Category: The Happy Academic

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A fifteen minute (or so) procrastination about a new computer desk layout

While taking a little grading/commenting break, I came across 15+ Beautiful and Elegant Mac Setups. This got me thinking about two things.

First, I probably am going to once again migrate my desk to a different part of the house, the study area upstairs where Annette has a desk space in theory, but only in theory since she generally is more comfortable and productive working not at a desk at all. Kind of like Richard Branson, though with considerably less money.

Second, if I just cleaned my desk once in a while, I might actually have something worthy of an “elegant” and maybe even “beautiful” desk set-up. And cleaning would be another form of procrastination from grading. Must… resist….

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Cool presentation, but what’s the point of conferences again?

First and most important, take a look at Daniel Anderson’s video of his presentation for the CCCC in San Francisco:


Mix and Mash Literacy from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

I’m not sure if this has happened already or if it is going to happen, but I thought it was well-done. Dan made some good points, which is pretty much all I ask out of a conference presentation. I passed it along as a link in my grad class, so maybe some of them will comment on Dan’s talk too.

But for me, it also raises the question I ask in the title of this post: what’s the point of conferences nowadays? Sure, it’s about networking, having meetings in person (always more efficient than meetings online, I will admit), getting “away” in the sense of a retreat, getting “away” in the sense of an opportunity to go out with friends, etc. It’s fun. But now that it is possible– even pretty easy– to put a presentation like this up on the web, I’m not sure if the pros of a face to face meet-up outweigh the cons of conferences– the costs of registration/lodging/food, the time away from work/family/friends/home, the damage to the earth resulting from air travel, the bad eating/drinking habits, etc.

Of course, maybe I’m just bitter for not being in San Francisco right now….

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Online conferencing

There is not one but two online conferences of sorts going on right now that are kind of interesting to me. The first is the online portion of Computers and Writing, which features sessions spread out over the next week or so via a Sakai site (asynchronous), SecondLife (though there doesn’t seem to be that much going on there), and AdobeConnect. Actually, with the AdobeConnect synchronous sessions, there was one yesterday and one today.

The other one, which I found here via elearnspace, is the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. The theme of this conference is on improving online conferences, which probably isn’t a bad idea for a discussion.

In theory, online conferencing ought to be one of those things that I ought to be all for: I like teaching online, I like interacting online, I like reading and writing online, and I’ve published more online than not online; what’s not to like about the online conference? Well, so far at least, online conferences seem like the sad second cousin of the face to face conference, with fewer presentations and less “prestige” or weight as something to list on a CV. I mean, I could count it at EMU, but I can imagine many places where the response of a tenure and review committee to an online conference presentation would be a laughing snort.

But besides that, one of the reasons I go to conferences is to travel someplace else: you know, to see colleagues and friends and to attend sessions in a “real” time and space that is not the same as every other day. Often enough, part of conference going is sight-seeing and socializing, which is why Computers and Writing in Hawaii was well-attended, and which is why the CCCCs is not likely to hold its annual meeting in a town like Omaha anytime soon (even though maybe they should). But beyond the junket factor, going to a conference is a way of doing “work” while simultaneously getting away from the usual work routine.

And we already have on-going “online conferencing” of sorts: mailing lists and, increasingly more important IMO, blog spaces. The blog post is in some ways like an online conference presentation. I write a post, and it shows up in various people’s RSS feeds, kind of like a promised article/presentation in a program schedule. Some folks come by and take a look, but most don’t, which is also very much like a conference. In fact, judging by some of the small audience numbers at some conferences I go to, it sure seems like a lot of folks’ idea of “attending” a conference is going someplace, thumbing through the program, and then doing all the fun stuff of conference going.

Don’t get me wrong– I like the idea of an online conference for the same reason I like online everything, and sometimes the travel is simply not realistic. But maybe the format has to be different somehow. Maybe the blog carnival or some kind of wiki-based exchange is more viable than just mapping the traditional conference presentation onto an online space. Or maybe I just need to attend some online presentations and see how it goes.

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Selling textbooks/going to “the dark side”

I was in my office the other day, catching up on various things (the main state of affairs for me as of late, but since the search I am chairing is in the final days, I think/hope, stuff will be “normal” busy here soon) when a textbook buyer knocked on my door. For those unfamiliar with the process/concept: a textbook buyer is someone who visits faculty offices offering to buy textbooks. They do this because the buyer and/or his company then turn around and sell these textbooks to students for a higher price. Obviously, it’s a “win” for the buyer, and it’s a “win” for most faculty since a lot of us get sent textbooks we don’t want or need all the time. It’s even a “win” of sorts for students who then have more used books to buy at a lower price.

The only one who “loses” out of this arrangement is the textbook publisher/industry. They lose money out of this process because textbook publishers send these books to faculty for free in an effort to get faculty to adopt a book for their teaching; they don’t do this so the professor can make a few bucks selling it. Needless to say, textbook publishers aren’t exactly crazy about the textbook buyback business– of course, they aren’t that crazy about used textbooks in general, but that’s a slightly different topic.

In any event, this guy came by yesterday asking if I had any textbooks to sell. My usual answer is “no, I don’t sell books,” delivered in a somewhat “holier than thou” tone of voice. Because generally speaking, I agree with the publishers on this one: it’s probably not entirely ethical to sell something that you received for educational purposes, and it probably does contribute to the rising cost of books. And besides that, it feels a little like regifting something. That’s always struck me as tacky.

But this time, I responded “no, but you’ve reminded me I need to find a book for a student of mine.” So I got up and started to rummage around my shelves a bit.

“Hey, are you using that little spiral-bound guy there?” the textbook buyer dude asked, pointing to a book that a) I’ve never used, b) I wouldn’t use, and c) I didn’t ask for in the first place.

“No,” I said. “You might want buy it?” And with a simple check of some sort of bar-code scanning data device the buyer had and an affirmative answer from him, I was off to the races. Off to what my wife jokingly referred to later as “the dark side” (she’s been selling books like this for a long time and thought my previous attitude on the subject was a tad haughty). Mostly I unloaded books that I just never ever thought I’d use and a couple of books where I had multiple copies. Ten or fewer books later, I had collected a tidy little $35.

Well, the textbook industry hasn’t exactly been kind to me in the past. And I like to earn a buck here and there. And it seems like everyone else does it. We are probably going to regift that Saturday Night Live Trivial Pursuit game someone gave us last Christmas.

Oh, the dark side indeed….

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“Why blogging is hard” (or “infrequent blogging”)/the “other” category of faculty work

Both Alex Reid and Will Richardson recently wrote about the difficulty of keeping a blog going after so much time and so many entries. I would work harder at trying to summarize them now, but instead I’ll just point out that the main reason I am linking to this is because I am going to have to start working on a chapter/presentation on “infrequent blogging” or ending blogging altogether for the “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project. Anyway, I think that both Richardson and Reid have good points, both introspective and theoretical, and I will hopefully remember to come back to them once I get on the stick again with that project.

Speaking only for myself (though probably also for others in academia, judging from my blogroll), I haven’t been writing much of anything lately because of an insanely busy couple of weeks at work. I might go into some details about this particular project eventually here, but suffice it to say that I have been super-duper busy with one of the many things faculty have to do that inevitably take time away from teaching or scholarship. These kind of duties are obvious to me now; after all, I have been a college professor someplace since 1996. But I remember vividly at the end of my first semester of my first job at Southern Oregon University (the toughest semester of my life, by the way) how surprised by and unprepared for I was by all of the other stuff that faculty do, stuff that does not fit well into a CV, and that stuff that confirms for me that academia really is a “job.”

Don’t get me wrong; it isn’t quite like the too-close-to-home comedy of The Office or Dilbert. And I’m also really REALLY happy to be engaging in this latest project that falls somewhere between “service” and “other.” But at the same time, it’ll be nice to remind myself that what I am supposed to be spending most of my time on is teaching and scholarship. With a little bit of blogging squeezed in here and there.

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Kaplan’s ads (or fantasy island meets back to the future)

While hanging out and watching a little television the other night, I saw an ad for Kaplan University, part of their “talent” campaign. The ad depicts a professor and college classroom straight out of central casting. The professor wears a sweater vest and a bow tie, he’s bald, in his fifties, and he is African American (that throws a bit of a wrench into the stereotype). He stands at lectern on a small stage in an anciently old lecture hall, a chalk board behind him–the word “talent” is scrawled on it– and a group of college-aged students in front of him. The classic “sage on the stage” scene. He’s giving a speech about how we are wasting talent and time in an educational system “steeped in tradition and old ideas.” Our professor says it’s “time for a new tradition, that talent isn’t just in schools, it’s everywhere.”

And suddenly, we’re transported to the magic of the “online classroom:” a woman laying on the couch and watching a laptop with her cat, a young man watching the professor on an iPhone while waiting for a subway, a mom sitting at a kitchen table watching the professor with a couple kids running about, a male model propped up in bed with coffee and a laptop, a business woman watching the professor on some sort of hand-held device, and a young woman sitting on an apartment roof with her laptop, perhaps the only place where the wifi signal is strong. And I swear I am not making any of this up– watch the ad. Through this montage, the music swells and the professor tells us again and again “it is time for a different kind of university– it’s your time.”

According to this Business Wire/Yahoo snippet about the campaign, “‘The new campaign makes a statement that the U.S. traditional higher education system doesn’t always meet the needs of today’s adult learners, mainly working adults struggling to balance jobs, families and education,’ said Andrew S. Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc. ‘At Kaplan University, we are rewriting the rules of higher education by offering students the opportunity to customize their education to meet their needs, and by providing resources and support to help them succeed.'”

Well, I see the point they are trying to make. But this is so wrong in so many ways.

First there is the fantasy of the kind of instruction being provided (potentially) by these online classes, of the “great minds” teaching to the masses. Long-story short, that’s not what has historically happened. David Noble (who I largely disagree with) made this point a decade ago: correspondence courses promised this sort of experience 120 or so years ago, but ultimately, what ended up happening was the “great minds” wrote up a few lessons and unknown and frequently inexperienced part-timers actually did the teaching. That is a danger at all institutions, but I guarantee you that you will never take a class from a “distinguished professor” at Kaplan simply because about 90% of their faculty are part-timers.

Second, there is the fantasy of the kind of students and the student experience. Basically, the ad depicts two kinds of students: those who are literally laying around and those who are doing something else while “learning.” I think the not so subtle implication here is that you can take classes online while simultaneously working a real job or something, or taking an online class is as easy as laying around on the couch with your cat. The one student the ad does depict that is somewhat realistic in my experience is the woman (perhaps a single mom?) sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop while a couple kids are running around. Lots of my online students have been single women with young kids, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a male model who laid around in bed all day.

And then there is the “back to the future” aspect. Kaplan is accusing traditional institutions as being “behind the times,” so what do they do to depict online learning? Why, they show a bunch of people watching a lecture! Splendid!

I appreciate that they can only do so much in a 30 second spot, but the fact is the point of online learning/teaching is not to replicate the face to face experience. Rather, the point of online learning/teaching is to take advantage of medium that fosters a lot of interaction between students and instructors. Speaking of which: I need to stop my rant here so I can actually go and do some online teaching this morning….

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Once again, I’m happy to not be at MLA

The Chronicle of Higher Education blog has a couple of posts about MLA on it tonight. The first one I read was “MLA 2008: Market Realities in San Francisco.” Apparently, the MLA has discovered both teaching and the internets. A couple of quotes:

Does the ailing economy have anything to do with a pragmatic streak evident in some of the panels this year? Maybe not, but you could say the timing is good. Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, picked “The Way We Teach Now” as the topic of his presidential forum. At the session, some of the profession’s marquee names tackled questions of how literary theory works (or doesn’t) in the classroom and how senior scholars could do a better job of helping their graduate students acclimate to “the culture of the profession, whatever that means,” as Michael Berube put it.

And:

Richard E. Miller, a professor of English at Rutgers University, made the idea of theory in the classroom look almost quaint with a talk—make that show—on reading and writing in a 2.0 world. The Web has not only changed the way we compose, it has become the material of composition, he said, citing the work of Jonathan Harris as a prime example.

“We are living at the moment of the greatest change in human communication” the world has ever seen, he said—more important than the moment our ancestors crawled out of the muck, more revolutionary than the invention of the printing press. If you want revolution, he seemed to be saying, it’s already here.

And then there’s this: “MLA Meeting Designed for Broader Appeal.” Here’s a quote from this:

She [Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA’s executive director] said that the group wants to close a perceived chasm between different constituencies—language-and-lit professors at research universities and those at community colleges, for instance. The association hasn’t been known to lavish attention on the latter group. “Too often, community college colleagues suppose that the MLA does not provide enough of what they need to justify being members,” Ms. Feal wrote on her blog.

To help remedy that, the MLA held a workshop this year on “the central move of academic writing” for community-college members. It was well-attended, with more than 60 participants. “We really are in this together,” Ms. Feal told The Chronicle.

Now, I may be a bit cynical and even defensive as a comp/rhet-type. But this sure sounds like too little and too late to me.

Basically, composition and rhetoric as a field originated in English departments among traditional literature faculty who actually took an interest in teaching writing and that purgatory called first year composition, and nowhere is the burden of teaching more acute than in community colleges. The mark of a good appointment in literature has traditionally been one with a low teaching load consisting of upper-level undergraduate literature courses, a grad seminar, and no freshman comp. This allows for plenty of time to worry about what’s really important, whatever that might be.

Over the years, this division of labor has evolved into deeper lines between literary studies and writing studies. Rita Felski, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, refers to this as “disciplinary Balkanization,” but from my point of view, this is simply the evolution of the field. Once upon a time, speech and English were typically the same department. But eventually English and speech/communications began to take on their own disciplinary identities; and nowadays, we’ve got English departments and communications departments. I think that this is what’s happening between literary studies and writing studies. In my view, it is less about the traditional political tensions between literature and comp-rhet and more about the increasing distance between what our different fields define as scholarship, teaching, and the other practices that define academic disciplines. This is why there are more and more Writing departments and programs completely separate from Literature and/or English departments, and this is certainly a trend that is going to continue.

Anyway, I’m not buying it. It just seems a little disingenuous to me to believe the MLA is all now most interested in teaching, writing, technology, and community colleges.

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Tenure, “A farewell to academia,” the journey to hell in a handbasket, and other problems of students not succeeding

I was not going to post about this at all since this article, “I’m Leaving” by John “not his real name” Smith, was in Inside Higher Ed almost a month ago and because I just am not that interested in the thoughts of yet another disgruntled college professor. But somehow, my holiday travels brought it up again for me.

We went to Iowa to be with my extended family of parents, sisters, their spouses, and their kids for Thanksgiving and an abbreviated Christmas. A good time was had by one and all, though at one point, the Republicans in the group went to another room to commiserate over the recent election.

And at one point, there was more interest than usual from my brothers-in-law about hiring in academia and this thing called “tenure.” I should point out that no one in my family (other than my wife, of course) knows anything about academia beyond their own experiences as college students 20 or more years ago, and all of these folks have had more immediate connections with the current economic downturn than I have. From their point of view, tenure was nothing more than a gimmick where people like me were guaranteed jobs. It was an interesting discussion for a variety of different reasons, but the one that struck me at the time was that this topic never came up when the economy was good. Suddenly, these (comparably) lower-paying academic/state government jobs look like a pretty good deal.

Anyway, I didn’t go into it all while watching Detroit lose again and family cheer, but I did point out the free speech aspect of it and that it was more complicated than that. In brief and in no particular order, here’s a few things I would have/should have said:

  • It is possible to be tenured and to be fired, though I will concede that it isn’t easy. But keep in mind that you’ve really got to prove yourself to get tenure and promotion, even at a less prestigious and less demanding place like EMU. In other words, faculty with tenure rarely get fired for doing a “bad job” because they have to demonstrate their abilities to do a really good job to get tenure in the first place. This also ties into the hiring process for professors, another discussion I had with one of my brothers-in-law: it takes a year to hire someone in my field because you’ve got to make dang sure you are hiring the absolute best person since you are liable to have to work with that person forever.
  • Tenure is a seniority system, meaning that if EMU did have to lay faculty-types off, they would first lay off part-timers and grad students, then lecturers, then non-tenured faculty, then tenured associates, and then the likes of me. As far as I can tell, this is no different than most other kinds of businesses where the most senior people have the best job security.
  • Lots of professions have something like tenure and/or a high degree of job security. A lot of K-12 school districts have a system of tenure not unlike higher ed, and I have always thought that college professors were more like “partners” in a law firm or a medical practice (though I don’t get a cut of the profits). Besides, I ultimately work for the government, which generally offers the same sort of trade-off of lower pay for higher job security.
  • I worked really really hard to get here– two degree programs past my undergrad, twenty years of teaching, publications and dozens of presentations. I’m a good teacher, a good colleague, and I have a modest national reputation in my field. I deserve it.

Anyway, on the 9 hour drive home yesterday, Annette and I were talking about all kinds of things, including work and including students who were not doing great. Were we failing these students? Were they failing themselves? It’s not a new discussion, though it’s one that tends to come up at this time of the school year where the realization that some students really will fail the term is extremely immediate.

The other side of this coin is that these students and the system are more or less failing us. Basically, the main reason why Smith quit his job is because of these sorts of failing students:

Professors and administrators seek to “nurture” and “engage” and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable [sic] and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. If a professor is lucky, the books are being skimmed hours before class.

It’s not just the students that are going to hell either. A little later in Smith’s article:

Today’s faculty and administrators capitulate to students’ demands in innumerable ways. They hold classes outside on sunny days, not really caring if there is no blackboard, or if the students are admiring each other instead of the texts to be dissected. They encourage students to think of college as a “comfortable” and “supportive” community, not as a means to acquire necessary skills. Far too many of my colleagues are dialing in – showing up late, popping in videos during class, assigning group projects, or sitting in a circle and asking students how they feel. Why they have abandoned classroom rigor is something that only they can answer. But one answer is simple – students flock to these popular classes, probably because they cater to the students’ worst sensibilities. Homework is minimal, or sometimes optional. Surprise quizzes are considered unfair. Late assignments are not failed. Some grades are even negotiable.

Not surprisingly, I think Smith is exaggerating both our students’ laziness and the faculty/administration’s response. I have lots of students who are working their asses off. I still give lots of homework, lower grades on late assignments, believe in rigor, etc., etc. It is a problem that universities are perhaps letting in more students than they ought to in an effort to make money. “Opportunity-granting” universities like EMU are always faced with a dilemma: what is the line between giving under-prepared students a chance to succeed and simply taking their money because they were never capable of doing the work in the first place?

Still, I think complaining about students (not to mention faculty, universities, and tenure) are kind of old news. I never tire of this passage from Isocrates’ Antidosis written 2400 years ago:

Yes, and you have brought it about that the most promising of our young men are wasting their youth in drinking-bouts, in parties, in soft living and childish folly, to the neglect of all efforts to improve themselves; while those of grosser nature are engaged from morning until night in extremes of dissipation which in former days an honest slave would have despised. You see some of them chilling their wine at the “Nine-fountains”; others, drinking in taverns; others, tossing dice in gambling dens; and many, hanging about the training-schools of the flute-girls.And as for those who encourage them in these things, no one of those who profess to be concerned for our youth has ever haled them before you for trial, but instead they persecute me, who, whatever else I may deserve, do at any rate deserve thanks for this, that I discourage such habits in my pupils.

Somehow, professors like Smith and Isocrates keep teaching these students year after year, and, even after teaching these students the same thing over and over and OVER, they still don’t get it. They still are interested in nothing but drinking, partying, and sex. Go figure.

Anyway, I’m not sure how this is all connected, but it somehow feels that way to me. There are certainly parts of the current economic downturn and the current state of academia as articulated by Smith and his ilk that are unique; but there is certainly also a feeling in the critique of tenure, the economy, and the sorry state of our students that feel a lot like something I’ve seen before.

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It is taking me longer than I thought to do virtually anything this term

Last year, I was on quasi-sabbatical, meaning that between my administrative release and my research release, I taught one class the entire year. The year before that, I was doing two administrative jobs at once, which meant I taught a whole lot less. And before that, I had been receiving one kind of release or another for administrative this or that.

So this is the first term in a long time since I’ve taught a full load, and also the first time in a long time where I’ve taught all of my classes on campus. And, just to add to the adventure, the graduate course I am teaching is new for me, and, because it’s a theory course called “the rhetoric of science and technology,” it involves a BOATLOAD of new reading. AND I’ve added/modified English 328 (the class I teach all the time) to include a collaborative video project. I have no idea how this is going to translate into the online version of this class.

Anyway, I’m not complaining exactly because I know lots of academics– especially at regional/undergrad-oriented institutions like EMU– teach a 3-3 load along with doing a lot of stuff I don’t have to do, my classes are quite small (I have fewer students in these three different classes than some of my literature colleagues have in one of their three sections), and, as always the case with academic jobs, it’s better than shoveling coal. But it does make me think of a couple of things.

First, I have yet to get my “grading mojo” back. The worst part of the job is reading, commenting on, and grading student essay projects. I don’t say that as a slam to my students at all; they do good things, they’re trying hard, etc., etc. I’m not going to lie and say that they all do really interesting and great work, but enough of them do that I can honestly say that the problem here really isn’t them. I think the problem is it’s just kind of hard work to do that can sometimes be boring and often can be easy to put off. Grading is certainly a lot less “fun” than actually being in class (or online, for that matter) and “teaching,” or planning a class, or just talking with students.

So, the first couple of batches of essays for student projects have just taken me way WAY too long to comment on. It vaguely reminds me of when I started teaching 20 years ago, or, much more recently, when I mentored a bunch of new grad students through their first semester of first year writing here at EMU when I was the temp WPA for a year: I used to (and my recent grad students used to) spend just HOURS on these things, mainly because I didn’t quite know what I was doing in the broadest possible sense. This is what I mean by my “grading mojo:” I am not back to the place where I can sit down with a batch of student projects and give them decent/useful feedback in a reasonable amount of time.

Second, I am reminded once again of how much of the job of being a professor has almost nothing to do with teaching, and that includes people (like me right now) who are teaching “full loads” with no release time to do anything else. This state of affairs has been obvious to me for a long time I suppose, but I do remember how when I started down the tenure-track at Southern Oregon 12 years ago that I was quite surprised by this. I suppose also that I am in the stage of my career where I could blow off a lot of this stuff and become one of those “dead wood” professors, but retirement is still about 25 years off for me and I’ve seen the sort of bad things/bitterness that can happen with senior folks who take the easy road and opt-out of the operations/politics of a department.

And third, I’m not sure which is the better lot in faculty life, the position I was in recently of teaching two and getting a course release to attend to a fair amount of administrative things, or teaching three, doing a few non-teaching things here and there, and largely staying out of the administrative heavy-lifting. There are some quasi-administrative things coming up that I can imagine wanting to do and/or being told that I really need to do, so we’ll see how that works out.

But if I start talking about becoming a full-time administrator, you know that a) I really want the money, and/or b) I’ve gone off the deep end.