Category: The Happy Academic

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More K-12 teaching jobs in the future? I wouldn't bet on it…

I haven’t been posting this week (and I won’t post much now) because I’ve been pretty busy with life things lately. But I have been meaning to post at least something about this article that was linked to the NCTE Inbox service, “40% of teachers plan to quit by 2010,” which was in the Chicago Sun-Times. Here’s a quote:

Forty percent of public school teachers plan to leave the profession within five years, the highest rate since at least 1990, according to a study being released Thursday.

The rate is expected to be even greater among high school teachers, half of whom plan to be out of teaching by 2010, according to the National Center for Education Information.

Retirement is the dominant factor, as the public teaching corps is aging fast, say surveys of teachers in kindergarten through grade 12.

Two quick thoughts:

  • I know this isn’t really the job of this article, but I have to assume that these retirement rates vary from region to region, and they might vary quite a bit. In Michigan right now, getting a job teaching English at the secondary level is kind of tricky, and I always tell prospective secondary school teachers that they might need to move to get a job.
  • You know, this is kind of what they used to say about teaching at the college-level, too. When I was in college in the mid-80’s, I was told by a number of college professors that there would certainly be jobs teaching in universities soon because all of these folks who were getting ready to retire. Well, guess what? A lot of these folks (at least in fields like English) either didn’t retire or they weren’t replaced with full-time professors. I don’t know if the powers that be could get away with that for K-12 schooling, but it is something to keep in mind: don’t count your retiring teachers until they actually hatch– er, I mean retire.
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That's done (sorta); now what do I need to do?

Monkey writer

I managed to meet the deadline that I had set up for myself with my textbook project just over a week ago– at least technically I met the deadline. This “on-again/off-again” project has been “on-again” in the past six or eight months, so I’m feeling confident about my progress and possibilities of finishing this project, or at least more confident than I have felt in the past. Of course, there’s still a fair amount of work that needs to be done, more revisions and such, it still has to be sent out to readers (yet again), if it’s approved it will take a year or more to actually publish, and even with all that, there is still no guarantee that this thing will ever actually appear as a textbook. Someday, when the dust for all this settles, I’d like to write something about the textbook writing experience. It’s been an education, no question about it.

Anyway, I worked on this a lot for the last 10 days or so, and this morning, the day after I emailed stuff to the editors, I have this odd “what now?” kind of feeling. Frankly, I know “what now”: I have to get ready for that pesky fall semester that is going to be starting here in about two weeks. I need to tidy-up my blogs and some other web projects. I should do at least a little thinking and reading about my longer-term project on the history or writing technologies before the computer (btw, thanks to Dennis Jerz to this link of Flickr picts of “writing machines,” mostly typewriters). And I am also interested in trying to focus some more time on actually trying to read the scholarship in my field and less time in trying to create more of it.

Not to mention I have a life, which includes a seriously neglected garden and a flabby body that needs to get to the gym. Immediately.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I know the answer to the question of this post. It’s just a matter of convincing myself that I need to go on to something else, I suppose. Okay contemplative monkey– get to work then!

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Congress wades into "grading and ideology". Sorta.

Yesterday afternoon, I stumbled across this article that appeared in The Boston Globe, “Provision tells schools to grade students on subjects, not ideology: Measure aims to shield campus conservatives.” It’s one of those kind of slippery stories that I don’t quite understand, but I’ll give it a try.

Congress is debating reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, and one of the attached resolutions (undoubtedly, there are many such resolutions) “…tells colleges to grade students on the basis of their mastery of subject matter rather than on their political views.”

Ah, okay. I’ve always done that, and pretty much everyone I know, regardless of their political philosophies, does the same thing. Republicans can get an A in my classes and Democrats can get an F. It all depends on how well they do with the subject matter, not their political views.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m a complete “blank slate.” I’ve had students write things that were, for example, blatently racist that I simply was not willing to tolerate. I’m thinking in particular of an essay a student handed in many years ago in which the student argued that Native Americans were lazy and self-destructive and deserved what they got, and he (this student) knew because he used to live next to a reservation. My response was pretty direct. “This is incredibly racist. You’ve got to rewrite this, and this time, do some research.” He did (and, to this student’s credit, I really believe that he didn’t even realize that what he was writing was as ignorant as it was), he did some modest research, and– surprise! surprise!– he learned through his research that in reality, Native Americans have been getting the shaft from the U.S. government for quite some time.

Anyway, I digress.

The Globe article goes on:

The provision makes no mention of specific political leanings, but represents a victory for conservative student groups who have been arguing for years that American universities are bastions of liberalism seeking to impose their liberal orthodoxy on dissenters.

The measure is not binding, but some higher education analysts caution that it is not to be taken lightly. Colleges and universities, they say, should consider this a warning shot from a Republican-controlled Congress fed up with the liberal academy.

”If the universities don’t move, all that’s going to happen is this will build,” said David Horowitz, a conservative author and a driving force in the free speech movement that inspired the resolution. ”They’re sitting on a tinderbox. Now we have resolutions. I guarantee you, if they thumb their noses at this, there will be statutory legislation.”

A little bit later on, the article says this:

Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who introduced the original resolution that inspired the language in the higher education bill, said his aim is to protect conservative students from having their views squelched by the more radical members of the academy.

”The common knowledge is academicians are usually liberal, and it’s cute because they’re harmless ivory-tower types, but as the years have gone by, I think they have almost imploded among themselves,” said Kingston, whose father and sister are college professors.

Wow, I bet family dinners at the Kingston house are kinda tense…

Hmm. Okay. Well, I guess I’m left with a few questions and thoughts:

  • Other than the fact that this resolution has been introduced by conservative legislators concerned with the “liberal” academy and it is being supported by David (who gets WAY too much attention, IMO) Horowitz, why is this resolution a “victory” for conservatives? I mean, I understand that the goal of these folks is to “rein in” the (so called) liberal academy, but I don’t see how this vague and non-binding resolution does it.
  • As any number of people have written in blogs and elsewhere, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of “not so liberal” academics out there. I’ll grant you that most of the folks in humanities departments tend to be liberal, but I’m just not sure that’s true about my colleagues in the sciences, the college of technology (at EMU, at least), medicine. law, business, and a whole bunch of other areas. Look folks– don’t forget that Condi Rice was in the provost’s office at Stanford before she came into the Bush White House. You don’t get a whole lot more a part of the so-called “liberal ivory tower” than that.
  • And while we’re at it, what exactly counts as “liberal” or “conservative” here, what counts as including multiple viewpoints? If my university hosts a speech by a Holocaust survivor, does that mean, in the interest of providing “equal time,” my university should also host a speech by a Holocaust denier? I hope not. So, as far as I can tell what folks like Horowitz and the supporters of this resolution mean by “liberal” or “biased” views in college classrooms is “ideas we don’t like.” But of course, part of a college (dare I say “liberal”?) education is to confront and consider ideas we don’t like.
  • Oddly, it doesn’t seem like this resolution (which of course has no teeth to it anyway) would prevent me from teaching radical and polemic texts. So if I teach a whole semester’s worth of Marxist criticism, as long as I don’t grade a student on their specific politics, I’m okay. Hmmm….
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What academic blogging means to me (and what it is likely to mean in the coming year or so…)

As I mentioned the other day, Alex and Collin both had some very good and reflective posts about the reasons for academic blogging. Good posts. Go read them.

For me, keeping an academic blog has been useful and satisfying for all kinds of different reasons. I use this blog space to kind of keep notes and make links for myself (for teaching, for scholarship), my blog is a way making connections with other scholarly-types, I like the immediacy of blogging, I like the control I have, and I like the attention, modest though it may be. This is just a guess, but I’m pretty sure that more people read my blog every month than have ever read my more “real” scholarly publications.

In fact, I for one am likely to write even more on my scholarly blog and even less in more conventional outlets, at least for the next year or two. Why? Because I can.

See, in the next week or two, I should be will be as done as I am likely to get with a textbook project that I’ve been working on (and off and on) for years now. That’s the kind of project that will make you want to take a “break,” believe me.

Plus I’m in a comfortable and “settled” space life and career-wise. I’ve been tenured for a while now, and, because of the way things work at EMU, I will almost certainly be promoted again to “Professor” in a few years based on the work I’ve already done. My wife, Annette Wannamaker, is going to be starting a position in the department here at EMU as an assistant professor, specializing in Children’s Literature. This situation– both of us employed in good tenure-track positions that allow us to live in the same house like “normal” couples– has been something we’ve been working to achieve for almost 10 years now. We’re darn happy about it and because of this arrangement and the difficulty in getting this deal in the first place, I seriously doubt that we’ll be leaving EMU (which means we won’t be “going on the market” again, which we’re pretty darn happy about, too).

In other words, I’ve reached a point in my career where I don’t have to play the usual “publish or perish” games. And because of that, why not just blog?

Of course, my situation is a bit unique and perhaps different from a lot of other bloggers out there. It seems to me that grad students and tenure-seeking faculty need to make some careful decisions about blogging, about what to write or not write (I’m thinking here of the need to avoid posting things to a blog that might hurt future or on-going employment), and about how much and how often to write. Collin says that blogging is something that has helped him with his other academic writings, but I think I tend to agree with Alex when he writes:

You don’t give up other scholarly pursuits completely to go “all in� on blogging (or, at least, most don’t). But the truth is, rather than writing this entry, I could be working on a half-dozen other projects that would actually show up on a vita. The direct payout is not at all clear.

And again, by “direct payout,” I think what Alex means is stuff that will count in the academic game of getting a tenure-track job, getting tenured or getting a better academic job, getting promoted, etc.

For me, blogging is a benefit in and of itself. But I also see it as a dangerous procrastination activity. In the time I have spent this morning on this entry, I could have (probably should have) gotten some more work done on my textbook. Which is what I think I’ll go do right now…

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Confessions of a College Dean and the Happy Academic

In an effort to broaden my perspectives, I’ve been adding a lot of links to the ol’ blog lately. Generally speaking, I am not a fan of the anonymous blog, especially those anonymous blogs written by folks who want to be taken seriously as an academic but who are hiding behind a pseudo-identity. But I decided to make (another?) exception this morning and I added Confessions of a Community College Dean to the blogroll this morning and I’d encourage you to check him out.

CCCD is sort of a “happy academic” among the administrative ranks. He writes things I don’t agree with (this post about what seems to be an adminsitrative “dream scenario” for getting rid of those pesky tenured professors is offensive and wrong in a bunch of different ways), but I thought this post about housing was good (and it hits home in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti market, “fly-over state” though I suppose we are), and this post
and this post about the cons and pros (in that order) of being an academic administrator.

One should never say never, and it’s difficult for me to predict my (or anyone else’s) future. But as a Happy Academic and a member of that (occassionally problematic, according to what I’ve read on CCCD) class of the tenured, I can only say that I would rather chew off one of my own fingers than to become a department head, assistant/associate dean, or dean of a college. I am greatful for good administrators and scornful for bad ones (we’ve got our share of both around here) and I am happy that someone else is willing to do this work, and I also understand the fact that administrative-types generally make more money than us faculty-types. But dang, if I wanted a 9-5 job that required me to show up in an office, dress in appropriate office clothing, attend a whole bunch of meetings, and deal with people complaining about stuff I can’t do much about all day long, I would have never gotten into academia in the first place. Thank you, but no thank you.

Instead, I believe I will spend the rest of my Happy Academic summer day by working on a book project, going to the gym, taking my son to swimming lessons, working in the garden, and going shopping. I’ll be doing these things not necessarily in this order and certainly while wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

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Finally, "The Writing Show" goes on: thoughts and conclusions

Finally, it was time for the grand event itself, “The Writing Show.” Here’s how it went:

The event was held in downtown Richmond at the Creative Change Center, which describes itself as “a community space and an organization of collaborators promoting creative, innovative and entrepreneurial endeavors in the region.” It’s a cool and funky loft space in an old warehouse, but one where some group spent a lot of money making it cool and funky. My guess is it’s used on a day-to-day basis as a “spill-over” space by the advertising agencies on the second and first floors.

Anyway, it was set up pretty much like Dennis promised: there were some couches and chairs with microphones up front, and Dennis sat stage left (as is the tradition on most talk shows), the other two guests (Jeff Lodge and Doug Childers) and I sat stage right. Dennis asked us questions, we answered and chatted. There was an audience of about 20, which I thought was reasonably good (how many conference presentations and/or readings have you been to with much smaller crowds?), though it’s apparently small for this thing. Past events have had much bigger crowds, 80 or so people. Of course, the timing of this event, late July, probably meant a lot of people were out of town, and, in my experience, the internet and its related geeky factors often make writerly-types and English majors seek cover pretty quickly.

The intention of the format was for us to talk amongst ourselves for the first hour or so and then take questions from the audience, but the crowd jumped in pretty early with questions and comments of their own. People on the panel did a few “show and tell” things as they came up (I showed folks Stuart Moulthrop’s web site when a question came up about using to web to do things other than as a publishing vehicle for more or less “traditional” print writing, Doug showed the web site he did for a writer in Richmond, Jeff showed some links, including the electronic journal he helps edit, Blackbird), but mostly, it was, well, like a talk show.

Personally, I thought the format worked pretty well, and I’m thinking about ripping it off borrowing from the concept. I think it might be kind of an interesting teaching tool (groups of students put on a talk show about some kind of writing concept for other writers), or it might just be kind of cool to try to replicate the concept in the Ypsi-Arbor area.

The only thing that marred the event a bit was at the very end. Dennis was cleaning things up and I was milling around, talking to him, talking to a few straggling audience folks. All of a sudden, Dennis and a woman named Colleen (who, it turns out, is the director of James River Writers and the only person who is actually paid to do any of this stuff), start having this confrontational, ah, discussion. Colleen didn’t think the event went all that well. She said she wanted to see more people taking notes (actually, a lot of people were taking notes), she didn’t think people were all that engaged (though the fact people were interrupting sort of suggested to me they were), and she didn’t think we were really delivering the right “product” (which begs the question “just what exactly were you expecting?”).

It was a kind annoying/marketing wonk way to end the evening. I’ll let those folks sort out their own internal political issues, but I guess what annoys me about the whole thing is the way she treated me. Or rather, didn’t treat me. Sure, I did come in and do this because I wanted to make a road trip to Richmond, to see Dennis, to participate in a unique kind of presentation, etc. And I’m not exactly a “superstar” or the sorts that can draw people just with my name. But that doesn’t give this Colleen person the right to more or less just ignore me (I don’t think she ever said “thank you” or much of anything else to me), and I thought it was bizarrely unprofessional to have that “discussion” right there. It’d be too bad if a good idea like “The Writing Show” was sunk because of petty politics and “creative differences” and micromanagement.

Anyway, even with all that, it was cool and fun. Now I gotta hit the road.

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day one of the writing show roadtrip (brought to you by a witty and reassuring lower-case san-serif font)

cute lettering

Annette and I stayed last night at a Hampton Inn in Harrisonburg, VA, where we stopped off to visit an old friend. A good time has been had by one and all and the hotel is very comfortable and pleasant.

But I have to say that I am really struck by the “branding” of this hotel, more than I have been by just about any place I’ve stayed recently. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING– the cups, the little writing pads (as you can hopefully see in this not great picture), the shampoo, the signage in the elevator, the listing of the available channels, the little sign that tells me there is “hi-speed internet access. complimentary.“– is is this font. And they are trying to be kinda funny/cute about it, too. The water cup says “some like it cold;” the cup for coffee says (you guessed it!) “some like it hot.” The soap says “clean your body.” Thanks for the tip.

This sort of branding is around us all the time of course. I guess I don’t give the hyper-consistency of font and color a second thought when I am in a store or surfing a well-designed web site, but it kinda freaks me out a little bit in a hotel room.

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Far FAR too close to my Happy Academic home

From the July 29, 2005 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education comes this article, “Guilty to a Tee” by Michael “actually his real name” Bérubé. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about what it was like in the summer as a “Happy Academic.” I tried, but I think Bérubé has done a much better job of capturing the feeling. There’s a lot of good passages in this piece, but this one kind of captures the general “summer and academia” kind of feeling:

You would think that whenever college professors get too depressed or whiny about their lot in life, they could simply chant to themselves the mantra, “May, June, July, August.”

But you’d think wrong.

For many of my friends and colleagues, summer is a time of anxiety about both work and leisure. Professors tend to be driven people; many of us have internalized a fairly severe academic regimen in which we are accustomed to jumping through hoops and meeting deadlines, even when no one’s watching (maybe that’s why Foucault’s accounts of modern self-policing caught on so readily in some academic circles). So we often seem to spend half our “downtime” worrying about why we’re not getting more things done.

Ain’t that the truth. One of the great things about the academic life is that the work can be a lot of fun and engaging and even addictive. And stopping to work can sometimes be down-right hard.

Bérubé writes about several different kinds of sport activities he and his colleagues engage in during the summer and at other times of the year. But golf, as he points out, “is another matter:”

It requires years to master, it tends to be more expensive than tennis or fishing, and it takes a full five hours out of your day. Last but not least, somehow it just doesn’t seem appropriate for a liberal professor from the humanities wing of the campus to buy a local club membership or test out a new $400 driver. For the record, I do not have a membership anywhere, and my driver cost $150. But it still adds up, and it’s still hard to be casual about golf.

This is so very true. Discussing my golf game kind of wanders more or less into the realm of “the unofficial” blog space, but since Bérubé brought it up in an academic space, I suppose I can spend a sentence or three on it here. I started playing golf again quasi-seriously a couple of years ago. This summer and last, I have averaged about one and half rounds a week, this despite the fact that I have plenty of deadlines and I have been teaching at least half of that time, too. It is a huge time-suck, clubs cost a fair amount, and actually playing the game costs too much, too. It’s not a game for poor (albeit happy) English professors.

Still, it is a whole lot of fun, and since I have plenty of other things to feel guilty about, I think I’ll just follow (what I think is) Bérubé’s advice and just enjoy this pleasure.

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Granholm "blasts" tuition hikes; refuses to believe you cannot get something for nothing

I heard this story on WEMU this morning, and I found a link to a written version on mlive, “Granholm blasts tuition hikes.” For the non-Michiganders reading this blog, let me catch you up:

The Granholm in question here is Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan. On the one hand, Granholm (who is a Democrat, by the way) wants to increase college attendance in the state– she’s said a couple of times that she wants everyone in the state to have the opportunity for some sort of higher education, be that an undergraduate degree, associate’s degree, some kind of community college training, etc. On the other hand, she keeps cutting funding to higher education in the state, saying stuff like this:

While acknowledging that what she once called “fat” had already been cut from university budgets, Granholm insisted schools could do more.

“We all know the state has cut funding, but the state has cut funding everywhere,” Granholm said.

Last year (and I don’t remember all the details about this), Granholm promised to not to cut funding to state universities beyond a particular percentage if the universities agreed to not raise tuition too much. The universities (including EMU) held their part of the deal, but the governor’s office didn’t. Here’s what’s happening this year:

Granholm is proposing a 2-percent cut in state aid to universities for fiscal 2006 and wants Michigan’s 15 public universities to hold their tuition increases to inflation for a second straight year.

After four years of state aid reductions, however, officials at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University said they had no choice but to raise the price of undergraduate education. U-M regents approved a tuition increase of 12.3 percent for state residents. MSU trustees approved a 9.3 percent tuition and fee increase for most in-state students.

In a tuition guarantee plan approved last week, Central Michigan University will charge incoming freshmen 19 percent more than last year, with lesser increases for upper classmen. Credit hour rates would be capped for as long as the student is enrolled, up to six years.

As I understand it, Wayne State is going to raise tuition around 19 or 18 percent; I had heard that EMU was going to go up 10 percent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this news didn’t prompt a higher increase. The way I see it, the state universities are simply responding (correctly, I’m afraid) from the messages they are getting from the state. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Bizarrely, this is setting up a situation where the Republicans are able to look like “the higher education party.” For example:

“(Granholm) cut university funding and now she’s lamenting tuition increases,” said Sen. Michael Goschka, R-Brant, who chairs the higher education budget committee in the Senate. “Part of the reason for the tuition increases is because higher education hasn’t been a priority for her.”

This comment strikes me as extremely accurate and reasonable.

Look, I understand the complexities of the problem here, I really do. The state of Michigan is in the proverbial crapper right now: high unemployment, too much heavy industry, the auto industry is sluggish, etc., etc. Plus the previous (Republican) governor more or less handed Granholm a pretty awful situation tax-wise. She needs to raise taxes, but politically, that would be suicide. So it’s no wonder that Granholm is literally saying that she doesn’t want the state to actually pay for higher education, but she wants it to be there as a financially affordable option for citizens.

It’s an ugly situation, and I hope it is one the state reverses soon. My first job was in Oregon at Southern Oregon University. That school was chronically under-funded (still is, as I understand it), and because the funding from the state was so minimal, SOU was nearly completely “self-funded,” as if it were a private school. The problem is you can’t run a private school on tuition fees that are attempting to be affordable.

In my two years there in the mid 1990s, the result was a “financial crisis” each winter, one where there were rumors of layoffs of faculty and other cuts. These things didn’t happen (and the old-timers claimed the so-called “crisis” was present every year), and for all kinds of different reasons, I don’t see EMU laying off tenure-track faculty. But I really hope that people like Granholm look at situations in Oregon as an example of what not to do with higher education.