stevendkrause.com

I just posted the final grades for the winter term (well, all but one– a student emailed me a corrupted file), meaning the spring “break” begins.  I say “break” like that because, like all academics, I feel compelled to be a bit defensive about how professors don’t really get the whole summer off, that it’s not like I am going to be on “vacation.”  I actually have an unusual number (for me) of projects in progress that need attention during May and June, and I will be teaching again in the summer term, which begins at the end of June.  Still, I won’t be teaching anything for the first term in at least three years, and we really will be taking an honest-to-goodness vacation in mid June.

Anyway, some thoughts on the term that was, the coming spring, and other things, in no particular order:

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Alex had a post on his blog yesterday about academic workspaces that got me to thinking about both the CCCCs for 2011 and the impending vacating of Pray-Harrold that is about to happen. (BTW, Alex:  what’s that thing to the right of your laptop?  And why don’t you put up a poster or something in there?)

Pray-Harrold is the building where my department (English Language and Literature) is located.  It is by far the largest building on campus, seven stories of lecture halls, classrooms, and offices.  Something like 500-700 faculty and staff have offices in there, and around 10,000 students are in and out of the building every day.  This explains one of the somewhat unusual quirks of working in this department: while faculty at most universities routinely teach in different buildings, almost all of my department’s classes have been taught in Pray-Harrold for the last forty years.  I have very senior colleagues who have never taught anywhere else on campus.

Built in 1969, I believe the technical term for the current state of Pray-Harrold is “shit hole.”  Not unlike many academic buildings, especially those housing things like English, History, Philosophy, and Political Science, Pray-Harrold has been long-neglected and often complained about, and with good reason.  But now, after years and years of discussion, Pray-Harrold is finally going to be renovated, a project that will not be enough but that will be better than nothing.  I guess. But that’s a slightly different conversation.

In any event, Alex’s post and the CCCC’s call for proposals is on my mind with all this for a couple of different reasons.  Everyone who currently occupies Pray-Harrold, those hundreds of staff and faculty who have offices that they use or don’t use, are being moved from the building by the end of this month to various locations around campus for about 18 or so months.  Needless to say, this is all causing a lot of “contested space” discussions on campus.  The English department is going to be occupying about 6 floors of a dorm on campus.  The main department office (including the department printers/photocopiers) is going to be on the ground floor, which means I am not looking forward to printing much of anything. All of the teaching that used to be under one roof are going to be all over the place, and very senior colleagues (and many not so senior ones too) are already grousing about the fact that they will actually be forced to go out of doors during the Michigan winter.

My school office is not unlike Alex’s, at least in how its used. I have posters, pictures, toys, and other various bric-a-brac, including a four foot inflatable Scream doll, but I do most of my work at home or in coffee shops; like Alex, my main use for my school office is to meet with students.   I do have colleagues who do actually use their offices as “an office,” and I have one colleague who will go unnamed who has an office that has an unreasonable amount of paper and books and just junk.  How to describe it… well, if I had kept every scrap of paper and/or book I read or wrote over the last 22 years, from the time I started as a graduate assistant to now, every student draft and test and quiz, every chunk of my dissertation with revision comments, every stupid memo and strategic planning and/or outcome report, everything, then I might have an office that looks a bit like this person’s office.

The contentiousness of space isn’t limited to those of us who are going to be in exile, either.  The Pray-Harrold remodeling is going to disrupt the entire campus, and there already have been “turf war” squabbles among different divisions/colleges who don’t want to let the unwashed Pray-Harrold masses into their buildings to teach or (God forbid!) to have offices.  Computer lab teaching spaces are going to be sketchy at best, and we’ve already run into some problems of classes being scheduled in closets.

So yeah, contested spaces.

I’m not entirely sure how this will (or really if it will) play out as a CCCCs proposal yet, in part because it would be a proposal about what is to come next year, always a potentially difficult to sketch out this far in advance.  We’ll see; I’m mulling it over in my own head and with some of my colleagues here.

As far as the office in exile and beyond goes: stay tuned, but I think working (sort of) in the dorms might be okay for a year or so.  Since there is no air-conditioning, the spring/summer terms in there will be pretty intolerable.  On the other hand, it’ll be closer to the EMU Student Center than Pray-Harrold, and since these dorm rooms are suites, the bathroom comforts ought to be pretty nice.  It’s hard to know what will come next when we move back after the construction, but I am thinking very much about a set-up without a desk and with some comfy furniture, a shelf or two, and a table, a space more conducive for how I use the place as it is now.

Via Johndan’s blog, I came across Scott McCloud’s talk at TED:

I only got a chance to watch the first few minutes of it (another crazy busy day ahead of me, though soon the craziness will end and it will settle back to just busy), but it looks a lot like the talk McCloud gave at EMU a few years back. I may very well have to teach this in English 328 or English 516 this term. Maybe both.

Or, as I was going to title this post, “jobs away!”

Since we now have an honest-to-goodness number for this position and are placing ads, I feel like I can officially announce that we’re searching for an assistant professor in computers and writing. Here’s what the ad will look like:

Assistant Professor, Computers and Writing

Tenure-track position in composition and rhetoric with an emphasis in computers and writing beginning in Fall 2009. We are seeking a colleague who values teaching, research, and service, and who is interested in joining a dynamic department which includes an active group of composition and rhetoric faculty in a nationally recognized writing program. Expertise in some combination of the following: new media writing, web 2.0 writing technologies, online and computer-mediated pedagogy, technical writing, digital rhetorics, and visual rhetorics. Candidates must complete PhD by Fall 2009. Submit a letter of interest, a CV, and a statement of teaching philosophy by November 1, 2008, attention Dr. Steven D. Krause, Department of English Language and Literature, 612 Pray-Harrold Hall, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197.

I think this is going to be a fun search for us and a good gig for whoever we end up hiring. As I said in the email post I sent to a couple of the usual mailing lists, EMU is a great place to work. We’re a large, friendly, and diverse department, and I have fantastic writing program colleagues. This is not the kind of position where you would be one of two or three comp/rhet folks to do everything.

And geographically, I think we’re hard to beat: easy driving distance to Detroit and all of its “big city” pleasures, and practically walking distance (well, I exaggerate a bit) to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and all of the various things that one can enjoy in a quintessential “college town.” This might be a kind of shallow example, but when contemplating a move to another institution in recent years, my wife and I have asked each other “yes, but is there a Whole Foods nearby?” Well, a second Food (W)hole opens in Ann Arbor next week.

But in all seriousness: this is a good gig. And I speak from experience at having a previous academic job that was, um, not.

Anyway, that’s probably all I’ll be posting here about this until we hire someone. If you’re interested in learning more and/or you’ve got some grad students who might want to know more, send me an email at skrause at emich dot edu

Along with my colleague Cheryl Cassidy, I had a couple of advising oriented meeting with some students about our MA program this afternoon– this while also trying to wrap up my spring teaching, too.  A couple hours after that, I had the pleasure of forwarding an email inquiry from a student directly to Cheryl, who is taking over as the new writing program coordinator starting, well, now.

And thus ends my era as the Emperor of Writing here at EMU.

Much of my thoughts on all this are more “insider politics” than is probably appropriate here, but basically, I am passing the torch on my position as the writing program coordinator.  I’ve been in this quasi-academic administrative position for two and a half years.  In exchange for a couple of course releases a year, I have been advising undergraduate and graduate students in all kinds of different ways, chaired the program’s committee, and done a bunch of other paperwork/dirty-work kinds of things.  On the whole, I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s time for someone else to have a turn and it’s time for me to step back a bit.

It ought to be interesting.  In the ten years I’ve been at EMU, I think I have “just taught” (that is, not have release time to do some kind of quasi-administrative thing) only two or three school years.  These releases are a mixed bag.  On the one hand, the responsibilities are typically too great to do them without release time.  On the other hand, because program coordinators receive release time, the general vibe of other faculty has been “hey, you get release time– you do it.”  I don’t have a particularly good solution to this, but there ought to be a system that gives faculty credit for doing this “extra” work while simultaneously encouraging a wider variety of faculty both “chip in” and to “buy in” to this quasi-administrative work.

In any event, I’ll be doing my part to chip in and help Cheryl out as much as I can.  At the same time, I’m looking forward to going to a while lot fewer meetings this fall.

I’m giving a talk in a couple hours at a small and local symposium about wikis and Wikipedia this morning. It’s part of the McAndless Scholar series of lectures, which features Marshall Poe (he has a book coming out on Wikipedia and an article in The Atlantic called “The Hive”) and Larry Sanger, who was one of the guys who thought up Wikipedia in the first place. My talk is called “Wikis, Free and Easy,” and it’s really just a show and tell about different wiki softwware. Here’s a link.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks as far as all this wiki stuff goes, both in the class I’m teaching and with the guests on hand. But I’ve got to get ready to actually go and do this now; maybe more later….