stevendkrause.com

I haven’t had a chance to read all of this, but I wanted to post a link before I forgot, before I restart my browser and computer, and before I start grading. This is “A snapshot of student reading habits over two decades,” from a UC-Berkeley News website. Since I don’t have the time to do the reading right now (ironically enough), I just stuck with the top 10 lists, and just to make it even easier, I’ll just stick here with the top 2:

• 1987: #1 The Color Purple (Alice Walker); #2 The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
• 1997: #1 The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) #2 A Hundred Secret Senses (Amy Tan)
• 2007: #1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling) #2 title unspecified (J.K. Rowling)

There’s a discussion going on the WPA-L mailing list right now about advice for PhD programs; the basic request was to come up with a “top 10″ list of PhD programs in composition and rhetoric, but it would appear to me that most people on the list resisted that temptation pretty quickly. As they should, of course. This did bring back for me this post from a month ago, but I liked this post from Paul Kei Matsuda’s blog that Mike Garcia of a “top 10″ of advice on what to think about when choosing a PhD program. This is a heck of a lot more useful than a list of ten schools that may have or may not have earned their reputations.

From the NYT, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” Basically, some of these professional bloggers are working to a point where they are hurting themselves:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Well, I think you can substitute “blogging” with occupations/pursuits/situations like “graduate school” or “working in a chicken processing plant” or “being homeless” or the like. It isn’t hard to think of things more dangerous than professional blogging. Still, it is a reason why it seems to me that it is better to be an amateur blogger.

I might be able to use this in the Writing for the World Wide Web class this spring….

Via the wpa-l mailing list, I learned about two different and oddly related articles out there in the blogosphere: “What Is a Composition and Rhetoric Doctorate?” from Inside Higher Ed and “What is Rhet/Comp for?” from Mark Bauerlein in the CHE. The IHE article is reporting on a session from the current CCCCs about the “split” between composition and rhetoric, the future of PhD programs in the field, and the shift into more “media” and technology oriented kinds of things. The Bauerlein piece, basically, is him wondering why it is that the field of comp/rhet, when they should have the answer for solving writing problems in the workplace and everywhere else, is worrying about things like social justice, identity, inequality, etc.

Nothing new under the sun down there in NOLA, as far as I can tell.
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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.

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.

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.

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?

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….

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?