, blah, blah, blah. We called a meeting for the whole community to discuss the intellectual rationale for the course, and to remind everyone that there were days scheduled into the syllabus designed to provide the sort of current-day info that they wanted. Throughout, no one ever thought to ask why we were studying the colonial period, so I thought I would volunteer it. I had thought out what I wanted to say, about the way the past weighs heavily in Latin America, the way nothing can be understood without understanding the colonial period. My speech brought me to tears, and I had to leave the room. Brian made a similar speech, I am told, and was also visibly moved. Both of us are still trying to figure out why or how all of this brought us in touch with the emotional and personal basis of what we did.

The meeting was good, though. The students felt that they had been heard, and not a few seem to have learned from our little outbursts. That night, I drank caiperinhas in the faculty lounge and danced to bad 80s music. The next day, at Sea Olympics, everyone got to unwind. This was a whole day of silly competition in which, among other things, the Executive Dean and I performed a stunning synchronized swimming routine, and the students put on the best lip synch show ever. Lip-synching to the Eric Cartman version of "Come Sail Away" was sheer genius.

Two days later, we were in Valaparaiso. Spirits were once again high, and David was back on the ship. I had never been so happy to see him in my entire life.