CHE Story AcaSheMia

Layin’ Down Grooves on the Tenure Track: the Wide World of Faculty Bands

By Emma Pettit SEPTEMBER 11, 2018 PREMIUM

Courtesy of Leucine Zipper and the Zinc Fingers

Leucine Zipper and the Zinc Fingers, a science-themed punk-rock band from Georgia Tech, aims for songs that incorporate science but are also accessible.

When controversy rears its head at Allegheny College, most people dodge or massage the issue, said Ronald L. Mumme, a biology professor at the Meadville, Pa., campus. But that’s not the Credit/No Credit way.

Credit/No Credit, a band made up of Allegheny faculty members, handles a touchy topic by jabbing a needle in its eye, Mumme said. For years, the ensemble performed at the annual dean’s dance, armed with an original song that satirized whatever hot gossip had circulated that semester.

One year, the biology department was awash in new students, so it expanded, provoking bruised feelings from faculty who sacrificed space. Credit/No Credit wrote and performed a song called "Go Bio." The lead singer, a psychology professor, crooned, "Lookin’ out for some space to grab / Gotta find out where to put a new lab / The [environmental science] space will be our prey / They aren’t real scientists anyway."

"We just went far beyond passive-aggressive to hyperaggressive," Mumme said.

When they performed original songs, audiences laughed nervously, Mumme said. But the band didn’t care. It was loads of fun to play into this "megalomaniacal" persona, he said, by writing songs that blasted from an amp what everyone on campus was already whispering about.

The academy can be a discouraging and monotonous place. So it’s not surprising that so many of the profession’s rank and file embrace their inner Iggy Pop when the university cuts the budget. Sometimes the music isn’t so punk, covering bacterial reproduction, or nonsense sentences by Noam Chomsky. Above all, it’s nerdy. But it also rocks.

Shouldn’t Quit Their Day Jobs

Every decent protest song needs a topical punching bag. When the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point announced plans to drop 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences, a feminist music collective fought back. The group, AcaSheMia, shot a video for a track they call "Oh Dean: Please Don’t Cut Them Even Though You Can."

“Oh dean, oh dean, oh dean, oh dean / Please don't use this bad strategic plan. ... Please don't cut them just because you can.”

To the tune of Dolly Parton’s "Jolene," the song laments the loss of majors like English, which "literally helps us read," so that majors with a "sexy ring," like finance, can expand. The video juxtaposes shots of empty library shelves with the refrain, "Oh dean, oh dean, oh dean, oh dean / Please don’t use this bad strategic plan. ... Please don’t cut them just because you can."

When Holly Hassel, who plays guitar and helps write songs in AcaSheMia, was a professor in the University of Wisconsin system, she worried about her job when Gov. Scott Walker weakened tenure. Hassel, now an English professor at North Dakota State University, said she drafted plenty of statements and used traditional means to express her discontent. But eventually, Hassel said, "It was just clear that what was being decided was decided." So brainstorming songs with a core group of fellow female troubadours felt like a productive and "maybe slightly subversive creative act," she said.

AcaSheMia also tackles less newsy but still scholarly topics, like English professors’ penchant for wearing black clothing, and what it’s like to be a "Lady Professor" in a male-dominated field: "She’s a writer of postmodern fiction / She’ll blow you away with her diction / Because she’s a lady professor / Don’t you ever second guess her." The low-budget video, which features artists calling themselves "DJ MLA" and "Chicago Style," along with a healthy dose of wood block in the soundtrack, follows a few female academics through hallways and into classrooms at the University of Wisconsin’s Marathon County campus.

"We’re not the most sophisticated or musically talented," Hassel said. But "we make it work."

In the 1980s, Robert E. Floden, now a dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, wanted an edgy and education-adjacent name for his newly formed band. He settled on School Violence. But as mass violence at schools became more and more common, the name seemed "distasteful," Floden said. That was especially apparent when they performed at an elementary-school talent show in the wake of the mass shooting at Columbine High School, said Michael Sedlak, the drummer and an associate dean at Michigan State.

For continuity’s sake, they became Against School Violence. Over the years, the group has dabbled in the musical stylings of Sheryl Crow, Tom Petty, and Jason Isbell. But they’ve also written a couple of originals with higher-education motifs.

There’s "Quantitative Data Gone Wild" to the tune of Johnny Cash’s "Ghost Riders in the Sky." (The song went over quite well at a statistical conference.) And Billy Joel’s "We Didn’t Start the Fire" became "We Didn’t Write the Textbooks." The chorus goes, "We didn’t write the textbooks / They were here before us and they really bore us / Oh, how we’d like to change them / But if we’d actually write them someone might not like them."

What kept the band together for more than three decades is mostly enjoying each other’s company during jam sessions. But, judging by audience response, they also sound pretty decent. The band performed at an annual education research conference, and a Michigan State colleague raved that their mesmerizing performance "forever altered our prior reputation as the potato-chip-and-pretzel stop on the university party circuit." Against School Violence included the praise in its CD liner notes.

Elbow-Patches Persona

Other professor bands focus less on the minutia of academic life and more on the minutia of the subjects they study. Leucine Zipper and the Zinc Fingers is a science-themed punk-rock band, said Michael Evans, a bassist and a chemistry-lab coordinator at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The name is a reference to protein structures.

Evans, a biologist, an immunologist, and an amphibian ecologist make up the core group. But technically, according to the band’s website, the ensemble is not composed of Georgia Tech faculty and alumni. Rather, the people who take the stage are clones of Georgia Tech faculty and alumni whose genetic makeup was spliced with DNA stolen from iconic rockers like Joan Jett and Alice Cooper to form the world’s first "genetically engineered rock band."

They’re pretty into it.

Science and punk are equally present at Leucine Zipper performances. The band dons lab coats and fluorescent wigs to scream-sing about entropy and fossils. They want songs to be sufficiently scientific, Evans said, but popularly accessible. That’s best on display in "Stuck on You." It’s both a lonesome love ballad and also an instruction in bacterial quorum sensing: "I’ll never make it on my own (Let’s stick together) / I get so scared when I’m alone (Let’s stick together)."

Neuroscientists who perform as The Amygdaloids also specialize in songs with multiple meanings, a genre the band calls "heavy mental," said Joseph E. LeDoux, a songwriter and principal investigator at the LeDoux Lab at New York University. LeDoux, who is known for his research on memory, emotions, and fear, writes songs about, well, you know what. A sampling: "Mind Over Matter," "Maybe I Lost My Mind," and "Map of Your Mind."

Though a song like "Map of Your Mind" is informed by knowledge of the human brain, the end result isn’t "a geeky science song," LeDoux said. "The science is just very subtly running through it."

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Over the years, LeDoux’s and his band mates’ research has bled into their music. Tyler Volk, the lead guitarist, is a professor of biology and environmental studies at NYU. Daniela Schiller, the drummer, is a neuropsychologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Mostly, LeDoux said, they don’t compromise on the science to make a song work.

There was one exception, a song called "All in a Nut." LeDoux wrote the lyrics, inspired by the amygdala, the almond-shaped mass inside the brain’s temporal lobe. The amygdala’s role in inspiring fear is often misunderstood, LeDoux said, and over time, he realized his song’s lyrics weren’t entirely accurate. He won’t perform it unless he gives a disclaimer first.

At an Amygdaloids show, the audience can expect a lot of back and forth about how brain science influenced the songwriting. "I’m not sure we’ve converted many people into neuroscientists through our music," LeDoux said. But maybe upon hearing a song, he added, "someone might become attracted to the ideas in there and pick up a book."

All P. Scott Stanfield does is pick up books when writing his music. When he was younger, the English professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University mined the turmoils of his emotional life for lyrical fodder. Then he grew up, and the drama smoothed out. So rather than write songs about being happily married with children, Stanfield turned to the turbulent lives in literature.

Stanfield, one of his former students, a Nebraska Wesleyan professor of Japanese history, and a banker comprise the band Prairie Psycho. They play mostly around Lincoln, Neb., performing songs inspired by the writers Emily Dickinson, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Eyre, among many others. One song, "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously," takes its name from a sentence Noam Chomsky wrote as an example of how something can be grammatically correct but not make sense.

Prairie Psycho performs mostly in bars and in local bookstores. Sometimes there’s a student in the crowd — a student who’s quickly amused to find that not all professors conform to the "mild-mannered elbow patches" stereotype, as Stanfield put it.

For Stanfield, playing music is a welcome break from the everyday pressures of his career in higher education. It’s a facet of his life where he doesn’t have to be self-critical or constantly assessed. And as far as songwriting goes, Stanfield said, literature is pretty much a "bottomless well."

"It sure beats just trying to stir up trouble in my personal life so I have something to write about."

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.