“Joy is the justice we give ourselves.”

I made this statement in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, in my side yard writing shack I called “The Thicket.” During a podcast conversation with Krista Tippett (On Being), it was my off-the-cuff response to the question of surviving not just a viral attack that was killing hundreds daily, but also assaults on justice with the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Sequestered, quarantined, and working remotely in a world that seemed to be falling apart, it was the first thing that came to mind when she asked questions about hope and joy in such a precarious time.

When the call came for quarantine and remote teaching in the spring of 2020, and when we didn’t return from spring break, I tried to figure out how to teach a field ornithology course from Zoom squares. It didn’t work too well, but what did happen was an internal intensification of nearby noticing. That is to say, although I was away from my academic home base at Clemson University, with no access to field sites or ability to teach students the rudiments of bird ecology and conservation face-to-face in those earliest days of no contact, my backyard became a cauldron of rediscovery. With trips cancelled on my busy speaking-teaching tour, no visits to bird festivals, and distant birding hotspots off limits with air travel suspended, the half-acre our suburban home sat on began to re-initiate me into the rudiments of deep noticing. No longer able to depend upon finding rare birds in faraway places, patience and appreciation became my cues for joy. Common birds like northern cardinals and white-throated sparrows regained statuses as unique individuals with qualities that allowed me to not just identify them, but to identify with them. A female cardinal with an overbite beak became a rose bush nester, and I wondered if any of her “kids” would inherit her cheeky look. The white-throated sparrows hung out in the corners of the yard, but as spring progressed toward them leaving for northern homes, they became bolder and brighter by the day. When the last bird departed in May, I missed the lisping calls and plaintive songs from the privet thicket. I wished them safe journeys to wherever they were headed.

This isn’t the behavior of a professionally trained ornithologist, is it? Should a fully tenured, chair-endowed professor be seeing and feeling birds as who’s rather than that’s? Those are amateurish moves close to breaking the rule of objective observation and not anthropomorphizing non-human beings. But in the stress of all that 2020 and the following months presented, I regressed on many days between never-ending Zoom calls to a childlike state of discovery where the origin of my ornithological life began with unending curiosity before the rules of taxonomy, statistical rigor, and peer review came into play.

Fast forward past that global pandemic, racial injustice, treasonous riot, civil unrest, and school shootings, etc., etc., ad nauseum ad infinitum, to current day. We’re back to “normal” (whatever that is) behind the ivy walls with students in front of us, but there are new, age-old threats to academic life that are not just resurfacing like some long lost ghost ship. No, these new threats have unfurled the rigging and set sail on a course to ignorance. They pose as much a threat to thinking and thriving as one might imagine.

How does one find joy in the midst of funding cuts bordering on programmatic obliteration? Labs lie empty, and fieldwork is understaffed because federal dollars flew the academic coop. Might the lesson of teaching field ornithology under Covid-19 and my backyard provide a roadmap here too? Is there joy in classrooms and labs where students and faculty increasingly feel disconnected from the educative purposes of higher education? Can there be joy in empty library shelves and journals discontinued as buildings rise around crumbling faculty morale? Free speech and academic freedom, once joyous hallmarks of why a career in the Academy was one of the best “jobs” one might attain, have been severely strained, with faculty in silos with little to work for but a paycheck.  Demonized by the current post-Covid politic and the state of higher education, what are faculty to do?

The solution is quite simple on the day to day. It has little or nothing to do with the ivy walls that have become toxic to the touch. My solution is to rediscover your passion, uncover your genesis for chasing knowledge, find your juice, your OJ; that is, your Original Joy.

I’m a conservation and cultural ornithologist, but I wasn’t born with that multisyllabic moniker. I have a doctorate, but that “terminal” degree came long after the foundations of my true being were formed. My foundations are rooted in nature and stewarding the environment; from these, I developed a habit to pause and notice. I recall pausing at a mud puddle as a child. The sudden appearance of water in the middle of a dirt road after a rain stopped me for a leapfrog across or a stick-stirring on my daily trips between my Grandmother’s and my parents’ house. I paused to define the dimensions of that puddle and notice black dots in masses of jelly made me a bit of an explorer. The next day or two, when I paused, there were little black commas swimming about where the little black dots had been. Where had these little swimmers come from? Was it some sort of magic? Perhaps some kind of spontaneous generation? A check in my parents’ encyclopedia and a few questions to my grandmother introduced me to tadpoles. A little further investigation helped me understand that it took frogs getting together in something called “amplexus.” With my introduction to the birds and the bees via frogs, I had firsthand field knowledge of sexual reproduction. I was a budding biologist. Because I’d counted the little comma tadpoles, I kept making counts and saw changes in some of the tadpoles to froglets. Just as critical, though, the puddle was drying up and I was concerned with its fate; I advised parents and siblings to keep car wheels and bicycles clear of the comma habitat. I was at that point a conservationist, caring for the fate of the wild world. In between puddle checks, I looked up in the surrounding trees to see new birds from distant lands. There were decisions to be made between birds and amphibians; between ornithology and herpetology. That could wait. I was a naturalist by age 10 and would spend those formative years establishing a foundation with no degrees, and with the only p-value being passion. Our peer review was showing friends our discoveries and sharing wonder and awe. Tenure was granted by sunrise, sunset, and birdsong.

But then career aspirations and the expectations of adulthood move us to other ends, no less real in grown folks’ context, but rife with stressors that can cause joy to get lost in the shuffle, with faculty squeezed into husks of our former selves.

In these many years in the university, I’ve watched too many faculty, including me, forget what got us here. Degrees have advanced us; tenure given some degree of achievement and security. But we must remember now, especially in these times of faculty depreciation, that for all the machinations and expectations we face in good times and bad, true joy isn’t derived inside the ivy tower walls, it lies outside of them. Here’s my thirty years’ worth of cynicism: do your work in the tower without expectation of anything resembling care or concern for your joy to be your employer’s deliverables. Instead, find your juice. Remember your OJ, that original joy of discovery and curiosity; knowing that learning should be fun just as it was as a child, no degree or peer-reviewed permission required. It took the quarantine of a global pandemic, insurrection, social unrest, and rampant racial injustice to re-introduce me in sequestration to the original joy that led me to the professoriate in the first place.

I’m not suggesting you go maverick solo. Instead, I’m suggesting a shift in perspective in this age of faculty isolation and depreciation. Collaboration is a watchword in almost every institution, but in reality, limited resources curb that enthusiasm. Collaborating with peers down the hall or across campus isn’t easy. To find joy in collaboration and have actual fun with the peers with whom I want to develop kinship and share passion, I build collaborative teams outside of my institution and on my own time. Leave ego (and Principal Investigator status/headache) behind and agree to be a consultant or advisor of some sort. Make yourself useful and connect with your OJ.

Finally, on the teaching front, remember: freedom. Joy is justice that no one, inside the academy or outside of it, can ever take away.