(Three guesses whence I've just returned--and, as my dad would say, the first two don't count.)
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Diversifying the portfolio
Because sometimes, poems and plays just don't pay the rent:
(Three guesses whence I've just returned--and, as my dad would say, the first two don't count.)
(Three guesses whence I've just returned--and, as my dad would say, the first two don't count.)
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Very special, very unique
I probably wouldn't read the New York Times wedding announcements if I expected to find nothing in them to mock, but I don't read them solely to make fun of them. In fact, they've provided me with much useful information over the years.
But of all the ridiculous things that people do with or reveal in their wedding announcements, nothing entertains me more than the earnest attempts some couples make to "create new traditions" or cobble together meaning out of traditions that are not their own.
Today's winners: a coupla white folk getting married in a "traditional Inca ceremony" presided over by a shaman.
But of all the ridiculous things that people do with or reveal in their wedding announcements, nothing entertains me more than the earnest attempts some couples make to "create new traditions" or cobble together meaning out of traditions that are not their own.
Today's winners: a coupla white folk getting married in a "traditional Inca ceremony" presided over by a shaman.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Different classes, same classroom
A couple of weeks ago New York magazine had a cover story, "Does Money Make You Mean?" about the effects of wealth on personality. It's a suggestive and interesting piece, though the research is still preliminary. But while I'm reserving judgement about how money affects individual personality, the article's discussion of the different values emphasized by working-class vs. more elite families seems pretty sound--and potentially important for those of us who teach students from a range of economic backgrounds:
Now, there are other variables here, to be sure: introverts may feel differently about group work than extroverts; the specific make-up of the group matters, and so does the make-up of the class as a whole. The classes I taught at BUU, for example, were two or three times as large as anything I taught at Instant-Name-Recognition University, so group work gave more students a chance to really get into a conversation about the material. This generally isn't true at RU, though, where most of my classes have 25 or fewer students and where even students in a 12-person seminar usually seem happy to work in pairs or quartets.
But beyond explaining a previously mystifying phenomenon, the article made me think about how a classroom can address both tendencies and not privilege just one. This goes beyond group work--though I do need to think more about that. Most of us have probably noticed that while some students have no hesitation asking for extensions or extra help or other special treatment (sometimes justified, sometimes not) others are diffident and won't advocate for themselves even when they have a compelling reason. If they've missed a class or missed a deadline, no matter the reason, they just seem to figure that they're out of luck: the professor doesn't care, doesn't want to hear their sob story, and would never adjust his or her policies just for them. And in my experience, the second group consists disproportionately of first-generation college students, especially when they're also economically disadvantaged.
When members of both groups are in the same classroom--the strong self-advocators who identify with and want to please Teacher and the reticent, blank-faced ones who never explain why they missed class or speak up when they're confused--it can be hard to be sure you're being fair, or really giving everyone the same opportunities and the same treatment. I've learned over the years to seem like a hard-ass in my syllabus policies, but to include a "crisis policy"--which I also read aloud, at the beginning of the semester in every class--telling students that hey, life is hard and they all have lots of outside commitments and pressures, but when an emergency arises they should TELL ME, because I'm willing to be flexible when I can.
That seems to help with that particular problem. But the New York article has made me think about the other ways in which the cultural differences between working-class and more affluent students might cause problems in the classroom, or simply not be fully legible to me as a teacher.
What do you think? Is this a problem? Where have you seen it in action, and how have you dealt with it?
"Parents in working-class contexts are relatively more likely to stress to their children that 'it's not just about you' and to emphasize that although it is important to stand up for oneself, it is also essential to be aware of the needs of others and to adhere to socially accepted rules of behavior," wrote a team led by Nichole Stephens. . . . Parents with higher incomes "more often tell their children that 'It's your world' and emphasize the value of promoting oneself and developing one's own interests."Reading this, I had a sudden insight: this is why my students at Big Urban University and Regional University have been generally cheerful, even actively enthusiastic, when I assign them to work together in groups--and the students at my Ivy alma mater tended to hate it. I'd never been able to figure this out. I hated working in groups when I was in college, and as a grad student teacher I saw that my own students disliked it, too, and I assumed that this was just a natural response to a crappy pedagogical strategy--until I started teaching at non-elite institutions and was astonished to get feedback to the effect that I should put them in groups more often.
[. . . .]
[Studies] have found, broadly speaking, that the affluent value individuality--uniqueness, differentiation, achievement--whereas people lower down on the ladder tend to stress homogeneity, harmonious interpersonal relationships, and group affiliation. . . . Lower-class people wanted to be the same as their peers, whereas better-off subjects showed. . . "a preference for uniqueness."
Now, there are other variables here, to be sure: introverts may feel differently about group work than extroverts; the specific make-up of the group matters, and so does the make-up of the class as a whole. The classes I taught at BUU, for example, were two or three times as large as anything I taught at Instant-Name-Recognition University, so group work gave more students a chance to really get into a conversation about the material. This generally isn't true at RU, though, where most of my classes have 25 or fewer students and where even students in a 12-person seminar usually seem happy to work in pairs or quartets.
But beyond explaining a previously mystifying phenomenon, the article made me think about how a classroom can address both tendencies and not privilege just one. This goes beyond group work--though I do need to think more about that. Most of us have probably noticed that while some students have no hesitation asking for extensions or extra help or other special treatment (sometimes justified, sometimes not) others are diffident and won't advocate for themselves even when they have a compelling reason. If they've missed a class or missed a deadline, no matter the reason, they just seem to figure that they're out of luck: the professor doesn't care, doesn't want to hear their sob story, and would never adjust his or her policies just for them. And in my experience, the second group consists disproportionately of first-generation college students, especially when they're also economically disadvantaged.
When members of both groups are in the same classroom--the strong self-advocators who identify with and want to please Teacher and the reticent, blank-faced ones who never explain why they missed class or speak up when they're confused--it can be hard to be sure you're being fair, or really giving everyone the same opportunities and the same treatment. I've learned over the years to seem like a hard-ass in my syllabus policies, but to include a "crisis policy"--which I also read aloud, at the beginning of the semester in every class--telling students that hey, life is hard and they all have lots of outside commitments and pressures, but when an emergency arises they should TELL ME, because I'm willing to be flexible when I can.
That seems to help with that particular problem. But the New York article has made me think about the other ways in which the cultural differences between working-class and more affluent students might cause problems in the classroom, or simply not be fully legible to me as a teacher.
What do you think? Is this a problem? Where have you seen it in action, and how have you dealt with it?
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
New office, new you
Apologies for the bloggy silence: I returned Stateside a week ago, immediately came down with a cold, discovered the back yard had become a jungle in our absence, had to assuage the needs of two cats, and decided that jetlag + headcold = awesome time to move offices. Because yes: upon earning tenure I also got a new office, one with a huge window that looks into the arms of a giant tree.
Getting tenure and scoring this particular office aren't directly related; one person is leaving, one person is coming in, and our old department chair is stepping down as our new one steps up, so there are several offices in play. Still, I enjoy both the symbolism and the ritual change inherent in the move: the office itself is only a bit better than my old one (which had a ridiculously tiny window but was otherwise spacious and agreeable), but thinking about how to organize and decorate a new space and going through, God help me, six years of lesson plans and course evaluations and administrative memos and plagiarism paperwork--and throwing out 2/3 of it and reorganizing the rest--has felt like an agreeable bit of housekeeping, an agreeable new start.
Whatever else tenure brings, occupying a new position within the department (literally!) and getting a new perspective on the world outside it (also literally!) seems like a nice way to begin.
Getting tenure and scoring this particular office aren't directly related; one person is leaving, one person is coming in, and our old department chair is stepping down as our new one steps up, so there are several offices in play. Still, I enjoy both the symbolism and the ritual change inherent in the move: the office itself is only a bit better than my old one (which had a ridiculously tiny window but was otherwise spacious and agreeable), but thinking about how to organize and decorate a new space and going through, God help me, six years of lesson plans and course evaluations and administrative memos and plagiarism paperwork--and throwing out 2/3 of it and reorganizing the rest--has felt like an agreeable bit of housekeeping, an agreeable new start.
Whatever else tenure brings, occupying a new position within the department (literally!) and getting a new perspective on the world outside it (also literally!) seems like a nice way to begin.
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
More on privilege
My previous post got far more comments than I expected, and evolved into a really interesting conversation about the ways in which privilege (or what Phoebe and commenter i. would prefer to call "advantages") works in the academy; thanks to all who participated. I didn't realize it would be so controversial to suggest that, even within the community of scholars, some people get at least mildly preferential treatment based on such things as the name on their Ph.D., the influence and connections of their dissertation director, the institution at which they work, and/or the nature of their employment (adjunct or lecturer/VAP, tenure-track or tenured).
To me, this is all self-evident, though it's important not to overstate the case or to conflate all forms of privilege as equivalent. It is certainly not true, at least in the academy as it currently exists, that all one needs is a degree from the right school or the right advisor to be put on the fast-track (or indeed any track) to success, and it's ridiculous to imply that someone with tenure at no-name public college has the same kind of power and influence as a scholar with tenure at an Ivy. But both of the latter have more power and influence than an adjunct or a grad student.
But whatever you choose to call these forms of professional privilege, I feel strongly that those of us who have them need to be cognizant of the fact. Most of us, I think, realize that our professional standing (whatever it may be) is partly the product of luck and not purely the result of our own intelligence and hard work; we may have worked damn hard, but we know that there are far more deserving candidates than get admitted to strong graduate programs or than get jobs--and it takes nothing away from our own achievements to acknowledge at least a little luck along the way.
However, we need to recognize that there are structural forms of privilege at work as well. Someone whose dissertation topic suddenly becomes hot just as she's going on the market is lucky, as is someone whose unrelated secondary specialization just happens to be something a particular department needs in addition to the primary specialization identified in their job ad. But those with a fancy Ph.D., or a well-connected advisor, or a tenure-track job, or tenure, are positioned to reap (which does not mean that they will reap!) advantages beyond what their work alone might get them. Saying that isn't saying their work has no merits, or that they haven't worked hard. It's just that they can get a hearing, or be taken more seriously, than those with less standing even when the latter may be equally smart and have done equally strong work.
I think that those of us with tenure are also privileged members of the profession, wherever we teach, and even though getting tenure should be even more obviously the result of hard work than getting into a fancy grad program or getting a tenure-track job in the first place. But even apart from the inequities in some tenure processes (those who get unjustly denied tenure or those who squeak through for dubious reasons), the term "privileged" applies here, because those who have it have the job security, and the professional standing, credibility, etc., to say and do things that people without tenure might think twice about. Tenure may be earned. But the advantages and protections it confers often go beyond what's earned, in the sense that not everyone who earns it gets it--and not everyone even gets the opportunity to earn it.
In acknowledging my own privileges I'm not apologizing for them, just as I don't apologize for my good luck. I'm proud of my hard work and I'm convinced that my work is also, generally, good work. But I wish to avoid the dual temptations both of thinking that everything I've gotten is purely the result of merit and of seeing as "privileged" only those who have the things I wish I did. I don't have every advantage, but I have many, and my successes have surely come just a little bit easier because of them.
To me, this is all self-evident, though it's important not to overstate the case or to conflate all forms of privilege as equivalent. It is certainly not true, at least in the academy as it currently exists, that all one needs is a degree from the right school or the right advisor to be put on the fast-track (or indeed any track) to success, and it's ridiculous to imply that someone with tenure at no-name public college has the same kind of power and influence as a scholar with tenure at an Ivy. But both of the latter have more power and influence than an adjunct or a grad student.
But whatever you choose to call these forms of professional privilege, I feel strongly that those of us who have them need to be cognizant of the fact. Most of us, I think, realize that our professional standing (whatever it may be) is partly the product of luck and not purely the result of our own intelligence and hard work; we may have worked damn hard, but we know that there are far more deserving candidates than get admitted to strong graduate programs or than get jobs--and it takes nothing away from our own achievements to acknowledge at least a little luck along the way.
However, we need to recognize that there are structural forms of privilege at work as well. Someone whose dissertation topic suddenly becomes hot just as she's going on the market is lucky, as is someone whose unrelated secondary specialization just happens to be something a particular department needs in addition to the primary specialization identified in their job ad. But those with a fancy Ph.D., or a well-connected advisor, or a tenure-track job, or tenure, are positioned to reap (which does not mean that they will reap!) advantages beyond what their work alone might get them. Saying that isn't saying their work has no merits, or that they haven't worked hard. It's just that they can get a hearing, or be taken more seriously, than those with less standing even when the latter may be equally smart and have done equally strong work.
I think that those of us with tenure are also privileged members of the profession, wherever we teach, and even though getting tenure should be even more obviously the result of hard work than getting into a fancy grad program or getting a tenure-track job in the first place. But even apart from the inequities in some tenure processes (those who get unjustly denied tenure or those who squeak through for dubious reasons), the term "privileged" applies here, because those who have it have the job security, and the professional standing, credibility, etc., to say and do things that people without tenure might think twice about. Tenure may be earned. But the advantages and protections it confers often go beyond what's earned, in the sense that not everyone who earns it gets it--and not everyone even gets the opportunity to earn it.
In acknowledging my own privileges I'm not apologizing for them, just as I don't apologize for my good luck. I'm proud of my hard work and I'm convinced that my work is also, generally, good work. But I wish to avoid the dual temptations both of thinking that everything I've gotten is purely the result of merit and of seeing as "privileged" only those who have the things I wish I did. I don't have every advantage, but I have many, and my successes have surely come just a little bit easier because of them.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Professional privilege
There's been something going around the academic blogosphere these past few months, with many long-time bloggers of roughly my generation wondering aloud about the purpose of their blogs now that their professional status is more secure. I've had those questions, too. A lot of us started blogging when we were grad students or were just starting our first full-time academic jobs, when we were growing into our professional identities but still felt pretty marginal. The period of becoming--the story of how one builds a life and fashions a self--is, after all, a traditional subject for narrative.
But now that we're done struggling upward, or have at least hit a significant narrative plateau (and now that we have enough buy-in that we're not going to be writing with complete candor about a specific obnoxious colleague, a gossipy scandal, or a potentially disastrous institutional initiative), then what's the point for those of us whose blogs are mostly life chronicles? Who wants to read about the relatively low-stakes struggles of the tenured?
I don't know the answer to the last question, but I suppose my answer to the first one is that, first of all, the story isn't actually over--and secondly, we were never fully candid and never really that marginal to begin with. Graduate school and the job market may have traumatized us, and we may even have spent a year or two as contingent faculty, but let's face it: those of us who went to fancy Ph.D. programs weren't ever in the belly of the academic beast (though we may have spent some time caught unpleasantly in his esophagus). So if we're more privileged now than we were then, it's only a matter of degree.
My point isn't that only the most marginal deserve our sympathy or have stories worth telling, but the opposite: academia can be brutalizing even for the relatively privileged, and as long as we're not conflating our lot with that of those further down the privilege chain--and as long as we're listening to them, too--writing honestly about our professional lives is a service no matter where we are or how much good fortune seems to outweigh the bad. (That guy we all know who didn't get tenure at Harvard or Yale or Chicago a decade ago, and who retells the story every year at the the conference hotel bar? Yeah, he's annoying as hell. But his story about the profession is a real one too.)
In the comments to my last post, I mentioned that I was striving to write both honestly and ethically: I want to tell the truth, including the emotional truth, of my professional life without being merely emotional and reactive, in a way that maintains the privacy of those who haven't signed up to be blogged about, and also in a way that at least implicitly recognizes my own privilege.
We'll see how it goes. But I'm hopeful that my life post-tenure is still worth writing about, and worth reading.
But now that we're done struggling upward, or have at least hit a significant narrative plateau (and now that we have enough buy-in that we're not going to be writing with complete candor about a specific obnoxious colleague, a gossipy scandal, or a potentially disastrous institutional initiative), then what's the point for those of us whose blogs are mostly life chronicles? Who wants to read about the relatively low-stakes struggles of the tenured?
I don't know the answer to the last question, but I suppose my answer to the first one is that, first of all, the story isn't actually over--and secondly, we were never fully candid and never really that marginal to begin with. Graduate school and the job market may have traumatized us, and we may even have spent a year or two as contingent faculty, but let's face it: those of us who went to fancy Ph.D. programs weren't ever in the belly of the academic beast (though we may have spent some time caught unpleasantly in his esophagus). So if we're more privileged now than we were then, it's only a matter of degree.
My point isn't that only the most marginal deserve our sympathy or have stories worth telling, but the opposite: academia can be brutalizing even for the relatively privileged, and as long as we're not conflating our lot with that of those further down the privilege chain--and as long as we're listening to them, too--writing honestly about our professional lives is a service no matter where we are or how much good fortune seems to outweigh the bad. (That guy we all know who didn't get tenure at Harvard or Yale or Chicago a decade ago, and who retells the story every year at the the conference hotel bar? Yeah, he's annoying as hell. But his story about the profession is a real one too.)
In the comments to my last post, I mentioned that I was striving to write both honestly and ethically: I want to tell the truth, including the emotional truth, of my professional life without being merely emotional and reactive, in a way that maintains the privacy of those who haven't signed up to be blogged about, and also in a way that at least implicitly recognizes my own privilege.
We'll see how it goes. But I'm hopeful that my life post-tenure is still worth writing about, and worth reading.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Getting It Published: Part 7
I was hoping that this post would be the final one in this series--to be followed, perhaps, by a few posts on the process of publication itself (from contract to bound copies), but alas: the news from my once-prospective press is not good.
As you may recall, I'd been working with this press for two years. They first sent the manuscript to one outside reviewer, who had stern but encouraging words, so I revised according to her suggestions. They sent it to her again, and she was very happy with my revisions and recommended publication. Then they sent it to a second reviewer, who read the entire MS in three weeks and was highly critical--but he also seemed confused about the basic parameters of my project; he made lots of suggestions, but most of them were, at best, tangential to my topic. I was asked to address "at least some of" his concerns, and I did so to the extent that I felt I could while maintaining the integrity of the project. I also told the press very clearly what I had done, what I had not done, and why.
So after winter break they sent it back to him. . . and after more than four months he submitted a one-paragraph review, most of it cut-and-pasted from his previous review, saying that I hadn't engaged sufficiently with his criticisms.
And that means that's it for that press. The editor was quite apologetic, but explained that such a negative review tied the press's hands and would make it hard for the editor to make a case to the publication board--even if the editor were to find a warmly receptive third reader.
And though I know that this is just one obtuse reader and that this is just one press, I haven't felt this crappy about my scholarly identity since grad school. I've been working on this project, in one incarnation or another, for ten years. At this point, I'm pretty much done. I want it to live somewhere other than my own head. Readers can like it or dislike it, but I want it to be other people's to grapple with, not mine.
I know that it will get published elsewhere, and maybe even at an equally good press. I'm not doubting the project's intrinsic worth, but right now I am feeling pretty demoralized about how goddamn long it will now be before it sees the light of day. And although I knew that this was a risk I was taking by sticking with one press for so long, I'm still surprised by this outcome and I still feel like I've failed. Moreover, being in Italy means I can't do what I'd normally do, which is send out another half-dozen proposals immediately. But I don't have a printer here and I don't have RU letterhead, so all I can do for the next three weeks is stew.
*
Well, that's not quite true. The silver lining, I guess, is that now I have to get on with the rest of my scholarly life. For the past four months, waiting for this review, I've felt paralyzed, unable to work on the article I'm half done with, unable to start strategizing about the next book (even though I'm excited about both), and unable to do more than desultory work on my scholarly edition. It just hasn't felt worth it, when I knew that I might hear back any day about this book and need to turn quickly to any final revisions.
And to be honest, I've been worried, over those past four months, about whether I was losing steam and losing drive, and maybe becoming complacent (about getting tenure, about the idea of having my book come out with this particular fancy press, and, generally, about all the things I've done rather than being energized by what lies ahead). If my book isn't coming out imminently, well, that feels shameful. But a sense of falling behind or of having something to prove has always been useful to my productivity. Having the book in limbo means I absolutely have to get that article out the door this summer. And I need to start applying for some external fellowships, maybe even a few big ones, in order to write the first couple of chapters of my second book and in the hopes of taking a year-long rather than a semester-long sabbatical in 2013-14.
I suppose it will all work out in the end; the race is not always to the swift, etc. But this sure wasn't what I'd hoped to hear.
As you may recall, I'd been working with this press for two years. They first sent the manuscript to one outside reviewer, who had stern but encouraging words, so I revised according to her suggestions. They sent it to her again, and she was very happy with my revisions and recommended publication. Then they sent it to a second reviewer, who read the entire MS in three weeks and was highly critical--but he also seemed confused about the basic parameters of my project; he made lots of suggestions, but most of them were, at best, tangential to my topic. I was asked to address "at least some of" his concerns, and I did so to the extent that I felt I could while maintaining the integrity of the project. I also told the press very clearly what I had done, what I had not done, and why.
So after winter break they sent it back to him. . . and after more than four months he submitted a one-paragraph review, most of it cut-and-pasted from his previous review, saying that I hadn't engaged sufficiently with his criticisms.
And that means that's it for that press. The editor was quite apologetic, but explained that such a negative review tied the press's hands and would make it hard for the editor to make a case to the publication board--even if the editor were to find a warmly receptive third reader.
And though I know that this is just one obtuse reader and that this is just one press, I haven't felt this crappy about my scholarly identity since grad school. I've been working on this project, in one incarnation or another, for ten years. At this point, I'm pretty much done. I want it to live somewhere other than my own head. Readers can like it or dislike it, but I want it to be other people's to grapple with, not mine.
I know that it will get published elsewhere, and maybe even at an equally good press. I'm not doubting the project's intrinsic worth, but right now I am feeling pretty demoralized about how goddamn long it will now be before it sees the light of day. And although I knew that this was a risk I was taking by sticking with one press for so long, I'm still surprised by this outcome and I still feel like I've failed. Moreover, being in Italy means I can't do what I'd normally do, which is send out another half-dozen proposals immediately. But I don't have a printer here and I don't have RU letterhead, so all I can do for the next three weeks is stew.
*
Well, that's not quite true. The silver lining, I guess, is that now I have to get on with the rest of my scholarly life. For the past four months, waiting for this review, I've felt paralyzed, unable to work on the article I'm half done with, unable to start strategizing about the next book (even though I'm excited about both), and unable to do more than desultory work on my scholarly edition. It just hasn't felt worth it, when I knew that I might hear back any day about this book and need to turn quickly to any final revisions.
And to be honest, I've been worried, over those past four months, about whether I was losing steam and losing drive, and maybe becoming complacent (about getting tenure, about the idea of having my book come out with this particular fancy press, and, generally, about all the things I've done rather than being energized by what lies ahead). If my book isn't coming out imminently, well, that feels shameful. But a sense of falling behind or of having something to prove has always been useful to my productivity. Having the book in limbo means I absolutely have to get that article out the door this summer. And I need to start applying for some external fellowships, maybe even a few big ones, in order to write the first couple of chapters of my second book and in the hopes of taking a year-long rather than a semester-long sabbatical in 2013-14.
I suppose it will all work out in the end; the race is not always to the swift, etc. But this sure wasn't what I'd hoped to hear.
Saturday, June 09, 2012
When you think dumb thoughts you like dumb people
As I struggle along with my Italian here where I'm surrounded by it, I realize what a comfort, what an absolute joy, the boring, the conventional, the formulaic, and the repetitive are. Bad detective shows and their stern, furrowed-browed heroes and bumbling sidekicks? Awesome. I've seen 'em all before. Glossy women's magazines with their rhapsodies over lipstick and dollops of personal-life wisdom? Even better. I love commercials and print advertisements, the stupider the better. (Really bad not-quite jokes? I get them! It's fantastic!)
As Cosimo has observed, the people you'd most avoid if they were speaking your native language--the loud, slow-talking, pedantic ones--are those you're most grateful for when you're trying to work up your language comprehension. Whining children? Pretty great! That guy opining loudly to his buddies outside the tabbachi shop? Also great! Ditto for old ladies narrating their purchases aloud at the supermarket, couples breaking up in public, and angry dudes with bad cell phone connections shouting the same sentence over and over. We went to mass at a local church (itself awesome, since the formulae are the same and lots of the terms are cognates and/or Latin loan words), and I briefly thought I'd been granted the gift of tongues when I was able to follow most of the sermon. But no: the priest was just a tedious young guy, fresh from the seminary, giving a deliberative, repetitive, and essentially theological sermon. It was terrific.
I guess I look forward to the day when I dislike tedious Italians as much as I dislike tedious Americans and Britons. But for now I embrace them. Eloquent, original, and complex thinkers just ain't for me.
As Cosimo has observed, the people you'd most avoid if they were speaking your native language--the loud, slow-talking, pedantic ones--are those you're most grateful for when you're trying to work up your language comprehension. Whining children? Pretty great! That guy opining loudly to his buddies outside the tabbachi shop? Also great! Ditto for old ladies narrating their purchases aloud at the supermarket, couples breaking up in public, and angry dudes with bad cell phone connections shouting the same sentence over and over. We went to mass at a local church (itself awesome, since the formulae are the same and lots of the terms are cognates and/or Latin loan words), and I briefly thought I'd been granted the gift of tongues when I was able to follow most of the sermon. But no: the priest was just a tedious young guy, fresh from the seminary, giving a deliberative, repetitive, and essentially theological sermon. It was terrific.
I guess I look forward to the day when I dislike tedious Italians as much as I dislike tedious Americans and Britons. But for now I embrace them. Eloquent, original, and complex thinkers just ain't for me.
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Fare come fanno i romani
So we made it to Rome, and with the exception of the mosquitoes, who have given us an overly-enthusiastic welcome, everything here is pretty near perfect: the weather, the apartment, the neighborhood.
If this is how the Romans do it, I'm sold. Check it:
A corner of the kitchen, opening onto the terrace
The back of the terrace
The view from the living room
Another view from the living room
So who knows how much I'll be blogging. Unless you're more interested in my adventures in verb conjugation than I imagine--or have a very high tolerance for hearing about bad Italian t.v., the many bottles of wine, prosecco, and limoncello already lining my fridge, or how tiiiired my feet are, there may not be much to report.
If this is how the Romans do it, I'm sold. Check it:
So who knows how much I'll be blogging. Unless you're more interested in my adventures in verb conjugation than I imagine--or have a very high tolerance for hearing about bad Italian t.v., the many bottles of wine, prosecco, and limoncello already lining my fridge, or how tiiiired my feet are, there may not be much to report.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Antioch U: where "flexible" and "individualized" mean cynical and exploitative
Over the weekend I got an astonishing request: a student at Antioch University* emailed me to ask whether I'd be willing to adapt one of my existing courses to a distance-learning format and allow her to take it for credit toward an M.A. degree at Antioch.
It's not the student's email that astonished me; she was polite and professional and obviously following the guidelines given her by the university itself. It's Antioch's educational model--if you can call it that!--that blew my mind. They're a low-residency, mostly online program, with five campuses and apparently only a few faculty employed full-time. Most of the courses are taught by faculty found by the students themselves and paid $125 per credit hour. The payment is officially designated as an "honorarium," I presume to skirt any rules the faculty member's home institution might have against moonlighting. Here, read the full instructor guidelines for yourself.
Nice racket, huh? Antioch is fully accredited and its tuition even seems pretty reasonable--until you compare it, credit hour for credit hour, with the price at a state institution: Antioch students pay $331 per undergraduate credit hour and $497 per graduate credit hour. By contrast, in-state students at RU pay between $146 and $220 per undergraduate credit hour and between $295 and $370 per graduate credit hour (the higher price is for part-time students; the lower price is for full-time students who are taking the maximum course load).
So Antioch students are paying more and getting a vastly lower-quality education, cobbled together on their own, by trial and error--and presumably taught either by desperate adjuncts or by cynical tenure-line faculty based elsewhere who are willing to make a few extra bucks now and again.
Yeah, sure: it's a free country and students can choose to enroll anywhere. But that doesn't make Antioch's educational model anything but a scandal. (Which is what I told the woman who emailed me--albeit rather more nicely and with a few words of encouragement about her intended area of study.)
Shame on you, Antioch.
------------
*The complicated relationship between Antioch University and Antioch College is partly unraveled here, here, and here. I'm not an expert on this history, and would welcome more information.
It's not the student's email that astonished me; she was polite and professional and obviously following the guidelines given her by the university itself. It's Antioch's educational model--if you can call it that!--that blew my mind. They're a low-residency, mostly online program, with five campuses and apparently only a few faculty employed full-time. Most of the courses are taught by faculty found by the students themselves and paid $125 per credit hour. The payment is officially designated as an "honorarium," I presume to skirt any rules the faculty member's home institution might have against moonlighting. Here, read the full instructor guidelines for yourself.
Nice racket, huh? Antioch is fully accredited and its tuition even seems pretty reasonable--until you compare it, credit hour for credit hour, with the price at a state institution: Antioch students pay $331 per undergraduate credit hour and $497 per graduate credit hour. By contrast, in-state students at RU pay between $146 and $220 per undergraduate credit hour and between $295 and $370 per graduate credit hour (the higher price is for part-time students; the lower price is for full-time students who are taking the maximum course load).
So Antioch students are paying more and getting a vastly lower-quality education, cobbled together on their own, by trial and error--and presumably taught either by desperate adjuncts or by cynical tenure-line faculty based elsewhere who are willing to make a few extra bucks now and again.
Yeah, sure: it's a free country and students can choose to enroll anywhere. But that doesn't make Antioch's educational model anything but a scandal. (Which is what I told the woman who emailed me--albeit rather more nicely and with a few words of encouragement about her intended area of study.)
Shame on you, Antioch.
------------
*The complicated relationship between Antioch University and Antioch College is partly unraveled here, here, and here. I'm not an expert on this history, and would welcome more information.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Multi-tasking, obviously, is not my thing
My intensive two-week Shakespeare class has just ended. And like last year, I'm torn between thinking that this is the wost schedule EVAH--four hours a day! five days a week! A new play virtually every day!--and thinking that, just maybe, this is how college should be: just twelve to fifteen students, all taking only one class at a time, with a professor teaching only one class at a time. The schedule is simultaneously brutal and leisurely, and while I dislike the brutality for obvious reasons, the leisure (four to six hours of class time on every play is a real gift, when you're used to barely three) and the focus that comes from that leisure is delightful.
So I'd get rid of the every-day part. But if all college classes met for four hours a day, two days a week, and each class lasted for five or six weeks--and we kept the small class size and the one-class-at-a-time thing for both students and instructors? That might just be heaven.
So I'd get rid of the every-day part. But if all college classes met for four hours a day, two days a week, and each class lasted for five or six weeks--and we kept the small class size and the one-class-at-a-time thing for both students and instructors? That might just be heaven.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Pseudonymity and its discontents
So it looks like I have tenure: I returned from a quick weekend trip to NYC to find a letter from RU's prez stating as much--and outlining such things as the effective date, the amount of my raise, and so forth. I'm not sure I'll truly believe it until I get the letter from the chancellor and/or see the raise reflected in my take-home pay, but since I was never really worried about getting tenure I'm not really worried now; I'm just waiting to feel different, I guess.
This month also marks my seven-year blogiversary: I started blogging as I was wrapping up my dissertation and preparing for my first full-time teaching job; a year later, after being offered my current job, I moved to this site. And here I am still.
I've never actually grown bored with blogging, though I've often figured that I would, someday: surely I'd eventually run out of things to say, or my audience would drift away, or I'd find a newer and more satisfying form of navel-gazing. None of that has happened yet, though it still might. I might also start blogging differently, or about different things, though I have no specific plans to do so.
The one change that I do expect to make in the near future is to link my blog identity more closely to my real-life one. That doesn't have to do with tenure, though getting tenure is a nice symbolic point at which to make this shift; it's been at least five years since I wrote anything in the expectation that my pseudonymity was secure or anything that I'd be uncomfortable having linked to the real me. I assume that anyone who doesn't already know who I am--but who wants to--could pull up most of my biography in 15 minutes on Google.
And many people have: I've made numerous professional connections through this blog over the years, and my blog has also helped to strengthen many pre-existing real-world friendships; some readers became friends and some friends became readers. (Hell, I even got to know my eventual spouse better as a result of this blog). But when I started blogging, all the academic bloggers I read were pseudonymous. For a very junior academic, pseudonymity was thus both personally comfortable and socially normative.
The newer generation of Early Modern bloggers and tweeters, however, mostly write under their own names. I have no intention of making this a specifically Early Modern blog, but I'd like to be more active in those conversations elsewhere on the internet and have my peers know who I am. Moreover, while my blog was once my primary link to my larger professional community--the place where I'd ask for advice, share conference gossip, and that sort of thing--I now use Facebook or Twitter for most such crowdsourcing and professional chit-chat. But my Facebook account is under my real name. And my Twitter account is under this name.
I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to fuse my identities; maybe I'll just put up a link to my department profile on the sidebar and call it a day. But at this point, the pretense of pseudonymity feels like more trouble than it's worth.
This month also marks my seven-year blogiversary: I started blogging as I was wrapping up my dissertation and preparing for my first full-time teaching job; a year later, after being offered my current job, I moved to this site. And here I am still.
I've never actually grown bored with blogging, though I've often figured that I would, someday: surely I'd eventually run out of things to say, or my audience would drift away, or I'd find a newer and more satisfying form of navel-gazing. None of that has happened yet, though it still might. I might also start blogging differently, or about different things, though I have no specific plans to do so.
The one change that I do expect to make in the near future is to link my blog identity more closely to my real-life one. That doesn't have to do with tenure, though getting tenure is a nice symbolic point at which to make this shift; it's been at least five years since I wrote anything in the expectation that my pseudonymity was secure or anything that I'd be uncomfortable having linked to the real me. I assume that anyone who doesn't already know who I am--but who wants to--could pull up most of my biography in 15 minutes on Google.
And many people have: I've made numerous professional connections through this blog over the years, and my blog has also helped to strengthen many pre-existing real-world friendships; some readers became friends and some friends became readers. (Hell, I even got to know my eventual spouse better as a result of this blog). But when I started blogging, all the academic bloggers I read were pseudonymous. For a very junior academic, pseudonymity was thus both personally comfortable and socially normative.
The newer generation of Early Modern bloggers and tweeters, however, mostly write under their own names. I have no intention of making this a specifically Early Modern blog, but I'd like to be more active in those conversations elsewhere on the internet and have my peers know who I am. Moreover, while my blog was once my primary link to my larger professional community--the place where I'd ask for advice, share conference gossip, and that sort of thing--I now use Facebook or Twitter for most such crowdsourcing and professional chit-chat. But my Facebook account is under my real name. And my Twitter account is under this name.
I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to fuse my identities; maybe I'll just put up a link to my department profile on the sidebar and call it a day. But at this point, the pretense of pseudonymity feels like more trouble than it's worth.
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Oh those girls and their books!
This New York Times article from a few days ago has been making the rounds on my social media sites: lowly book technician discovers an engraving by Paul Revere! And, yeah, the part about making an unusual find is nice (the engraving isn't the first known copy of the image, though it's very rare). But the article itself is stupendously bad, written in a voice of sentimental condescension. Here are some early paragraphs:
So okay, that's some bad prose right there, and it's on the writer, not the subject. But I wonder whether the two aren't related, for this is the way that lots of educated people talk about old books: in terms of rapturous sentimentality. Books are precious things! Oh, the dust of ages! Oh, the tooled bindings! They connect us to the past! Why, who knows who leafed these pages before us?
It's also worth noting the way that book-loving is so often feminized. It's a charming, quirky, unpractical, feminine habit, this ability to get lost in books and to have a passionate emotional relationship with them as objects. It's not that there aren't male book-lovers in the world or in popular culture, but as I noted some while back, the relationship that gets drawn between men and books tends to emphasize their deep thoughts and their pursuit of knowledge. Male book-lovers are writers and scholars. Female book-lovers may occasionally be imagined as writers and scholars, but more often they're simply readers--and the kind of readers who go into misty raptures over that old-book smell, and touching the past, and all that shit. Their thoughts about books don't matter; it's their relationship with books. They're books' most most devoted acolytes, and perhaps by extension the devoted acolytes of (mostly male) writers.
Don't get me wrong: I love books, too. And I own a couple from the seventeenth-century and get a little thrill from them. But I wish female book-lovers weren't so often portrayed as passive daydreamers, for whom books are just another form of daydreaming.
(This portrayal is rather better.)
Day after day, a tall, shy woman weaves her way unnoticed through the earnest and learned campus swirl of Brown University. She enters the hush of a library, then promptly vanishes from sight.
[. . . . ]
Ms. Malchodi is more spiritually attuned to books than her Orwellian job title might suggest. She came to Brown as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, but life wound up demanding her study. Soon she was working in a College Hill bookstore rather than reading in a college library, and making cabinets rather than writing papers about her beloved Romantics.
One day she saw an advertisement for a bookbinding and conservation job at the university. She has been here ever since--though mostly underground--inspecting old books, submitting to their long-ago stories and vanishing to where now is then and then is now.
In the ensuing 20 years, gray has come to her hair and a husband and twin girls have come to her life, yet wasn't it all just yesterday? When Wordsworth thrilled her heart? When Wordsworth lived?
So okay, that's some bad prose right there, and it's on the writer, not the subject. But I wonder whether the two aren't related, for this is the way that lots of educated people talk about old books: in terms of rapturous sentimentality. Books are precious things! Oh, the dust of ages! Oh, the tooled bindings! They connect us to the past! Why, who knows who leafed these pages before us?
It's also worth noting the way that book-loving is so often feminized. It's a charming, quirky, unpractical, feminine habit, this ability to get lost in books and to have a passionate emotional relationship with them as objects. It's not that there aren't male book-lovers in the world or in popular culture, but as I noted some while back, the relationship that gets drawn between men and books tends to emphasize their deep thoughts and their pursuit of knowledge. Male book-lovers are writers and scholars. Female book-lovers may occasionally be imagined as writers and scholars, but more often they're simply readers--and the kind of readers who go into misty raptures over that old-book smell, and touching the past, and all that shit. Their thoughts about books don't matter; it's their relationship with books. They're books' most most devoted acolytes, and perhaps by extension the devoted acolytes of (mostly male) writers.
Don't get me wrong: I love books, too. And I own a couple from the seventeenth-century and get a little thrill from them. But I wish female book-lovers weren't so often portrayed as passive daydreamers, for whom books are just another form of daydreaming.
(This portrayal is rather better.)
Friday, May 04, 2012
The arm bone's connected to the shoulder bone
I think one of the reasons my colleague's departure has me feeling so shaken has to do with the way that networks of affinity work within academic departments. Even in happy and collegial places, like my own, not everyone is equally close--and in fact "closeness" isn't even the issue, if by that we mean social and emotional intimacy. We all, I think, have our own private and not necessarily conscious sense of who makes the department for us: those people whose values or commitments most line up with our preferred vision of the place. Sometimes those people are bona fide friends, but they needn't be. If I were a theorist, for example, my most theoretical colleagues--those who incorporated theory into their classes most energetically and whose writing reflected their own engagements--would likely be crucial to the department I believed in and wished to preserve.
Maybe this is less true in larger departments, but most of the people I know in mid-sized ones (say, fifteen to thirty tenure-line faculty) feel similarly. I've had friends at other schools say things like "I like my job, but if X and Y left? I'd probably leave, too." My departing colleague isn't my closest friend in the department, but if a successful workplace is like a toy building made of blocks, then s/he's a pretty strategically located one. Lose a second block nearby, and others start tumbling, too. Few blocks are so important that their removal affects the whole structure--but any one can weaken some part of it.
There are two things to note about this. First, these networks of dependence and self-definition aren't necessarily obvious (in fact, if they ARE obvious, it's usually because they've taken the more or less destructive form of cliques or factions). I can only guess who the triggering figures would be for some of my colleagues, but I'm sure they have them, as I have mine. This means we may be slow to recognize how weakened another area of our shared structure has become, or how unhappy or alienated a colleague we value might feel. We don't actually all live in the same department, even when we think we do.
Second, academia strikes me as unusual in the degree to which bonds of affinity among coworkers affect not just day-to-day happiness, but the actual mission and identity of a place. Sure, co-workers are key to almost everyone's job satisfaction, no matter the industry, and it's common to hear remarks like, "the best thing about this place is its people." But because academic departments are relatively autonomous, and because they're also pretty egalitarian--everything is done by committee--the things your coworkers want and believe in become what the department does and who it is. When my department overhauled its curriculum and the shape of its major, we did it ourselves, over nearly three years and lots and lots of conversations. We looked at many other models and the whole thing had to be approved at the college level, but it wasn't imposed by anyone in a "leadership" role. It was shaped by us, collaboratively, junior as well as senior faculty.
This is an excellent thing. It's wonderful to have control over the specifics of one's job and it's wonderful to have colleagues one likes and believes in. But to the extent that the values and goals of our workplace are determined by our colleagues and our specific networks of allegiance and affinity, the structure is also very fragile.
Maybe this is less true in larger departments, but most of the people I know in mid-sized ones (say, fifteen to thirty tenure-line faculty) feel similarly. I've had friends at other schools say things like "I like my job, but if X and Y left? I'd probably leave, too." My departing colleague isn't my closest friend in the department, but if a successful workplace is like a toy building made of blocks, then s/he's a pretty strategically located one. Lose a second block nearby, and others start tumbling, too. Few blocks are so important that their removal affects the whole structure--but any one can weaken some part of it.
There are two things to note about this. First, these networks of dependence and self-definition aren't necessarily obvious (in fact, if they ARE obvious, it's usually because they've taken the more or less destructive form of cliques or factions). I can only guess who the triggering figures would be for some of my colleagues, but I'm sure they have them, as I have mine. This means we may be slow to recognize how weakened another area of our shared structure has become, or how unhappy or alienated a colleague we value might feel. We don't actually all live in the same department, even when we think we do.
Second, academia strikes me as unusual in the degree to which bonds of affinity among coworkers affect not just day-to-day happiness, but the actual mission and identity of a place. Sure, co-workers are key to almost everyone's job satisfaction, no matter the industry, and it's common to hear remarks like, "the best thing about this place is its people." But because academic departments are relatively autonomous, and because they're also pretty egalitarian--everything is done by committee--the things your coworkers want and believe in become what the department does and who it is. When my department overhauled its curriculum and the shape of its major, we did it ourselves, over nearly three years and lots and lots of conversations. We looked at many other models and the whole thing had to be approved at the college level, but it wasn't imposed by anyone in a "leadership" role. It was shaped by us, collaboratively, junior as well as senior faculty.
This is an excellent thing. It's wonderful to have control over the specifics of one's job and it's wonderful to have colleagues one likes and believes in. But to the extent that the values and goals of our workplace are determined by our colleagues and our specific networks of allegiance and affinity, the structure is also very fragile.
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Decline and fall
One of my colleagues is leaving RU. This isn't actually the first of my tenure-line colleagues to take a job elsewhere, but it feels like it: the others were people I wasn't close to, and they weren't here long, and neither their presence nor their absence materially affected my sense of my department's identity.
This colleague, on the other hand, turns out to have been pretty integral to my sense of my department's identity, which is maybe a way of saying integral to my own sense of identity. We were hired at more or less the same time, we have similar training and research ambitions, our teaching interests overlap, and s/he has been an admirably dedicated member of the department. We're also personal friends.
And though we are friends and though it's normal to regret the loss of any cherished coworker, I'm surprised at how shaken this colleague's departure has left me and how much it's destablized my feelings about my department.
There's no reasonable reason for this: my colleague is moving in order to be close to family--not because of any dissatisfaction with our department--and we're almost certain to get a replacement hire. Indeed, I've argued before that it's actually a sign of health for a department occasionally to lose a talented person. It means we're hiring well, that we provide our faculty with opportunities for growth, and that we're remaining competitive. Obviously no department wants to be a revolving door, but a limited amount of turnover is to be expected.
So why has this felt, at occasional moments since I got the news, like it might be The End of Everything?
Well, the thing about hiring talented people is that they can leave. And I look around my department, and it seems possible that, if the stars aligned in just the right awful combination, we could lose three or four people in a two-year period. Those of us with seemingly intractable two-body problems are likelier to leave than others, but who's to say? Any one of us could leave even if most of us aren't planning to.
And the prolonged jobs crisis means that even those of us who have been spared haven't been spared. My department has hired something like fifteen tenure-line faculty in ten years, many of them for entirely new positions. Even in the depths of the recession we've had continuous cost-of-living raises, as well as a pool of competitive merit raises. And our institution's financial picture is only improving.
But it still feels precarious, probably because it is precarious. We're okay now, but for how long? We might stop getting replacement lines, nevermind new ones. We might lose the upper-administrator who has been most enthusiastic about promoting the humanities. And as education jobs dry up in this state, we might lose English majors (since a great many of our majors are also pursuing their teaching certification). And then what?
Losing this particular colleague may not be a tipping point--in fact, it almost certainly isn't. But it's made me feel anxious and vulnerable, reminding me that nothing is forever and that bad news is more likely than good in higher education.
I'll get over it. But it's hard to believe that things are getting better at one's own institution when they're getting so much worse elsewhere.
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