Category: EMU

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And thus ends my duties as the Emperor of Writing

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.

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For what it’s worth: My brief spiel on “Wikis, Free and Easy”

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….

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Poly-Ticks

It’s been kind of a bad week around here because of some unpleasant politics among department faculty. Obviously, I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the issues, but in the general and “Happy Academic” sense, I thought I’d offer some random thoughts about academic politics/fights I’ve seen, including this one:

  • As the saying goes, the politics in academia are so ugly because the stakes are so low. But when the stakes become about something that at least one group of people see as “something,” that’s when they can get really really ugly.
  • It’s amazing how a group of faculty who are otherwise not empowered or involved in things can cause a big fight.
  • People who have advanced degrees in fields like English are just as capable as anyone else of misreading texts and/or writing things with one supposed intention when it would appear to others to have the exact opposite intention. In other words, we all bring our own “terministic screens” to the party. The wikipedia entry on Kenneth Burke describes terministic screens as “a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us. Here Burke offers rhetorical theorists and critics a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology. Language, Burke thought, doesn’t simply “reflect” reality; it also helps select reality as well as deflect reality.” That sounds about right to me, and in this particular situation (and many others in English departments everywhere), I think the screens that literature scholars assume are completely different from the ones that composition/rhetoric scholars assume.
  • Way back when I was in my PhD program and just starting out as an assistant professor, I used to think that senior faculty who were “dead wood” got that way just because they were lazy and they gave up. I suppose with some folks, that is true. But I’m beginning to think that most of these people are actually “dead wood” because they are battle-scarred from old poly-ticks. And I’m beginning to have a lot more sympathy for that.
  • These things can turn into just an ENORMOUS time suck, both in the time it takes to engage in the argument, the reconciliation, the aftermath, etc., and in the sense of just mental and spiritual energy that one would normally devote to things like teaching or scholarship. A few days and I feel a month behind.
  • Academic politics and the arguments that ensue are like icebergs in that everyone worries about and talks about the surface, but everyone also knows that so much is submerged, invisible, and unseen.

There’s probably more to say, but in the spirit of actually getting caught up, I think I’ll stop.

Oh, I do feel like I should mention this opening paragraph from this Inside Higher Ed article, “Learning From Cats:”

Academic squabbles are often compared to cat fights, but as one who has owned cats for several decades, I’ve come to believe that such analogies are unfair to felines. Cats, for instance, instinctively know to terminate a chase when they would consume more calories than their prey would provide. And even the pugilist tabbies I’ve owned eventually learned to give wide berth to rivals who consistently bloodied them. All of this suggests that cats may be more evolutionarily advanced than a lot of academics.

Of course, I’m kind of a dog person….

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The beginning is near…

Of the winter term, that is, what every other university I know of refers to as “spring.” Though I have to say that calling this time of the year the “winter” term makes perfect sense, especially in Michigan, where winter is certainly in full effect through late March, when spring really starts, and quite often long after that, too.

In any event, on tap for me as of tomorrow for this term:

  • “Sabbatical Lite” continues since I am teaching but one class, doing administrative stuff, and still doing research. Once again, we’ll see how this works out. Since I have been granted some modest funding, I’m hoping/planning on getting my surveymonkey blog survey up and running for the “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project. With a little luck, I’ll start collecting some cool data.
  • I’m teaching “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice” again, which is a required course in our MA in the Teaching of Writing program. The course is pretty much what it’s about, although there is a focus on pedagogy that isn’t really in the title. It’s online again, and I’ve decided to experiment/try doing the whole class on emuonline this time around, meaning there isn’t going to be a class web site. Students will still have to make web sites, I will have my own little blog for the class (as will the students), and we’re going to do some cool stuff with wikis and video at different points of the term that I am hosting outside of emuonline. So maybe I’ll post some links to things here as the term goes on.

    I really like teaching this course, but it is always a challenge to get it together. I think I know what we’re going to be doing in general every week, but around half of the readings right now are still in the “TBA” stage. I was talking about this today with a colleague of mine: the great thing about being in computers and writing is it’s always new and interesting and changing and stuff. The bad thing though is that it’s always new and changing. If I taught rhetorical theory or the history of rhetoric class, I don’t think I’d have to scrap 2/3rds of the syllabus every year.
  • Speaking of computers and writing and collecting some good blog writing practices data, I need to get a proposal together for Computers and Writing in Georgia. I doubt I’ll end up proposing anything that has to do with the conference theme on open source software though; we’ll see what happens, I guess.
  • And this semester will mark the end of my term as the writing program coordinator, or at least that’s the plan. This is a job that involves running our undergraduate and graduate programs in writing, it’s a job that rotates around a bit, and it’ll be time for someone else to do it soon. There will be some transition during the spring and summer of course, but this is the last term where I expect a lot of meetings and such associated with this.

I know there are many MANY more things on my “to do” list for the term already, but for the time-being, I think the best thing I can do is get to bed so I can get that bright-eyed/bushy-tailed feeling.

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On watching CourtTV

It’s been a pretty busy week around here in general– surprisingly, because at the beginning of the week, I thought I was going to have a lot more time to write and read than I thought I would. One of my interruptions this week has been the Orange Taylor trial and its coverage on CourtTV. This has been a topic of conversation on the community blog I run, EMUTalk.org, for months and months– here’s a link to the category on that blog. More details there than you could shake a stick at, but basically, Orange Taylor is on trial as I type for the murder of Laura Dickinson last December, a murder that EMU administrators essentially covered up and that cost some of them, notably President John Fallon, their jobs.

Now the Taylor trial is the “featured trial” on CourtTV– they’re calling it the “Dorm Room Murder.” Normally, I don’t watch CourtTV, but since this is a very local story for me, I’ve been tuning in when I can.The coverage I’m watching is just the audio of the interview with Taylor before he was charged with anything, so what you hear is a recording made back in January (where they are talking about a crime in December 2006 and where they are discussing pictures and videos and such from back then) and video of the court live. Right now, they’re focusing on Taylor and the police officer who conducted the interview reading the transcript of the audio.

I have to say it’s fascinating viewing. Again, it might just be that I’m more interested because it is something that is happening here– literally, I could ride my bike to the court house and I’ll be on campus later today. But just the way this is presented, with all these different mediums mashed together to make the story and compelling TV.

And it isn’t just a “the facts and only the facts” kind of presentation. CourtTV anchors interrupt the trial about every 15 minutes or so before the commercial breaks and to usually talk to lawyer commentators. Now, I’m no lawyer and everyone is presumed innocent and such, but without going into any detail, the evidence against Orange Taylor is pretty overwhelming. But in the world of CourtTV, “reasonable doubt” is key: commentators talk about whether or not the interview was even legal, about the validity of Taylor’s story, etc., etc. And it occurred to me that in TV-land, they have to do this. If the commentators came on and said “oh, he’s guilty as hell,” then most viewers would turn the channel.

I don’t know exactly what that all says (and maybe it’s patently obvious), but I still think it’s interesting.

One other thing I’ve learned from this: if the police ask you to come in for an interview for any reason (well, unless you are clearly the victim of a crime), bring a lawyer. Taylor, who is proving himself not to be one of EMU’s best and brightest in this interview, more or less gives the police all that they need to file charges against him just through this “informal interview.”

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Advice for the new assistant professor; thoughts on being a new professor

Just browsing Inside Higher Ed this morning, I read through this article “Surviving the first year” by Shari Dinkins, and by “first year,” she means the first year of a faculty person on the tenure-track. It’s all good advice, though if I had to pick two– okay, three– highlights from the piece, it would be “don’t fall into one camp right away” (meaning be careful how quickly you politically identify with one group or another), “STFU” (meaning that the new person needs to hold their tongues a bit), and “Prepare for a deeper level of commitment” (meaning that there is a big difference between being a full-time adjunct and a tenure-track faculty person– Dinkins describes it as the difference between “just dating” and being engaged).

I suppose that means I’m married to the institution at this point….

Anyway, I’m starting this school year as a newly promoted full professor. As I’ve mentioned here before, that is not as big of a deal as it is at many other schools– certainly tier 1 research schools– because everyone at EMU who manages to get tenure and who continues to have something resembling a pulse gets promoted to professor. That low standard and the general blues/bad budgets hitting EMU makes my promotion and current state a very mixed bag indeed. On the one hand, “it’s good to be the king,” it does mean something to have seniority, and the pay raise is nice. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean as much here since it’s a promotion everyone can be expected to receive, it’s the last pay raise I’m ever likely to receive, and it makes any more mobility to another institution all that more difficult. And given the metaphoric and literal shit that has hit the fan at EMU in the last year (an ugly faculty strike, a meddling board of regents, a murder cover-up followed by a weird media blitz by the ex EMU president, and, most recently, a series of very deep and troubling budget cuts), I’ve been thinking about mobility lately.

The truth is that leaving EMU would be difficult. Besides all kinds of complications being a full professor applying for a less than that level job, I’m part of an academic couple and a commuter marriage is not on the table. And complicating the matter even more is the fact that we live near the epicenter of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage debacle means that our chances of selling our house and not losing way too much money seems unlikely. Oh, and besides all that: if I were to leave EMU at the end of this year while I am on sabbatical, I’d have to pay EMU half my salary back. That ain’t gonna happen.

So, like I said, it’s a mixed bag. It is nice to feel empowered and secure, but it’s not as nice to feel stuck.

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A word about the unpleasant EMU news of late…

Here I am, just beginning with Sabbatical Lite, and already I am feeling out of whack.

Most obviously, I and everyone else at EMU has been following the recent news of the president, the chief of campus police, and the VP of student affairs getting fired/”separated” from EMU. It’s a little discombobulating to hear the story I’ve been hearing/repeating on campus and at EMUtalk.org (the campus/community oriented blog I started running last September) for months now showing up on CNN, Fox News, in the New York Times, in the UK’s Guardian Unlimited, and 500-600 other outlets, according to news.google.com.

For folks coming here for more info on this– either regular readers or folks who found me on a web search– I would encourage you to take a look at EMUtalk.org in general, and perhaps at this post, “To first time EMUtalk.org readers/searchers about “Laura Dickinson Murder.” On this page, there’s a link to the category on EMUtalk.org “Dickinson Murder,” which has 64 different posts beginning on December 15, 2006 when the rumor of a dead girl in the dorms turned out to be true.

There’s only two things I’ll add here. First, the basic news story that has appeared in the national/international press recently basically summarizes the story well enough, though there are obviously a lot of other details. It’s been a topic of discussion on EMUtalk.org since December, and very heated discussion since late February when a suspect was arrested and when it suddenly became clear that Dickinson’s death was not “just one of those things” but a murder, and that murder had been covered up.

Second, I think the thing that is most frustrating to me personally and, simultaneously, most interesting about this to me professionally, is that all of this was easily avoided with some simple and clear communication skills. I won’t go into it all right now, but the various reports and investigations suggest that the players involved who came up with the “no foul play is suspected” line that was the seed of the administrative cover-up were working with almost zero actual information about what happened and that the line was more or less a toss-off line to round out a very short web statement/press release. “No foul play is suspected” was as much as anything a sloppy sentence written by a PR person (and apparently approved by Fallon) simply to close out a paragraph, not unlike other toss-off lines like “In society today” or “In conclusion” or something.

Then, after this toss-off and inaccurate line (and I say “inaccurate” because the investigation into the cover-up makes it clear that “foul play” was always suspected by the police investigating the crime) was allowed to go forward, no one in the upper-levels of EMU administration felt the need to correct this. And to be perfectly honest, it isn’t completely clear to me if this did not happen because the principles involved– President John Fallon, VP for Student Affairs Jim Vick, and/or Police Chief Cindy Hall (all now “former” in these roles)– did not want the message corrected for misguided PR and/or investigation reasons, of if these people were just not competent. Fallon, btw, is claiming as his defense that he just didn’t know what was going on, and there have been some cryptic suggestions in the latest reports that he’s got some kind of story to tell and that he was fired because he was about to do something that would have been very bad for EMU. I don’t know, strange.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to get at here is this: I think there is little doubt that Vick and Hall got fired because they tried to cover up a murder in the dorms, either because they didn’t want the bad PR or because they just didn’t know what they were doing, and that Fallon was fired because his defense of not knowing what was going on is about as problematic as actively participating in a cover-up. At the same time, it seems to me that a lot of this mess is also simple the result of sloppy writing and thinking, a terrible misreading of audience, and the lack of willingness to revise. Had someone– anyone– at some point gotten to the powers that be and successfully convinced them that EMU should have corrected the “no foul play suspected” line, none of this would have happened. Had someone published on the web site or elsewhere a statement like “We can’t say for sure there was no foul play involved. We’re investigating, and in the mean-time, everyone ought to review basic personal safety information,” etc., etc., this would have never become national news, and none of these people would have lost their jobs.

There’s always the what ifs though.

Besides this most public distraction, there are some departmental distractions too, things I will not go into right now, and some major budget cuts coming about soon. This puts me potentially into an odd place in terms of my sabbatical lite. On the one hand, my own work is inevitably being interrupted by these distractions (I suppose this post is evidence of that), in part because being the writing program coordinator (among other things) means I can’t just ignore these problems. On the other hand, I have already said I’m going to consciously not get “too involved” in some of these departmental distractions because of my writing and research plans. It’s probably too early to tell, but I think this has a chance of working.

In any event, I feel like this post might help me get some of this unpleasant news out of my head and maybe help me think about how to frame my sabbatical lite plans in the long-term. In the short term though, I think I had better get on to the scholarly/BAWS plan I had for the day: organizing my desk/office space a bit.

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The end of the 17 inch iMac?

From something called Think Secret comes this story, “Death knell tolls for 17-inch iMac.” This actually has something potentially to do with the world I work and teach in at EMU, as the last paragraph of this piece points out:

The omission of a 17-inch iMac means customers looking for a more affordable Mac or one with a smaller display, especially in the education market, will have to hang their hat on the Mac mini and buy a separate display.

We are (supposedly) going to get a computer refresh in on of the labs in the English department, and the original plan was to get the 17-inch iMacs. I don’t know if the powers-that-be are going to opt for the very stealable Mac minis or if they are going to bump us up to 20 inch machines, but I am hoping for 20 inchers, obviously.

At home, I have a 20 inch iMac (and a second 19 inch display, actually). It is true that the price difference was such that it didn’t seem “worth it” to me to get the 17 incher, especially given that the 20 inch iMac also came with a faster processor. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there is a big part of me who thinks I should I have spent just a wee-bit more money and gone with the 24 incher….

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Something I'll do different with English 516 next year

I’m teaching the graduate course I teach all the time, Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice, online for the first time, and I think it’s turned out to be a great experience. (It’s been kind of an odd semester on the whole, because I’ve been way over-stretched by doing double-administrator-duty and because I’m not teaching any “face to face” classes this term, a teaching experience I have mixed feelings about, though they’re largely positive. But that’s a tangent and a slightly different story).

The class started a little slow, in part because some of the students were unfamiliar with the online format and the level of participation I was expecting, and in part because I wasn’t as prepared for teaching this class as I should have been. And I’ve been over-committed (see above). But once the ball got rolling, I think this class has been extremely exciting and vibrant, a lot more interactive and participatory than face-to-face versions from the past. I probably won’t do it online next year because the plan has been to alternate between face-to-face versions and online ones. But I’m looking forward to doing it online again.

There are a lot of things I’d do differently of course, and that for the time being brings me to what was to be the original point of this post:

Checking through my blog feed for the first time in a while this morning, I must say that I am constantly impressed by the stuff that is available from the site Open Culture. Podcast after podcast, info and examples of how we’re making the cross-over to video-based podcasts, about searches of wikipedia, a nice little podcasting primer, and podcasts (the old-fashioned kind and video ones) galore.

Just a really great distracting site, and one that I can see figuring into the next version of 516 for sure.

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Ending "Conversations"

I’ve been a bit of a stranger this week because I’ve been one of the coordinators (well, probably fair to say the main coordinator/organizer) for a conference we have here in the English department at EMU, “Extending Conversations.” This year, the theme was “multimedia,” though we meant that in the broadest possible sense– we had panels on sound poetry, “low tech” multimedia, children’s books, video games, etc., etc. The keynote speaker was none other than Dan Anderson. He gave a very thought-provoking speech (he’ll have to remind me of the link at some point), and was just an all-around good egg/good sport about the thing.

From my point of view, it was fun, kinda, I guess. A number of things happened in the last week or so that threatened to derail planned panels, promised helpers, finances and food supplies, etc., etc. I suspect this is par for the course for conference planning. I’m happy that it seemed to have come off relatively well, and that I was able to escape from the event with what I perceived as a majority of attendees being pleased with it all.

It’s not the kind of event that makes me think about ever hosting a much larger conference in my field, though. Though, oddly, the larger scale of that event might make it easier only because (I am only imagining here) there isn’t quite as much of a shoe-string budget and the way that the panels end up getting organized makes it easier to a) pull it all off in general terms, and b) less troublesome to get individual panels to run. Presenting at C&W is somewhat competitive, so, since you have more folks who want to present than can present, you don’t have to worry about panels not “making,” about twisting arms, etc., etc.

But hey, like I said, relatively speaking, I think it went off well. I’ll wish next year’s coordinator all the luck I can and I’ll pass along my wisdom.

And now, I think I’ll probably go to sleep for a while….