Steven D. Krause

See this article from the December 10 Chronicle of Higher Education,“Help Wanted, Please: Applicant pools for top administrative posts are shrinking.” Actually, by “top administrative posts,” they mean university presidents (what, there are other administrative posts?), but I suspect a lot of what’s here applies to dean-level positions too. The fall-off in applications is described as something of a “mystery” in the article, but the two general explanations offered don’t seem that mysterious at all. First, a lot of people aren’t applying for these jobs because of the increased level of fund-raising demands associated with these positions. Second, a lot of people aren’t applying because of the mixed signals they get from the “head hunter” services that are routinely used for “top level” administrative positions.

My initial reaction to this is sort of summed up in the title of this post: never say never because never is a long time and I (hopefully) have another 25 or 30 years of “happy academic” life to experience, but other than a stint as a “department-level” sort of administrator (a Writing Program Administrator position, director of a graduate program, an assistant department chair position, etc.), I cannot imagine being an “Administrator” (as in the dean’s office, the provost’s office, or the president’s office). Being a “capital A” Administrator defeats the purpose of being a “happy academic,” doesn’t it? Deans and the like are in the office every day all day long, they do nothing but attend meetings, they write reports that are read by other deans, they deal with problems both petty and not, and they hardly ever see students. If I wanted that kind of job, I’d go back to school for an MBA and try to get a job with Ford or something.

And for the academic-type who sees herself as making an accademic contribution to the world as a “top level Administrator,” I have to think the idea of being vetted by a consulting firm (as opposed to other academics) is probably unpleasant, and the prospect of being an institutional fund-raiser/cheerleader is probably not attractive, either. Like I said, this doesn’t seem that “mysterious” to me.

By the way, EMU has hired a consultant in its current presidential search. My hope is that someone on that hiring committee reads this article and notices that a couple of the successful searches for “top level Administrators” that have been done recently have minimized the role of the consultants.

I’ve noticed two interesting technological developments at EMU. This might be old news at other places, but it is news here, a school that is one of the poor step children universities in Michigan (at least compared to favorite children U of Michigan, Michigan State, and, to a lesser extent, Wayne State).

* EMU is going to have a contract with Napster. It’s going to be free for students in the dorms, $10 a semester for students off campus, and $7 a month for faculty and staff. I’m not that happy about the fee for faculty and staff, but hey, I don’t download that much music anyway. I don’t know if this is the sort of deal that is happening at a lot of other campuses around the country, but it seems like a reasonably good deal. And according to the FAQ of the web site linked above, EMU is doing this as part of an “educational effort” and also as an alternative to illegally downloads. That’s probably true, but I bet the “legal and supported” service will ease the crunch on dorm computer networks.

* Speaking of networks: This is the last week of classes around here, and the parking lot in front of the building where I teach was an absolute zoo. I could go on and on about that, but I won’t. Anyway, while waiting for a spot to open up (and one never did open up), I stopped and opened up my laptop. I had left my airport card/wifi connection on and was about to turn it off when I found a connection. I don’t know where the signal was coming from (the nearby dorms? an administrative office with an especially strong signal?), but I made a connection and I was on and able to look over a few student’s web sites.

I don’t know exactly what the moral of that story is, but I will say this: I think I have better internet connectivity in the parking lot than I do in my office.

Will Hochman alerted the readers of tech-rhet to this article from last Sunday’s New York Times book section, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back” by Sarah Glazer. According to Glazer, ebooks are the fastest growing segment of the publishing market and are catching on with people who are used to reading stuff on cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other computer screens.

Two things that occur to me with this article:

* Glazer talks a fair amount about libraries that have started to use ebooks. Both the EMU and the U of M libraries have some ebooks, and personally, I hate them. You have to be online to read them, which dramatically limits where you can read them, and because you read them with a simple browser, there’s no good way to annotate them. Icky.

* There seems to be some good evidence that suggests that the next generation of devices for reading ebooks is just around the corner. Glazer writes about some of what I had read in other places about improvements in displays and “electronic ink,” technologies that would allow a display that could be rolled up or folded like a newspaper. But ebooks have caught on (to the extent that they really have “caught on”) as things to be read on devices that do other things, too. Like Glazer, I used to think that we’d have stand-alone ebook reading devices; now I think what we’ll see in a year or two are devices that do a bunch of things, like a reader that also had PDA software, or maybe a cell phone with some kind of expandable reading screen. Maybe it’ll be a sort of iPod device with an attachable backlit display, something bigger than that little window. That’d be cool….

As requested, here’s a picture of me in the truck we rented on Friday, the one I used to almost kill myself with the snow blower (as previously mentioned).

Last year, on the old version of my unofficial blog (which I don’t want to link to right now because that old blog is just full of spam), I wrote about making my Grandma Krause’s Peffer Nuts cookies. Everyone has their thing at Christmas, and for me, these cookies/things are it. As I wrote last year, “Not really like the traditional German cookie Pfeffernusse, Grandma Krause’s Pepper Nuts are hard little nubbins of cookies that resemble little nuts, or, as a friend of mine recently put it, dog food. They have a pleasant crunchiness that tastes very similar to a gingerbread cookie, though not quite as strong, and, as the recipe makes clear, not ginger but anise.”

I made them last year, and I made them again yesterday, but this time, I had the help of a standing mixer. My lord, what a difference. It’s still quite a project because this recipe makes “a pail full,” as my grandma put it. There’s a lot of rolling out of the dough, and it just takes a long time to bake all of these things. But the trusty new KitchenAid mixer made getting the dough together not much more work than dumping the ingredients into the machine and turning it on. Sweet.

Anyway, here’s the recipe again, slightly altered based on how I did it this year:

1 cup dark karo syrup
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup butter, softened (or margarine or crisco or, in the old days, lard)
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup hot water
2 tsps baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp anise oil
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
7 cups (or so) flour

1.In your trusty KitchenAid standing mixer mix together the syrup, molasses, butter, sugar and hot water until well combined. If you lack a standing mixer, you can do this with a large bowl and a hand mixer.

2. Add everything else but the flour and continue mixing until combined.

3. Start adding the flour, about a cup at a time, mixing each time until the flour is well incorporated. If you have a trusty KitchenAid standing mixer, lucky you! You can keep mixing this until all seven cups of flour are combined. I shifted from the regular mixing paddle to the bread hook attachment after the fifth cup of flour.

If you don’t have a standing mixer (unlucky you!), you’ll probably have to give up on the hand mixer after the fourth or fifth cup of flour and knead the rest of the flour in as you might with the making of bread or pizza dough.

Either way, you may have to add a little more or a little less flour to get a dough that is moist but not sticky.

4. Take about a handful of the finished dough and roll it out on a lightly floured surface in long snakes that are about the width of your pinky. Lay these out on a cookie sheet. You can create different layers of the dough snakes by separating them with parchment paper or plastic sheeting.

5. Chill these dough snakes. Grandma Krause’s recipe said to chill “overnight or for at least a couple of hours,” but I stuck the dough snakes in the freezer for about a half-hour or so and that turned out fine.

6. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Take each snake and cut them into tiny bite-sized pieces of dough. Put the little dough pieces onto a cookie sheet, being sure to spread them out so they don’t touch either. The cookies will expand slightly in size.

7. Bake about 9 minutes or until golden brown. Cool them on a clean counter or a clean cookie sheet and store them in a sealed container.

One more thing that I learned last year: initially, the peffer nuts will be soft. But if you let them sit for a few days (covered, of course), they will get a bit stale and crunchy, which is the way that I actually prefer them.

See this, “IT Issues & Strategic Viewpoints in Higher Education” which was forwarded to the tech-rhet mailing list by the ever-wise and useful Nick Carbone. It is a report/summary of a survey conducted “among selected IT executives and professionals of director level and above from 52 colleges and universities across the country: doctorate-granting institutions, master’s colleges and universities, baccalaureate colleges, and associate’s colleges.” They list the “key results” on this web site; the two that struck me were:

* While 93% of colleges surveyed buy commercial CMS products, on average only 30% of their faculty use CMS to create Web sites, manage their courses, and integrate the Web into teaching and learning.

* CMS products from the vendors Angel (www.cyberlearninglabs.com), Desire2Learn (www.desire2learn.com) and eCollege (www.ecollege.com) were uniformly praised by their users. In contrast, WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) were routinely criticized for skyrocketing prices, bugs, and ease-of-use problems.

There’s something here about how this was among the 14 universities, so I’m not sure that means that they talked to 52 people at 14 different places, or if these conclusions only have to do with the university people and not the community college people, or what.

They also talk here about the Sakai Project, which is an open source CMS tool being put together by a bunch of different universities, including that quaint liberal arts college over in Ann Arbor. Interesting stuff.

See this item, “Researchers create tool to automatically search handwritten historical documents.” Here’s a useful quote about all this from the lead researcher, R. Manmatha:

“Right now, searching a scanned handwritten document is very hard to do. Scanned historical documents are basically images, or pictures, and currently can only be searched if someone manually transcribes the documents or creates and index of their contents. This is time consuming and expensive to do. Given the cost, most handwritten documents are never transcribed or indexed,” Manmatha says. “But there is an enormous amount of handwritten, historical material.”

Pretty neat. There is a more detailed explanation and demonstration here.

Here’s a picture of my snowblower. I want to say “our (as in both Annette and I) snowblower,” but she takes now ownership in such things. And perhaps with good reason. I bought it last summer at a yard sale for $30 or $40. The guy I bought it from (who frankly needed the money) got it to start and run for a few minutes, but when I tried it again in October or so, nothing.

So I took it down to a place in Ypsi. But when I took it down there about a month ago, we still had a minivan, and as loyal readers know, we ain’t got no minivan no more. So, to get this thing back from the hardware store/small engine repair place, I first had to rent a pickup truck (which was fine because we needed something like that to get the Christmas tree stuff back home and because driving around a pickup truck perked up my manliness). That didn’t cost that much because the auto insurance is paying for up to $25 a day for a rental car, and we had to pay the $10 difference.

Then I needed a ramp to get the thing in and out of the truck– there’s no way that Annette and I could lift this monster up. So I bought a piece of unfinished plywood for $20. And then, I of course had to pay for the repairs, which cost $95 because they essentially rebuilt the carburetor and replaced a bunch of broken parts.

The “priceless” part of all this was getting it home. My plywood ramp, which worked brilliantly at the hardware store/small engine parking lot, slipped out from under me when I tried to use it at home in the driveway. I’m not entirely sure how I managed to not seriously injure myself and destroy the newly repaired/old hunk-o-junk snowblower, but the board slipped completely off the bed of the pickup, I fell, and the snowblower stayed up on the tailgate door with a few inches to spare.

But hey, it’s a happy ending, so far. Like I said, I wasn’t hurt, the snowblower didn’t fall, I did ultimately manage to get the ramp system to work, and the newly tuned and nearly bulletproof machine cranks up and works like a charm.

Now we just need snow, and a lot of it.

See Fuck the South. Since I’m applying for a couple of jobs that are actually in the south and/or red states, I think I’ll just let this stand as is.