Category: The Happy Academic

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Wayne Booth, RIP

I just learned from a post on the WPA-L mailing list that Wayne Booth passed away yesterday. According to the Wikipedia entry on him I link to above, he was 84, and according to the discussion on WPA-L, he had Alzheimer’s.

I have kind of have a soft-spot for Booth’s work because one of my first “big” projects as a Ph.D. student a dozen years ago now was to give a presentation on Booth’s work in a rhetorical theory class. I hadn’t read much of his work before that assignment, but I ended up reading quite a bit for that class spiel. I especially remember a book he wrote called The Company We Keep, which I remember being a particularly readable and humane alternative to some of the theory I was trying to digest. And I am hoping to soon get on with reading Booth’s last book, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.

Thanks for the inspiration and fine words, Dr. Booth.

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If Academic Blogging is a Carnival, Where's the Cotton Candy?

I don’t have a lot of time to write about this now (I’m way behind on my grading), but I’d highly recommend the CHE article “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas” by Henry “his real name” Farrell, who is himself a member of the Crooked Timber blogging collective.

It’s a great piece. After a few opening paragraphs where I thought Farrell was going to go down the really tired pseudoanonymous blogger argument thing again, he gets into swing with an argument that I and plenty of other academic bloggers have made for a while now: “blogging isn’t a hobby; it’s an integral part of their scholarly identity” and blogging should have some place in the realm of academic publishing. Here’s a longer quote:

Why are so many academics beginning to blog? Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won’t replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.

Right. And that’s what we’ve been saying for years now. I’m just glad that Farrell said it as well as he did and that the CHE published it. Go read it; you’ll be glad you did.

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The "Intelligent Design" trial: the inside story

Via The Education Wonks comes this article from The New York Times, “In Pennsylvania, It Was Religion vs. Science, Pastor vs. Ph.D., Evolution vs. the Half-Fish.” This is of course about the trial having to do with creationism — okay, so-called “Intelligent Design”– being taught in science classes. I haven’t been following the story of this court case that closely, though I am concerned as an academic and, ultimately, I suppose I’m concerned as a parent, too.

Anyway, this NYT piece strikes me as kind of unusual for them because it is sort of taking the People magazine/Entertainment Tonight approach– you know, the “inside story,” the “people behind the scenes.” Here’s a juicy section:

The trial presents a particular challenge for the journalists from science magazines. In the courtroom hallway during a break last week, Celeste Biever, a reporter for NewScientist, was interviewing a courtroom regular, a bearded local pastor who says he considers evolution a lie.

“You want half-bird, half-fish?” she asked, drawing a dotted line on her notepad.

“Yeah, why not,” the pastor said.

Later, out of the pastor’s hearing, Ms. Biever said with fascination, “He thinks evolution is a bird turning into a fish turning into a rabbit” – one straight line of common descent, instead of a tree with common roots.

Ms. Biever was finding that she could not cover the trial the way she would a classic courtroom face-off. When you put intelligent design up against evolution, she said, “It’s not a head-on collision between two scientific arguments; it’s orthogonal,” with the opponents coming at each other from right angles.

“It’s apples and oranges,” Ms. Biever said.

Her readers do not take intelligent design seriously, she said, so she was striving for “local color.” Her readers want to know, she said, “Why is this happening here?”

“We’re not just science cheerleaders, and I don’t want to overlook any valid argument for intelligent design,” Ms. Biever said. “As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t heard one yet.”

As for the pastor, after four days of listening to science experts dismantling the case for intelligent design, he was unimpressed.

“They’re babblers,” said the pastor, the Rev. Jim Grove, who leads a 40-member independent Baptist church outside of Dover. “The more Ph.D.’s you get, it seems like the further away from God you get.”

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"How to email a professor"

Via Dr. B’s blog, I found this post on Orange Crate Art: “How to e-mail a professor.” SOLID solid advice; in the near future, I’m either going to point out this entry to my students or I’m going to write up my own version of this advice (referencing Michael Leddy’s post, of course) and pass this out.

I for one like to communicate with my students via email (though I have colleagues who either would rather not have their students email or who even go so far as to say that their students cannot email them), but I do think it can be a problem. I get a lot of email– at least 100 messages a day– of various levels of importance. I get a lot of spam and junk of course, and while my “junk filter” works relatively well (I’m using the Mail software that comes standard on the Mac nowadays), I also get a lot of junk and spam in my inbox, all mixed in with some mailing list mail, important school mail, student mail, advertisements, mail from friends, etc. And the “student mail,” too often with a subject line like “hey,” can disappear into the mix in the inbox, or, far worse, be determined by my software to be “junk.”

Anyway, the advice offered by Leddy is pretty darn good, the sort of “common sense” that sometimes needs to be directly taught in order to be realized.

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The Happy Academic ponders not being on the job market and not being an administrator

This is the season in which folks start posting potential job searches to mailing lists, where folks start polishing up their CVs and making hotel reservations for MLA. Not me– not this year, and probably not ever again.

Never say never, of course. But since my wife has started on the tenure-track here at EMU, we’re probably here for the duration, for better or worse (and it is mostly for better).

I have to say that it is a somewhat odd feeling, though. My wife and I had been “on the market” pretty much since 1996; some years, we were somewhat casual about our searches, and in other years, like last year, we were very close to taking different jobs. But now that we’re settled, I’m merely a spectator and it is a weird sort of feeling. Good, but still weird.

Anyway, I started thinking about this in part because of the CHE article “The Sixth Time is the Charm,” by Esther “not her real name” Davis. Basically, Davis offers advice to current job seekers based on her own six years “on the market” in the social sciences. My and my wife’s experiences are pretty similar to Davis’.

Also in ths issue of the CHE is an article with the inviting title of “Crossing Over to the Dark Side” by Jean and George “real names” Dowdall. I think it’s a worthwhile piece for faculty like me to consider. Like many faculty who have been granted tenure, I have thought (albeit very briefly) about pursuing an administrative position. But this article simple re-confirms my reasons for not doing this. Among other things, the Dowdalls warn potential deans and other full-time adminstrators that moving from a faculty position to an administrative one means:

  • an “academic calendar change” (meaning that they expect administrators to show up every day during business hours, including the summer);
  • being required to work within a pretty strict system of supervisors and supervising;
  • having to work with people you don’t want to work with (though faculty have to do this, too); and
  • inevitably making some decisions that will piss some people off (my paraphrase there).

Oh yeah, one thing not mentioned in this article: the dress code changes– I mean, they don’t call them “the suits” for nothing.

There are some quasi-administrative positions within the English department– director of graduate studies or coordinator of the writing program, for example– that I wouldn’t mind doing. But being a full-time administrator? No, thanks.

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Reining in grades, reining in "the university?"

I’ve come across three kinda short-ish, unrelated, and still somehow connected articles about the “state of the university” and what that might mean in terms of where where we’re going in the short, medium, and long(ish) terms.

First, there’s this CNN article about Princeton trying to control the percentage of “As” it gives out to students. Predictably, the administration wants to give out fewer “excellent” grades.

Second, there’s this interesting discussion in Inside Higher Ed: “What Should the U.S. Commission Do?” As the first paragraph of the article says:

On Monday, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the creation of a national Commission on the Future of Higher Education. She said the panel would help develop a “comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education,� exploring such issues as access, affordability, and higher education’s role in reversing America’s declining competitiveness in the world economy.

The rest of this article is different folks view on the whole thing, which basically seems to be “it’s too early to tell/we don’t want any more regulations/it’s never a bad idea to study our practices.”

And third, also on the Inside Higher Ed web site, comes this Q&A with the writers of a new book called Remaking the American University. Among other things, the authors are worried about universities becoming all about “the bottom line” (as in “What worries us most is that universities and colleges have become so preoccupied with succeeding in a world of markets that they too often forget the need to be places of public purpose as well.”), the problems with rankings by outfits like U.S. News and World Report, the problems with doing institutional assessment (“people don’t like assessment if it is done to them”), problems with academic publishing, and about technology in the classroom (“Not until faculty members, for their own reasons and purposes, decide that Web-based instruction offers both important and sustainable advantages will major changes in collegiate teaching actually happen — regardless of how attractive distance education becomes”).

I have a lot of different thoughts about this, but because I have a lot of other things to do right now, I’ll just list them and let you fill in the blanks at your leisure:

  • Few things are less interesting to me than grades.
  • One of these things includes institutional assessment.
  • I am sure that the ancient Greeks also complained about grade inflation at Plato’s Academy. They might have complained about institutional assessment, too.
  • I suspect that this commission to study American universities will not go far because a) “No Child Left Behind” has been a bad policy that is unlikely to be repeated easily, b) American universities pretty much have their act together in terms of assessment and competiting on an international level, and c) if this commission turns into a “political witch hunt,” then I suspect they won’t get as far as they want to get.
  • Of course, I agree that it’s a bad thing for universities to remake themselves in the model of for-profit corporations. On the other hand, if the funding for public universities is going to steadily decrease, then the money to pay the bills has to come from somewhere. And tuition increases alone ain’t going to make up the difference.
  • The only thing that is reassuring about all this is history because academia has more or less been down these paths many times before.

Update:
My colleague Bill Hart-Davidson sent me a link to this article on Economist.com, “The brain business.” It’s an excellent piece that shows the view from “across the pond” and how similar it is to here. Oh, and there is a list of the “top 20 universities in the world,” based on some dubious measures by a university in Japan. Of the 20 schools, one was Japanese, two were British, and 13 were in the U.S.

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Go read My Freshman Year right now

I finished reading Rebekah “not her real name” Nathan’s book My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student the other day. I say “not her real name” because the author had originally written the book under a pseudonym about students at AnyU, but it’s been pretty well documented that Nathan is really Cathy Small and AnyU is actually Northern Arizona University.

I think that anyone who teaches college and who ever wonders what the heck these students are thinking should read this book. No, should be required to read this book. About a month ago, there was a discussion on the WPA-L mailing list I posted about here, one where folks were complaining about “the students today” in relation to the Tommy Lee Goes to College show. (BTW, I did actually watch parts of a couple of episodes of the show; I didn’t find the students that surprising or even that “bad” or whatever. I just thought the show was kind of boring). These folks complaining about students need to really really read this book.

I don’t think Nathan’s/Small’s book says anything about the student experience that is too surprising or even that different from (what I remember of) my college experience. But it’s her willingness to really partake in the contemporary student experience that is most striking to me, I think. Nathan/Small has real empathy for her students as she writes this book, and I guess it’s just refreshing to see some educator to be as undertanding of students as we educators would hope students to be of the world around them.

This is not to say that Nathan/Small doesn’t have any critiques of contemporary students. For example, the chapter on international students’ views about the general ignorance of the world outside of the US American students have is pretty effective, and she is critical of the “corporate state” of affairs at most American universities nowadays and how this is driven in part by student demands. But she does a good job of complicating these problems. This book never reads like a “those dumb kids today” critique because Nathan/Small goes to great lengths to examine why students have the perspectives they have, and she points out frequently enough that in many ways, the problems of students today aren’t a whole lot different from the problems of students in her generation or even in the 19th century.

My only problem with the book is its focus on “traditional students:” 18-22 year olds living in the dorms. This isn’t really Nathan’s/Small’s problem exactly because this is what she sets out to do, but it’d be interesting for someone to do an ethnographic study like this of more non-traditional students. Of course, it’d be a heck of a lot more difficult to follow non-trads around for a year….

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Getting out of NOLA

From the September 16 CHE comes this narrative by Bill Lavender, who runs a creative writing program at the University of New Orleans. Pretty scary stuff; I’m glad that he and his girlfriend got out of there, and I of course wish him and all the folks in NOLA and all academic-types (happy and otherwise) good luck and a speedy return.

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Health care trends at EMU?

Faculty received an email today from the EMU-AAUP President Howard Bunsis about a number of things, including the status of negotiations between the EMU Lecturers and the administration on their contract. (Two points of explanation are perhaps in order here: first, the lecturers– full-time and permanent instructors who are not on the tenure-track– have their own union that is different from the faculty’s union. Second, EMU has a strong tradition of collective bargaining, and the faculty union is not merely a “gentlemen’s agreement” of a group. We strike. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been on two: one that last about a week, and one that lasted about seven hours).

According to the update that Bunsis sent, the administration is offering lecturers a 2% pay raise but they want to charge them up to $2200 a year for insurance (for the “family plan” insurance). Bunsis said that, assuming an average lecturer salary of $31,500 and an inflation rate of 3%, the package that the university is offering lectuers really represents an 8% cut in wages. That probably isn’t completely true for a variety of different reasons: for one thing, it’s hard to predict next year’s inflation rate and how it will effect people (and even Bunsis, who, like most of the union folks, prone to exaggeration in their favor, offers a “non-inflation impacted” figure of a 5% cut as well). For another, I am sure that the $2200 a year is the most expensive insurance option, and I’d be willing to bet that there are plenty of lecturers who will not pay that much for their insurance.

Still, this is an alarming development, for the lecturers now and, presumably, for the faculty later. Now, I know (as does everyone else around here) that most faculty-types at most other colleges and universities, like most employees at most other businesses, pay for a portion of their insurance out of pocket. But here’s the thing: for years and years, the various unions at EMU have been willing to ask for less money in base salary than a lot of comparative institutions in exchange for excellent benefits. If the administration wants to start tearing away at the bennies and they want to start offering contracts that ultimately represent a pay decrease, well, that does lower incentive, doesn’t it?

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New Year's Resolutions

Today’s the first day of classes here at EMU. Since I don’t teach today, my original plan was to actually not be at school today, but it turns out that I have a Faculty Council meeting I need to attend. Oh well; summer is over.

I’ve thought of the beginning of the school year as the beginning of “the year” pretty much my whole life and certainly since I started teaching 17 years ago. Jeesh, 17 years ago. I was a graduate assistant back then. I was 22 years old in an MFA creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, teaching first year composition about three or four months after I finished my BA. Ah, memories….

Anyway, since I’m at the beginning of the new year, I thought it might be good to make some new year’s resolutions (and I also thought that if I made them here, I might stick to them, too). So here they are, more or less in this order:

  • Get into shape. This might seem like the sort of thing I would mention on my unofficial blog, but I mention it here because I have an academic schedule this term that allows me few excuses for getting exercise and I really do want to make losing some weight and being a bit more healthy my top priority this semester.
  • Figure out this online teaching stuff. So far, so good, though I haven’t seen any activity on my online class yet. It’s pretty early though. And one of the things I am going to have to figure out for sure this year for my online teaching is podcasting and (possibly) screencasting, too. I just found out my CCCCs proposal was accepted; it’s called (right now) “Broadcast Composition : Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and for the time-being, it’s going to be about using things like podcasting and other “lower-end” multimedia to supplement my online teaching. But that could change and evolve.
  • Read. I have mentioned this in the recent past on my blog, but basically, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) finished with my textbook project, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) pretty much off of the job market, and I have therefore reached a point in my career where I don’t have to produce scholarship in order to participate in that “academic game.” So, for a while at least, I think I’m going to become mainly a consumer of scholarship and read, both current scholarship and some of the things before.
  • Blog. And despite what Ivan Tribble said again, I stand by what I said back in July: While he did have some valid points, I think blogging can help someone on the job market and I think it helps those of us who are more “established” in academic careers too. To read more about Tribble II, I’d suggest reading Collin’s entry about this. By the way: it occurs to me that it is a little– I don’t know, strange/funny/ironic — that Tribble in this article seems to think that blogging under one’s own name can be okay and yet he’s sticking to his pseduonym here. Hmmm…..