Steven D. Krause

The EMU board of regents commissioned an audit of the controversial presidential house project at EMU, and the results are in. You can read all about it in the Ann Arbor News and other recent stories about the house by visiting the web site http://www.mlive.com/aanews/special/university_house/. The story reports that the audit found that there wasn’t anything illegal about the way that the house was paid for and built, and Kirkpatrick and Incarnati (the chair of the board of regents) are more or less using this as a reason to say that this should end the discussion.

Hardly. In my mind, the issue was never the legality of how the house was being built– I mean, I didn’t think that Kirkpatrick et al took kickbacks or whatever. Though it is worth noting that the audit apparently makes it clear that there were some notable “irregularities” about how funds were shifted around different university accounts to pay for things like the landscaping.

No, I think that the issue is the same as it was a couple of years ago: the President’s house, the building of which Kirkpatrick put into motion the minute he came to campus four years ago, is excessive, especially in light of the budget cuts that have hit EMU and other public universities in recent years. While the faculty ranks shrink, EMU is hiring more administrators and more part-time teachers. While the majority of EMU students and faculty have to work in inadequate and unpleasant academic buildings, the President and Mrs. Kirkpatrick live in a 10,000 square foot palace. Is it any wonder why morale around campus is not exactly at an all-time high?

My department head came to my name on the “Faculty who Haven’t Gone to Commencement Recently to Represent the Department” list and told me it was my turn this winter. Actually, it really is about time– I’ve been here five years and this is the first ceremony I’ve attended– and when all is said and done, it was kind of fun. I got to dress up in a funny academic costume (just a rental and not one of the fancy ones that some folks have), I got to listen to an okay speaker (Kevin Klose, who runs NPR), and I got to see the students right as they came down the ramp after getting their diplomas. It was interesting, because you could really see in some of their eyes the extent to which it was a defining moment in their lives. Or not.

Best story of the afternoon: there was a guy who graduated this term who was 83 years old. He actually started college in the late 30s, and had been taking classes at night at EMU since the late 60s.

Out of the 1,000 or so graduates, I only recognized two students of mine. There must have been more than that, and I am sure there are some students who graduated but who didn’t go to commencement. Well, if you were there and I didn’t see you, congrats; and if you weren’t there and you are about to graduate, good luck to you, too.

I noticed in The Chronicle of Higher Education today that the faculty senate at Auburn University have taken a “no confidence” vote of the president. Since I don’t subscribe to The Chronicle’s online news service, I did a google search and came up with the web site http://www.firewilliamwalker.com/, which is all about why William Walker, the president of Auburn U, needs to go. I of course don’t know any of the details, but from this site, the two big things that have gotten Walker in trouble are managing to get Auburn on probation with its accreditation body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and he had some shady dealings with trying to hire Bobby Petrino as the football coach. I get the impression from the web site and the articles linked to from the web site that the thing that really has people mad there is the football coach deal and some other corrupt practices involving the board of regents.

I wonder how a $5 + million dollar house would figure into this situation?

In the “you learn something every day” and “stuff to remember for teaching Writing for the World Wide Web” departments:

There was a discussion on one of the mailing lists I’m on about this phenomenon called “Googlebombing.” If you go to Google, type in “miserable failure,” and then hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, you’ll get this page, the official biography of George W. Bush. Go ahead and try it. I’ll wait.

How does this happen? Well, this article from the International Herald Tribune explains how if enough people link to something on the web with a particular phrase, it rises to the top of the Google search engine. So, as the result of the grass roots efforts of a blogger named George Johnston who has a blog called Old Fashioned Patriot, enough people linked to Bush’s biography with the phrase “miserable failure” on their page and Google reacts.

There are some obvious political implications to all this (and I happen to agree with the linkage between “miserable failure” and GW Bush), but I am more fascinated by the complex rhetorical dimensions of all this, about how an audience can define terms in a way that, generally, is reserved exclusively for a very few people. In other words, a larger group working together can literally change the terms of discussion. Pretty interesting.

From Household Opera comes this good discussion about the five paragraph essay. For anyone invested in composition and rhetoric theory and practice, this isn’t exactly a news flash, but this discussion and the many links Amanda has here suggests to me that it is becoming the conventional wisdom for all kinds of folks outside of composition studies, too.

My favorite critique of the five paragraph essay is in Jasper Neel’s book Plato, Derrida, and Writing; he argues the five paragraph essay comes from Plato’s notions of the way rhetoric and arguments work, and Neel convincingly explains why the five paragraph essay is “anti-writing.” A very worthwhile read.

In my own mind, learning how to write a five paragraph essay is the same as learning how to fill out a form. Filling out a form is obviously not the same as writing, though people do need to learn how to fill out forms, and the five paragraph essay does have its uses. For example, the five paragraph form works well for any sort of timed writing like an essay test. But the five paragraph form becomes a problem for students when they learn it is the only tool they will ever need to write anything, sort of like using a hammer to bake a pie.

Yet, as easy as it is to note how wrong the five paragraph essay is, we do see its form in all sorts of different kinds of writing and settings. Ultimately, it is an embodiment of the “holy trinity”– a beginning and an end, sure, but also a division of everything into three mysterious parts, a father, a son, a holy spirit/ghost. This division of three is everywhere– small, medium, large, etc. And most dissertations (including mine) are divided into… five chapters…

Via The Invisible Adjunct comes this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education,“Ignoring Good Advice.” The article is part of a very good resource for information on the academic job market, CHE’s Chronicle Careers pages.

In the nutshell, the article is a humorous and fictionalized account of the advice a student received from her professors about getting a PhD in literature. The article is funny largely because it’s true, of course: getting a PhD in anything, to borrow a phrase from our current administration, is a long, hard slog, and the odds against those studying literature are extremely high. I’ll give my take on all this in the near future with the third installment of my series of “Happy Academic” postings regarding PhD studies.

There is an interesting discussion of this article on the IA blog– here is a link to it. First off, despite the fact that the advice our would-be PhD seeker receives is “don’t do it,” the author indicates that she is “undeterred” and is planning on entering into a PhD studies. Second, a lot of the commentary on the IA blog linked here suggests that the participants claim they didn’t know how hard grad school would be or how bad the job market in various fields are and so forth, and they now regret having gone to grad school in the first place.

In a way, I think that the “undeterred” writer of this CHE article who is planning on going into a PhD program in literature despite the warnings and the folks on IA who are either ABD or with a PhD and unemployed are essentially the same person. That is, like the writer who is going to get a PhD despite the advice against it, the people on IA who said they were never warned really were warned and they are either forgetting that they were warned or they are repressing it. When I was thinking about PhD studies in the early 1990s, I received many warnings against pursuing work in literature. Sure, there weren’t blogs back then, but the difficulties of the job market then were not a secret to anyone who was willing to do an iota of research, just as it isn’t a secret now that the academic jobs in literature are few and far between.

I’m happy to report that the EMU-PDU folks running for election won and won in a landslide!

This is the group that was trying to get seats on the Executive Committee of the EMU-AAUP, which is the union that represents the faculty at EMU, and basically take control of the union so that we can finally put our proverbial house in order. Finally and hopefully. I’m sure there are going to be more bumps along the way, but we’re on right path.

Check out the PDU homepage for some more information about all this.

I came home to my own modest abode with my wife and son (we had just stopped to get our Christmas tree) to read an enormous article in the Ann Arbor News that detailed the cost overruns associated with the newly constructed presidential home (which EMU always refers to in official documents as the “University House,” as if it is as much my space as it is President Kirkpatrick’s… hmmm…). The article is on the web By following this link (I think there’s a free registration to get it). Let me just quote a bit from it. Here’s the lead:

Eastern Michigan University spent at least $5.1 million to build, furnish and landscape a new home for its president, a figure that is $1.6 million more than publicly disclosed.

The increased price tag was compiled by The News from a review of more than 2,000 pages of university records obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Here’s a good summary a few paragraphs down from the lead– some of this might be hard to understand to those who might be reading this and who are unfamiliar with what’s been going on at EMU, but you get the idea:

In its review, The News also found that:

* EMU did not get bids for construction. Instead, it sought general proposals from builders for a much smaller, 6,500-square-foot project costing $1.5 million to $2 million. After a builder was picked, the size grew and the budgeted cost of the building and furnishings rose to $3.5 million. The budget for the home was drawn up by the builder, who received 10 percent of the construction costs as profit and 8.5 percent for administrative expenses.

* The contract with Menard Builders of Plymouth, the general contractor, was signed five months after construction began.

* Kirkpatrick, in an interview last week, distanced himself from the house, saying he did not make the decision to build it. Yet records show that he and his wife, Pamela, made many detailed decisions.

* The Kirkpatricks charged $34,465 worth of home furnishings to university credit cards issued for house-related purchases.

* The president and his wife requested 22 of the building’s 141 change orders, many near the end of the project. Their change orders totaled $130,000.

* University officials told regents that EMU made a gross capital gain of $97,100 on the sale of the Pittsfield Township home where the Kirkpatricks lived while the new house was being built. But records show EMU lost $19,612 when real estate commission, interest and permanent improvements at the house are included.

Ought to make for some interesting conversation around campus tomorrow, huh?

I came across a pretty interesting blog today called Croooked Timber and a post there about courseware. I’ll spare you the details of it all– you can read it for yourself. I don’t know much about this blog space yet, but I think the concept of a successful “group blog” is a good one.

As a “happy academic,” I am sometimes asked by students about whether or not they should go to graduate school. I am asked this enough to make it worthwhile to write down an answer (I’ve been working on this one off and on for a couple of weeks), and because of some of the reaction to my first happy academic posting (and I’m thinking in particular about some of the reaction I got on Invisible Adjunct), I thought I would post it here.

First, let me point out the obvious: since I am an English professor, I am mostly familiar with the idea of graduate school as it relates to English, particularly in rhetoric and writing. If you’re thinking about doing graduate work in history, go talk to a history professor. Along these obvious lines, if you really are thinking about graduate school, you should talk to many different people and get many different opinions. Read the happy stories and rosy views (like mine), but read the sad stories and warnings, too. Graduate school is a major life decision, and it isn’t something that you should make a decision about on a whim.

Second, I think the more general question “should I go to graduate school?” needs to be divided into two more specific questions, at least when it comes to English studies: “should I get a Master’s degree?”(the subject of this posting), and “should I get a PhD?”(the subject of a happy academic post in the near future). I think that these two related degrees are actually quite different from each other, and I think the advice has to be different as well.

The short answer is this: while the answer to the question “Should I get a Master’s degree?”is “probably yes,”the answer to the question “Should I get a PhD?”is “probably no.”

So, “should I get a Master’s degree?” The first question you need to answer for yourself is “Why do you want to get a Master’s degree?” Most of my EMU grad students have one of three basic answers to this question:

Answer 1: “Because I am a junior high or high school teacher,”or “because I am an employed technical communications professional.”

Probably 60-70% of the grad students in EMU’s written communications program fall into this category, and I believe that close to half of the students in our department’s MA program in literature are also in this category. The reasons why technical communications professionals enroll in our program varies quite a bit; for some, the MA means a promotion of some sort, and for others, tuition reimbursement is a fringe benefit of the job, so they might as well take advantage of it and pursue a graduate degree. Almost all of the practicing junior high and high school teachers enroll in our program because a Master’s degree means a significant pay raise, and also because secondary school teachers in Michigan are required to earn a certain number of graduate credits or “in-service training” credits to retain their teaching certification anyway.

I think these are very good reasons for getting a Master’s degree, and I believe our MA program at EMU in written communication serves these students well. We teach almost all of our graduate courses at night and we allow students to attend school part-time, both of which are necessities for someone with a full-time job.

If this is why you want a Master’s degree, you should probably enroll. There is one important exception to this, though: if you don’t already have a full-time job that you are happy with, you should think twice about getting a Master’s because the advanced degree might make you slightly less employable. This is particularly true for teachers because most school districts prefer to hire new teachers with a Bachelor’s degree.

Now, some reading this might think it is crass and corporate of me to suggest that getting an additional credential is a good enough reason to pursue graduate work. I take it as a given that anyone interested in graduate school wants to do so because of the inherent value of education; but along with intellectual enrichment, one goes to graduate school to earn a particular credential. If a person is only interested in going to graduate school because of the abstract and philosophic benefits of it, well, I think that person’s time and money would be better spent reading, attending lectures in public places, and engaging in conversations over the Internet.

Answer #2: “Because I’m thinking about pursuing a PhD and eventually getting a job as a happy academic.”

My guess is that less than a third of our students at EMU would give this answer, though it is the one I’m most familiar with personally because this was why I wanted to go to graduate school. Well, this and a bit of answer #3, too.
If you are thinking that you might like to be a happy academic, and you are someone who has few life commitments (e.g., mortgages, significant others, children, etc.), who is willing and able to move just about anywhere in the country, and who is accustomed to living on a minimal income, this is also a good reason to go to graduate school. Of course, if you decide to go beyond the MA, you will face all of the challenges of PhD studies, and if you are someone who does have various life commitments, going on to a PhD program might ultimately not be a wise decision. But that’s something I’ll talk about in that entry.

There are several programs in English nowadays that combine the MA and PhD, and I suppose these are good options for particularly dedicated and determined students. But personally, I think there are good reasons to get your MA and your PhD from different schools. For one thing, you get the experiences of two different schools, which will automatically give you a broader experience in terms of fellow students, professors, and institutional cultures. Second, your chances of earning funding in the form of a teaching assistantship might be better at programs that offer Master’s degrees and not PhDs. And funding and assistantship work is critical– see my warnings about going into a MA program that follow “Answer 3.”

Answer #3: “Because I didn’t know what else to do and/or I’m trying to put off going into the ‘real world’ for another couple years and/or I’m trying to find myself.”

It’s hard to say how many of the grad students at EMU fall into this category, I suppose because many of our students can offer this is at least a partial explanation as to why they want to go to graduate school. Like I said, this is part of the reason why I went, and I would wager to say it is at least part of the reason why many people who are now academics themselves went to graduate school in the first place.

I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with “finding yourself,” and I think that a Master’s degree program is one good place/time in which to do this. At least it was for me; I spent two years in a Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing in my early twenties, and I felt like I learned a tremendous amount about myself as a writer, a thinker, a teacher, and just as an overall person. Like most people that age, I did a lot of foolish things, but I also had a lot of “once in a lifetime” experiences I’ll always remember, experiences that I wouldn’t have had without the culture and community of graduate school.

But let me point something out that will be discussed further in my future posting regarding PhD programs: getting a doctorate is not the time one should be “finding themselves.” The stakes for the PhD are too high and the pain potentially inflicted on students is too great.

So, should you get a Master’s degree? If you liked your undergraduate studies and want to go on to the next level, especially if you find yourself in one of the three categories I outline above, sure, why not? But before you enroll, keep these two warnings in mind:

Seek funding and teaching assistantships.

Unless you are independently wealthy or a gainfully emplo
yed teacher or technical writer and you are going to graduate school to improve your employment status, getting a Master’s degree in English is not worth paying for entirely out of your own pocket (see my next warning). Explore the different funding and teaching assistantship options at the schools you are interested in, and avoid applying to Master’s programs that do not provide their students any funding.

Graduate teaching assistants at EMU do things like teach first year composition, assist professors in lecture hall sections of literature classes, and tutor students about writing. They are paid poorly unfortunately, and as a result, most of our grad students who have assistantships also have some other sort of part-time job. However, assistantships generally include tuition and they provide invaluable classroom teaching experience. I had no idea what it meant to be a “college teacher” before I had a teaching assistantship, and for me, the experience was a wonderfully rewarding one. On the other hand, some of my colleagues in my Master’s program realized after two semesters of freshman comp that being a college teacher was not for them and they went on with their lives. I think it’s better that they discovered this in a Master’s program rather than a PhD program. And if you are seriously considering going on to a PhD program and thus a career as a happy academic, experience as a teaching assistant is an essential part of the job training.

By itself, a Master’s degree will not help you be a happy academic in an English department. If your goal is a full-time academic career, you will need to go on to a PhD program.

If you are a high school teacher or any other sort of “real world” working professional, a Master’s degree is all you will probably ever need. In fact, at most of the high schools in this area, teachers “max out” in terms of pay levels with an MA; PhDs are only important for those who go into administration (and most of those folks do doctoral studies in Education). However, if you want a full-time career teaching English at a college or university, a Master’s degree is not worth much of anything. You need to have a PhD.

The only exception I can think of to this rule is in creative writing, a field where the MFA is considered by some to be a terminal degree and also a field in which many well-known professors don’t hold an advanced degree at all. But the most important thing for getting a job in creative writing is publishing well-received poems, plays, stories, novels, etc., and anyone who is capable of doing that successfully certainly has no need for my advice.

It’s still possible to get a full-time position at a community college with only a Master’s degree, but beyond the workload and problems of teaching in community colleges that make being a happy academic more challenging in those environments, I think this is a very risky strategy. For one thing, English positions at community colleges are increasingly being filled with people who have PhDs. Second, community colleges hire an amazing amount of their teachers on a part-time basis, and in my way of thinking of things, teaching college part-time rarely makes for a happy academic career. But that too is another story.