Steven D. Krause

Funny what posting something that rubs people the wrong way will do for hit-counts. I’m used to getting somewhere around 25 or so a day; yesterday, it was just over 100, and today, at the current rate, it looks like I’m going to top 150. That’s not huge by most standards of course, but for someone who keeps a pretty modest little “academic” blog that has mostly to do with comp/rhet, technology, and EMU, that’s pretty impressive.

Anywho, I thought some folks here might be interested in some of my “happy academic” posts of the past. Sadly, Blogger doesn’t support categories, so if you’re somehow interested in what I’ve said lately about these things, you’ll just have to sort through it.

HA! comments I’m especially happy about include:

* The posts last October that started it all.

* “Should I get a Master’s Degree? (scroll down all the way to December 1 for this one.

* “Should I get a PhD? which is an unusually “unhappy” piece of advice.

* “How to survive a PhD program (assuming you decided to go into one in the first place).”

* “Should I get an MFA in Creative Writing?” a good news/bad news story. (In case you were wondering: yes, I have one of these degrees, too).

There are other posts too, but isn’t this enough, especially in terms of self-promotion?

And for those of you who want to skip all these links and wonder what makes me a “Happy Academic,” I’ll boil it down to two reasons:

* I had a “real job” once, the kind of thing described in “Dilbert,” and the best day of that doesn’t come close to the worst day of this; and

* Given that there are millions of people in this world who have to make a living by doing stuff like mining coal, sewing carpets for pennies an hour, digging ditches, scrubbing toilets, selling their bodies, selling drugs, committing crimes, practicing law, farming rice, begging, or nothing at all, I feel like I ain’t got nothing to complain about, ultimately.

I would have written this in response to the profgrrrl here, but I didn’t have enough space in Haloscan to respond, and then I remembered the article I was trying to grab on to in my head.

profgrrrl asks in part “To me, the “problematic” case, if there were to be such a thing, would be the pseudblog that hides its pseudonymity (pretends to be under a real name). Don’t know if those exist, but …” I don’t know either, though I suspect there’s at least one blogger out there who is trying to pass with a “real name,” and I’d bet that that person is an academic.

But the point is identity is always a big ol’ convoluted mess, only more so in electronic spaces like the web. One good explanation of this comes from this article I recall from way back when and which I actually found through a google search just now, Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” This is a somewhat dated piece of course (published originally in 1991), but in it, Stone goes to great lengths to theorize the problems of identity in a very literal sense in cyberspace. Here’s an excellent example of what I mean:

Let us begin with a person I will call Julie, on a computer conference in New York in 1985. Julie was a totally disabled older woman, but she could push the keys of a computer with her headstick. The personality she projected into the “net”–the vast electronic web that links computers allover the world–was huge. On the net, Julie’s disability was invisible and irrelevant. Her standard greeting was a big, expansive “HI!!!!!!” Her heart was as big as her greeting, and in the intimate electronic companionships that can develop during on-line conferencing between people who may never physically meet, Julie’s women friends shared their deepest troubles, and she offered them advice–advice that changed their lives. Trapped inside her ruined body, Julie herself was sharp and perceptive, thoughtful and caring.

After several years, something happened that shook the conference to the core. “Julie” did not exist. “She” was, it turned out, a middle-aged male psychiatrist. Logging onto the conference for the first time, this man had accidentally begun a discussion with a woman who mistook him for another woman. “I was stunned,” he said later, “at the conversational mode. I hadn’t known that women talked among themselves that way. There was so much more vulnerability, so much more depth and complexity. Men’s conversations on the nets were much more guarded and superficial, even among intimates. It was fascinating, and I wanted more.” He had spent weeks developing the right persona. A totally disabled, single older woman was perfect. He felt that such a person wouldn’t be expected to have a social life. Consequently her existence only as a net persona would seem natural. It worked for years, until one of Julie’s devoted admirers, bent on finally meeting her in person, tracked her down.

The news reverberated through the net. Reactions varied from humorous resignation to blind rage. Most deeply affected were the women who had shared their innermost feelings with Julie. “I felt raped, ” one said. “I felt that my deepest secrets had been violated.” Several went so far as to repudiate the genuine gains they had made in their personal and emotional lives. They felt those gains were predicated on deceit and trickery.

Now, to me, this serves up the reason why identity in general is problematic on the web, and why it is particularly problematic when folks use pseudonyms. If it all stays online and if the participants in these conversations acknowledge the fluidity of identity in these spaces, then I don’t see any harm. But when it starts to cross into RL and/or the realm of the academic, well, then I see some potential problems.

How do we ever know if someone is authentic and real? Well, I suppose it’s always a crap-shoot until you’re right physically there, and even then it can be tough– this is why we wear nametags at conferences. But there’s a pretty good chance that I’m real, for example, because if you do a google search about me, you’ll find my name in other academic settings– listed as part of the EMU web sites, my name on other web sites, a publication here and there, a mention in some mailing lists, etc.

How do I know any of the folks who have been posting here with pseudonyms (like profgrrrl or bitchPhD, for example) are authentic and real? Well, I suppose in one sense in the same way, but it’s also pretty clear that both of these folks are writing as personas in a way that creates a certain separation between their pseudonym and their “real” selves.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as they might say on Seinfeld. But the tricky thing is when these things leak into each other, much in the same way that (I am just guessing) that an actor/comedian like Jerry Seinfeld is always having to re-explain to fans and such that he didn’t really hang around with those people in that New York apartment and have those wacky times.

Something that popped into my head while walking the dog this morning:

Some friends of the family (I’ll just leave it at that) recently bought a new car, a VW station wagon of some sort. It’s a nice car and all of that, but when asked why they got a station wagon instead of a mini-van, both of these friends expressed strong aversion to the concept.

Now, I too am not a fan of mini-vans, and I drive one. Why, you ask? It’s a long story, but we thought it was a good idea at the time. It’s a Plymouth Voyager, a ’98 or ’96 I think, and it’s a piece of junk. Don’t buy one. Unfortunately, at this stage of things, we’ll probably end up driving this heap into the ground because upon the purchase of our Honda Civic last spring (thumbs way up on that car, btw), the van became an “around the town” car. We’ve put less than 5,000 miles on it in the last year, and I can easily imagine driving it like that for another four or five years.

So I understand the idea of not wanting what I have. But it seems to me that most people who want the features of a mini-van but not the actual mini-van end up buying an SUV. I think that’s kind of dumb because, IMO, SUVs are dangerous, a waste of gasoline, and completely unnecessary unless you live on the side of a mountain or something like that.

At the same time, I don’t get the station wagon thing. I mean, I’m not a hater of the station wagon; in fact, one of my fondest car memories was the piece-o-crap ’79 Chevy Impala station wagon that was abandoned to me by my parents in the late 80s/early 90s. And I clearly understand not wanting an SUV (I think these friends aren’t all that crazy about them either).

But is it possible to think of a station wagon as somehow “cooler” than a mini-van? Didn’t station wagons used to be the equivalent of mini-vans? In fact, didn’t the mini-van come along as a sort of “cool” replacement for the station wagon?

Questions to ponder as my work-day begins….

An interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this morning, “Don’t be that guy” by Sarah “not her real name” Ben-Al. I think that Ben-Al is offering some interesting and good advice to folks who teach and she tells some amusing stories of some bad teachers she’s had in the past. It’s certainly a lot easier to “teach badly” than to “teach well,” and I especially agree with her arguments against teachers who try to “trick” their students with obscure test questions. Education isn’t a contest of “teacher vs. student,” and teachers who treat it that way aren’t playing fair ’cause the teacher wins every time.

However…

* Not that this is the purpose of this article, but it would probably be more useful for teachers– especially relatively young teachers– to think in terms of what to do instead of what not to do.

* Why is Ben-Al using a pseudonym here? Because she’s on the job market? Quite frankly, I would think an article written under your “real name” for CHE about teaching would look pretty good on a CV and in a job letter.

* I can’t but help contemplate the “guy” part of all this, especially in light of gendered-tinged discussion about anonymously written blogs. Have all of her bad teachers really been “guys?” And can you imagine an article written by someone named Samuel Ben-Al titled “Don’t be that gal?”

I have a busy rest of the week coming up here, with an “end of the summer term” grading push coinciding with a visit from the in-laws. But I had to post about this one more time after reading what Collin said about all this over on his blog. I don’t want to drag him into this (and I don’t think he really wants to be dragged in, either), but I like what he mentions with this post about the difference between academic blogs and blogs written by people, anonymously or not, who happen to be academics.

I wish I would have said/thought of that in the first place.

I’m a lot more interested in academic blogs than blogs that happen to be written by academics, as I think is evident in what I’ve written here in the last few days.

THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT THOSE OF YOU WHO KEEP PERSONAL BLOGS WRITTEN UNDER A PSEUDONYM ARE JUST WRONG, NOR IS THIS MY WAY OF POLICING OR JUDGING THE WAY OTHERS BLOG! Short of posting pictures of kiddie-porn and other similarly appaling things, I don’t really care what people who may (or may not) be academic post on their blogs. Do what you want.

Just thought I’d make that obvious– folks didn’t seem to get that before.

The problem I have as a reader is the line between “academic blogs” and “blogs written by people who happen to be academics” is constantly shifting. Again, Collin talks about this in smart ways here, and he more or less exemplifies the way that “the personal” shows up in academic blogs right here.

I’m not saying it’s “wrong” for Collin or anyone else to mix the “personal” with the “professional!” But what I am saying is I think it potentially problematizes the way us academics who want to “count” and “cite” blogs. This is the reason why I personally keep my “academic” musings here, and my “non-academic musings here. This is of course a completely artificial and leaky separation in aspects of my identity, but it works for me.

The last thing I would ever do is try to propose the answer. I’m just thinking with my fingers here, which is pretty much the purpose of this blog for me. (And that’s a sentence that could be dissected quite a bit– a blog with a purpose, a blog where the purpose is more for the writer than the reader {I think of the distinction between “writer-based” prose and “reader-based” prose…}, a blog where I’m trying to “think” and put on my “academic” persona, etc.)

Been an interesting day around here. As I mentioned earlier, I have found myself in the midst of a “discussion” about the use of pseudonyms in blog authorship, something I kind of feel like I stumbled into with a sidebar comment about the blog where I found the article I was discussing– see this to see what I mean. And boy (and girl), let me tell ya: if there’s one thing I know now from all this is that the people who blog under pseudonyms take this stuff seriously.

Two thoughts and then a thought with some questions:

Thought #1: I don’t know if I want to say that I’ve “seen the light” or not, but the discussion here and elsewhere has been educational in that I can see some of the reasons why folks might want to blog anonymously and/or under pseudonyms. Clearly, most the people who do this are women in “real life,” and they point to reasons why it’s important for them to preserve their privacy. I can’t critique that. Some of the folks who blog anonymously say they do so because of the unpleasant work situations they find themselves in, something I can relate to (my first academic job was less than ideal), but that isn’t the case for me now. As much as I complain about EMU, I know that on the whole, it’s a good place to work.

Now personally, I’m not sure I would blog about EMU or anything else if I felt like I might get canned or “in trouble” for what I might say, anonymous or not. But that’s a slightly different issue…

And hey, let’s face it, using a pseudonym is fun. I guess I was trying to be cute with my last post on this, but it really is like putting on a costume, isn’t it? By day, I’m a mild-mannered academic named Steven D. Krause; by night, I’m a blogger named Batman! Has a ring to it, right?

Thought #2: I think part of my “problem” here is the idea of writing under a pseudonym is so unappealing to me. I would never write scholarly things under a pseudonym, and I would only write fiction under a pseudonym if I was absolutely forced to do so. (This kind of happened to an old friend of mine. He published a couple of science fiction novels under his real name, and when they didn’t sell that well, his new publisher said he’d have to switch names).

Why wouldn’t I write under a pseudonym? Part of it is my own desire over “ownership” of my writing. Theoretically, owning your own words is impossible; but at the same time, I want to receive credit from folks who quote and cite me, and I especially want to receive the meager awards that come from academic publishing.

The other part of it is I see my writing as “public” anyway. Except for writing in a private journal (which I do occasionally) or email messages to some close friends, I always write with the a larger and “more public” audience in mind. The idea of writing for a larger and public audience is a part of conventional writing pedagogy nowadays, too. It’s one of the reasons why I would never give students an assignment like “write about a very personal and important event” because assignments like this create situations where students write an essay about something so personal that they are unwilling to share it with classmates and where they are putting me in the position of being a sort of therapist.

Thought #3 (with questions): One of the basic measures for “credibility” and (dare I say it?) “authenticity” on the web has always been authorship. In the (not so) old days, just about everyone dismissed newsgroups as an incredibly non-credible source for information on the ‘net. Why? Because posts were so frequently made anonymously and/or with pseudonyms and because there was absolutely no filtering mechanism out there. I mean, my Lord, anybody could say anything, and you really had no idea who they were!

Now, if I am to believe the folks who advocate for the use of pseudonyms on blogs, it seems the tables have turned. Now, in this medium where literally anyone can create their own “fake” identity and have a blog up and running in minutes, the use of a pseudonym frees the writer completely from the restraints of identity, and this allows her or him to truly speak their mind. By eliminating the person behind the name, the writer can speak about the personal. By using an identity that is intentionally “false,” the writer can speak “the truth.” I’m tempted to say something like “peace” through “war” and “freedom” through “policing,” but you get the idea.

So, the questions I have here:

* When did the tables turn on this idea of “not my real name” equals credibility and authenticity?

* I probably shouldn’t take this same attitude with newsgroup posts or spam messages; but why not?

* Blogs are still in the early stages of being seen as “legitimate” by the academy at large; how does the abundance of anonymous and pseudonym-authored blogs effect this effort at legitimacy?

* Am I to take seriously as credible, academic writers folks who only identify themselves by their pseudonyms, things like “proffgrrrl” or “Dr. Crazy” or “BitchPhD” or “Invisible Adjunct?”

* Does this make sense?

See this review from last week’s The New Yorker, “Bad Comma” by Louis Menand. It has a bit of a “Mr. Smarty-Pants” tone to it, but I guess since it’s critiquing a book that ias a bit of a “Ms. Smarty-Pants” tone about commas, it’s fitting enough.

For what it’s worth: I’m really glad I came across this on the web because I had intended to buy the issue of the magazine at the local book store for this article. Given some of my teaching, especially this course, I thought it might come in handy as a reading assignment. But I was too late to the store. Thanks to the web for saving the day, though who knows how long the article will be available for free.

Well no, not really.

Hits to my site are up quite a bit, and I didn’t really think of it much until I came across this post at the “Playing School, Irreverently. Basically, the “profgrrrrl” didn’t like the way I mentioned her blog in my blog the other day. Read the comments on the blog, and you’ll see what I mean.

Well. Let me again publicly apologize to the (pseudo)anonymous profgrrrl and her friends and fans. It’s not my intent to belittle or anything like that. Sorry if I hurt feelings.

But, at the risk of ticking people off more by writing under my own name and at my own blog, I thought I’d make a couple of observations about all this stuff:

* Obviously, I have a bit of a problem in terms of my own “identity” and “power” in this discussion because I’m a middle-aged and married white guy who is tenured. So when I say that I don’t think it’s true that women or the untenured need to hide behind a fake name in blogs or anywhere else, those women are going to say “Yeah, easy for you to say that, tenured male dog-pig!” I suppose they have a point.

Nonetheless, I still think what I’m getting at is true. Academia– or at least what I’ve been able to see of it up to this point– tends to reward the squeaky wheel. People who critique the system in intelligent ways tend to actually get positive attention from folks because academics, who tend to be pretty smart people, welcome these insights. Or at least academics recognize that they are supposed to welcome these insights. I’m not sure a lot of my administrative colleagues at EMU are “pleased” with the criticism they’re getting right now, but I am sure that they won’t publicly castigate faculty for complaining about things.

In any event, and maybe this is naive, I think it’s rare when someone faces reprisals in the world of academia for saying what they think in something like a blog space. I’ve always said that if the most famous of anonymous bloggers, the “Invisible Adjunct,” had published under her own name, she wouldn’t have been fired as an adjunct, and, in fact, she may have been hired into a tenure-track job.

* I personally have a hard time understanding why anyone would go through the effort of creating a somewhat elaborate pseudonym persona on an academic blog, an identity that includes a fake name, a fake school, a fake town, maybe even a fake discipline, just so that person can write about things in a public place they wouldn’t be able to write about otherwise. But okay, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there are good reasons for doing this. It seems to me that there are at least two inevitable issues/problems.

First, once a writer writes something and posts it to the web on a blog for all to see, that writer more or less loses control of their text. In other words, once you post it to the world and make it available for linking and everything else, it isn’t yours anymore. Period. So if other readers interpret what you’re saying differently or don’t like what you’re saying, well, too bad, there’s nothing you can do about it. This is why I believe it is important for folks to think before they post and to recognize that, despite the fact that blogs frequently feel to writers and readers like a personal journal or diary, they really ultimately aren’t.

Second, I’m not sure that using a pseudonym/being anonymous is going to automatically protect you and allow you to say whatever you want. Now, having said that, I guess the Invisible Adjunct was able to protect herself with her pseudonym; however, she didn’t really say anything that mean or negative in a way that might get her in some kind of trouble. But if “profgrrrrl” really went off on her place of employment or on a colleague or a group of students, I have to think that she would be “outted.” And of course those bloggers who use pseudonyms are practicing a form of self censorship in order to protect their “real” identity anyway. So what’s the difference?

* Identity is a pretty strange thing, especially on the Internet. I could go on and on about this– and I kind of do in my dissertation, particularly in the fourth chapter— but in the nutshell, the nature of the medium (and I argue about this in terms of “the rhetorical situation,” but it’s easy enough to think about this in other ways too) makes identity extremely fluid. I always think of that famous New Yorker cartoon from the early 90s that shows two dogs sitting at a computer. One dog is talking to the other, and the caption reads “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Ain’t that the truth.

So I would contend that all of us– including me– create and recreate our identity(ies) all the time, certainly every time we write. I try to create some “order” with my identites by maintaining this “official” blog and my “unofficial” blog, but this too is a completely artificial construction of aspects of my identity, and it most certainly isn’t a complete or even partial picture of my identity. How could it be?

* I have to think that one of the appeals of maintaining an anonymous blog, academic or otherwise, is it’s a little bit, well, “naughty” and secretive and like wearing a costume or something. You know, like going in costume to a Star Trek convention: you can pretend to be a Vulcan or a Klingon. I guess that’s some peoples’ idea of fun, and I guess it’s harmless enough; but part of what I’m getting at is I think that the folks who create a pseudonym to blog with are doing it less to “protect” themselves and more because it’s fun to pretend.

That’s enough of that. I need to get on with the work of the day, the whole “teacher/scholar” thing…

I came across this article, “UAB’s editor’s blog raises legal questions,” while surfing around and stumbling across yet another “anonymous” blogger telling sassy stories about the underbelly of academia, Playing School, Irreverently.

The newspaper article is about a guy named Doug Gillett who works for the University of Alabama at Birmingham as an editor in the “creative services department,” whatever that is. Gillett keeps a blog called “George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!” and he got in trouble for spending “company time” working on this blog. To quote from the newspaper article:

Election law prohibits public employees from using “state, county or city funds, property or time, for any political activities.” The state ethics law has a similar prohibition….University of Alabama at Birmingham spokeswoman Dale Turnbough said Thursday Gillett will face disciplinary action. “UAB has clear policies against using university time and resources for partisan politics or non-university business and takes violation of those policies seriously,” Turnbough said. “We began to look into this matter as soon as it was brought to our attention today, and we will follow up with appropriate disciplinary action in a timely fashion as soon as we conclude our review.”

Several thoughts come to mind:

* As I’ve always said, this is one of the reasons why I have always maintained an “official and academic” blog and an “unofficial and rant ‘n rave” blog.

* This is also one of the reasons why I have for several years owned my own computer. I used to have an EMU-owned laptop as my main computer, but that always made me nervous– not because of a free speech issue, but because if the computer had been lost or stolen on my watch, I would have owed EMU for it. If the laptop I own is stolen, that’s a different kind of problem. Plus I can play games and goof-off with this computer without a tinge of guilt.

* One of Gillett’s problems (as far as I can tell from the story) is he was an “on the clock/regular” employee of UAB and not a faculty person. That doesn’t mean Gillett doesn’t have his right to an opinion or anything like that; but the nature of the work habits of many faculty, I don’t think they’ll getting many tenure-track folks on this same “policy” against using university time and resources.

* Every person I know who has a “real” job (and I must admit, I don’t know that many people who do have “real” jobs) spends at least part of their office time surfing the web.

* I doubt this sort of thing would happen at EMU. I don’t want to be too critical of the folks at UAB, but it doesn’t surprise me that a policy like this exists in Alabama. And it also doesn’t surprise me that they’re coming down hard on an anti-Bush site. I’m just speculating here, but I wonder if folks at UAB posting to the anti-Kerry blogs on company time are getting a “pass?”

* Finally, the blog “Playing School, Irreverently” is like the second or third blog I’ve come across lately that is written anonymously by someone who claims to either have another blog with their name on it and/or that they are “successful” and “well-known” academics in their more “visible” lives. Inevitably, these anonymous blogs are set up as a space to complain and gripe and vent about things.

A while back, I thought about setting up a blog that focused on my “happy academic” theme of posts. But I got lazy and I decided I could just post those things on this blog. But now I’m rethinking that. I don’t want to be anonymous for reasons I’ve written about before, but I’m beginning to think that it might be kind of fun to have that separate space, and maybe to invite some folks to post their own “happy academic” stories. Just for a change of pace.

See this article, “Square Peg, Round Hole,” by Charles A. Goldthwaite, Jr. (actually his real name. Basically, Goldthwaite (I wonder if he’s any relation to “Bobcat”– remember him?) tells the story of how he was a freelance science and medical writer while in graduate school and how he “ramped up” his business after he couldn’t find a job with his new PhD in American Lit.

I think he’s giving some good advice here to folks who find themselves in similar situations– PhD in some form of lit in hand and no place to go. But, wearing the hat of a happy academic, I have to make two observations:

* Given all the science and medical writing that Goldthwaite has done as a freelancer, both as a grad student and since then, I kind of wonder why he didn’t try to “re-package” himself as a technical writing scholar? It might take a bit, but I don’t see it as much of a stretch. I might be totally wrong about this, but it’s such a “seller’s market” for folks who study and teach technical writing nowadays that my impression is a lit PhD who “does tech writing” would be able to get a tenure-track job in tech writing. One of my tech writing colleagues here at EMU essentially has that background (though he has very much left his literary studies behind), and I know a guy who was working on a PhD in literature at about the same time I was working on my PhD in comp/rhet who now teaches tech writing stuff in the business school at Western Michigan U.

Maybe Goldthwaite doesn’t realize that this is a possible route back into academia, or maybe the last thing he wants to do is teach tech writing. I don’t know. But I do think it’s something for him to think about.

* I have to take issue with what Goldthwaite is implying is the “curse” of his “whiteness” and how it hurt his chances on the academic job market. To quote at length from the article:

At my first mock job interview with a faculty member from my home institution, I was informed that I would appear “too white.” (My dissertation examined the uses of rock music and culture in American prose literature of the last 50 years, and white men have created the lion’s share of the source material.)

Having been white my entire life, however, I was unsure how to amend this shortcoming in the three weeks that remained before the real interviews at the Modern Language Association convention. Am I efficient? Yes. Able to fill a niche? I think so. White? Without a doubt.

Again, I can only speculate on the whole story, but I suspect the fact that his scholarly project focused on late 20th century American lit hurt his job prospects a hell of a lot more than his whiteness. The academic job market is simply saturated with folks who study and teach this kind of thing nowadays, and the result is an extreme “buyer’s” market. I wasn’t on any of the comittees, but we’ve hired recently in American lit, and the folks we’ve been able to hire are pretty impressive.

Second, I don’t think “being white” is a disadvantage because I don’t think the implication of reverse discrimination is accurate. Let me put it this way: there is no question that qualified job candidates who are members of some minority group (African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, etc., etc.) have a certain advantage on the academic job market. As they should– I’m a firm believer in the value of diversity in higher education. On the other hand, I don’t think academic hiring committees make choices against white candidates in the way that I think Goldthwaite is implying here; that is, I don’t think hiring committees say “we can’t hire another white guy.”

Beyond that quibble though, I think Goldthwaite’s article is a “must read” for the many folks in a similar “PhD in hand and no academic job” position.