What does a University President have to do to get fired?

I noticed in The Chronicle of Higher Education today that the faculty senate at Auburn University have taken a “no confidence” vote of the president. Since I don’t subscribe to The Chronicle’s online news service, I did a google search and came up with the web site http://www.firewilliamwalker.com/, which is all about why William Walker, the president of Auburn U, needs to go. I of course don’t know any of the details, but from this site, the two big things that have gotten Walker in trouble are managing to get Auburn on probation with its accreditation body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and he had some shady dealings with trying to hire Bobby Petrino as the football coach. I get the impression from the web site and the articles linked to from the web site that the thing that really has people mad there is the football coach deal and some other corrupt practices involving the board of regents.

I wonder how a $5 + million dollar house would figure into this situation?

Googlebombing and a "Miserable Failure"

In the “you learn something every day” and “stuff to remember for teaching Writing for the World Wide Web” departments:

There was a discussion on one of the mailing lists I’m on about this phenomenon called “Googlebombing.” If you go to Google, type in “miserable failure,” and then hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, you’ll get this page, the official biography of George W. Bush. Go ahead and try it. I’ll wait.

How does this happen? Well, this article from the International Herald Tribune explains how if enough people link to something on the web with a particular phrase, it rises to the top of the Google search engine. So, as the result of the grass roots efforts of a blogger named George Johnston who has a blog called Old Fashioned Patriot, enough people linked to Bush’s biography with the phrase “miserable failure” on their page and Google reacts.

There are some obvious political implications to all this (and I happen to agree with the linkage between “miserable failure” and GW Bush), but I am more fascinated by the complex rhetorical dimensions of all this, about how an audience can define terms in a way that, generally, is reserved exclusively for a very few people. In other words, a larger group working together can literally change the terms of discussion. Pretty interesting.

More than three reasons why the five paragraph essay is bad

From Household Opera comes this good discussion about the five paragraph essay. For anyone invested in composition and rhetoric theory and practice, this isn’t exactly a news flash, but this discussion and the many links Amanda has here suggests to me that it is becoming the conventional wisdom for all kinds of folks outside of composition studies, too.

My favorite critique of the five paragraph essay is in Jasper Neel’s book Plato, Derrida, and Writing; he argues the five paragraph essay comes from Plato’s notions of the way rhetoric and arguments work, and Neel convincingly explains why the five paragraph essay is “anti-writing.” A very worthwhile read.

In my own mind, learning how to write a five paragraph essay is the same as learning how to fill out a form. Filling out a form is obviously not the same as writing, though people do need to learn how to fill out forms, and the five paragraph essay does have its uses. For example, the five paragraph form works well for any sort of timed writing like an essay test. But the five paragraph form becomes a problem for students when they learn it is the only tool they will ever need to write anything, sort of like using a hammer to bake a pie.

Yet, as easy as it is to note how wrong the five paragraph essay is, we do see its form in all sorts of different kinds of writing and settings. Ultimately, it is an embodiment of the “holy trinity”– a beginning and an end, sure, but also a division of everything into three mysterious parts, a father, a son, a holy spirit/ghost. This division of three is everywhere– small, medium, large, etc. And most dissertations (including mine) are divided into… five chapters…

Should you go to graduate school? Good recent article and discussion

Via The Invisible Adjunct comes this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education,“Ignoring Good Advice.” The article is part of a very good resource for information on the academic job market, CHE’s Chronicle Careers pages.

In the nutshell, the article is a humorous and fictionalized account of the advice a student received from her professors about getting a PhD in literature. The article is funny largely because it’s true, of course: getting a PhD in anything, to borrow a phrase from our current administration, is a long, hard slog, and the odds against those studying literature are extremely high. I’ll give my take on all this in the near future with the third installment of my series of “Happy Academic” postings regarding PhD studies.

There is an interesting discussion of this article on the IA blog– here is a link to it. First off, despite the fact that the advice our would-be PhD seeker receives is “don’t do it,” the author indicates that she is “undeterred” and is planning on entering into a PhD studies. Second, a lot of the commentary on the IA blog linked here suggests that the participants claim they didn’t know how hard grad school would be or how bad the job market in various fields are and so forth, and they now regret having gone to grad school in the first place.

In a way, I think that the “undeterred” writer of this CHE article who is planning on going into a PhD program in literature despite the warnings and the folks on IA who are either ABD or with a PhD and unemployed are essentially the same person. That is, like the writer who is going to get a PhD despite the advice against it, the people on IA who said they were never warned really were warned and they are either forgetting that they were warned or they are repressing it. When I was thinking about PhD studies in the early 1990s, I received many warnings against pursuing work in literature. Sure, there weren’t blogs back then, but the difficulties of the job market then were not a secret to anyone who was willing to do an iota of research, just as it isn’t a secret now that the academic jobs in literature are few and far between.

We Won!

I’m happy to report that the EMU-PDU folks running for election won and won in a landslide!

This is the group that was trying to get seats on the Executive Committee of the EMU-AAUP, which is the union that represents the faculty at EMU, and basically take control of the union so that we can finally put our proverbial house in order. Finally and hopefully. I’m sure there are going to be more bumps along the way, but we’re on right path.

Check out the PDU homepage for some more information about all this.

EMU's President's House Cost $3.5 Million (well, unless you really want to count that other $1.5 million…)

I came home to my own modest abode with my wife and son (we had just stopped to get our Christmas tree) to read an enormous article in the Ann Arbor News that detailed the cost overruns associated with the newly constructed presidential home (which EMU always refers to in official documents as the “University House,” as if it is as much my space as it is President Kirkpatrick’s… hmmm…). The article is on the web By following this link (I think there’s a free registration to get it). Let me just quote a bit from it. Here’s the lead:

Eastern Michigan University spent at least $5.1 million to build, furnish and landscape a new home for its president, a figure that is $1.6 million more than publicly disclosed.

The increased price tag was compiled by The News from a review of more than 2,000 pages of university records obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Here’s a good summary a few paragraphs down from the lead– some of this might be hard to understand to those who might be reading this and who are unfamiliar with what’s been going on at EMU, but you get the idea:

In its review, The News also found that:

* EMU did not get bids for construction. Instead, it sought general proposals from builders for a much smaller, 6,500-square-foot project costing $1.5 million to $2 million. After a builder was picked, the size grew and the budgeted cost of the building and furnishings rose to $3.5 million. The budget for the home was drawn up by the builder, who received 10 percent of the construction costs as profit and 8.5 percent for administrative expenses.

* The contract with Menard Builders of Plymouth, the general contractor, was signed five months after construction began.

* Kirkpatrick, in an interview last week, distanced himself from the house, saying he did not make the decision to build it. Yet records show that he and his wife, Pamela, made many detailed decisions.

* The Kirkpatricks charged $34,465 worth of home furnishings to university credit cards issued for house-related purchases.

* The president and his wife requested 22 of the building’s 141 change orders, many near the end of the project. Their change orders totaled $130,000.

* University officials told regents that EMU made a gross capital gain of $97,100 on the sale of the Pittsfield Township home where the Kirkpatricks lived while the new house was being built. But records show EMU lost $19,612 when real estate commission, interest and permanent improvements at the house are included.

Ought to make for some interesting conversation around campus tomorrow, huh?

The Happy Academic, Part II: "Should I get a Master's degree?"

As a “happy academic,” I am sometimes asked by students about whether or not they should go to graduate school. I am asked this enough to make it worthwhile to write down an answer (I’ve been working on this one off and on for a couple of weeks), and because of some of the reaction to my first happy academic posting (and I’m thinking in particular about some of the reaction I got on Invisible Adjunct), I thought I would post it here.

First, let me point out the obvious: since I am an English professor, I am mostly familiar with the idea of graduate school as it relates to English, particularly in rhetoric and writing. If you’re thinking about doing graduate work in history, go talk to a history professor. Along these obvious lines, if you really are thinking about graduate school, you should talk to many different people and get many different opinions. Read the happy stories and rosy views (like mine), but read the sad stories and warnings, too. Graduate school is a major life decision, and it isn’t something that you should make a decision about on a whim.

Second, I think the more general question “should I go to graduate school?” needs to be divided into two more specific questions, at least when it comes to English studies: “should I get a Master’s degree?”(the subject of this posting), and “should I get a PhD?”(the subject of a happy academic post in the near future). I think that these two related degrees are actually quite different from each other, and I think the advice has to be different as well.

The short answer is this: while the answer to the question “Should I get a Master’s degree?”is “probably yes,”the answer to the question “Should I get a PhD?”is “probably no.”

So, “should I get a Master’s degree?” The first question you need to answer for yourself is “Why do you want to get a Master’s degree?” Most of my EMU grad students have one of three basic answers to this question:

Answer 1: “Because I am a junior high or high school teacher,”or “because I am an employed technical communications professional.”

Probably 60-70% of the grad students in EMU’s written communications program fall into this category, and I believe that close to half of the students in our department’s MA program in literature are also in this category. The reasons why technical communications professionals enroll in our program varies quite a bit; for some, the MA means a promotion of some sort, and for others, tuition reimbursement is a fringe benefit of the job, so they might as well take advantage of it and pursue a graduate degree. Almost all of the practicing junior high and high school teachers enroll in our program because a Master’s degree means a significant pay raise, and also because secondary school teachers in Michigan are required to earn a certain number of graduate credits or “in-service training” credits to retain their teaching certification anyway.

I think these are very good reasons for getting a Master’s degree, and I believe our MA program at EMU in written communication serves these students well. We teach almost all of our graduate courses at night and we allow students to attend school part-time, both of which are necessities for someone with a full-time job.

If this is why you want a Master’s degree, you should probably enroll. There is one important exception to this, though: if you don’t already have a full-time job that you are happy with, you should think twice about getting a Master’s because the advanced degree might make you slightly less employable. This is particularly true for teachers because most school districts prefer to hire new teachers with a Bachelor’s degree.

Now, some reading this might think it is crass and corporate of me to suggest that getting an additional credential is a good enough reason to pursue graduate work. I take it as a given that anyone interested in graduate school wants to do so because of the inherent value of education; but along with intellectual enrichment, one goes to graduate school to earn a particular credential. If a person is only interested in going to graduate school because of the abstract and philosophic benefits of it, well, I think that person’s time and money would be better spent reading, attending lectures in public places, and engaging in conversations over the Internet.

Answer #2: “Because I’m thinking about pursuing a PhD and eventually getting a job as a happy academic.”

My guess is that less than a third of our students at EMU would give this answer, though it is the one I’m most familiar with personally because this was why I wanted to go to graduate school. Well, this and a bit of answer #3, too.
If you are thinking that you might like to be a happy academic, and you are someone who has few life commitments (e.g., mortgages, significant others, children, etc.), who is willing and able to move just about anywhere in the country, and who is accustomed to living on a minimal income, this is also a good reason to go to graduate school. Of course, if you decide to go beyond the MA, you will face all of the challenges of PhD studies, and if you are someone who does have various life commitments, going on to a PhD program might ultimately not be a wise decision. But that’s something I’ll talk about in that entry.

There are several programs in English nowadays that combine the MA and PhD, and I suppose these are good options for particularly dedicated and determined students. But personally, I think there are good reasons to get your MA and your PhD from different schools. For one thing, you get the experiences of two different schools, which will automatically give you a broader experience in terms of fellow students, professors, and institutional cultures. Second, your chances of earning funding in the form of a teaching assistantship might be better at programs that offer Master’s degrees and not PhDs. And funding and assistantship work is critical– see my warnings about going into a MA program that follow “Answer 3.”

Answer #3: “Because I didn’t know what else to do and/or I’m trying to put off going into the ‘real world’ for another couple years and/or I’m trying to find myself.”

It’s hard to say how many of the grad students at EMU fall into this category, I suppose because many of our students can offer this is at least a partial explanation as to why they want to go to graduate school. Like I said, this is part of the reason why I went, and I would wager to say it is at least part of the reason why many people who are now academics themselves went to graduate school in the first place.

I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with “finding yourself,” and I think that a Master’s degree program is one good place/time in which to do this. At least it was for me; I spent two years in a Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing in my early twenties, and I felt like I learned a tremendous amount about myself as a writer, a thinker, a teacher, and just as an overall person. Like most people that age, I did a lot of foolish things, but I also had a lot of “once in a lifetime” experiences I’ll always remember, experiences that I wouldn’t have had without the culture and community of graduate school.

But let me point something out that will be discussed further in my future posting regarding PhD programs: getting a doctorate is not the time one should be “finding themselves.” The stakes for the PhD are too high and the pain potentially inflicted on students is too great.

So, should you get a Master’s degree? If you liked your undergraduate studies and want to go on to the next level, especially if you find yourself in one of the three categories I outline above, sure, why not? But before you enroll, keep these two warnings in mind:

Seek funding and teaching assistantships.

Unless you are independently wealthy or a gainfully emplo
yed teacher or technical writer and you are going to graduate school to improve your employment status, getting a Master’s degree in English is not worth paying for entirely out of your own pocket (see my next warning). Explore the different funding and teaching assistantship options at the schools you are interested in, and avoid applying to Master’s programs that do not provide their students any funding.

Graduate teaching assistants at EMU do things like teach first year composition, assist professors in lecture hall sections of literature classes, and tutor students about writing. They are paid poorly unfortunately, and as a result, most of our grad students who have assistantships also have some other sort of part-time job. However, assistantships generally include tuition and they provide invaluable classroom teaching experience. I had no idea what it meant to be a “college teacher” before I had a teaching assistantship, and for me, the experience was a wonderfully rewarding one. On the other hand, some of my colleagues in my Master’s program realized after two semesters of freshman comp that being a college teacher was not for them and they went on with their lives. I think it’s better that they discovered this in a Master’s program rather than a PhD program. And if you are seriously considering going on to a PhD program and thus a career as a happy academic, experience as a teaching assistant is an essential part of the job training.

By itself, a Master’s degree will not help you be a happy academic in an English department. If your goal is a full-time academic career, you will need to go on to a PhD program.

If you are a high school teacher or any other sort of “real world” working professional, a Master’s degree is all you will probably ever need. In fact, at most of the high schools in this area, teachers “max out” in terms of pay levels with an MA; PhDs are only important for those who go into administration (and most of those folks do doctoral studies in Education). However, if you want a full-time career teaching English at a college or university, a Master’s degree is not worth much of anything. You need to have a PhD.

The only exception I can think of to this rule is in creative writing, a field where the MFA is considered by some to be a terminal degree and also a field in which many well-known professors don’t hold an advanced degree at all. But the most important thing for getting a job in creative writing is publishing well-received poems, plays, stories, novels, etc., and anyone who is capable of doing that successfully certainly has no need for my advice.

It’s still possible to get a full-time position at a community college with only a Master’s degree, but beyond the workload and problems of teaching in community colleges that make being a happy academic more challenging in those environments, I think this is a very risky strategy. For one thing, English positions at community colleges are increasingly being filled with people who have PhDs. Second, community colleges hire an amazing amount of their teachers on a part-time basis, and in my way of thinking of things, teaching college part-time rarely makes for a happy academic career. But that too is another story.

Happy Thanksgiving (and be careful what you say…)

My wife and son and I are on the road this Thanksgiving, returing from visiting old friends in Virginia seeing relatives on her side of the family in South Carolina. This post comes to you on a stay on the way home, from a hotel just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, the first one on the trip where free high speed Internet access was included. Pretty sweet.

Two minor thoughts. For “happy academics” like myself and my wife, Thanksgiving comes at a sort of odd time of the year. Since it involves a great deal of food shared with family and friends in a largely non-religious setting, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays of the year. Yet inevitably, my wife and I find ourselves working quite a bit during the break. This has been especially true this year for my wife, who has been busily grading and rewriting an essay for a journal while I drive. Reading and writing while riding in the car is a curious skill she’s learned over the years. It makes me queasy to just watch her. Anyway, I don’t know why, but while I have learned to make Spring Break a time to relax, Thanksgiving hardly seems like a time away from school, even when driving all over the country.

Second, as I was logging on to blogger to make this post, I came across this article about how Microsoft fired someone because of his blog. In the nutshell, this guy posted a silly little picture of a bunch of G5 computers being delivered at Microsquish headquarters. He got fired because, he was told, the picture represented a “security risk.” Blogger’s “advice” about all this is amusing because they have used this widely publicized event to tell folks about the special Blogger features you can use to avoid getting in trouble with what you write on your blog. Oddly enough, they don’t suggest that writers just use a pseudonym.

Part of my solution to this has been to create An Unofficial Blog where I occasionally post observations that I think are inappropriate for here. If you check this space out, you’ll see that I don’t feel the need to post things to this unofficial space that often.

But for the most part, I think that being able to say pretty much whatever I want is simply one of the perks of being a happy academic. At the school where I work (and I think this is true for the majority of public university and colleges in this country), it is a perfectly acceptable practice to criticize and complain about things because this simply falls into the realm of the open and free exchange of ideas critical to an academic institution. I suppose I haven’t really “pushed it” and posted something really confrontational, but I’ve posted here about the controversies surrounding the EMU President’s house and the faculty union and such, and I don’t expect to be called into anyone’s office about these observations anytime soon. If I worked at Microsoft, well…

Two Examples of Academic Humor

Let me put it to you this way: if you think these things are funny, you might be an academic…

* Here’s what kind of theorist I am:

Lacan
You are Jacques Lacan! Arguably the most important
psychoanalyst since Freud, you never wrote
anything down, and the only works of yours are
transcriptions of your lectures. You are
notoriously difficult to understand, but at
least you didn’t talk about the penis as much
as other psychoanalysts. You died in 1981.

What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

A pretty odd fit, if you ask me.

* Here’s a link to a job search letter that is obviously a joke. If you don’t get it or you find it kind of in poor taste, a) my apologies, and b) you might not be an academic…