Month: September 2006

Mouse Droppings




Creepy Chuck E.

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

I meant to blog about this about a week ago, when Will’s Chuck E. Cheese party actually happened, but, well, it’s been kind of a strange week with the strike and everything. So a lot of this is kind of fuzzy memory.

I do recall saying to Annette when we went into Chuck E. Cheese before Will’s birthday, “Isn’t it unfortunate that a place that serves food has a rat for a mascot?”

“Chuck E. is a mouse,” said Annette.

“Whatever.”

In any event, Will and his friends had a good time, as I think is apparent in this set of photos from the event. Still, I think this is the last time Will will want this sort of birthday party. Most of the other kids who were having parties when he was there for this event were closer to 5 or so.

Will’s getting to be a big boy, doncha know.

I had fun too, though I have to say that my experience was spoiled/tainted by some of Annette’s past students. I can’t remember how this all came about, but she apparently was talking with some students and asked who it was who got selected to be in the actual Chuck E. Cheese suit. Without missing a beat, these students said “the newbie.” And, apparently, the actual Chuck E. Cheese suit, which is unbearably hot and uncomfortable, smells like the sweat of all of those who have worn the suit previously.

That thought makes this little silent video of Chuck E. dancing all the more creepy.

Anyway, happy birthday (belated) Will, and please don’t make me go back here.

"Term Paper II" Fun with plagiarism again

I did not see the “part one” in this series, but the NYT article “Term Paper Project, Part II” might be an interesting one to share with folks in English 516 this coming winter. One of the more interesting parts of the article for me was the talk with Kevin Smith, the webmaster of a site called “Asian Grade” that distributes term papers for free.

Needless to say, I don’t adhere to the not so subtle racism of a site predicated on the idea that it’s best to cheat off of Asian students– despite, as the NYTimes dutifully notes, that Mr. Smith “is half-Asian.” And there are some other features of the site that are problematic– like, for a fee, they will remove a paper that you copy from it so that your professor can’t find it as easily. (Note to professors: see The Wayback Machine). But I do think he has a point when he (and his site) say:

The site argues that a lot of term-paper assignments are mindless make-work, and that many teachers don’t even bother to grade them carefully.

“In fact, the biggest academic con is not plagiarism by students,â€� the site says, “it’s the fact that teachers pretend to read 25-30 papers on the same subject, semester after semester, year after year … come on, did you honestly think your teachers enjoy your opinion of Robert Frost’s poems.â€�

In other words, make an assignment that’s easy to plagiarize and you can be assured that someone will do just that.

The Strike of 2006: Blogging about blogging (or, metapost)

That was pretty weird.

Now that EMUtalk.org is up and running and the strike itself is in a holding pattern that could last years, the traffic on this site has returned to some version of normal. So this seems as good as a time as any to reflect a bit on just what the hell happened here.

I had been writing about the possibility of the faculty going on strike at EMU off and on for a while just as part of my regular writings here about things that happen at EMU– for example, this post about the health insurance issues was from the beginning of August. And about the same time I started getting more specific in my posts about the possibilities of the strike (or what I had hoped wouldn’t be a strike), I noticed that if you did a google search for “EMU strike” or “EMU faculty strike,” this blog came up pretty close to the top. I suppose there are a lot of reasons for that– a fair number of people link to this blog, I was one of the few places where there was anything out there on the strike, etc.

Well, after we actually went on strike, page hits and views started to climb. As the strike went on, I wrote more. As I wrote more, I got more hits and views and comments, which, in a classic feedback loop, drove me to write even more. By a few days into the strike, I was getting about three times as many hits and views as I normally get. And by about ten days into the strike, well, here’s a graphic of that:

stats

So, the purple represents page views, which is when someone comes to the site and then doesn’t do anything, and the green represents visits, which means someone did something to the site– scrolled, clicked on a link, commented, etc. On September 11, the point of the highest peak on the chart and the day before we essentially gave up the strike, this site had about 1,800 views and about 600 hits. In “normal times,” as the far left of the chart suggests, traffic here is dramatically less than that.

Like I said, it’s been weird. During the course of the strike, faculty who were relative strangers to me were coming up to me and thanking me for my blog. A bunch of people told me that I was the only decent source of information about what was going on with the strike, which to me says something about a) what a piss-poor job most of the local media did on covering the strike (other than the student paper and WEMU, that is), and b) what a piss-poor job that that union did in telling its story.

But one way or the other, people came here and they came here in relatively big numbers. I realize that sites like boing-boing probably get 1,000 hits every few minutes, but that’s record-setting traffic for the likes of me.

Anyway, in no particular order, here’s what I see potentially coming out of all this:

  • I’m trying to channel the energy on campus and to nurture EMUtalk.org, and so far, so good. There’s about four or five other people who seem pretty active and involved in making it work, and it’s already getting more traffic than this site. Which is good. It will be interesting to see how long this site can sustain itself, especially after the anger of the strike wears off.
  • This little experience represents for me a little microcosm of how blogging can work as a space where readers come to get information that is unfiltered and then to comment on that information. It’s why blogs are kind of like other news media, but also why blogs are not like these other things.
  • I think this also proves that if you write about something that others want to know about– in this case, the faculty strike at EMU– these others will find your blog through search engines and recommendations, and they will read it and comment on it. But it also proves that there’s a delicate balance here. Had I been posting stuff about the War in Iraq or anything else that already gets lots of coverage in other media and other blogs, nothing would have happened. Had the event of the strike not happened– what Lloyd Bitzer would call an “exigence”– there would be no reason for me to write so much about the strike. On the other hand, as Vatz might have argued, the situation of the strike became filtered for many readers in part through this web site.
  • Through this blip in time, I saw my blog go from a rather personal and idiosyncratic space for me and a handful of other computers and writing readers/bloggers to this “community space.” And yet, at the same time, it wasn’t really a “community space” in that it really functioned because of me. I mean, I was (and I remain) the main writer here, the person who starts the conversations that people can comment on. I suppose this is why a lot of blogs striving for the “community thing” have multiple authors.
  • The feedback loop I found myself in here was really fascinating. Like I said, while my motivations for my initial posts about the strike were more or less personal– that is, I wasn’t thinking of myself as providing news to a large audience– I felt myself posting more and more in response to the presence of more readers and commenters. And then, as I posted more and as more people out there heard about my site via a Google search or just by other people on campus, more people read and commented on my blog. Which just made me want to write more. And so forth. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I do think it says something worth exploring about why people blog (or not) in the first place, and I think it also says something about why students in classes across the board write well (or not) too.
  • Finally, all if this makes me rethink some scholarly activities. As one of my colleagues said to me during all of this, “you have to at least write an article about all this.” I’m beginning to think that’s true, or maybe there is a reason to actually try to start writing a book about blogging this year.

In any event, I’m not happy to return to normal around here. At least once I finally get caught up on my life….

Fun in Gitmo

So, what do the “illegal combatants” (being illegally held, IMO) in Guantanamo Bay do for fun? Well, according to this article Scotsman.com News article:

The Harry Potter stories are the most popular books in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre’s library, the Pentagon has revealed.

JK Rowling’s tales of the young wizard were the most requested by terror suspects held at the high-security camp from among 3,500 titles available.

The Defence Department also said detainees enjoyed watching World Cup football games and playing table tennis.

Wow, sounds like paradise, huh?

The Strike of 2006: Fallon on WEMU this morning

President John Fallon is on WEMU as I type this this morning. Here’s what he said:

  • Fallon the offer we got on Tuesday was no improvement over what we were offered originally; it was merely a rearrangment of the dollars.
  • For the first time ever, the reason he gave for the not great offer in the first place was poverty. Fallon claims that 67% of every dollar of expenses come from students and we just can’t afford these extra expenses. I suppose he means faculty salaries, but he’s conveniently forgetting administrator salaries, the football team, the new student union, etc., etc. And besides that: had they left insurance untouched, I think they could have given everyone 1.5-2%, not spent anymore money, and gotten a deal.
  • To paraphrase, “I care about faculty, but we can’t willy-nilly spend our money on just anything.” For sure! Faculty are the heart of the institution and our buildings are collapsing but jeez, we just can’t spend money on these things!
  • Fallon said fact finding could take as long as two months, even longer. Then he said he thinks that fact finding is a great idea, because it represents “stability,” even though it’s going to take “some months, eight months to a year.” (So, what is it? 2 or 8 or 12?!) I agree with him about the benefits of fact finding, and I think it’s something that I think both the union and the administration ought to consider next time at the start of this negotiating process. But a year?! How does this save the administration any money?
  • David Fair from WEMU flat-out asked if the administration would adhere to the fact finders findings. Fallon very clumsily stepped around that one. He said some pretty words about the recommendations, about them being public, etc. And then he said these recommendations “Cannot be summarily dismissed. That feature alone means that we can’t just walk away from the fact finding results.” Fair kept pressing him on this, but of course, no comittment was given. He did say at some point in this interview that he’s confident that the fact finder will find in favor of the administration.
  • They talked about the other contracts on campus. Fallon said that he didn’t think the faculty union contract would signal a different approach by the other bargaining units; rather, he had hoped that the deal they had made with the other units would have had an effect on how the administration negotiated with the faculty. First off, the only other bargaining unit that has a contract that I know of right now is the lecturers. Second, they got a pretty crappy contract. And third, what he was hoping has never happened here before. Because the faculty union is by far the largest on campus, we have tended to be the one that has set the pace for everyone else. It doesn’t work the other way around.

I’m sure the whole thing will be up on the WEMU web site soon.

The Strike of 2006: "Ended" for fact finding

I don’t have much time to post right now– I’m sure I’ll come back to this later. But three things for now:

  • In case you haven’t heard, the EMU-AAUP has suspended “Ended” the strike so we can take the administration up on their offer of “fact finding.” See the union’s press release here.
  • In my opinion, this was the best option– followed closely by simply agreeing to the administration’s deal, and distantly by going back out on strike.
  • I’m going to try to get a version of my previously suggested “EMUtalk.org” up and running yet this weekend. It will be merely a shell at this point, but something to get us started.

Now it’s later…

Some of what I’ve come across in the papers and such:

  • From the Detroit News, “EMU’s renegade professors should stay on job.” This is the one that was supposedly on the EMU web site for a while, though I think they took it off. Really, this strikes me as so ridiculously pro-administration as to not even be worthy of comment. I suspect this is why they took it off of their web site.
  • The Detroit Free Press’ “At EMU, Teach, Talk and Settle” is a bit better. I mostly agree with this paragraph: “With EMU refusing to negotiate until the American Association of University Professors ended its walkout, the union, in effect, blinked first. But the school administration has nothing to crow about until a contract is settled. Given the ever-increasing costs of college, neither side can expect much public support for failing to deliver on its end of the higher education bargain. They owe the university constituency a better effort.” Though I’m not sure I would say that the union “blinked.” I think we demonstrated that we had souls and we actually cared for students. If that’s “blinking,” well….

And then the rest of what I came across was about what you’d expect.

So, here’s some of what I remember from the day:

I went in today and met with one of the graduate students I’m teaching/mentoring as part of my interim Writing Program Administrator duties, someone who was having an interesting teaching issue. Needless to say, I’m not going to say anything more about it than that. But I will say this: first, the issues all had some version of a happy ending. Second, this student said something I really appreciated and that says a lot about the whole situation. She (I guess I can let that out) said “I’m really glad you weren’t on strike today.” I kind of laughed and said “yeah, me too.” And she said “No, really. I’m really REALLY glad you weren’t on strike today.”

Yeah, me too.

After all this got sorted out, it was time for the noon meeting in Roosevelt Hall. The short version was the offer the administration ended the morning sessions with today (at like five in the morning, by the way) were not any better and, in some ways, a regression. At least that’s what the union team said. I’m not completely sure. One thing though that is missing from the administration’s “latest and greatest” offer is a contribution to retirement. In other words, while the percentages of what they are willing to give us for salary are higher in this latest version, they got that way by taking away money from someplace else.

Tangent #1 in two parts: First, one of the many things that is so frustrating about this whole thing is that the administration could have made all of this go away SOOO easily. As one of my colleagues said in the hallway today, if they had said something like “okay, we’ll pay for insurance– at least we’ll pay for the decent PPO– and we’ll give y’all 2%,” we would have settled for that in a second. And that deal probably would have cost the administration less, too. Certainly less than the legal fees of the last 11 or 12 days.

Second, I’m not completely convinced that this is that bad of a deal. Not a great deal for sure, but not that bad. As far as I can tell, it isn’t a pay cut, and right now, that’s good enough for me.
/tangent

Anyway, the bargaining team, union executive committee, and, most importantly, a very articulate guy from the national AAUP office (I can’t remember his name right now) basically offered two options: go on strike again or take the offer of fact finding. And they were pushing fact finding. Approving/considering the contract as offered was pretty much out of the question. While some folks spoke up for the idea of a strike, I think the vast majority of people were for fact finding even before we got the pitch for it. Striking was simply not working, we were obviously losing public support (see above editorials, for example), and I think there was a general sentiment that it was time to try something new.

Tangent #2: I might have time to write more in terms of a reflection as a wrap-up to this whole strike mess later, but I am totally TOTALLY convinced that this union has hit a time to give up on striking as a strategy and try something new, and I mean that for now and in the future. We’ve been going on strike now (off and on) for 30 years, and, while the union has made a lot of gains in different areas, it hasn’t gotten us a lot more money. When we went on strike in 2000, we were near the bottom of the MAC and Michigan colleges and universities in terms of salaries. In 2002 or 03 (I forget which), same deal. In 2006, same deal. And I’m pretty sure this was all the same in the mid ’70s. All I’m saying is we need a different approach here, and I for one am just not convinced that we would be that worse off by working without a contract instead of going on strike. I do know that working without a contract would be a hell of a lot less stressful and disruptive on my life, not to mention my students’ lives. But like I said, maybe more on that another time. /tangent

There was a lot of disappointment amongst folks, of course. For one thing, it means we didn’t win. I don’t think it means we lost exactly, but the relationship between the union and the administration has, up to this point, been about “winning.”

For another, it means this isn’t over yet. Really, fact finding just puts us into limbo, at least until the fact finder finds facts (which could be December easily), until the administration does something about it (or not, which is the main fear of going down the fact finding paty in the first place). One good argument for this is the old contract is arguably better than the new one, but the process is still annoying and stressful.

Tangent #3 And I guess what also frustrates me about this is we really could have avoided this minimal gain and highly stressful version of trench warfare called “picketing” by agreeing to fact finding last week. Back on September 8, the EMU-AAUP poo-pooed fact finding; now it’s the way we’re going. /tangent

Some/many of my colleagues saw this as the beginning of the end of the union. I actually don’t think that is true at all. You know, one of the good things that comes out of crises like this is it forces a different way of thinking. Carrying around sticks with paper stapled to them wasn’t working, and, IMO, it has never worked that great here anyway. Folks are still united in this group, and I actually got a sense of some potential energy and a larger involvement in this “next step,” during fact finding, by the rank and file of the union.

That, as a certain former imprisoned professional homemaker might say, is a good thing.