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I’ve got a blog. It’s written using my real name. Its online home is my department’s server. So it was only a matter of time before one of my undergraduate students discovered this space.

It’s possible, of course, that this happened long ago and no one bothered to tell me. But tonight, one of the students in my other class — the class that I failed to mention in my post on the Science Museum of Minnesota’s exhibit on race — revealed that she had been poking around the department’s website … and, in so doing, stumbled across these wayward scribblings of mine.

It would be easy — too easy — for me to respond to this particular moment of discovery (and the apparent sense of surprise that accompanied it) in stereotypical fashion: i.e., to affect a wry sense of superiority and comment on the putative naivete of students who fail to realize that their professors have lives off campus that include all sorts of things that “ordinary” people do. Grocery shopping. Happy hours. Movies. Blogging.

Much as there’s some truth in such a response — it is always amusing to watch the visible shock on some students’ faces when they encounter me pushing a shopping cart by the cheese counter at the local supermarket — it would also be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that this sword can (and often does) cut both ways. That I sometimes get caught with that surprised look when I run into a student of mine at a “faculty” bar (as if one has to show a suitably endowed c.v. to get in the door?) or at the pet supply store (as if students don’t need to buy dog kibble too?).

So I’ll own up to having been caught off guard by my student’s revelation. Not upset, mind you. And, as noted above, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all, especially since I’ve often blogged (or, in some cases, deliberately not blogged) with one eye on the possibility that my words might someday wind up in front of my students. But there was also a part of me that was genuinely unprepared for the reality that at least some of my undergrads would eventually — inevitably — find these words.

And it’s probably good for me to have that bubble burst from time to time. I like to think that I’m good at remembering that “my” students are adults in their own right, and that if I were to encounter most of them for the first time in any number of other contexts, we’d all just be “ordinary” people to each other. But it’s also awfully easy to get caught up in the “us vs. them” mentality that permeates so much of the student/teacher discourse — even for those of us who don’t want to embrace such an adversarial way of framing that relationship.

So a tip of the proverbial hat to the newest reader of this humble blog (even if she never reads it again) for the helpful reminder of the gap between my own ideals and what actually goes on inside my head sometimes.

Not only do I suddenly find myself in a mini-blogging frenzy of my own (after way too long a gap) — three posts in four days? as if I’m Michael Bérubé or something? — but I also find myself piping up with quips and comments on other people’s blogs — and sometimes even doing so with more prose than I’m laying down in my own blogyard.

My junk e-mail filter this morning included an e-mail from Judy Genshaft, President of USF. There’s something poetically fitting about her message automatically being shuffled into my “junk” folder, since her standard policy with respect to faculty input on major issues was (and presumably still is) to accept them without ever actually paying attention to them.

What’s amazing to me, though, is that I’m still getting such messages at all. Officially, my USF appointment ended in early May 2006, and I assumed that my two USF e-mail accounts would get closed out not too long after that. I figured there’d be a relatively brief delay — maybe a month — while my change of status trickled through the University’s bureaucracy and tripped all the appropriate Off switches. And even though I knew from personal experience that said bureaucracy is dense enough that light bends around it, I also knew that the USF administration is awfully persnickety about what faculty can and can’t do using University resources — and figured that the latter would trump the former when it came to things like closing off access to USF computers.

Guess I was wrong. Nearly nine months after the official end of my employment there, both my old USF e-mail accounts are still fully operational. Most of what comes into these accounts these days is spam . . . but I do receive a few wayward e-mails every week where the sender believes that I’m still the Director of Graduate Studies for my old department: a title I relinquished way back in 2004. A more mischievous soul could probably wreak all sorts of low level havoc with this. The stakes, however, simply aren’t worth the effort, especially since the people who’d probably wind up having to clean up after any such mischief are people I still like.

. . . since I last set fingers to keyboard with active blogging in mind. The first couple of weeks of the semester have kicked my ass more than I expected.

And, if my visit to the Science Museum of Minnesota’s new exhibit on race is any indication, it’ll be a long, long time before we get to a place in this country where we can routinely have sane conversations about race. That’s not a knock on the exhibit, mind you, which is very smartly done (though I’ll admit that I’d have been happier if Ward Connerly hadn’t been accorded even the minor “expert” commentator role he was given in a couple of places), but some of the visitor feedback — of both the live and the recorded variety — was unsettling.

The section of the exhibit on racialized sports mascots, for instance, included an album of visitor comments . . . that was all the more disturbing because I suspect the curators filter out some of the more heinous responses they’ve received. The comments from pre-teen children were all very sweet in their open-minded desire to treat other people with respect and kindness, but they weren’t enough to offset the multiple comments from (alleged) adults about “whining” Native Americans who should “get over it already” and stop complaining about team names like “Redskins.”

I also watched the female half of a twentysomething white couple interact with a computerized questionnaire that attempts to assess people’s beliefs about the connections between national and racial identities. Asked to decide which of about two dozen nationalities were “white” or “non-white,” she confidently decided that Britons and Canadians were white, but every other nation on the list was non-white. And she did so at a speed that suggested she didn’t even bother to need to read the list: if she didn’t recognize the name of a nation right away, she didn’t even bother with the “not sure” option — she just pressed the “non-white” button and moved on. Even granting that the questionnaire is set up so as to encourage such sloppy thinking — I’m not sure there’s a nation on the list that can safely be said to be mono-racial, either by its own standards or by those currently in play in the US — the ease with which this woman divided the world up into “people like me” and “people not like me” was frightening. After she was done, she turned to her date/boyfriend/husband and (in a complete misreading what of the screen was actually telling her) proudly proclaimed that she’d “gotten them all right.”

It’s possible, of course, that I was simply caught off guard because the students in my “Media, Race, and Identity” course this semester have been surprisingly game when it comes to these sorts of issues. Not perfect — by any means — but I don’t think too many of us (myself included) have perfect conversations about race and racism: it’s way too fraught a terrain for that to be the rule. But they’ve been an impressively earnest and open-minded group — all the more so given that we’re only two weeks into the semester. And I can’t recall ever teaching these issues in the past without there being at least a small (but vocal) undercurrent of self-interested resistance to the conversation somewhere in the group. I’ve got my fingers crossed (though I should probably know better) that the rest of the semester will run so smoothly.