Posts

Posted on

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….

Posted on

Talking Points Memo Hilarious Romney Ad

Makes some pretty good points, but in the end, I couldn’t justify the effort it would take to participate in the daily KOS’ campaign. Besides the fact that I have a hard time getting fired up to go through the whole primary voting rig-a-ma-roll for what amounts to a practical joke, I am a little worried that this little joke (ha-ha– let’s vote for Romney) will lead to nominee Romney and then president Romney. As Jack “who?” Lessenberry said/wrote, the last time Michganders did that, they voted for Reagan. And that turned out freakin’ hilarious, didn’t it?

Posted on

Does anyone know anything about Scrivener?

I was talking on the phone the other day with an old friend of mine and in the course of our meandering conversation, her mentioned/recommended Scrivener, an Apple only software that is a word processor that is designed for “writers” with all kinds of compelling-looking features. You can try it 30 days for free and it’s only $40 after that, so I will probably monkey around with it anyway. But I’m sort of curious if anyone reading this message now has played around with it themselves.

The main question I have in my own mind is this: is this software that will help me be more efficient/”write better,” or is this software that will help me procrastinate/goof off?

Posted on

A week of school done/some links from the week

This has been one of those weeks where stuff has piled up and then cascaded by me. One thing after another, and yet, not really that much of significance at the same time. If that makes sense. The one thing that I did learn/remind myself about is that “time management” with any kind of release time, sabbatical lite or otherwise, because I felt like I spent way WAY too much time getting my class in line, way WAY too little time working on my sabbatical lite project, and basically no time blogging.

So, in an effort to at least get caught up on the blogging, I offer a variety of links to stuff I’ve been reading lately:

And then today, I came across a couple of handy videos. First, there’s this one on Facebook:

Kind of interesting, though some of the connections they’re making here between the Facebook crowd and the CIA seem like they might be a bit of a stretch to me.

And, on a more cheerful note, this CommonCraft video about Online Photo Sharing:

Definitely a teachable moment here….

Posted on

I might very well vote for a Republican– sort of

The Michigan primaries are coming up on Tuesday, but it’s going to be meaningless for the Democrats because of squabbling within the party. As I understand it, when the state party moved up its primary date with permission from the national party, the national organizers said that Michigan’s delegates won’t count. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards aren’t campaigning at all (Dennis “rhymes with spinach” Kucinich is making some stops though). Obama and Edwards aren’t going to be on the ballot and there are no write-ins allowed. So basically, if you don’t want to vote for Clinton or Kucinich, you’re only choice is to vote for uncommitted, as this Ann Arbor News article about a group pushing for “uncommitted” explains.

First off, this is just bullshit. People can complain about the system in Iowa or New Hampshire all they want, and maybe they have a point, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of stupidness that is the way we pick candidates for president. The idea that I can’t even write in the name of the candidate I want (Obama) is ridiculous, and voting for uncommitted is the same as not voting at all. I don’t know what the right way to do these things, but what’s going on this year– especially in Michigan (Florida too, I think)– is definitely the wrong way.

Democrats for MittAnyway, this is the climate that just might make me vote for Mitt Romney. This is part of a campaign/joke over at the Daily KOS, which is explained here and here. Basically, the idea is to vote for Mitt and thus prolong division in the Republican party and Romney’s campaign. As the Daily KOS puts it, “We want more of that money spent trashing his fellow Republicans. We want an unsettled field with Republicans fragmented and fighting. We want the theocons (Huckabee), the neocons (McCain), and the corportate cons (Romney) to maintain viable top-tier candidates in the race for as long as possible, since it fuels their civil war. Heck, if we truly hit the jackpot, we might even get a brokered GOP convention.”

It’s an intriguing idea. If it’s easy to do, I will probably do it. But I’m not sure I can vote for a Republican even as a joke….

Posted on

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.