Category: The Happy Academic

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Thanks for your 10 years of service– would you like a can opener?

I received a pleasant letter, certificate, and foldout the other day to congratulate me on my 10 years of service at EMU. I guess that hadn’t really hadn’t occurred to me before I received this stuff: yep, 10 years. Go figure.

Anyway, as part of being congratulated and as “an expression of our gratitude” (I assume “our” there is human resources in general?), I can pick from a wide selection of anniversary gifts. Now, there are the usual kinds of things one might expect– watches, jewelry, clocks, etc. I think I’ll stick to the watch I have, I don’t really wear jewelry other than a wedding ring, and we need another clock in this house like a hole in the head.

Fortunately, there are some other gifts of gratitude, though some kind of goofy gifts. Some of the options include (and I swear I am not making this up) a tennis racket, flatware, dishes, a boom box, binoculars, a cordless phone set, walkie-talkies, golf balls with an umbrella, a fishing pole, slow-cooker, and (my personal favorite) an electric can opener.

I just don’t know what to make of this. I mean, I appreciate the thought and the recognition, but given some of these choices, I think they might have done better to just give us all a gift certificate to one of the Main Street Ventures restaurants in Ann Arbor or to Borders or something.

In the end, I actually settled on the Coleman Propane Road Trip Party Grill because it looked like the best reviewed items available that was something I vaguely wanted. So the next time we’re camping this summer, I’ll think of my service at EMU and wondering if I can get a tent for year 20.

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I’m going to take this as a back-handed compliment

Via Digital Digs, I came across this article in The Nation, “Professing Literature in 2008,” which is about the 20th anniversary of the Gerald Graff book Professing Literature and which laments the sorry state of English departments. At least from the point of view of a literature professor.

Here’s a long quote, one I find especially interesting as one of those comp/rhet specialists:

There’s no better way to take the profession’s temperature, it seems to me, than by scanning the Modern Language Association Job Information List, the quarterly catalog of faculty openings in American English departments. If you want to know where an institution is at, take a look at what it wants. The most striking fact about this year’s list is that the lion’s share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the “service” component of an English department’s role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you’ve got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.

That’s more than half the list, and we still haven’t gotten to any, well, literature. When we do, we find that the largest share of what’s left, nearly a third, is in American literature.

Yes indeed– can you imagine English being something beyond literature?

Well, three brief thoughts on this:

  • In the early 1990s, I went into a PhD program in composition and rhetoric and not literature for a bunch of different reasons, but one of them was what I already knew about the job market as a relative outsider. I vividly recall a lunch I had with my dissertation director in about October 1995 about the job market where I was expressing my anxieties and concerns. She waved a spoon at me and didn’t even look up from her soup and said “you’ll be fine.” When I asked more about this, she just pointed out to me that people in my field had been in demand since the mid 1970s and that no one who graduated from my program had not gotten a tenure-track job. In other words, the “new” rise of these wacky and marginal fields like composition and rhetoric is not, um, new.
  • It would be tempting to dismiss the author of this article, William Deresiewicz, as some old fogey who can be excused a bit for being out of touch with contemporary trends in English studies. But interestingly, as his homepage indicates, Deresiewicz is only 10 years out of his PhD program. You’d think that someone like that would be a tad more up to date on trends in his field. Sadly, I don’t think that Deresiewicz is really all that unusual among my colleagues in fields like British literature.
  • This seems to me to be another reason as to why we’re seeing a rise of “Writing” departments across the country, and why I think that the free-standing writing department– one that includes first year composition, undergraduate majors, and graduate programs– will be the norm by the end of my career.
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Golden oldie and my own less golden and previous Happy Academic/grad school advice

Alex Halavais has a post I can’t link to right now (there’s some issue on his blog I am sure he will fix) where he has an excellent quote about scholarship and graduate study from Norbert Wiener. Here’s a link to Alex’s blog; I am sure he will make the link work to this entry soon enough.

Alex offers his own solid advice on going on for a PhD in communication studies, and that got me to thinking about my own previous bits of advice on the matter. I do occasionally get these kinds of questions from students, and I figured since I wrote this up before, what the heck, I’ll link to it now.

So, blasts from the past in this order:

  • Steve the Happy Academic, Part I, from 2003. This was back in the day when I was responding to a couple of different academic bloggers who were lamenting their sorry state. I still agree that working in academia is still a pretty good job, even with all of the stupid stuff that comes up.
  • “Should I get a Masters degree?”, also from 2003. I never know if that’s “Masters” or “Master’s” degree, but you get the idea. The short answer is “yes.”
  • “Should I get a PhD? (an answer in three parts),” which is from early 2004 but which is also only from web archives. This is when I was trying to run a blog off of the computer in my office, which was way more trouble than it was worth.
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Does Bauerlein have a point, or is he just a jerk?

I’m leaning toward the “jerk” part, but before I get there, let me contemplate the post Mark Bauerlein has on his “blog” of sorts at CHE, “Stop Pushing Yourself.” He starts with a story about a professor speaking about the work week and claiming that she works over 60 hours a week. Then Bauerlein starts to wonder, “can this be true, 60+ hours?”

Let me quote and comment as I go:

Maybe for some segments, such as teachers with a 4-4 load that includes heavy writing assignments on the syllabus. And maybe for assistant professors struggling to get the book finished before tenure time, or researchers in the sciences working on a timetable because of funding.

In other words, “maybe this is true for some people who aren’t working at places like Emory or who aren’t full profs, but it ain’t true for me.” But of course, I would bet that 85% of people who work in higher education (and sorry Prof. Bauerlein, but places like EMU and community colleges and a whole bunch of other places that are not elite and overly privileged institutions still count as “higher education”) actually do have work loads similar to the “exceptions” he seems to be dismissing here.

But if we look at tenured professors in the humanities and in many other disciplines, it seems to me that much of the work they do is entirely self-generated. The conference papers that have to be written, the scholarly articles they want to complete, the book projects that hang over them . . . these are not required. They are elective. Yes, they can enhance a career, extend a CV, or even contribute to the historical record—sometimes.

There are plenty of tenured professors who have indeed “opted out” of this supposedly elective scholarly activity. At EMU, which is certainly not a “publish or perish” kind of school, the only way you can opt out of scholarship and still not be considered “dead wood” is if you make significant service contributions. So sure, you don’t have to do these things; if you are willing to be thought of as irrelevant by your peers, go ahead and check out of the scholarly thing.

But the fact is that the degree to which the vast majority of conference papers and articles in the humanities effectively change the working conditions of professors doesn’t come close to justifying the number of hours they spend on the projects. These projects fill their afternoons and evenings, and in my experience inside academia and out I have never heard any groups speak as loudly about how “busy” they are as professors do. Plainly, the situation makes many of them unhappy.

Okay, here I actually think Bauerlein has a point. There are BOATLOADS of papers, articles, and books produced by academic-types that are probably not worth it in all kinds of different ways. And yes, there are many professor-types who are constantly busy. But I have to say that some of the folks I’ve worked with over the years who claim to be constantly busy don’t seem to get that much stuff done.

So why do they do it? Is it really worth sweating all those months getting that manuscript in order—which upon publication will sell only a few hundred copies—just to boost your annual raise a few hundred dollars?

Caught! It’s all about the money! Yes, I went to school for a decade to earn the salary and benefits of an experienced GM factory worker– that is, I’m not complaining about my lifestyle, but I’m not getting rich for doing nothing either.

To be honest, I don’t really know how many hours a week I work, and it clearly varies from week to week. No meetings and a week of in-class work on web sites or essays? Probably not 40 hours. Three meetings, 5 student appointments, a report on a new writing major, a big batch of essays and web sites to comment on? Probably over 70.

But it seems to me that all of this “just how much do you professors work” stuff is problematized by two realities of the work that is inherent for nearly every academic, happy or otherwise. First, we all work weird hours and in weird spaces. I’m in my office for about six hours a week, but that’s because I do almost all of my work at home, in coffee shops, in the library, etc. I work during the day one day and at night another, often on Saturdays, sometimes not at all on Thursdays. Even academic-types who are more tied to a particular place– most science folks, I imagine– get to work weird hours and in environments like laboratories or in other facilities or “in the field” or whatever. Given that the vast majority of Americans live in a Dilbert-like world and see work as a “place” they go to (e.g., the office, the factory, the fast food restaurant) on a very particular schedule, it is no wonder that they don’t get it when a professor says they work so many hours (“But you’re never in your office! How could you be working?!”).

Second, academics have really strange and fuzzy lines between “work” and “aspiration.” Never mind that it’s hard to define just what exactly this “work” is in the first place. I mean, is this blog post academic work or just something “for fun?” What’s the difference?

So the suggestion that professors write or give conference presentations or whatever for the money is goofy, and Bauerlein has to know that. Sure, professors do these things to earn and maintain cred in their discipline, but the main reason why they do these things is because they want to. And again, that’s another thing that is foreign to most non-academic types: after all, why would you do something for “work” just because you think it’s interesting?

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“Professors strike back”

I rarely check Ratemyprofessors.com for all kinds of reasons: a) there aren’t a lot of rating for me; b) the ratings for me are not very good; and c) no chili peppers. What’s up with that?

But I did find this (relatively?) new feature appealing, Professors strike back. I think these are hill-arious. I especially like this response to the critique “I’d rather poke my eyes out with needles.”

I have said similar things in my weaker moments….

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Isn’t “Open Source” academic publishing kind of a moot point?

As I finish up sorting through my RSS feed, I have to note posts from Alex, Jeff, and (via Jeff) Anne regarding Dana Boyd’s call for academics to boycott closed/”locked down” journals. It’s all kind of interesting in an, um, academic way; but is this dust-up really all that relevant?

Boyd seems to be kinda steamed because her article in the journal Convergence is not just “out there” on the Internets for one and all to grab for free/as an open source document. Without getting into the pros and cons of all this (though I think I agree with the general sentiment of folks I link to above, that while open source is a good idea, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to boycott journals that haven’t gone that route), I guess I am just having a hard time getting too excited one way or the other about this. Yes, I can’t get Boyd’s article directly from the Internets. But we also have this old-timey academic technology called “the library,” and from there, I am sure I will be able to access this article, either electronically or, if EMU doesn’t subscribe to Convergence, via inter-library loan. The last time I got an article via interlibrary loan, they emailed it to me as a PDF. So while this might not be as open and as easy if it were “just there” on the web and while the EMU library probably doesn’t do this for people coming in off the street (though they might, actually), it’s still pretty quick and open and accessible if you ask me.

One of the things that most of these (kind of, but not really) closed access journals get you is paper, and paper, as I discuss in this section of version 2.0 of my article “Where Do I List This on My CV?” can matter. Granted, these closed (but again, not really) journals don’t have the reach of stuff that’s just up on the ‘net; on the other hand, paper doesn’t just disappear, which is something I experienced with the first version of this piece.

Besides, if Boyd (or anyone else) wants to put up an academic article that they wrote up on the web, well, go ahead. Anne makes a point of saying that she has written this into contracts for things that she’s published. That’s probably the legal and proper way of doing things, but I don’t think that’s even necessary. As I wrote in this article (also in the section I quote above), plenty of scholars in my field just put things up on the web– Carolyn Miller, Michael Day, most of the people in my blogroll, etc. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I intend to make links to PDF versions of stuff I published that came out in closed journals available under the “Scholarship/CV” tab. If some academic publisher wants to email me and tell me to take it down, then I will. But really, is that going to happen?

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Whadda wearin’?

As I type this (or at least as I start to type this), Larry Sanger is talking at the symposium I’m attending on wikis and stuff, and (obviously) my mind is drifting a bit. I will probably have to write something more thoughtful about the events surrounding Sanger’s visit later.

Anyway, while that was going on, I stumbled across “A Call for Professional Attire” by Erik M. Jensen in Inside Higher Ed. Basically, he’s pointing out the long-standing bad dress of most academics. It’s kind of a funny piece, one that I don’t agree with generally speaking, but amusing and thought provoking nonetheless, and there are lots of good comments on the article.

As far as my own fashion senses (or lack thereof) go, a couple of thoughts in no particular order:

  • I have gone through various phases of professional dress in my academic career. At Southern Oregon, where outdoorsy wear was the main wardrobe for everyone, even deans, I went through a period where I showed up in a tie. The reasons for this were complicated, but they included being on the job market. A few years ago here, I went through a phase where I wore a coat and tie, in part again because I was sort of on the job market, and in part because I realized I had all these clothes in the closet that I wasn’t wearing.
  • My current dress mode is something along the lines of khakis or nice jeans, a golf shirt or a button-down shirt, often with a sweater in cooler weather, nice quasi-walking/hiking shoes or deck shoes or Doc Martin-esque shoes– kind of “business casual light.” I think I am in this place in my life and career where I’ve taken sort of a Martha Stewart attitude toward fashion. Like Martha, I see myself as always dressed about the same, yet always kind of casual but able to fit in all but the most formal or most casual settings. And, like Martha (I presume, though we’ve never really talked about this), I’ve taken this approach because I frankly have better things to worry about.
  • Professorial dress code, IMO, depends a lot on context. I don’t teach lecture hall classes, but if I did, I’d dress up. If I was a dean or department head or something like that, I’d dress up. But I don’t. I teach online or I teach in small groups, so I don’t think the “gravitas” of a coat and tie matters that much. I think there are two possible exceptions to this: first, younger/more junior instructors probably get more mileage out of dressing up. Second, it probably helps for the instructor to dress up a bit more for classes like first year composition. But those are both just guesses/assumptions on my part.
  • What I think Jensen is missing here is that the reason why professors dress as casually as they do is because they can, and if people in the “real world” of felt-lined cubicals and the like could, they’d wear jeans and a sweater and sneakers to work every day too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put on some sweats and do some online teaching….

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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.