Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
… but I thought this post at “Confessions of Community College Dean” titled “Jonas Salk Presents the Polio Vaccine to the Faculty Senate” was pretty roll-on-the-floor funny, especially if you’ve ever been to a Faculty Council/Senate meeting.
I kid because I love…
When it comes to writing the generic “start of the term” post, I have a couple of problems. While our trip to Europe earlier this month was a lot of fun, it wasn’t exactly relaxing. It was more of one of those great “trips” that require a bit of a “vacation” for recovery. So in a sense, I have kind of been making that vacation now, even though I’ve been sitting in on the training sessions for graduate assistants that Linda AK is leading before she hits sabbatical and hands me the keys to the first year writing program store– more on that in a bit.
And then there’s the whole faculty union stuff. But that’s the subject of a different (tomorrow’s?) post.
In any event, even the threat of a strike casts quite a shadow on the beginnings of the term, especially when it comes to the advising and quasi-administrative work that is going to make up the bulk of my work this year– again, more on that in a bit. I found myself last night going through a backlog of email and telling students, potential students, and other advisees that I will be available next week– unless we’re on strike. That’s kind of annoying, and while I suppose the union negotiators can be blamed for some of this, I mostly blame the administration and I really REALLY blame the lawyer that the university hires to break negotiate with the union. I am certain that if this guy was not at the table, the folks from the faculty and the folks from the administration would have worked out a deal months ago. But the lawyers get paid by the hour, and they get paid to bring us to the brink, right?
Oh wait– I said that was going to be a different post….
Besides this academic holding pattern created by a combination of my body/soul forcing a post-trip “break” and the relative uncertainty of the start of the term, I feel like my non-academic life is in a bit of a holding pattern, too. Our son doesn’t start school until after Labor Day, and oh my, we are all soooo ready for him to go back to school. The Washtenaw County Rec Center, which is where I go to work out (when I go to work out) is closed until September 1, which has thwarted my plans to start getting in shape right after our trip.
Anyway, I know this hold will end eventually. And when it does, when the term really does start, I will begin what will be I hope a very interesting year as a sort of faculty/administrator. I have been the “writing program coordinator” in our department since January. My charges in that job are to more or less run the undergraduate majors in professional and technical writing and our graduate programs in professional writing and teaching of writing. In addition to that, I’m going to be the “interim director of first year writing,” which is what Linda usually does and which is more akin to what most people think of as a WPA. I’m the go-to person for the 120 or so sections of first year writing we have each term, I’m the one who has to do all sorts of miscellaneous paperwork and meeting associated with all of that, and I’m going to take over the teaching of the course our grad students take to get ready to teach first year writing. Linda is teaching the part that meets for two weeks before the term begins right now.
So thing number 1 on my agenda for next year: Don’t screw up the Interim WPA thing too badly. Given the great incoming students we have and the support I’ll be getting from some other folks here (along with Linda from a short distance away), I think this is a goal I will be able to meet.
Agenda item #2: read (and not write) some scholarship. There’s two basic reasons for this. First, with my various quasi-administrative roles, I just don’t know how much time I’m going to have to work a lot on new articles or whatever, God forbid a book. Second, as I elluded to in my earlier posts about my academic mid-life crisis, I kind of feel like that if I don’t have a “burning project” I just have to do, then it would perhaps be a better idea to not do anything for a while. So I’m looking forward to just reading stuff for a year or so.
Well, other than at least one conference presentation.
Finally, there is agenda item #3: Get in better shape. This is an annual agenda item for me, of course. But given item #2, I might actually have a little more time to do this one this year….
As some of my friends (both academic and not) have had to endure from me lately, I feel like I have been going through a mini mid-life crisis– an academic mid-life crisis, that is. I’m not likely to dump my wife for a twenty-something girlfriend and a convertable. But I have been in a bit of quandry as to what to do next. The short version goes like this:
Meanwhile, I recently found out that I can apply for promotion to professor this year (meaning that I would be promoted for the 2007-08 school year). I am of course aware that at many institutions, where one has to produce truly distinguishing scholarship in order to get promoted to full professor, it’s very common for faculty members to toil away as an associate professor for decades or longer. For better or worse, promotion at EMU doesn’t work that way. If I were to bust out and write one or two books in the next year or two or three, I would be promoted to professor. If I did what I am doing now or even less (see below), I would be promoted to professor.
And, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, my wife Annette Wannamaker has just wrapped up her first and very successful year as an assistant professor here at EMU. She’s happy, I’m happy, and, given the challenge of us both finding academic jobs elsewhere that would work for us as a couple and a family, we’ll probably be at EMU for the rest of our careers.
So, this opens up another possibility:
Now, I had been more or less putting off/not thinking too hard about my additional WPA duties in the fall, mainly because I’ve been busy teaching. But as that class wraps up, as I prepare for our trip to Italy and Germany, and as I think about my more than pseduo-administrative duties for the fall term, it has occurred to me that really, the only thing I’m going to be able to do next year is a version of Option C– though I am already imagining an article where I discuss and describe my role as the “accidential WPA.”
So, like I said, convergence. For the time-being, my future seems decided for me, and that’s an okay thing.
On various occasions in this blog and elsewhere, I’ve argued that it seems increasingly obvious to me that almost all publishing for fields like English studies and composition and rhetoric will be done electronically. This is perhaps most likely with journals– heck, even the less than techno-savvy CCCC now is available electronically before the paper copy arrives– but I also think it’s going to happen with books too.
Anyway, not that I’m the only one who has had this crazy notion before, but you’ve heard it here before. Now, according to the July 14 issue of Inside Higher Ed and the article “New Model for Scholarly Publishing,” it turns out I’m right. Maybe.
It’s a good piece, one you should read for yourself and one that would probably make good reading in my graduate course on computers and writing (which reminds me: I need to start doing some of the set-up work for that….). A few highlights:
“Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, is a member of the MLA tenure reform committee, and he said Thursday that he was very encouraged by the Rice announcement. ‘This sounds like a fascinating model,’ he said.” So perhaps even the MLA is on board with this one? See, I am right!
I came across an interesting article this morning on the Spellings Commission, which is looking into reform of higher education in the U.S. It’s “A Stinging First Draft,” and it’s about the first draft of the report coming out of this group. Feel free to read these pieces, but I guess I have a few quick thoughts:
The article talks again and again about how “mean spirited” the report is. Given the politics of the folks leading this group, that’s hardly surprising. Only three things comfort me about all of this. First, I hope that the public and legislators have enough of a memory to recall the on-going problems of “No Child Left Behind” and thus will not repeat the mistakes of that legislation. Second, the fact that this is a first draft and one that members of the committee are themselves divided about suggests that there will be changes. And third, since so-called “public” institutions get increasingly less money from states or the feds, I’m just not sure how much difference this or other reports will make.
The bottom-line (well, at least so far) of the problem(s) at hand and the problem(s) of solutions is summed up pretty well in the Inside Higher Ed piece with the comment by Jonathan Cohen (I’d link to it if I could, but I couldn’t figure out how). To summarize it/put my own spin on it here: the report says that there are three basic problems that impact higher education:
Well, first off, there isn’t much higher ed can really do about K-12. And if the thinking is that higher ed should up the requirements for entry (thus forcing K-12, particularly secondary schools, to get their act together so their students are prepared for college), I can tell you right now that flat-out isn’t going to work. It certainly wouldn’t work at “opportunity granting” institituions like EMU.
As far as costs being out of control goes, I would say I agree a lot with what Cohen says about how the first place any reformer ought to look is at the administrative costs, both in terms of the high-priced salaries of administrators, the number of administrators, and the “creep” of administrative work on to faculty. Take me, for example: right now, I receive a course release a term for being the coordinator for the writing program (meaning our undergraduate majors and graduate programs), and next year, I’ll receive even more release time as I step into the role of interim writing program administrator (meaning first year writing). Not to mention the faculty time it takes to research and write the mind-numbing and irrelevant reviews and reports and crap that no one ever reads.
Sure, there are other places to save money too, but it seems to me that other things vary too much from institution to institution. Comparing the costs of faculty and virtually everything else between a place like EMU and a place like the University of Michigan just doesn’t make that much sense. But the one “universal” here seems to be administrative costs.
Oh, and the other reason why tuition is going up so fast is pretty simple: the government at both the state and the federal levels are getting out of the higher education “business,” and they’ve been doing so for a long time now and at an alarming rate. If the state of Michigan cuts funding to EMU, then EMU has to look someplace else to pay the bills, and that someplace else is student tuition. Seems like math even an English professor can figure out.
Finally, figuring out what students learn: I think that this commission and others that have driven things like standardized testing are looking for an answer to an unanswerable question: how can we really really tell what students learn in our classes? To me that’s like trying to figure out what someone really really “believes.” There comes a point where it is ultimately an act of faith.
The best we can do, IMO, is think about this via accreditation. We’re about to go through an interesting, um, “time” here at EMU with NCATE, which will assess and ultimately accredit our many majors in K-12 educaiton. While this is likely to be a highly problematic process in all sorts of ways, that’s one way to deal with this: have accrediting bodies of higher education actually do more than rubber-stamp.
There are two articles in Inside Higher Ed right now– this one and this one— about the academic’s life during the summer. Frankly, I don’t really relate to either one of them, but feel free to read if you’d like.
For me, summer (or really, at EMU, we call this “spring” and then “summer”– that is, there are usually two 7.5 week terms between the fall and winter semesters) is kind of the worst of times, and the best of times. The bad stuff first: whenever I talk with my non-academic-type parents about being done with the winter term, they always assume that I am on “vacation” from the last day of school in April until the first day in late August or early September. Hardly.
Technically, the faculty contract does allow for this kind of approach– that is, technically, I could just disappear completely for four or so months. But practically speaking, this never happens. Inevitably, there are various meetings, and this spring/summer, since I have taken over as the “writing program coordinator,” I am spending a fair amount of time doing various paperwork things and responding to emails from and meeting with future (hopefully) graduate students. I also have a couple of scholarly projects going on, a workshop on blogging coming up (more on that tomorrow or so), some projects having to do with writing.emich.edu, etc.
And then there’s teaching. Basically, I cannot afford to “take the summer off” from teaching, because of a combination of needing the money and the money for teaching at EMU in the summer being too good to refuse. Normally, summer teaching at EMU means working for 7.5 weeks, either the spring or the summer terms, which means that I’d still be “free” for about 8 weeks. But as loyal readers will recall, I worked out a deal where I am teaching an online class this spring/summer for 12 weeks instead of the usual 7.5 weeks. The verdict is still out and there are some “complicating issues” with this particular group of students, but I think that I actually might prefer “sucking it up” and teaching online in the usual 7.5 weeks. My wife is teaching in the regular 7.5 week term and the fact that she only has three class meetings to go has me envious.
But there are the “good times,” too. Work-wise, things are more quiet right now. Teaching only online is good, albeit a bit discombobulating since it makes that line between “work” and “life” even more fuzzy. I do get to play golf about once a week or so, though my game has been quite bad lately. The weather in Michigan this time of year is beautiful. And so forth….
Enough of that though; time to get back to work!
Kind of an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed this morning called “Losing Their Edge?” It’s about a study of economics departments that is trying to suggest that “the internet” has lead to a flattening out of the heirarchies between different economics departments and being at a “top 20” econ program doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Here’s a quote:
The basic approach of the research was to examine the productivity of professors at elite universities (defined as the top 25 in economics and finance) in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. What the scholars found isn’t good news for those top departments. In the 1970s, a faculty member moving from a non-top 25 university to Harvard University would nearly double in productivity (based on various measures of journal publishing, which is where most economics research appears). By the 1990s, this impact had almost entirely disappeared.
Beyond Harvard, the study found that moving to 17 of the top economics departments would have had a significant positive impact on productivity during the 1970s, while moving only to 5 of them had a significant negative impact on productivity. By the 1990s, only 2 such departments were having a positive impact on productivity while 9 had a significant negative impact.
It goes without saying that this study, at least as described in this Inside Higher Ed piece, sounds kinda fuzzy if you ask me. And, of course, I am not in economics. But I have to say that there is a grain of truth to it, and I certainly see communication technologies like the web (and, once upon a time, things like gopher), email, and other internet search tools figuring into my own Ph.D. education and my current practices as a happy academic.
I earned my Ph.D. at Bowling Green State University— a good school for composition and rhetoric, but not exactly the “center of the academic world.” But technology made it considerably less far-flung. For example, I did most of my research with OhioLINK, a service that essentially allowed me to browse and borrow books from a whole bunch of different university libraries in Ohio. Unlike an inter-library loan request, I could do an OhioLINK search with no paperwork and I could expect to get my requests in a day or two. So instead of using just BGSU’s library (which was pretty good), I was using a whole bunch of libraries.
Another example: back then, MBU, an email list discussion about computers and writing stuff, was very active. For me, MBU served as both an instructional medium– that is, I learned a ton of stuff from the discussion on this list, things about the connections between writing instruction and technology that I wasn’t getting anywhere else– and as a space where I was able to participate in a discussion with colleagues (fellow grad students at other schools, senior “big name” faculty at fancier schools, and everyone in between) in the field. As the writer(s) note in this Inside Higher Ed piece, forums like MBU have made it possible for scholars to talk with others all over the world, while in the old days, scholars talked mostly with people down the hall and/or “across the quad.”
It’s strange to me that mailing list discussions have either dried up (MBU went off-line in 1997, and it’s replacement, tech-rhet, is basically stopped) or have turned into kind of annoying spaces (WPA-L has these tendencies). Perhaps a lot of the discussion has moved to the blogosphere, which is a shame since I for one see blogs as a poor substitute for electronic mail list discussions. Perhaps it’s just me though; perhaps I’ve moved to a place in my training where I don’t “need” the email discussion forums as much as I did way back when.
So, heirarchies have flattened, at least a bit. Does this mean that being at a “tier 1” school no longer matters? Of course not, and the Inside Higher Ed piece makes that clear as well.
I think there is still a lot of unspoken heirarchies in place in hiring practices, even in a field like comp/rhet, which is considerably less “stuffy” and traditional than fields like philosophy, history, or literature. Basically, it is very difficult to rise above one’s academic class: someone who holds a Ph.D. from what is largely a regional state university (me) is unlikely to secure a position at a flagship state university– the U of Michigan, Michigan State, and University of North Carolinas of the world. Further, there is a difference between working at a university like EMU versus a university like the University of Michigan, most of which are probably obvious: money, teaching load, institutional facilities, support, etc., etc.
Of course, there are certain interesting advantages at working at an “opportunity-granting” university like EMU too, advantages that are often overlooked by status/heirarchy-minded academics. But that’s another post.
Both Collin and Johndan recently wrote thoughtful blog posts about the process of writing a dissertation and also reflections on their own dissertations. I’m not even going to pretend to really add anything too significant to that discussion; but these posts do remind me:
About ten years ago, I was in the midst of dealing with the nitty-gritty of my dissertation. I was largely done by mid-May, but according to the intro for the online version of my dissertation, I defended on June 12, 1996. Wow, ten years. Go figure.
In any event, in the spirit of unsolicited “happy academic” reflections and advice, I thought I’d pile on a bit about my experiences with writing a dissertation way back when.
Anyway, like Collin, I’ll wish to all the summer dissertation and thesis writers. And remember: just sit down and do it and it will all be fine.
Right now, Bill H-D (when he isn’t eating, drinking, or juggling) is at a conference in Denmark, Collin is getting ready to go to the Rhetoric Society of America conference, though he is writing here about the Computers and Writing Conference, and, more specifically the “Get Info” project, where presenters offer one minute “teases” or “trailers” on their presentation. Here’s an example from Dan Anderson, though I’m not sure if all of these have to be or are going to be electronic.
I, on the other hand, am trying to get myself motivated to do a little house-cleaning and a little more gardening. I’ll check in on my online class today, though the big day will be tomorrow (a rough draft for peer review is due). I have a couple of meetings next week. And I know I’m playing golf on Monday, at least. In other words, I am most certainly not preparing for a conference.
Originally, I had planned on going to the Computers and Writing conference this year. C&W is easily my favorite annual conference. In short, these are my people. But I didn’t go last year because I couldn’t justify/afford two trips to the San Francisco Bay area in one year, and I’m not going this year also because of money. Mostly.
What it boils down to is the support at EMU for travel, like many under-funded universities, is less than stellar. I can generally get enough money to cover one conference, two if one of those two is cheap. I had originally planned on going to the CCCCs in Chicago and to C&W, but while the CCCCs was not too expensive for me this year (I drove), it wasn’t exactly cheap, either. And Lubbock was going to pretty expensive. Before I even thought about the conference registration fee, I think travel and lodging was going to be close to a grand.
So basically, I did a cost/benefit analysis and Lubbock came up short. Not to be too crass or anything, but I don’t really need to go to conferences anymore, certainly not in the way I did when I was seeking a job and then seeking tenure. And, no offense to the folks in Lubbock (Lubbockers? Lubbockians? Lubbockites?), at this stage of my life, if I’m going to spend $1,000 of my own money to go someplace, that someplace has to be one where I’d actually want to visit on purpose. C&W and the Buddy Holly Center just isn’t enough of a draw for me.
Besides, I’ve got enough going on this summer. I’ve already mentioned my online teaching; beyond that, my “to do” list includes getting a research project on blog writing going, getting my defunct textbook online, revising the layouts of my blogs, setting up a blog/web space for stuff on writing for the web, setting up a blog/web space for an online version of a graduate course I’m going to teach next year, getting geared up to be the interim writing program administrator, etc., etc., etc. There’s a ton of things to do around the house, it is golfing season, and there’s family travel plans, including an August trip to Europe. Looking at it now, it kind of feels like going to C&W this year would have just been “piling on.”
Oh well, have fun in Texas. And I’ll certainly see everyone next year at C&W in Detroit. In fact, since I will more or less not have any travel or lodging expenses, I might even just “attend” and not present….
From an Inside Higher Ed article titled “Overexposed?” comes this:
Diana Blaine, who lectures on feminist theory, recently linked her blog to an online photo album that has topless photos of her near a painting of a topless woman, and at “Burning Man,� an annual weeklong festival in Nevada where clothing is optional.
After a student who has made a habit of criticizing Blaine on his blog, “ Cardinal Martini,� linked to the photos, an NBC station in Los Angeles reported that the pictures are “causing concern,� bringing Blaine even more exposure.
Okay….
First off, USC (where Blaine teaches) has basically said that she hasn’t violated any of their policies, so they aren’t pursuing any action against her. And this is a good thing since these photos etc. (there are links in the article, if you’re curious) are on her Flickr account and her own web server and such.
Second, while I understand and basically support the feminist politics that Blaine is putting in play here, it personally strikes me as falling into the category of “too much information.” Or let me put it to you this way: you won’t be seeing any topless or otherwise exposed pics of me either here or on my unofficial blog anytime soon.
Third and perhaps most distrubring are the angry student(s) keeping a blog that seems directed at attacking Blaine. She seems to be taking it in stride, but if I had former/current students who seemed hell-bent on this sort of attack against me, I don’t think I’d be quite as passive about it.