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The other day, Inside Higher Ed ran a story called “Burning Out, and Fading Away.” Here’s a quote:

In an analysis of professional burnout among professors, a Texas Woman’s University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts.

Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe’s most coveted status led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member among them described the pursuit of tenure as “a living hell.”

The comments on the piece suggest that for at least some, that burn-out/living hell thing continues into tenure, promotion, emeritus status, and beyond.

On the same day, Dean Dad (aka Confessions of a Community College Dean) had a post titled “Lions in Winter,” in which he takes up this post by Tenured Radical, in which TR contemplates Helen Thomas rather sudden  retirement and how her situation and obvious deterioration (I believe Thomas is about to turn 90) is similar to that of some “Venerable professor famous for irascible personality and eclectic remarks goes right over the edge one day and has to be forcibly retired, when in fact the signs of ineffectiveness and mental decline have been clear to close colleagues for several years: inappropriate remarks, fits of rage and/or confusion, memory lapses of gargantuan proportions.”

Dean Dad goes on to lament this situation:

Since the Supreme Court decided — absurdly, in my view — that tenure is fine but mandatory retirement isn’t, there’s literally no way to push the declining self-caricature out the door short of a documented public meltdown. Of course, by the time that happens, there has typically been a long train of abuses that either weren’t public or weren’t quite enough in themselves, as documented, to stand up in court. (Part of that usually has to do with the power that senior faculty have, and the fear that others have of that power. Fear of retaliation for coming forward is powerful, and it prevents the effective documentation of some very real behaviors.) And the combination of age discrimination laws, tenure, unions, the ADA, and public sympathy can make it effectively impossible for even a conscientious administrator to solve the problem.

So, on the one hand, faculty are burnt-out, bitter, stressed, emotionally exhausted; on the other hand, they hang on to their tenured positions far too long, sometimes to the point of being far beyond their prime.

Now, I can think of colleagues who fit both of these caricatures.  Because the tenure and promotion requirements in my department are both modest and humane, I think my colleagues here who see that process as a “living hell” are more or less creating that for themselves.  The self-inflicted notion of all this is something I’ll return to in a second.  The very senior colleagues who appear to be “losing it” is arguably more common at EMU, perhaps because the place is less of a “living hell” than the kinds of places where faculty burn-out long before they reach senility.

And I can also think of faculty who are both burnt-out and bitter, and appear to be “losing it” and behaving more and more irrationally.  Actually, this is not an uncommon combination in the aged, right?

Still, there’s something of a contradiction to me here.  How is it that faculty can be both burnt-out and holding on to their jobs far too long?  Is the suggestion that there are basically two different kinds of faculty, those who are burnt-out and bitter and thus retire/exit academia as soon as they are able, and those who aren’t burnt-out and outstay their welcome?  I’m not sure.

I’m at an age where I can see retirement conceptually, kind of like the way I could see what it might be like to have a “real job” when I was twelve, but I have a hard time right now imaging retiring. As I said to a colleague the other day, what would be the point?  What else would I be doing?  I pretty much get to do what I want to do now as it is.  A lot can and will change in the next twenty or thirty years of course– assuming I make it for that long and (hopefully) longer– but right now, I suspect I am more likely to leave academia as that “crazy old guy” as opposed to the more bitter/burnt-out one.

But it also seems to me that those who are being identified in Crosmer’s study as being burnt-out are perhaps in that state of affairs more because of who they are rather than their chosen profession.  There is a link between the two, but I’m questioning the causality; in other words, I would suggest that it isn’t the work of academia that inherently burns people out, but rather, that the people who go into academia tend to be of the type who are going to burn themselves out and describe any number of work/life environments a “living hell.”  I’ve worked any number of low-stress (and generally low-paying) jobs over the years, and from what I can recall, there are lots of people who are able to turn almost anything into a “living hell” with their bad ‘tude.  What I think is probably the case is academia attracts more of these kinds of folks than some other fields.

In my own experience, I experienced “workplace frustration” most acutely as a PhD student, especially when I was trying to finish that diss.  “Living hell” is a bit strong, but the situation for me at my first job at Southern Oregon was “challenging.”  But once I got here, and especially once I got tenured and promoted, the workplace frustrations– while still clearly present– became more manageable.  But as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I think that most academics who feel burnt-out and miserable about what they are doing ought to spend some time doing something like shoveling coal or cleaning toilets.  Suddenly that stack of essays and administrative busy-work doesn’t seems so bad.

As I mentioned in this post a couple weeks ago, I decided that I was going to try to not take my laptop but just my iPad with me to the Computers and Writing Conference at Purdue.  I will admit that this was a bit of a “stunt,” mainly because I had about four or five back-up plans if something didn’t go right, and the truth of the matter is I probably could have gone to the conference with no computer and been fine by borrowing, using the hardware/software set-ups in presentation rooms, etc.  Stunt or not though, it was an interesting experiment, and there were a couple of interesting iPad moments. Continue Reading »

With the whole CCCOnline thing off my chest, I decided to divide this up into two parts because of my adventures with the iPad (as I mentioned before, I decided to take it instead of a laptop to the conference)– I’ll post about that one later.

Anyway, as usual, Computers and Writing was great, that one conference I go to every year where it really is “my people.”  There are a lot of conferences like C&W, actually– Rhetoric Society of America, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (and their conference is coming up in July), writing center folks, etc.  I like going to the CCCCs and participating in its “big tent,” but it’s a little more comfortable to be in the smaller tent (side show?) that is C&W.  Here’s how it went for me, more or less in this order:

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Generally, I attend my department’s once a month or so faculty meetings, and generally speaking, they are kind of boring.  But when I miss a meeting, something inevitably contentious and/or otherwise interesting happens.  So it was at this year’s Computers and Writing Conference, or so it would appear.

Since I presented twice and back-to-back on Saturday afternoon (and I’ll have more about that and the rest of the C&W experience later), I decided to have a little “quiet time” before the “hog roast,” which was good but not really involving a “hog” on a spit as I was expecting. But I digress. Anyway, while I was hanging around my room and lazily looking through the twitter feed that was going on during the “featured deliverator” sessions, I noticed that things were heating up in the feed during Bump Halbritter’s “Exploring the Constellations of the New CCC Online.” Here are some of the tweets that peaked my interest (which I found via the “Twapper Keeper” for the conference):

@mday666 I’m excited, but wonder how it will be different from previous efforts at NCTE, and current journals like Kairos & C+C Online.

@rrodrigo @mday666 I’m thinking that’s one of the major ones, please prove me wrong!

@preterite disagree somewhat with Bump’s contention that CCCO 1.0 was just archiving: C. & D.’s indexing functions did much, much more.

@trauman @rrodrigo Not sure the comparison’s necessary. I’m just thinking context and a capacious history.

@mday666 @rrodrigo I’m not disagreeing; just want to see it to believe it. It would be great!

@kristinarola man, there’s a backstory here i do not know clearly…. watching 1/2 the people get it, and 1/2 the people not.

@selfe3 #cw2010 Bump’s Talk: ball, concerns about animosity between CCCC and C&W. How to bridge that? How to understand this will be sustainable.

@mday666 Cheryl asks how we can erase some of the issues we’ve had in the past, with mistrust between NCTE/CCCC and the C & W community.

@dcfitzg Some intense emotions swirling around ccc online intro and cfp

@thatcarlygirl @varhodes @kristinarola Not getting it either… But boy the mood sure shifted in here! Must hear backstory.

@warnick Maybe we can invite Dr. Phil to next year’s conference. He might be able to help us hug it out.

@preterite yet again, Derek asks the right question

@kristinarola this conversation would be way more interesting if i knew what was going on. veiled conversations by those in power. la lala. la.la.

@CNBlank As a newbie to the party, I’m not sure what to make of all of this. Civil but tense seems to be the mood.

In the course of procrastinating/poking around on the Internets, I came across this CHE article, “Professors in Texas Protest Law That Requires Them to Post Teaching Details Online.” It’s behind their firewall, so I will paraphrase.  And let me say at the outset that I am obviously uncomfortable in finding that I agree with conservatives, let alone Texan conservatives.  I fear I am missing some of the more controversial points of this provision, so if anyone who knows better can correct me on what I’m not getting, please do so.

Here’s how the article opens:

Faculty members and administrators in Texas are speaking out about a recent state law that requires them to post specific, detailed information about their classroom assignments, curricula vitae, department budgets, and the results of student evaluations.

A conservative group whose administrators have close ties to Gov. Rick Perry lobbied for the law, saying it offers important “consumer protection.” Opponents counter that it has created an expensive and time-consuming burden and offers little benefit to the public.

Beginning this fall, universities will have to post online a syllabus for every undergraduate course, including major assignments and examinations, reading lists, and course descriptions.

Curricula vitae must include a faculty member’s teaching experience and contributions to professional publications. All of the information must be no more than three clicks away from the college’s home page.

Colleges are required to assign compliance duties to a campus administrator and, every other year, send a written report to the governor and legislative leaders.

Okay, I have some questions/concerns– what exactly does the law mean by “specific, detailed information,” for example?  And what’s the nature of this report to be submitted to the governor and legislative leaders?

Still… what’s the big deal here?  I mean, I have posted pretty specific classroom assignments, readings lists, course descriptions, and the like on the web for years and years.  Lots of people I know have some version of the CV up online, including me (though mine is not at all complete and it is a little out of date).  Basic results of student evaluations have been available to students at EMU for years, and there is a little site called ratemyprofessor.com that has been doing a problematic version of public student evaluations for years.  I think it would awesome if the administration would be a little more forthcoming about institutional budgets. And quite frankly, given all the horseshit reports that administrators make faculty write in the name of program review, accountability, and “strategery,” I think it is more than fair to make the administrators write a few horseshit reports themselves.

Here’s how the article ends:

Theresa J.C. Norman, an instructor of philosophy at South Texas College, calls the reporting requirements “a waste of time.”

Ms. Norman, who is also president of the South Texas Faculty Association, also resents what she sees as the law’s underlying assumptions. “You get the feeling that the government sees us as slackers,” she says. By requiring professors to list every assignment, she says the law interferes with her ability to respond to students’ interests and current events and shift to different topics during the semester.

Texas Tech University has spent $85,000 upgrading its server and hiring an administrator to train faculty members how to create digitally-searchable CV’s and syllabi that will meet the law’s requirements, according to Valerie O. Paton, vice president for planning and assessment.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lois W. Kolkhorst, wanted to protect students and tuition-paying parents at a time of rising college costs, according to her chief of staff, Chris Steinbach. “Enrolling in a course and finding that it’s not what you needed can be an expensive mistake,” he says.

If this law means that faculty have to give REALLY specific details about assignments to the point where it is not possible for changes/modifications to the course, then I would agree.  But is that what this law is saying?  Really?

And an $85,000 server upgrade and training for faculty?!? Really.  Really? How hard is it to slap a PDF up on the web nowadays?

Now, I will admit that I teach in a state and at a university that is considerably more left-leaning than Texas, and I also don’t teach in an area that is particularly controversial.  I mean, the public at large gets a lot more “excited” about the politics of teaching evolution in biology or “dirty books” in literature than they do about teaching the controversies about writing and technology.  I don’t think I have to worry too much about Teabaggers coming after me for English 328.

Still, what’s the big deal here?  What am I missing?

Grading is one of the last things I should have on my mind right now since I am not teaching this term.  And not teaching right now has made this last week– which is the one between winter and spring terms, a time when I normally would be busy trying to get too much stuff done around the house (getting the garden in, for example, or, like last year, completely moving my home office space) while simultaneously getting ready for the too quickly arriving spring term– quiet.  Too quiet, in some ways. I don’t think I received as many email messages all week as I was getting toward the end of winter term every day.

Anyway, today in Inside Higher Ed, I read “No Grading, More Learning,” which is about a “non-grading” scheme Duke University professor Cathy Davidson had as she returned to the classroom after being out of it for a number of years in administration.  To quote from the article:

Her plan? Turn over grading to the students in the course, and get out of the grading business herself.

Yeah, I don’t really understand what that means either….

Just to be clear:  I’m not saying that Davidson was doing anything bad.  I’ve done all kinds of different things to experiment with grading in my classes.  For example, I have students at all levels do a self-assessment for their participation grade, mainly because I want students to be “self-aware” that what they do (or don’t do) and how that leads to a particular grade.  People have done various kinds of contract grading in writing classes for years, and I think Peter Elbow and one of his colleagues had an article in College Composition and Communication a while ago about the “B” contract grade, something that I’m toying with laying out to students the next time I teach 328 in the summer term.

That said, this article and some of the responses to it does raise a few issues for me.

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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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Okay, one more iPad post, and then on with my regular (not necessarily relevant) postings.

Being an iPad expert (as I have owned one for an entire week now), I’m still pretty darn happy and impressed with it. So far, it’s mostly for me what it has been billed as:  a great “experience” for reading/consuming text, audio, and video.  It is not (for the zillionth time) a computer, though for me, it is something like a netbook.  I realize that this wouldn’t be true for everyone, especially non-Apple computer people, but since the rest of my computers are Apples, the iPad syncs and “just works,” which wouldn’t be the case if I was working with some kind of Windoze netbook.

Typing is an issue, but that’s the case with netbooks too, right?  For me, I can touch-type well enough on the iPad when it’s landscape mode, but if I’m going to type anything longer than a couple paragraphs or an email response (or this blog post), then I’m going to use a real computer.  I might break down and eventually buy a keyboard for the iPad, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the lean simplicity of the iPad.

And it doesn’t strike me as particularly “magical” either, though given the fondness for fantasy and science fiction in my household, perhaps my standards and definitions of “magical” are different than Steve Jobs.  All the things the iPad does best– stuff like IMDB, Yahoo Entertainment, Netflix, various weather and newspaper apps, photos, music, videos, etc.– are all great, but not really beneficial for my job as a writing professor.  Safari is okay (very quick, but, as the entire world knows, no Flash) and email is great, but neither are reasons to get an iPad.

I have played around with Keynote and Pages a bit, and while there’s some potential, I have to say I’ve been a little disappointed.  On the plus-side (as I wrote about with this post earlier), both Keynote and Pages demonstrate that the iPad is indeed a device with which a user can make content.  But the problem with both apps is that they don’t quite synch with my desktop versions of the software– different fonts, not all the effects and builds work, etc. Plus there are the previously mentioned keyboarding issues. It’s not a deal-breaker by any means, but it does mean that if I take only my iPad to a conference or something instead of a laptop, I’ll have to make some adjustments.  Again, not a reason to get an iPad, at least not yet.

All that said, I do think there are so far two (or three, depending on how you look at it) potential “killer apps” for the iPad:  PDF annotation and books, both iBooks/Kindles, and “books” that are really applications on their own.  Too long of a ramble/review after the jump.

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While on my every other day “run” the other day and while listening on my iPhone to Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs– and let me say now as an aside that 20 years ago, I most certainly would not have been doing any of those things– I listened to his essay “Cosmodemonic,” which is about his time in the Master of Fine Arts writing workshop at the University of California, Irvine “twenty-odd years and nine books” later. I like Chabon as a writer– really really liked The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay– and I did not realize until reading this collection of essays about growing up, culture, reading, women, children, etc., that he is, more or less, my age.  We’ve had very different lives and careers, obviously, but in terms of being of a certain age and with certain interests, I can relate.  For example, like Chabon, I too was one of the (if not the) youngest person in my MFA cohort.  Unlike Chabon though, I did not a) “score” much with the women in my program, b) smoke big bags of weed, and/or c) go on to have an outstanding career as a novelist.

Six years ago, I wrote on my blog (one that is about 3 versions removed) answers to some of the questions that Chabon considers in the opening pages of his essay here:  “Should I get an MFA in Creative Writing?” I pretty much agree with everything I said then and it’s still available via the wayback machine web archives.  But this is all on my mind this morning because of the 20 year thing.  When I was at the CCCCs last week, I got a ride to the Bedford/St. Martin’s party with Cheryl Ball, who was also in Virginia Commonwealth’s MFA program, but exactly 10 years after me, and I told her how I was reminded that I graduated from the program 20 years ago this year.  Her jaw dropped.  I know.  Maybe it’s something about the sound of “twenty” that sounds more serious than, say, “nineteen.”

I don’t know what this all means, other than I’m getting old (and tomorrow is my birthday).  Annette and I were discussing mid-life crises a bit ago and she was wondering if I was going to have one.  I don’t think so for all kinds of reasons, though I do wish that I had managed in the last 20 years to actually write and publish a novel.  This is not a regret, really.  Putting aside talent/abilities for a moment (I would rather not face the question of whether or not I had/have “what it takes”), I decided a long time ago that I enjoy steady and reasonably paying work far too much to live the kind of life it takes to get a first novel off the ground.  And I also of course like the idea of teaching and doing more academic sorts of work, obviously.  I still write lots, and, as I mention in my older post about getting an MFA, I think my experiences in a creative writing program helped me a lot with the academic writing I’ve been doing since the MFA.

I think this is probably true for the vast majority of folks I knew back in those MFA days.  Through the blessing and curse that is Facebook, I’ve managed to connect and reconnect with a lot of the people I knew back then, and, as far as I can tell, most of them have morphed into real jobs of one sort or another.  In that sense, I think the MFA has turned out to be a lot like a lot (most?) college degrees:  you start in a place with a set of lofty goals and dreams, and then, after one thing leads to another, you end up in a different place.

I’ve been working all day trying to figure out what my classes for the winter term (which starts tomorrow) are going to look like.  I was going to write “working my ass off,” but let’s face it:  working in academia isn’t exactly manual labor, a point I’ll return to in a moment.  It involves a lot of sitting, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading online and on the page.  It’s fun.  Hitting the gym and eating right to reduce the size of previously mentioned ass– now that’s work.

Anyway, earlier today via Facebook and Twitter, I came across this CHE article by Thomas “not his real name” Benton, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.” It’s an article about why getting a PhD in “the humanities” in general is a bad idea, and it comes on the heels of a number of articles about how dreadful the job market is for academics at the MLA and, as this piece in Inside Higher Ed suggests, fields like history and economics as well.  I agree with at least two things in Benton’s article:

• A lot of potential graduate students in his and my generation received bad advice.  “Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.’s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, “There are always jobs for good people.” If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, “Don’t worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available.” The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity.”  I think that’s spot-on, and it makes me glad that my entry into graduate work in the late 198os was in an MFA program– not that that was a great career move, but the stakes were a lot lower than a PhD, and it was useful in lots of other ways.
• Getting a job as a professor– particularly a humanities/literature professor– is not as easy as getting the degree, and getting the degree isn’t that easy either.  “They don’t know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don’t make any fallback plans until it is too late.”  Also very true, and I like the comparison of being a professor to these other less than “sure thing” professions.  You want a “sure thing” at a job where you can make good money, live almost anywhere, work on your schedule (within reason), and help people?  Be a nurse.

But as I skimmed and reskimmed the article during my day, while I was putting together the previously mentioned syllabi for English 328 and English 516, I got to thinking a bit more.

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