Author: Steve Krause

"Welcome to AdjunctNation"

I don’t know why I’ve never actually come across this before (perhaps because I’m not an adjunct– at least not anymore and/or right now), but one of my grad students who is writing about adjunct issues referenced this site, AdjunctNation.

Great site. Besides info about and some articles from the magazine Adjunct Advocate, it also includes a lot of helpful tips and pieces of advice for would-be and current adjuncts and a lot of cartoons that are funny because they’re true(this one made me laugh outloud while my students were working on their web sites in class), and heck, it even has a version of “hangman” called “Adjunct Hang Prof!”

Cool interactive political map

Check out this New York Times map of the election as it stands right now. Interesting data, and given that there are 180 electoral college votes in “swing states” right now, it looks like it’s going to go down the last minute.

Though some of these states as “swing states,” well, I don’t know. I mean, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are all “swing states,” but all of them have gone Democratic for the last three or four or more elections.

Mob Rule

Nick Carbone sent this article on “Art Mobs” in Slate to the tech-rhet mailing list. I think I posted earlier about “mobs” and the ‘net.

Anyway, a couple quick thoughts:

* They talk in this article about Wikipedia too, which might also be a good topic to bring up for 516.
* The stuff about collaboratively created fonts and music jams are cool and interesting, though I don’t know if it actually fits in with anything that I do in my academic work.
* Nick Carbone always finds cool links.
* I ought to read Slate more often than I do.

A couple of Art Fair things I missed

I successfully avoided Art Fair this year, but I did get a chance to see a couple of cool things via the web.

First, as noted in the AA News “Talk about Town” feature on the art fairs, I could have been playing Art Fair Bingo. It’s a PDF file, but well worth the download.

Second, via Arbor Update, which has several good tidbits about the fairs, I came across the artwork of Steve Shepard. Neat stuff. Here’s a couple examples of what I mean:

You gotta love lefty folk art, right?

Academia and The Real World: What's the difference?

This morning, I came across this entry at Collin’s blog about a Stanley Fish article in CHE called “The Case for Academic Autonomy.” In the nutshell, Fish is saying that academia ought to be autonomous from the “real world” in the sense that we academics ought to not merely respond to market forces, we shouldn’t try to make ourselves more like businesses, etc.

Collin’s take on the article is that Fish is misreading what Mark Taylor means by “networks” and what Taylor concludes in his book. I am at a disadvantage there because I’m not at all familiar with Taylor’s work (though it certainly sounds like something I ought to read), and I’m also not familiar with what Collin refers to as a “spectacularly miscalculated keynote” speech Taylor gave at a C&W a few years back. Which one, Collin?

Anyway, on the CHE site I also came across this article, “The Grand Poobah,” written by Frank “not his real name” Miller. By “Grand Poobah,” Miller means his new role as the graduate coordinator in his department, which is described as at a large midwestern research university. From the way he describes the job, it certainly sounds like an English department. Miller is a newly tenured faculty member, and he’s afraid that he will move away from “scholarship” and become an “administrative hack.” He writes “The relationship between the terms ‘academic career,’ ‘scholarly discipline,’ and ‘teaching vocation’ has never seemed more complicated to me.”

A couple of things strike me about all this:

* In my own department, I had put my name in to be the graduate coordinator for the next three years and I didn’t get it. On the one hand, I was (and actually, still am) displeased about this because of the departmental politics that were involved. On the other hand, not getting this has renewed my interests in my scholarship, which has been fun and something I can do on my own terms, more or less.

* Like Miller, I don’t have any interest in full-time academic administrator positions– you know, department head, dean, etc. I can’t say that I’ll never be an administrator since “never” is an awfully long time. But I’ve always believed that being an administrator is like having a “real job,” one where you are expected to be there 9 to 5, where you have to wear nice clothes, where you end up pushing a lot of paper around, etc. If I wanted to do that, I’d leave the academic world for the “real” world, which pays a lot better.

* Having said all that, Fish and Miller both remind me in different ways that being “an academic” means more than being a “scholar,” or even a “teacher/scholar.” I’ve had two different tenure-track jobs at “regional college/universities,” schools that focus on undergraduate education and that are considered “opportunity-granting” institutions. At both places, I’ve done “administrative” work where I was given release time. On an interim basis, I was a WPA and I ran a writing center at my previous job, and I used to be the “computer guy” of the department at this job, doing things like maintaining a computer lab and running the department web site. But beyond these “official” administrative roles, I also find myself spending a fair amount of my time as a professor doing administrative stuff– advising students, going to meetings in the department and beyond, etc.

I don’t think my experiences are all that unusual, especially for folks in composition and rhetoric. I think most professors, even those who don’t have any explicit administrative duties, actually do a lot of administrative work. And because of that, I think the definition of “academic career” that Miller is talking about is indeed always in play, even if you don’t take on any official administrative duties. I suppose it’s possible to be an academic whose only obligations are to sit around and be really smart, but those positions are few and far between.

* And for me, this raises questions about Fish’s desires for an “autonomous academy.” When he says “the walls between the academy and society,” what does he mean by “the academy?” And isn’t “the academy” a key component of contemporary “society?”

I kind of understand what Fish is getting at, and I even agree with it a bit. Schools ought to not be run like businesses; rather, schools ought to be run like, well, schools, meaning the goal should not be to turn a profit through finding “synergy” with “customers” or whatever. Our goal should be to provide students with access to an education.

But really, the world of academia is “the real world,” or at least it’s a part of it. Students attend schools because of societal pressures (e.g., a college degree will help you get a better job), not purely for academic pursuits, and people work at schools because of societal pressures (e.g., working at a school as a teacher, administrator, staff person, janitor, and so forth is a job that pays the bills) and not just the love of knowledge. Don’t get me wrong– being a college professor is a great job, but it’s still a job.

If the academy really were separate from society, maybe the job aspect of it wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe it would be sort of like being a monk or being Amish, communal living where all of my day-to-day needs and pleasures would simply be part of the lifestyle. Of course, if the academy really were separate from society in this fashion, I wouldn’t be in the academy.

Inventio article is out (finally!)

I just noticed that the spring 2004 issue of the online journal Inventio has finally been released. It carries a commentary/article by yours truly called “Yes, but is it writing?” I say “finally” because the editors of Inventio asked me if I’d be interesting in submitting something after an email discussion/blog discussion that took place after the Computers and Writing Conference– in 2003. It’s another one of those things that suggests to me that even when academic publishing takes place online, it can still take forever!

Anyway, it’s out now and that always pleases me. The article was finished a long time ago, but it really feels “finished” now. I like the way that they broke it up into hypertext-friendly chunks, too.

Blogger is just weird…

As I’ve noted recently here and here, I’ve experienced a variety of problems with my blogger account lately. I thought they were because the vast majority of my computer work takes place on Macs: the computer I actually own and use most of the time, an iBook G4, and my office computer, an eMac. Well, it seems to be more complicated than that.

In our house, we also have a Dell Windoze XP computer, which is used mainly by my six year old son and me to play games. Last night, I was noodling around with it, and when I tried to use IE, the one browser you would always expect to work, I started running into the same problems that I was getting on my Mac. Then I tried Netscape and still couldn’t get it to work. Then, just for the hell of it, I installed Firefox on the machine and tried to mess with my Blogger account. It worked like a champ until I tried to spell-check; I hadn’t changed the pop-up menu settings, so it erased all my text.

( I’d try to experiment with the Dell computer again this moring, but my son is busy playing “Spongebob Squarepants and the Battle for Bikini Bottom.”)

So, if you’re keeping score, here’s how Blogger works for me, as far as I can tell:

On the Macintosh:

* IE always worked, thought it didn’t have any features at all (like spell-check), and of course, IE is no longer supported for the Mac.

* Safari, which is my browser of choice and which I am using right now, didn’t work before and it now it almost works, but the spell-check is still busted.

* Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, and Firefox all don’t work and they all don’t work in a similar way. I go to blogger.com to log in, and many times it lets me in to my Blogger “dashboard,” though just as many times it asks me to log in again (and again and again). When I log in again and again, some times I get through even to the place where I can create a message; however, as soon as I try to post it, I’m back to the log in screen, which doesn’t work over and over.

On the Windoze platform:

* IE and Netscape have the problems that I just described with Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, and Firefox on the Mac.

* Firefox for the PC seems to work just fine.

Hmm… does any of this make any sense to anyone?