Category: The Happy Academic

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And thus ends many of my new school year resolutions

I was originally going to write– briefly, since I do have things I need to do– about how I was about to break one of my new school year resolutions and comment on a batch of student essays. But then, when I went back and looked at my new school year resolutions entry at the end of August, I realized I am/I have broken resolutions. In fact, have I kept any?

Let’s see:

  • Take my own damn advice and at least “touch” the book project every work day. Ha! What book project? Okay, it’s not that bad, but I certainly need to reacquaint myself with that project one of these days, hopefully next week after this first wave of papers passes.
  • Do not twist and turn my schedule too much just to attend a meeting, and do not go to my office on Tuesdays and Thursdays for any reason whatsoever. Actually, I’ve done pretty good at this one. I went to one meeting on a Thursday a couple weeks ago under protest, and I have a meeting of sorts on Tuesday. But since the meeting Tuesday is small and not in Pray-Harrold, I am not going to count that one.
  • Get to the gym, get in better shape, lose some weight. Pretty good, up until this weekend. I’ve kind of been a bit more lazy about weights than I should be though.
  • Take these things called “weekends.” I was able to do so until this weekend. But I collected the first essay projects for two sections of English 328, and while I realize that I don’t have a ton of students and these essays aren’t that long, it is taking me a lot longer than I had hoped to read them. And getting a cold and such threw me off on time/schedules/etc. during the week.

So here I am on a Sunday, about to start commenting on student essays. But don’t feel too bad for me. I’m still able to do this while sitting in my backyard on a shockingly beautiful October day.

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Wanted: Assistant Professor, Computers and Writing, EMU

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

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After the boys of summer have gone/looking to the school year ahead

Benninghoff and I played what is likely our last round of weekday golf yesterday out at Pierce Lake. A couple of the EMU folks who I play with once in a while were already too busy, and Bill HD and his colleagues at Michigan State started last week, so Friday’s long round– which included the classic golf lunch of a hot dog with chips and beers at the ‘hoff’s house afterwords– seemed more than a moment of closure; it kind of seemed like we had pushed it one step too far.

Ah yes, and as a child of the 70’s/80’s, I of course have this running through my head:

Anyway, on to work for the school year– or rather, back to work since I did teach in the summer term too, sort of.

There are some interesting changes coming up for me. For starters, this will be the first year in four or five years in which I will actually not have some sort of quasi-administrative duty. Between my quasi-sabbatical and my year of interim WPA-ing before that, I have taught a total of four classes in the last two years (not counting spring and summer); this year, I’ll teach 3 and 3. I’m looking forward to it because I’m retooling English 328 a bit, I’m taking my first whack at the graduate Rhetoric of Science and Technology course, and I’m not really doing much of anything in terms of administrative/service work. Well, comparatively speaking. I’m still on the department’s personnel committee, I am going to help maintain the writing program web site, etc., etc. But the theory that I am going to be testing in my own mind this school year is trying to figure out what is “more work,” just teaching or teaching a bit less and doing quasi-administrative things too? My theory right now is that “just teaching” will be less work; we’ll see.

Other items/resolutions for the new school year:

  • Take my own damn advice and at least “touch” the book project every work day. I read Deb Hawhee’s post reflecting on her first sabbatical with some interest the other day because I have come to the conclusion that a) I sabbaticalled quite poorly, and b) a sabbatical just might not be for me. I don’t know, but I am afraid that I might be the kind of person where I just get a lot more done the more demands from other things I have on my time, so the time/freedom of a sabbatical is too much rope for me to hang myself with. Get back to me in about seven years on this though; by then, I might actually be able to afford to take a full year. In any event, I have actually been able to take my own advice on the BAWS project as of late; hopefully I can keep it up.
  • Do not twist and turn my schedule too much just to attend a meeting, and do not go to my office on Tuesdays and Thursdays for any reason whatsoever. This is part of letting go of that “I must be involved in everything” feeling, but it is also because of my station/lot in life right now. Without going into a lot of detail about it right now, I guess I’ve decided that at this point in my career at EMU, I don’t think I need to bend-over backwards in terms of the rest of my life’s schedule to attend some meeting.
  • Get to the gym, get in better shape, lose some weight. The “get to the gym” part has gotten considerably easier to do since Annette and I joined the Health and Fitness Center at WCC. It costs too much money, but the nice thing about the expense is that the facilities are fantastic, which makes going there a lot more pleasant, and it’s too expensive to not use, which raises my motivation to go there so as to not waste too much money. I have a particular weight loss goal for the term in my mind, but I am not going to reveal any of the details of it here, of course. If I accomplish it, I’ll post about that.
  • Take these things called “weekends.” When Annette and I were in our PhD programs, we pretty much worked every day. That was a good thing to get us through in a rapid fashion, but I still haven’t really gotten out of the work every day habit. Sometimes, it’s awfully hard to determine and define what is “work” and what is something “not work” that I would just do– reading Jill Walker Retteberg’s new book Blogging is a good example. But generally speaking, I am going to strive to save Saturdays and Sundays for doing stuff around the house, hanging with the fam’, maybe golfing a few times more while the weather holds, reading, and not doing clearly work things like grading, responding to student emails, prepping for class, etc. We’ll see how it goes.

Speaking of which: now I am off to the gym and then I’m going to work on getting my grad class together since yesterday’s golf counted as a weekend day for me….

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Badly behaving debaters

Via my google read, I came across this Chronicle of Higher Ed article, “Debate Coach Fired and Team Suspended After Mooning.” Here are the first couple paragraphs of the article:

Fort Hays State University fired a professor and debate coach on Friday, just weeks after video surfaced on YouTube of his dropping his shorts in front of judges at a national tournament. The university also suspended its debate team, one of the best in the country, over concerns that the collegiate-debate circuit had become too uncivilized.

The coach, William Shanahan III, a professor of communication, got into a shouting match with a judge—and at one point briefly dropped his shorts and exposed his underwear—during the national tournament this past spring of the Cross Examination Debate Association.

The New York Times had a similar article. And here’s a pretty good commentary on the piece, “No ifs, ands, butts about civil debate.”

Curiously, both articles lack a couple of key links. First, there is the video– yes, actual video at the debate– of the event in question:

There are a variety of different remixes and such on YouTube too. It wasted my morning, I can tell you that.

The actual mooning event happens quickly (I didn’t see it the first time through) and at about the 36-37 second mark. Though the video goes on for quite a while after that. I watched about three minutes and then scanned through the rest. To be honest, I can’t really tell what the argument/fight here is about– I am guessing a disagreement about a decision. One article I read said it happened after the quarter final round. Note that the screaming match involves people saying “fuck” quite a bit.

And it turns out that Professor Shanahan has a blog, though he hasn’t updated it since June.

To me, it looks like these folks have just gone kind of nuts, cracking under the pressure of a big tournament, and– this is just a guess– sleep deprivation. These late tournament rounds often don’t begin until well into the evening after a full day of competition. And you have to remember that debate at this level is as much of a competitive and intense an event as the game to play into the “final four” at the NCAA basketball tournament. When I was in high school and college debate 20+ years ago, I saw plenty of arguments where an occasional “f bomb” was thrown. So in the broad sense, I don’t think the idea of a near brawl breaking out is that weird.

Still, just as you don’t routinely see basketball coaches throwing chairs across the court, you don’t usually see arguing coaches/debaters dropping their pants, if even briefly.

I also think this video is ample evidence of something that every academic already knows: just because you are a professor and you have a PhD doesn’t mean you are above behaving badly.

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Krause vs. CCCCs: 0-3-1

I just got the notice that neither of the proposals I was a part of was accepted at the 2009 CCCCs in San Francisco. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised because I was riding shotgun (and/or in the backseat) of a couple of different things that I thought were pretty good. One was a pre-conference workshop with Dennis Jerz, Sharon Gerald, and some other folks I don’t remember now that would have been a workshop on easy uses of free and open-source tools in first year writing classes. The second was a panel organized by Joanna Howard and it would have featured Joanna, me, Matt Barton, and Nick Carbone discussing some of the pros and cons of alternatives to the traditional textbook industry– e.g., the wikibook comp/rhet book that Matt has worked on, my The Process of Research Writing, etc.

I thought the workshop might be tricky because I’ve only been able to pull off one of those in my attempts at the CCCCs and there is always a space issue/lack of technology issue. But I thought the panel on publishing was a shoe-in shoo-in. I mean, a panel about textbook publishing, about multimedia, one that features speakers from very different kinds of schools/occupations from all over the country? What’s not to like?

On the one hand, it’s not that big of a deal for me. It’s not like I need this on my CV, and I had been mulling over in my own mind the choices/opportunities of going to the CCCCs versus going to C&W at UC Davis in late June. My meager travel (and personal) budget can afford only one trip to California this year, and while I think I would have preferred the CCCCs because I didn’t go last year and because it still is the main conference in the field, I think computers and writing is a much more fun conference. Perhaps the fam and I will find a way to make this into a visit to Ashland, OR too.

On the other hand, I am at a bit of a loss at my recent CCCCs proposal record. Between 1995 and 2007, I presented at the CCCCs eight times, was on the program for a couple different special interest groups, and was a part of one workshop. In that time, I think I had a proposal rejected once– maybe twice– and I just decided not to go to the CCCCs that was in Minneapolis (I can’t remember why now). But since 2007, my batting average has been poor to say the least. Two rejections this year, one rejection for 2008 (which was a strange one because I didn’t get the final word until well into October), and one initial rejection but then an acceptance after I appealed (I ended up giving my presentation to an audience of 3, one of whom was, if I recall, Dennis Jerz).

All I can figure is that it’s a combination of bad luck and different emphasis at the CCCCs the last few years. My CCCCs proposal for 2008 was about my on-going research on blogs, and it was rejected; I proposed something pretty darn similar for C&W in Athens, it was accepted, and it was a very well-attended panel. It’s not that the CCCCs hasn’t excluded “technology things” from its program as of late, but it would appear that in the last couple of years, they aren’t that interested in the stuff I’m proposing. For whatever reason.

Oh well, there you have it. If there are any other CCCCs losers out there who want to share their stories, feel free. Or the winners too, you bastards.

By the way, if you are curious to see who did get accepted, check out the CCCC searchable program here.

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“Online Universities are Gaining Acceptance, Pollster Says”

Kind of an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Online Universities Are Gaining Acceptance, Pollster Says.” It strikes me as a bit dubious because the claim of the headline comes from a book by John Zogby called The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, “which is based on Zogby International polls and other studies, also touches on public attitudes toward politics, consumer habits, spirituality, and international affairs, and on what men and women really do want from each other.”

That sounds a bit too much like everything and the kitchen sink for me to make much about a claim that higher ed and the online world, and there’s a big difference between an “online university” and a university that has some online offerings. According to CHE, Zogby talks about higher ed in the same chapter he talks about car sharing companies, blogs, and microbrewed beer. Sure, those things all go together….

I don’t think there is any question that online courses and online programs are more popular and more accepted than they were even five years ago, and it is not at all difficult for me to imagine a future where the vast majority of college students take at least some classes online. But I don’t think we’ll all be attending college online while driving around our shared cars and drinking our microbrewed beer anytime soon.

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Toy Story Meets Pulp Fiction

One of the side effects of doing research on blogs and probably anything Internets-related is that it’s really easy to get distracted. For example, my “research” somehow brought me to this:

Perhaps I ought to take a break and mow the lawn….

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What Stanley Fish doesn’t know about writing could fill a universe

Stanley Fish has a new book coming out called Save The World On Your Own Time, in which, among other things apparently, he decries the ways in which politics have crept into the classrooms of university professors and how it ought to stop. What professors are supposed to do is teach and that’s that. He has an interview here in Inside Higher Ed where he talks about this and some of his other views.

Frankly, I think he’s kind of lost his marbles.

Continue reading “What Stanley Fish doesn’t know about writing could fill a universe”

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What’s the difference between “fan-cons” and academic conferences?

I took a day off today to go down to Columbus, Ohio to visit a friend of mine who was in town for Origins, which is a very large (10,000-13,000 people) fair/convention/conference about all things “gaming.” Now my friend Chris is heavily invested in this both for fun and for his job, and he made a drive halfway across the country to specifically attend this thing– well, that and travel to some other places. Me, I was doing the drive there/drive back trip solely to see Chris. I will admit that I do have a gaming past– mostly things like Dungeons and Dragons, but generally other role playing games. However, my gaming days were pretty solidly behind me once I left my teens, and in general, I’m not really much of game person. I rarely play computer games or video games, I don’t play poker or many other card games, etc. I probably would play bridge again (a game some friends of mine– including Chris– took up in college) if it didn’t involve sitting around with a bunch of old people, though given that I am rapidly closing the gap age-wise, I might be finding a bridge club sooner than later.

Anyway, I had no plans to go to the “con”; I figured Chris and I would grab some lunch and/or chat about our lives and that’d be about it. But it turns out that I was able to get a “teacher’s pass” based on my EMU faculty ID (membership does have its privileges), so Chris and I toured around a bit. I had a surprisingly good time.

Basically, people do three different but obviously related things at Origins (and I think this is true of most game-oriented conferences). First, they play games– board games (mostly of the war and/or fantasy variety– I don’t think you can play Monopoly at this thing), card games (see above– I don’t think there’s any poker or hearts tables or something), role-playing games, games with miniatures, etc., etc. Second, they go to panels of people talking about games and game related things. And third, people go to the large exhibition area to look at and buy games and game-related things. We just stuck with activity number 3, though we saw plenty of game playing, and there was a program of presentations and other events the size of a small-town phone book.

You see a lot of overlap here with other related geeky cultures/subcultures– people in various kinds of costume and/or “geek appropriate” attire and grooming. There was a lot of stuff on sale that was exactly like the kind of thing you’d see at the RenFest– fake swords and fake armor and stuff like that. Chris and I spent some time talking about the differences between game cons and science fiction cons (Chris, a fan of both, prefers the latter).

But I guess I was was left with two thoughts I’ll post for now before going to bed. First, I really am just not that much of a “fan” of anything, certainly not like the many people who I saw today, people (okay, almost all geeky guys) who travelled half-way across the country to play a simulation game involving armies of tiny figurines of gnomes or card games along the lines of Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering or any number of different games involving pirates. Pirates seem to be a big trend at these things. I don’t really have a favorite favorite sci-fi/fantasy character, and I’m not likely to dress up like one anytime soon. I don’t keep my day job so at night I can meet up with my buddies and the dungeon master and take on my role playing persona of Zandar the Pig Barbarian. These people do, and there’s something about this that strikes an outsider like me as just odd.

Second, I think there’s a lot of similarities between these kinds of conferences– or at least the motivations behind them– and academic conferences. At both, there are presentations, insider lingo, trends, conference badges, and “famous” (for that context) people sightings. People go to both kinds of conferences to attend presentations, to see trends in “the field,” shmooze with people they know only vaguely through email lists and other conferences, and to sell and buy stuff related to the topic of the conference. The outfits at academic conferences tends to be a bit more on the conservative side–not a lot of chain mail at the academic conferences, for example– but there are definitely “outfits/costumes,” and a real insider can spot the differences between the MLA, the CCCCs, and C&W just on the outfits alone– even just the footwear. And let’s face it: most academics treat their work with the same fanatic devotion that most of the people at Origins treat their hobbies.

I dunno, but maybe the organizers of academic conferences ought to see what kinds of tricks they can pick up from these things.

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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.