I appreciate how you situate the question of ethics (which is how I am interpreting your quesiton about the benefit of the doubt) in the context of both trauma and the structure of institutions. Today, emotionally, I still repeatedly return to traumatic moments in my past — long periods of unemployment between 1994-5, then loosing a job in 1996 due questionable circumsances in which I knew I was at fault but not in a way that warranted the action that was taken (an action that was taken against me but not against others who’d done similar or worse things, and everyone involved admitted that the situation was unfair), repeatedly wanting to quit grad. school between 2003-2006 and hating my own dissertation half the time. I remember having a panic attack once in Japan in 1997 just because something happened that reminded me of how I lost my job — just the reminder was enough to make me feel panic even though in actuality I knew I had nothing to feel panic about. Anyway, all of these events go through my mind at least once a week. I even wrote a story about my experiences in 1994-1996 while in the midst of writing my dissertation a decade later. In some ways I think these events make me a better teacher, because I get the “real” that the theory and the literature is about and because I can connect on that level with students. I remember being asked during a job interview what I thought made me a good teacher, and I answered, “my failures.” Also, in some ways it also makes me a more productive person because I always feel this anxiety that what I have now can be taken from me at any moment unless I’m somehow “better” — more engaged, more engaging, more interdisciplinary, etc. — than everyone else.

Oddly, however, I find myself repeating some of the same risky behavior that led to problems in the past. For instance, being a smartass on faculty list-serves, resisting norms of etiquette and social behavior, my in-your-face radical politics, dropping the F-bomb in class often, overly engaged with extra-curriculars that aren’t recognized by the institution/field as counting towards promotion. You’d think, given my past experiences, I’d want to play it as much by the book as I could in order to avoid having to experience the trauma again, but instead, just the opposite is the case….

Sorry, way too much information for a comment, but your blog post just kind of brought that out of me.