Category: The Happy Academic

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Small conferences and things to come in Detroit

There’s a nice (little?) piece in the April 9 Inside Higher Ed, “In Praise of Small Conferences,” by Jason Pickavance. The basic up-shot is that small conferences are better than big ones, and he goes on to describe what seemed like a perfectly pleasant meeting of the Two-Year College English Association West in Park City, Utah.

I would basically agree with Pickavance, but I would use the analogy of seeing live music. Those small venue events featuring performers I had not heard of before seeing them are often the best. On the other hand, there is a certain energy and excitement that comes from seeing the big and flamboyant rock shows with international acts. Small shows tend to be affordable entertainment; big shows nowadays tend to stretch into three figures.

My favorite music shows are the sort of medium-sized ones. My wife and I are going to see k.d. lang and Lyle Lovett perform together at the Ann Arbor Sumer Festival in June. They’re going to be at U of Michigan at Hill Auditorium, which holds around 3500 people. A big theater-sized performance featuring pretty big name acts.

Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why the Computers and Writing conference is pretty much my favorite. Besides being focused on my area of scholarship, it’s about the right size of conference for me. It’s not tiny, like the 80 or so people at the conference that Pickavance writes about, but it’s not giant like the CCCCs too. And better yet, I’ll be commuting to this year’s event.

Of course, looking at the calendar just now, I am realizing that this is coming up on the calendar quicker than I recall, May 17 to May 20….

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Easter Blog Reading/Web Reading Round-Up

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to just read/browse some blogs and web sites. Even though I have a mountain of things to do, I figure that I ought to take at least some time on this “holiday” to do some point around. So I did, and here’s some of what I found:

Alright, this extended beyond Easter. Now it’s time to get back to work, and busy BUSY week of work it’s going to be.

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The end is near (hopefully…)

I was thinking the other day “gosh, I haven’t posted anything to this blog in a while; why is that?” Then I took a look through my calendar for March. I had about 20 student appointments (advising, GAs, etc., ). I probably another dozen or so drop-in appointments with students about first year composition– typically students who are trying to get exempted from our composition requirement for one reason or another. These meetings are frequently disappointing for the students.

Then I had about eight or ten other meetings with various committees. And then there was the English department conference I helped run at the beginning of March.

Of course, there was the CCCCs.

And just to make things interesting, I’m teaching an overload this term.

Anyway, I ran through this list of stuff and said “Oh yeah, that’s why I haven’t been posting lately.”

I don’t mean to be too whiny, and I’ve had a lot of tremendous experiences doing double-duty administrator work this year. But I’ve got to say I’m also pretty burned-out. I’m looking forward to turning the first year program officially back over to Linda AK, getting back to being “only” the coordinator of our undergraduate and graduate programs in writing, and maybe posting on my blog once in a while.

Soon….

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The CCCCs, Day Three: "Three and Three…"

What do I mean by “three and three,” you ask? Why, that’s the number of presenters on my panel and the number of brave souls who came to listen to us talk. Actually, it was about what I had expected for a 9:30 AM Saturday morning session, especially since I think our panel title could have just as easily been “miscellaneous.” Don’t get me wrong– the other two people on my panel (Elizabeth Weiser and Rita Hadin) had good talks; it’s just that was essentially no connection between these things. The basic reaction to my comic was “Huh. He made a comic.” Still, it was a friendly chat, which is about all I’m looking for out of most conference presentations.

I decided I needed to go to at least one “real” panel, sort of a combination of both a certain amount of “guilt” at my bad participation and a desire to get my money’s worth. Generally, I go to three kinds of panels at the CCCCs: ones with “stars” of the field, the ones with a bit of a “rock concert” feel; very specific computer topics I am interested in by people I know who are likely to have good things to say; or panels about some sort of topic I really don’t know anything about but which sounds kind of interesting. I picked the last type for this panel and saw Debra Hawhee give a talk in the eyes and the “vision thing” in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Jeffrey Walker talk about declamation. Both were great talks, and I very much appreciated Walker’s ability to connect the particular declamation he was discussing to current events.

And that, as they say, is how she wrote– well, at least for official things. The unofficial/”fun” in New York side of the trip will come on the unofficial blog after I get back to Ypsilanti. Kind of a short conference for me made all the more short by Northwest Airlines, which still sucks. See everyone in New Orleans; I might even drive….

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The CCCCs, Day Two (Sort of): Northwest Airlines Still Sucks

What is it that they say about the best laid plans? Deep sigh….

My original plan, before Northwest Airlines decided to just leave my luggage sitting at the airport for about 20 hours before doing anything about it, was to get up first thing in the morning and go to sessions and such at the CCCCs all day Friday. My lost luggage and highly smelly clothes changed that. So instead, I went shopping at Macy’s, actually changed into my new clothes at the store, and got to the conference at about 11:30. I shmoozed with various folks for a while, went to the book exhibit, shmoozed some more, went out for a long lunch with my near future colleague John Dunn so I could answer those kinds of questions he wanted to ask when he was on the interview but which he couldn’t ask (you know what I mean). And by then, it was three-ish, I was beat, I had dinner plans (I’ll post more about that on my unofficial blog eventually), and so my conference day was over.

Damn you, Northwest Airlines!

Of course, it wasn’t a complete loss. Thursday night began with the St. Martin’s party at Tavern on the Green. I felt like a proud papa talking with some colleagues at some PhD programs where we have sent/are sending some of our recent MA graduates and enjoyed some of the best food I’ve had at a St. Martin’s shin-dig. I was a bit surprised by Tavern on the Green though; not as nice as I thought it might be, but my expectations might have been too high.

Thursday night, I did end up meeting up with my usual partners in crime at the CCCCs, Bill H-D and Steve B (and the usual Purdue folk). Since I’m not splitting a room with Bill and Steve this year (my wife came with me to this CCCCs), we were only out comparing various notes while enjoying refreshments until about 1 or so.

When I did get to the conference on Friday, I thought the book exhibit was a little disappointing, maybe because it seemed to me like there weren’t a lot of presses there. The textbook business has been buying each other for a long time, but the same seems to be happening with academic presses as well. I noticed that Routledge has bought LEA, for example.

Oh, and our luggage did show up, finally– about ten minutes before we had to leave for our dinner plans.

And now I’m getting ready for my Saturday morning presentation. I’m actually sitting in the lobby of my hotel (my wife is still asleep), The Paramount. Basically, a thumbs up. It has this uber-pretentious/mod thing to it. The lobby has fashionably mismatched furniture, polished concrete, lighting designed for effect instead of visibility, and they’re playing 80’s pop music at a volume beyond atmosphere. My parents would hate this, but we think it’s kinda cool.

Originally, I was going to present and leave, but given my inability to go to panels yesterday, I’ll be hitting at least one panel presentation. Unless I run into someone, of course.

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The CCCCs, Day One (Sort of): Nortwest Airlines Sucks, Part One

I’m writing this several hours before I can post it since I’m in the Detroit airport, soaking in textbook (perhaps that’s why it belongs on my official blog instead of the unofficial one?) examples of bad (with bursts of good) customer service.

First the bad: per my fetish for getting to the airport very early (almost 20 years ago now, I missed a flight because of the friend who took me to the airport, a chronically late sort of guy), my wife and I were sitting at our gate about an hour and a half before we were scheduled to depart. There was some flight leaving for Buffalo at our gate, and we didn’t think much about it. Around 45-30 minutes before we were scheduled to leave, my wife goes to the desk at the gate and finds out that our flight has been canceled entirely.

Now, I’ve been in situations where flights change gates, and I’ve been in situations where flights get canceled. But I’ve never been sitting the area near the gate and NOT heard this sort of thing being announced. Anyway, finding this out like this makes me mad. Really REAAAALLLLYYYY mad, and for those of you who have seen me shift into “Hulk Angry at Customer Service Person� mode, I have to tell you that it’s not pretty.

I get up, gather my stuff while my wife is doing the same thing, and go over to the podium. “Why wouldn’t you announce that the flight was canceled?â€� I yell pretty much as loud as I can (oh, and this is something that many loyal readers can confirm– I pretty much have the loudest voice of anyone you are likely to meet).

“Hey, didn’t you see there was no one around here?� the Northwest gate guy says.
Not having time to deal with this jerk, my wife and I scurry to some area to reboarding our flight. “I’ll do the talking, I’ll do the talking,� my wife keeps saying. Fine. So while she goes and actually arranges for the re-booking, I’m asking to speak to a supervisor, who turns out to be the person managing the line of people rebooking flights because of other cancellations. Angry at Northwest, this person, the world, etc. with a passion of a 1000 burning suns, I proceed to tear this person a new one, so to speak. This proved to be somewhat cathartic for me and great theater for the growing line of people, some of whom I am sure were waiting for their opportunity to have at this person.

Given that this “supervisor-type� seemed to have the job that might be best described as “get yelled at by angry customers,� this person was not going to give us a whole lot of satisfaction. We did end up getting booked onto a flight to JFK instead of LAG, and we headed to the gate.

I was still pretty pissed off, so I went to find a white courtesy phone to try and complain to some other Northwest supervisor. There was nothing on the other end of the phone– no dial tone, nothin’. So I hiked over to some desk with some other customer service folks hanging around, was told “oh sure, eventually someone will pick up the phone,â€� and hike back over to the not so curtious phone. Anger is seething in me, and I imagine the tease for my story on the local TV news services all over the country: “A seemingly mild-mannered college professor killed three Northwest customer service reps today at Detroit Metro. More at 11.â€�

Finally, a different Northwest rep comes over and says “hey, is there anything I can do?â€� I give the version of my story (at slightly lower volume), and tell him at this point, what I want is to figure out the deal with our luggage and to make up the difference in a cab ride from JFK (further away, a bit more expensive, etc.) Finally, this guy tries to make it right, explains the weather situation that canceled these flights, and he gives us a voucher for a limo ride to Manhattan. Okay, fine, there’s a brush of good customer service in there.

But then, when we get to JFK airport, and find out that a) we have much confusion regarding our the location of our luggage, though we’re told that we should receive the luggage yet tonight, and b) the car/limo service for which we receive a voucher does not appear to exist. In other words, what I was given in Detroit turns out to be worthless.

There’s more, but I’ll shake it off and get on with some conference things. But the point is this: There were any number of opportunities for someone at Northwest to try to make things right, and instead, they decided to keep making things wrong.

I’ll still end up flying Northwest because if you stay in the metro Detroit area and you want to get on an airplane, you pretty much have no choice but to fly on Northwest. But just to repeat: Northwest really sucks.

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Stupid meetings…

From MSNBC (and via Dan’s blog) comes this story, “Meetings make us dumber, study shows.” It’s kind of an interesting story, I guess. Dan makes a point about meetings and writing peer review groups, but my first thought was about the meetings I go to in my life as a happy academic type. Three quick thoughts on all that:

  • One of the things that really surprised me when I first started down the tenure-track was how much of my job didn’t really have much to do with teaching or scholarship. Lots and lots and lots of meetings, and an hour here and an hour there really starts to add up fast.
  • In my role as the Interim WPA and the coordinator of our writing program, I go to even more meetings this year. And if I’ve learned anything about my year in this duel administrative role (and I have certainly learned a lot) it is that I do not want to become a full-time administrator and spend even more time attending meetings.
  • Having said all that, most of the meetings that I go to aren’t really “brain storming” sessions. Mostly, I think most of my meetings are about following procedures and policies, about “governance” of the faculty role in the department, etc., etc. I mean, sure, there is some brainstorming about things, but at most of those meetings, people throw around some ideas and then they go off and think about those ideas for a while, and then they come back to vote on them.
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A pretty good list of PhD programs in Comp/Rhet

This comes from something called the “Doctoral Consortium in Rhetoric and Composition:” A list of “current members,” which basically means a list of places where one can earn a PhD in composition and rhetoric.

I was just talking with a grad student in our program the other day about PhD studies in comp/rhet, so that’s one of the reasons why I’m posting this now. It seems to me though that some of these places aren’t really comp/rhet programs so much as lit or education programs where you can sort of/kind of sell yourself as a comp/rhet scholar. Sort of.

Anyway, one of the things I told this grad student is that if I had to do it all over again, one of the things I would do different is I would have done a lot more research on my options than I did. I mean, I have no complaints: things have worked out well for me and Bowling Green State (where I earned my PhD) was a great program for me. At the same time, I don’t think I did enough research about my options before I started my PhD studies.

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A blog reading round-up

I’ve been totally swamped the last week or so with all sorts of different life and school things lately (thus my lack of blogging here). For one thing, I’m behind (though getting caught up) with my online teaching. For another, I’m being paperworked to death because I’m applying for promotion this year, which mainly means putting together a report and a thick binder of materials to make my case. So that’s why I haven’t been around here lately.

But I decided to try to do a little blog reading at least this morning. Here are a couple of links to things I found, some stuff to read later, some things that were interesting, etc.

  • Collin has a post here about reading/re-reading John Trimbur’s 2003 article “Changing the Question: Should Writing be Studied?” He links to posts by a couple of others thinking about this stuff too. About a month or two ago, I wrapped up my very small part of a collaborative editing project of a forthcoming issue of Composition Studies that discusses what a writing major might look like, and I’ve got a meeting later today about changes we want to make to our own undergraduate major in writing. So to me, the answer to Trimbur’s question (without really reading what he had to say or even too closely what Collin et al have to say) is “yes.” Of course, what’s more interesting is why the answer is yes, and that’s why it’s worth reading Collin’s, Jeff’s, and Donna’s posts.
  • Speaking of things I don’t have time to read right now but I’ll have to come back to later: Bitch PhD posted her MLA presentation, something that I wrote about here a few weeks ago.
  • Via Anne 2.0, I like this post, “The Most Tiresome Cliché in Technology Today,” which is “Make it easy enough for my mom to use.” To quote briefly: “I doubt any of my three kids will ever say that. They might say ‘make it easy enough for my dad to use’ because in our house it’s dad who’s the more technologically clueless.”
  • The new issue of Kairos is out, and, just browsing the TOC, I can see one (possibly two or three) articles to include in my current online graduate course. More things to read later.
  • John Walters says there’s a bunch of audio in the Ong collection available online now. Something to listen to while I’m reading these other things I’m going to read later. Actually, this might also be a good thing to have for teaching Ong, too.
  • And finally, I relate quite a bit to Jeff’s YouTube surfing efforts.

Oh, and in the spirit of somewhat random YouTube sites and academia mashed together, I give you Derrida talking about writing:

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Inside Higher Ed's "Meet the Bloggers" (and a few other tidbits)

I had a day of unintended “blog silence” yesterday because the service I use to host this (and other) blog(s), ICDsoft, crashed for the day, and crashed hard. From the sounds of it, something blew a fuse or a cable was cut or something. Anyway, they’re still a reliable service and I’d still recommend them.

This didn’t give me a chance to blog about an article that showed up on Inside Higher Ed yesterday, “Radical Shift for MLA– on Meeting Date.” To quote at length:

The endorsement of a date change by the Delegate Assembly at the MLA annual convention in Philadelphia Friday was perhaps the biggest news for the thousands of MLA members who voiced overwhelmingly on a recent survey that holding the convention during the peak of the holiday season no longer makes sense. In a survey of 20,000 members, which yielded 5,806 responses, 75 percent indicated that shifting the date so that the convention always begins the first Thursday following January 2 would positively affect their decision to attend. Just 9 percent said it would negatively affect their decision (9 and 7 percent respectively said it would not affect their decision or they weren’t sure).

This will certainly help the situation, but as long as MLA keeps up its primary role as a “job market,” I think that people will still be pretty grumpy at it. Oh, and as long as it continues to equate “English studies” with “literature,” I’m not that interested.

Anyway, the other Inside Higher Ed piece was a report on the “Meet the Bloggers” MLA panel by Scott McLemee called “Against Phalloblogocentrism.” Interesting piece for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it includes links to several of the presenter’s papers, things I’ll have to go back and read when I’m not distracted by getting ready for this pesky school semester coming up next week.

From what I can tell from this article, it was a pretty good panel, and the apparent “star” of it was Bitch, PhD. Interestingly enough, this panel (and also this article) “outted” the pseudoanonymous blogger as Tedra Osell, an assistant professor of English at the University of Guelph. From there, it’s but a hop and a skip to a brief version of her CV, and then even a site with a picture of her (but I’ll let you do your own searches for those).

Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the so-called phallocentric nature of the “blogosphere” that McLemee discusses and that Osell’s presentation (as of yet not online) eluded to. To quote from the Inside Higher Ed piece:

There was one moment in Osell’s presentation that must have hit close to home, given the panel’s Y-chromosomal preponderance: her reference to the “old-boy network� in the blogosphere. This is no joke — and no exaggeration, either. Just before heading off to Philadelphia, I had photocopied an article from the summer 2006 issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly called “The Gendered Blogosphere: Examining Inequality Using Network and Feminist Theory.� Looking it over now, it’s striking how exact her formulation really is.

The authors, Dustin Harp and Mark Tremayne, are both assistant professors of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “Sampling over one year from blog rankings,� they note, “we found that 10% of the top [political] bloggers were women.� They consider various explanations of why this might be, but conclude that “the linked nature of blogs� has had a skewing effect given certain tendencies familiar to network theorists.

Well, okay. But what’s the gender sample for blogs who are writing about cooking? About childcare/family life? About composition studies? What I’m getting at is it perhaps makes some sense that most political blogs are gendered male since politics in general has been gendered male for a long time.

One more thing about Osell’s/BitchPhD’s appearance at this: I have never been much of a fan of the pseudo-anonymous blog thing, and there are lots of reasons why I don’t read BitchPhD that much. I like the things that she (and others) have to say there about academia and politics (occasionally, at least); I’m not as wild about the posts on her boyfriend and semi-open marriage (that falls into the category of “too much information” for me, but call me a squimish small-town boy from Iowa on that if you like).

So I’m not a fan/regular reader. But I have to think that at least part of the fascination people have with reading that blog is trying to figure out who she is. Well, now that we know, is it as interesting?

Slight addition:

From Sivacracy.net comes another summary of this panel.