Author: Steve Krause

There’s an excellent “first person” article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Ed “Career Network” section, an essay by Jack “not his real name” Thomas called “Searching for Sinister Motives.” The essay, which is surprisingly and effectively written in “second person” (as in “you do this,” and “you do that”), tells the story of “you,” a new hire into a tenure-track position, and the relationship “you” and “Fellow New Hire” (FNH) strike up with “Slightly Senior Junior Colleague” (SSJC). “You” and FNH come to rely on SSJC for all sorts of insights and information about the brutal politics and sinister plots that are everywhere, and it is “you,” FNH, and SSJC against them:

“You learn that everyone in the department hands out easy grades, that only one or two (including SSJC, of course) are brave enough to deliver the low grades the students deserve. You learn that your senior colleagues want to block the hiring of any young scholars with strong publishing potential, since they will make the current faculty members look less productive.

“You find all of this surprising, but you begin to interpret things you hear in department meetings from SSJC’s perspective, and much of what you see and hear seems to support his perspective.”

Well, to get to the point: after a while of following things in the department from this point of view, “you” dare to disagree with SSJC, you are “banished” from SSJC’s inner circle, and “You look at everyone around you, in the department and the college, with a fresh pair of eyes — your own. You have climbed out of the tunnel of SSJC’s perspective, and find that the landscape has changed entirely.”

Besides the moral of the story (which boils down to two lessons: always gather information from multiple source and recognize that legitimate differences of opinions are not the same as sinister conspiracies against “you”), Thomas offers this about SSJC:

“Ultimately, you begin to feel sorry for SSJC. He may remain miserable and isolated for the rest of his career. His views of the department border on clinical paranoia. He needs professional counseling. You and he may never talk again.”

This article ought to be required reading for every new hire in every English department in the country. I have been “you” at two different schools, and while I like to think I did not fall under the “spell” of SSJC quite as hard as “you” does here, I most certainly know a couple of SSJCs.

It’s also an article that reminds me to be careful to not become SSJC now that I am tenured and “slightly senior” in the department. It’s important for me to remember the advice that Thomas is offering, that it is a good idea “to take everyone at face value, to assume that people have good reasons for the positions they hold, and to understand that multiple and competing visions of a department or a program ultimately create better departments and programs than visions created by a single person or an exercise in groupthink.”

One of the things on my list this weekend is to revise a web-based article I have out there, “When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Emailing Lists, Discussion, and Collaboration.” I think it’s pretty much a “done deal” that this web site/essay will be published in a journal I will name in the very near future– I don’t think it’d be appropriate to name it right now, though many of my readers will probably be able to make an educated guess.

I’ve already received some excellent and useful advice on this piece from some readers, but I thought (in the spirit of “blog community”), I’d give the millions of readers out there a chance to offer me some advice before I sit down and revise this in earnest.

A couple of things to keep in mind, if you’re interested in playing along:

* I’m not real crazy about the “arrangement” of the piece, and I don’t think most of the readers are either. So that will probably change.

* I think the definition of “collaboration” is something I have to spell out in a bit more detail here, and I am of course interested in ideas.

* I’m not trying to say in this essay that using blogs in classrooms is a bad idea. All I’m trying to say is that they aren’t very good at creating a “discussion” among a group of students, they aren’t very good at fostering a “dynamic” or a “collaborative” writing atmosphere, and they aren’t a replacement for using an email list discussion set-up.

Any suggestions are more than welcome– post them in the comments, or send me an email.

This afternoon, I resigned as the “web master” of the EMU-AAUP Web Site. It’s one of those deals where I am not sure if I was fired or if I resigned– perhaps a little of both– but I guess the time had come, albeit a bit prematurely in my way of thinking.

I was planning on stepping down from these minor web site duties once the contract was settled because I simply have too many other things to do right now. I’m going on the job market this year, mainly because my wife and I want to see if we can improve our “academic couple” status, and I assume that this job search might go on for a couple of years. After three or so years, we may get to the place where we recognize that EMU is the best place for us, and if that happens, I will probably get involved with the union again. But until I know for sure, I will remain simply another faculty member who supports the EMU-AAUP.

It’s been an interesting 20 or so months. Just short of 2 years ago, I was approached by my business department colleague Susan Moeller to run for an “at large” position on the Executive Committee of the EMU-AAUP. I put my name in, rather naively, I got elected, and then I endured around six months of painful and utterly stupid meetings. As I wrote in my June 2003 resignation letter, “The bickering, the arguments, the petty and irrelevant disputes, and the finger-pointing have been non-stop and extraordinarily stressful, and we still are not any closer to resolving the problems of our chapter.” I haven’t “been around” all that long– I started my first tenure-track job in 1996– but without a doubt, my time on the Executive Committee was the absolute worst situation I’ve been in since I started my “academic” career, and the people who were part of the “old guard” of the union who I had to deal with were the most awful, petty, and despicable sorts of people. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

The situation was “icky” to say the least, and I was among the “slate” members (that is, the “new guard” that got elected in 2003 to reform the union) who resigned last summer and who forced a vote that was essentially about reform of the way the union was being managed. Long story short: the good guys won in the last election, and the EMU-AAUP chapter has been reforming ever since.

So, why am I “out” as the web master? Well, I think there are two reasons. Part of it had to do with the fact that I had the nerve (?!) to disagree with part of the “party line” of the union in terms of insurance and the “floor” for scholarship requirements in emails to folks on the Executive Committee and in the larger faculty meetings (like the one on Tuesday). Another part of it had to do with the fact that a sitting member of the Executive Committee didn’t like that I took over the web site and made it significantly better than it used to be. In short, there were “personality issues” involved.

But hey, that’s okay. I honestly feel that the people running the show for the union now are more or less competent, and like I said, I don’t really have time to put up with the nonsense of all this right now anyway. Best of luck to these folks.

Here are some lessons I’ve learned (I think…):

* Faculty unions are extremely important, especially for schools like EMU. And I most definitely support the union at EMU, especially during the current contract negotiations. However…

* Faculty unions are extremely simple-minded and reductive. They work too hard to protect the work of downright incompetent faculty and they are too interested in the lowest common denominator instead of promoting excellence.

* The business of running a union in general seems to me to be pretty ugly. Basically, what I’m getting at is this: On the one hand, I support the ideals of unions as a good “leftist” sort of academic. On the other hand, when you get an “inside” view of the actual practices of the way unions work, it give reason to pause. It’s the same thing they say about legislation: it’s like making sausage, meaning that after you see the meat being ground and being forced into the casing, you realize that it isn’t quite so innocent and pure and tasty. And that’s an inherent condition of the system. In other words, even folks with the best intentions (like the folks running the union right now) still end up grinding some pretty nasty-looking meat we’re ultimatley forced to choke down.

* Power corrupts. I’m not saying that the folks on the Executive Committee right now are “corrupt” per se– they aren’t– but being in that position of “power” makes folks think that they are entitled to act in a way that they really aren’t, and it makes folks think that their beliefs are the same as the rest of people in the bargaining unit, when that isn’t necessarily the case.

So, that’s it. That’s been my all too long and strange trip with the EMU-AAUP. I may be back, but probably not any time too soon.

I don’t know what the deal is, but it looks like the haloscan stuff isn’t working, which means that you can’t post comments. I’d ask for ideas for help with this, but, well, where would you tell me what you think? Jeez…

I’ve got a few too many things to monkey around with right now, but once the beginning of the semester dust settles around here, I think I’m going to switch my blogging software. Again. I’m either going to go with the new MT or with WordPress, I think. Ack…

I watched the documentary Derrida last night, and I found it fascinating. I’m not an “expert” on Derrida’s work, though he does figure into my dissertation in some important ways and it’s pretty much impossible to deny the influence of his thought on the academy and beyond. My dissertation advisor was no fan of Derrida, calling him a “one trick pony.” That may be true, but deconstruction is a pretty impressive trick.

Anyway, I liked two things in particular about the film. First, Derrida was able to talk about his work in ways I thought were helpful. Now, I might feel this way because I’ve actually read enough (not a lot, just enough) of Derrida’s work to find his explanations helpful, so I don’t know what someone not familar with his work would think of this. But if I were to teach a class that focused on Derrida’s work, I would probably want to show this movie at some point.

Second, I liked the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing Derrida as a “real” person. You can imagine the different layers with all this. A lot of what Derrida talks about in the movie is how Heidegger said at one point that the “personal life” of the philosopher is essentially irrelevant. And, of course, he’s saying these things in a documentary about himself. The movie has these really interesting and even funny juxtapositions; for example, Derrida sitting there saying something profound and smart, and then we cut away to Derrida in his house looking for his car keys or spreading butter on a bagel. We see Derrida getting his hair cut, and I was struck by the fact that he’s a handsome and charming man who seems to know that he is both handsome and charming. We see Derrida talking at different seminars, dressed in these really wacky suits (Derrida is not afraid of either color or patterns in his wardrobe), being approached after words by people like he was a rock star. Which, in a way, he is. He doesn’t talk about it too much (which is one of the points of the movie), but it turns out that Derrida has been married for nearly 50 years, something I personally found kind of surprising given the level of divorce among academics.

Anyway, interesting stuff, especially if you’ve only encountered the man on the page.

I went to the EMU-AAUP faculty union meeting Tuesday afternoon, where I suppose the “big news” was a vote to authorize a vote to give the chief negotiator to take a “job action” of necessary. If we actually wanted to go on strike, we’d have to have another meeting to authorize that, so this is just a first step.

It was a good meeting because folks on the negotiating team explained some of the issues on the table and there was a chance for “questions and answers” from faculty. In brief, the main issues on the table (as I understand them and in my own personal ranking of importance) are:

* Hiring more faculty. There is some debate about some of the numbers here, but basically, under the Kirkpatrick administration, faculty numbers have been decreasing, while the ranks of administrators at EMU have been increasing. The administration has announced more searches in the coming year, but given the fact that these same administrators cancelled 25 or so searches last year, there’s reason to be a bit doubtful about these “promises.” What the faculty want is some kind of contract language that pledges a commitment to hire a certain number of folks over the next few years.

* Money. We want more of it (duh). The administration hasn’t made any offer on this yet, so it’s hard to say what they are willing to give us versus what we want.

* Insurance. Right now, faculty can choose among three (I think it’s three…) different insurance programs. The administration wants us all to be in one program called “Community Blue PPO.” The union doesn’t like this for a variety of different and obvious reasons, including the fact that about a third of the faculty have one of the programs the administration wants to eliminate. What the faculty want is for the insurance choices to remain the same. Personally, I don’t care as much about this one because I’m already enrolled in the program the administration wants everyone to be in, and I think it’s pretty good insurance, too.

There are some other issues too that might be significant (including pay rates for Continuing Education classes), but I think these are the big three…

A few other thoughts:

* The argumentative practices of unions in general and of these meetings in particular are always so crude. It’s always a “us versus them” kind of discussion, when the reality of it is most of “them” (the administrators) were in recent memory one of “us” (faculty). I saw a guy at this meeting sitting in front of me who used to be the dean of the college of arts and sciences, then he stepped down and was a faculty member, then he was an interim department head, and now he’s back to the faculty. And on some of the issues, even issues that would seem black-and-white, how good or bad the situation is depends a lot on which set of numbers you use. I guess that’s the fault of the format of these things, but you would think a bunch of academics could be more subtle than this.

* Along these lines, I’m not sure that a faculty union meeting looks a lot different than an automotive worker union meeting. For example, this meeting featured speeches peppered with “call and respond” sorts of lines along the lines of “are we gonna take that?!” It’s like someone holding up a big sign that says “Faculty response: NO!” Of course, I’ve never been to an auto worker union meeting, so…

* I believe in unions, I really do. I think faculty at EMU are better off in general with a union, and there is no question that Kirkpatrick would have made things a hell of a lot worse here in his time had there not been a union to at least slow him down a bit. But at the same time, one of the downsides of unions is they end up protecting and preserving a certain level of mediocrity among workers, because in its efforts to protect all workers, unions end up protecting some workers who probably don’t really deserve protection. And the result is unions don’t really promote a culture that encourages individuals to over-achieve. I could go on about this, but I think that’s enough. I’m glad I’m in the union– honest, I am. I just wish there was a better process.

I’m reading this collection of essays called Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, Editors, Duke UP, 2004) right now because it kind of has to do with the book project I’ve been working off and on now for a while. The emphasis here is more on “media” as in visual and audio and less on writing and pedagogy, but still really interesting and useful for my research nonetheless. This morning, I’ve been reading this essay by Lisa Gitelman called “Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, the Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls.” I don’t want to simplify her point because, like most things that have to do with copyright, it ain’t simple. But I thought I’d offer two slightly out of context quotes:

… “new media” resemble each other to varying degress in their newness, whether they happen to have been new a long time ago or new today. So the phonograph records and piano rolls of 1900 or 1910 compare to the downloaded MP3 files only in the most banal regard because they are all musical forms for private consumption.

If the popularity of self-playing pianos help to challenge the material meanings of printed music at the beginning of the twentieth century, one need hardly be surprised that the popularity of Internet downloads is helping to challenge the material meanings of compact disc at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Like I said, Gitelman problematizes this comparison in this article, but you get the idea.

I remember reading a novel many years ago– I can’t remember the name of it right now– where the narrator, an academic, reflects on how the end of summer is the end of the year, and how the fall semester is the start, and how odd that is in relationship to the way that “real people” think about the way the year works. The beginning isn’t September for most; it’s January. It’s just another way in which academics are in a sort of parallel universe sometimes.

Classes don’t start here until next Wednesday, but practically speaking, it feels like the semester is underway already. There’s a union meeting tomorrow afternoon (Will we or won’t we strike? Which rumor do you want to believe? This meeting Tuesday might help answer both of those questions), a department retreat on Thursday, meetings and meetings next week, and whammo, classes. I’ve managed to stay out of the (seemingly seasonal) arguments about plagiarism and other things I’m not following too closely on the WPA-L mailing lists, and instead, I revised my official web site and posted the web sites for the classes I’m teaching this semester. So teaching-wise, I’m pretty much ready to go.

By the way, for my loyal readers who were following some of my earlier musings on my fall teaching: After thinking it over, I decided to go with the e-reserves option because it’s free for students and it gives me some needed flexibility with picking assigned readings. Also, for folks who offered advice and comments on this post about a list of books for students in my grad class to review: The assignment is posted here, part of the class web site. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m supposed to be revising an article and some other projects as I type, things I should have probably finished over the summer. What did I do over the summer? Well, I did do some scholarly things, including the excellent Computers and Writing conference in Hawaii. I taught a couple of classes this summer which both went well, but which were also draining and time-consuming and all the rest. I had some fun, though I played golf quite poorly this summer, and the garden has done bad because of bad weather here– too cold– and lack of interest on my part. I managed to finish reading The Da Vinci Code, which after a while seemed more like a chore just to get to “the answer” about “The Grail,” which you do get to, literally on the last page.

And I blogged a lot this summer, which I think has had its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, blogging gets my brain moving and gets me to the keyboard to write. On the other hand, blogging is also a procrastinating tool, too. So in the fall, I think the trick is going to be to find ways to maximize the benefits of blogging while still finding time to read and write, scholarly things and otherwise.

Anyway, happy new year.

… judging from my limited viewing of the Summer Olympics on NBC, it seems that the most important sport at the whole thing is women’s beach volleyball. Every time I turn it on, unbelievably fit and tall women in bikinis are pounding the ball at each other the net. As if there’s nothing else going on at this thing. But not that I’m complaining. If I wanted to watch something different, I’d turn it over to CBC…

See this article, “Armed Robbers Steal ‘The Scream’ in Oslo.” Basically, that most famous of Munch paintings was stolen the other day, along with a less famous but still cool painting by Munch called “Madonna.” A few thoughts:

* I’ve been a big fan of Munch’s work and all of the various parodies of “The Scream” for years. In fact, I used to have a web site about it, one where I had pictures of various “Scream” things I collected (a keychain, blow-up dolls, posters, pillows, coffee mugs, etc.) and pictures of “Scream” things I came across on the ‘net and such. The site was popular to the point where I was quoted at one point in time in a newspaper story that ran in The Des Monies Register and then various wire services. The Internet is a weird place; put up a web site that goes into enough detail about something, and before you know it, people quote you like you knew what you were talking about.

Anyway, this makes me think that maybe I’ll set up that “Scream stuff” site again.

* Another story I read about it here, this one an AP wire story, said that the paintings had virtually no protection or security around them. Basically, the robbers came in, waving guns around, and yanked the pictures off the wall, and ran away. Considering the fact that a different copy of “The Scream” was stolen about 10 years ago, you’d think that they’d have at least a little security around this thing…