Don't sell out your colleagues. Even the assholes.

Yesterday's Times carried a story about Michigan's defense of its same-sex marriage ban, and particularly its use of scholarship arguing that children raised in same-sex households are disadvantaged. According to the article, Michigan's use of the child-welfare argument is unusual: most states have abandoned that approach, since most research now indicates that children raised in same-sex households fare about the same as those raised in heterosexual ones. Even more unusual is the response of the department that houses one dissenting researcher. Basically, it's rushed to disown him:

On the same day that Mark Regnerus, the most prominent of the state's witnesses, started his testimony, his own department of sociology at the University of Texas issued a highly unusual and stinging disclaimer:

"Dr. Regnerus's opinions are his own," wrote Christine L. Williams, the department chairwoman. "They do not reflect the views of the sociology department of the University of Texas at Austin. Nor do they reflect the views of the American Sociological Association, which takes the position that the conclusions he draws from his study of gay parenting are fundamentally flawed."

Confronted on the witness stand with that statement, Dr. Regnerus called it "regrettable" and said, "I guess they have been getting negative press probably about my appearance here."

I'm not a lawyer, but this strikes me as a weak move. Wouldn't it be better for the plaintiff's lawyers to cite the American Sociological Association itself? Or itemize the specific methodological flaws in Regnerus's work? Or present the studies that have come to contradictory conclusions? I mean, is the department chair an actual expert in this area? Who cares what she says?

Now, I support same-sex marriage and I'm skeptical of any work that suggests children are harmed by it. But since I'm not a sociologist, I'm not going to go around making public statements about the work of someone trained in that field. But you know what else I'm not going to do? I'm also not going to go around making public statements about the merits of the work done by my colleagues who are twentieth-century Americanists, or Victorianists, or medievalists. If I'm a department chair or on a P&T committee, sure: I have to make judgements about my colleagues' work from time to time, and to do so I have to rely largely on what other specialists say about it. But whatever I come think about their work, I'm not going to trash it in a public forum.

The Times doesn't make clear where Williams's statement was originally made, and that matters (the text appears on the department's website). But as presented in the article, this seems like a terrible precedent for academic departments, one as likely to be used against people who are on the cutting edge of research as those mounting a rear-guard action.

By all means: if your colleague's work strikes you as flawed or objectionable, and a reporter asks you about it, go ahead and point out that faculty pursue their own research interests, work independently, and that no one "speaks" for the department as a whole. But collegiality and confidentiality would both seem to demand you not go further than that.

Winning the lottery, part II

Okay! I'm back and ready to share a few more details. This will surely be only the first of many posts on Things Job Markety--believe me, I have A LOT to say--but I'm guessing that my adoring public wants the autobiographical part first.

The short version is that this was a weird year, and flukey good luck played an even bigger role than it does in most job market success stories. The biggest fluke was that both my department and Cosimo's wound up getting approval to hire in our respective partner's subfield. Neither position was intended as a partner hire--our institutions don't have a mechanism for that, and neither do they typically make mid-career hires (there isn't the budget for it, and, absent doctoral students, there isn't really the need). But although both lines were very much needed for curricular reasons, neither was either department's first hiring priority. So it was a big surprise that both departments got multiple searches approved.

This was obviously our luckiest break, but since both jobs were advertised as entry-level we tried not to get our hopes up; Cosimo is four years past tenure and I'm two, and we're well-paid for the kinds of institutions that we're at. Although living together has been a major goal (and would save our household a certain amount of money), we weren't willing to cripple our careers to make it happen. So we agreed that we'd rather turn down an offer--or even two!--if it involved one of us taking a big professional hit.

So we applied. . . and waited to see what would happen. Even though each of us had some inside knowledge about the department that we were applying to, we had absolutely no inside knowledge about the search itself; the waiting and wondering WHAT THE HELL WAS HAPPENING was pretty much as I remember it from job-market years past.

I'm not going to pretend that we didn't have advantages, but they aren't necessarily the ones that people think of when they carp about inside candidates. Neither set of colleagues had ever seen the spousal candidate teach, or read his or her scholarship, or heard him or her present a paper; I'm sure they were mostly predisposed to think well of us, but they only knew us socially and I think were perfectly capable of being appalled by our teaching or research if it had been appalling. Moreover, there were probably at least one or two members of each department predisposed against a spousal candidate.

At the same time, the reality is that no one else in those applicant pools looked quite like me or Cosimo because no one else with our experience, credentials, and publication records was going to be applying for an entry-level job at a regional public institution. When you don't hire mid-career, you just don't get candidates who have already made a name for themselves in their fields and who could be your next chair or help you redesign your curriculum from the ground up. You get great candidates with strong early track records--absolutely. But their strengths are not fully comparable. And funnily enough, the nature of our inside-candidacy helped guarantee that both searches were "real searches": even if one department had been hell-bent on hiring their existing colleague's spouse, the hiring committee had to know there was a real chance they'd fail, either because the institution couldn't make a good enough offer or because the couple might choose to go to the other institution. So all the finalists were strong candidates whom each department was genuinely excited about. They had to be.

At this point in the story, in the interests of confidentiality, I'm going to get a little vague about the details. So let's just say that although both departments were wonderfully supportive and strong advocates for a solution that wouldn't involve compromising either partner's career, only one institution was able to make such a solution happen. As a result, I'll be leaving my current job at the end of the 2014-15 academic year and joining Cosimo's department.

I'm still grieving the fact that I'll be leaving a department where I've been so happy, but I have no complaints about how any part of the process played out. Moreover, my new institution has made the move very much worth my while. My sadness is also tempered by the fact that I'll be returning to RU to repay the year I owe after my sabbatical. Not everyone would be thrilled about that--but frankly, I prefer it. We've been off living in a rented apartment for seven months, away from friends and colleagues, and next year will give me the chance to leave in a deliberative way. I need the time to say goodbye to the people and places I love. . . and also to get itchy and impatient to move on.

Winning the lottery

So, the eventfulness I referred to in my last post has concluded, which means I can now reveal that for many months Cosimo and I have been on the job market with the specific goal of solving our two-body problem. This wasn't something we fretted about much during the fall, but since mid-January, when we learned that we were finalists at two different institutions, it's been hard to focus on anything else. Thus my near-absence from this blog.

The good news is that we emerged victorious: we accepted a very strong offer and will be joining a department of talented teacher-scholars. I'll share more details soon.

But the reality is that whatever happened was going to come with a cost: either outcome was going to require our giving up some cherished friends and colleagues, some beloved spaces and places, and at least one city where we'd spent years trying to put down roots. As sorrows go, I grant that this is a minor one. Who feels sorry for the person who won the lottery? But although there's nothing to dislike about the future that's opening up, I need a few days to be sad about the other futures that won't be happening now.

I'll be back when I'm feeling more celebratory.

Thirty-nine.

Apologies for falling off the face of the internet; the last month has been. . . eventful. Eventfulness prevents me from saying more just yet, but in the meanwhile, hey! I'm thirty-fucking-nine years old!

Young Flavia is pretty excited, too.

PSA for no one in particular

If you've ever said to yourself, "you know, I like Flavia's blog--what with the snark and the intemperance and the navel-gazing and all--but what I'd really like to see is what she could do with 90,000 words on seventeenth-century religious prose," then you, my extremely unusual friend, are in luck.

Jus sanguinis

As I've mentioned on Facebook and Twitter, I am now apparently an Italian citizen.

Italy, like Ireland, allows "heritage" dual citizenship for Americans who can prove genealogical descent (and who are willing to assemble a ton of documents and jump through a lot of hoops), and after years of talking about it, my dad finally submitted all the paperwork through the Italian consulate in Los Angeles; eleven months later, the members of my immediate family have dual citizenship (Cosimo will be eligible in October, after we've been married for three years). If I can convince the New York consulate to update my address, I could have an Italian passport as early as next month.

It's a weird thing. I can't decide if it's more James Bond--a lock-box full of passports!--or more suburban-Subaru with a rear-window full of college and country decals. Since I have no plans to move to the EU, in the short-term this basically buys me shorter lines at European customs & immigration and means I wouldn't need a visa if wanted to spend more than 90 days in an EU country (e.g., while on a sabbatical or leading a study abroad program). Given that Italy does not offer birthright citizenship and in fact makes citizenship very hard to obtain for the children of immigrants, I admit I'm a little uncomfortable with the politics of the program; by all means, take whatever advantage you can of Italian-American pride, nostalgia, and tourism dollars--but my Italian "blood" does not make me as Italian as a kid of North African descent whose first language is Italian and who has lived there his entire life.

Still. My discomfort doesn't mean I won't be flashing my passport and speaking with the approximate fluency of a six-year-old at every future opportunity.

Pop-cultural flotsam

Mark Edmundson's meandering mess of an essay at the Chronicle has attracted a lot of ridicule in the corners where I hang out on the internet, and it is indeed a doozy. Though I'm often impatient with Edmundson's take on the humanities--both his fuzzy celebration of their value and his dour certainty that they're doomed--I respect him as a writer and have usually felt that his heart is in the right place: he values the humanities; I value the humanities; and the fact that he has a national audience probably helps all of us.

But this. . . well, even before I got to the really outrageous part, I was embarrassed for him. It's a self-indulgent and not entirely coherent account of Edmundson's time at Yale and how alienated he felt from both the tweedy profs with their sherry and the undergraduates he regarded as an undifferentiated mass of Skull & Bonesmen headed straight for Wall Street and/or the C.I.A. Edmundson was different--what with his black leather jacket--and so felt some initial sympathy with the rise of theory, which seemed sexy and young and opposed to all that fusty establishmentarianism. But! Over the years he came to see the nothing and the nihilism at the core of theory, and his essay concludes with the sorrowful realization that the tweedy fuddy-duddies had it right all along. But alas, the fuddy-duddies are all dead, and now "[f]ew professors in my field, literature, believe that they can distinguish rigorously between pop-culture flotsam and the works of Milton. Few of them know how to mount an argument that values Wyatt's poetry over a video game."

Um. Say what?

That last quotation is the portion of the essay that has received the most scorn, and rightfully so. Some of Edmundson's defenders claim he's merely being hyperbolic, and though I'm not convinced that he is--wild claims of this sort have been a staple of conservative critiques of the academy* for decades--whether Edmundson literally means that there are legions of literature professors who can't discriminate between the value of Paradise Lost and a video game or whether he means merely that they can't mount a coherent argument for the value of any canonical author, he's wrong.

Most professors know how to argue for the worth of whichever texts are canonical within their particular area of expertise, and most do so explicitly or implicitly one semester after the other. One reason is that we tend to be hired within traditionally-defined subfields ("Victorian Novel," "Modernist Poetry") and tend to be expected to teach bread-and-butter genre or period surveys. This means we do a lot of thinking about what our students need to know and what it would be irresponsible to leave out; we also--and especially if we happen to teach any subject that isn't immediately appealing to students--tend to think about how to make the case for those texts. Believe me: even at the most elite schools, students do not arrive convinced of their need to study Chaucer or Milton.

At less-elite institutions this is doubly true. (I've had students who assume "British Literature"--all of it!--is strange and foreign and totally distinct from any American literature ever.) At RU, Shakespeare is a required course, but I still consider it my job to make the case, actively and every day, for why Shakespeare is worth reading. I do not assume it. Canonical works only remain canonical because new generations of readers continue to fall in love with them and continue to believe in their worth; if your only argument for Shakespeare's canonicity is "because generations have said so," or even, "because I love him," you've lost. And lemme tell you: if I couldn't make the case for Milton, my classes would get cancelled. I only get to teach Milton because I sell him, hard, to students who have frequently never heard of him.

But I want to move away from the question of whether professors still recognize a canon and toward an interrogation of what we're doing when we dismiss some works as "pop cultural flotsam." I'm not sure what Edmundson intended to include in this category, and his vagueness is probably strategic. But as someone who works on an earlier period, I've long noticed that conservative critics who inveigh against the teaching of pop culture, ephemera, women and minority writers (and so on) do not take quite the same position when it comes to very minor writers who happen to be part of the establishment. So, early modern ballads, sermons, and the works of fifth-rate playwrights are so interesting and so worthwhile and even an important work of recovery (because: OUR HERITAGE!), but Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish--nevermind Toni Morrison, August Wilson or The Sopranos--aren't important enough or central enough to the culture.

Now, I'm not claiming that this is how Edmundson feels--I don't know his opinions about any of those works or writers--but I'm uncomfortable with any sweeping dismissal of popular culture. The fact is that virtually all serious scholars work on noncanonical texts at least some of the time (I wrote almost an entire book about 'em!), but not all noncanonical texts get sneered at as "flotsam." I can tell you that I've never once had anyone assert the triviality of the material I work on: it's old enough and aligned enough with traditional sources of power (the court, the church) that it reads as serious and important. But I'm not sure it's intrinsically any more or less valuable, as a subject for analysis, than 1950s sit-coms. Part of the question is what one does with the texts in question.

Some uncanonical texts are useful primarily for contextual or historical information (to see the evolution of a particular writer's works; to study the conventions of a genre; to understand the period's attitude toward gender, money, science, religion), but many are aesthetically interesting in their own right to a greater or lesser degree. I teach very few of the noncanonical texts I work on, but I'll assign the occasional sermon or excerpt from an ars moriendi manual, just as some of my colleagues show the occasional clip from a sit-com or bring in a series of midcentury advertisements.

The formal and interpretative skills that scholars bring to Shakespeare or Faulkner can be applied to any aesthetic object, however low or high, serious or pop-cultural, but only the best will keep yielding new meanings. Some of our t.v. shows (and, who knows? maybe even video games) will last or will be rediscovered by future scholars. Some of our "serious" novels and films will not. In the meanwhile, we study and we teach what seems most meaningful, most illuminating, most worthy. Most the time, those are canonical or critically-acclaimed texts. But real humanists know when and how to attend to the flotsam and ephemera.


--------------------
*H/t Phoebe, who has anatomized the conservative critique of academia in this post and later ones.

Mid-sabbatical update

So, classes began today at RU, which means my sabbatical is really and truly half done. I'd been dreading itemizing my accomplishments--but in looking over what I've actually done, it seems I haven't been a complete slacker.

So, the deets:

Book One

-Indexed
-Proofread
-Acquired cover image & permissions
-Rewrote and approved jacket & catalog copy

Book Two

-Spent a week at a rare books library doing background research
-Read another Donne biography
-Read, re-read, or power-skimmed all of Donne's prose
-Wrote a short commissioned essay on Donne (related to my Donne chapter)
-Drafted an additional 20 terrible rough pages of a Donne chapter
-Significantly revised & resubmitted an article on Shakespeare (which will be the core of my Shakespeare chapter)
-Read Bede's Ecclesiastical History
-Read around in Foxe's Acts & Monuments

Other scholarship

-Read The Compleat Angler in two editions and 8-10 essays on Walton
-Wrote two conference abstracts and had them accepted
-Wrote 2.5 conference papers
-Delivered one conference paper and one invited talk
-Collaborated on an SAA seminar proposal (for 2015)
-Began the background research for my SAA paper (for 2014)
-Did a small amount of work on Browne

Other other

-Completed a semester of college Italian
-Watched a few seasons of 30 Rock and a few seasons of Community
-Read Robert Alter's translation of Genesis
-Read Harbach's Art of Fielding and half of Tartt's Goldfinch
-Mostly kept up with my magazines and reviews
-Somehow still found things to blog about

Many of those accomplishments are pretty small and interstitial--the kinds of things I could fit into an ordinary semester of teaching and service--and I know I frittered away plenty of time. But though I certainly haven't been working 40hrs/week on my research, I've easily done twice or even three times the work I manage in a regular semester, so I'm not going to be too hard on myself. My goal had been to emerge at the end of my sabbatical with three long, strong chapter drafts, and though that's looking increasingly unlikely, I do think I'll have the core of three chapters plus a lot of important background work done--enough, at least, to make me feel that Book Two is well underway, even if years and years of work remain.

Toxic

Over the years, I've known several people stuck in toxic workplaces. By "toxic" I mean something more than merely dysfunctional, dispiriting, or run by assholes. I mean a place that, like an emotionally abusive relationship, erodes a person's sense of self and denies the reality of her experiences. A toxic workplace is one where you're always at fault, always the troublemaker, always the reason for any confusion, misunderstandings, or screw-ups.

Of course, you could actually be a troublemaker--and your friends and family, hearing your woes, may privately wonder whether that's the case or whether you're not at least exacerbating the problem. You may wonder the same thing. But since a toxic workplace is a place of mass delusion (or a conspiracy to support the delusions of a few), it's hard to know for sure.

Toxic workplaces exist in all fields, but I'm starting to wonder whether they're not worse in academia. Limited mobility makes it hard for any individual to get out, which also means that whatever dynamics or patterns of behavior have been established in a given department or division have been building for a very long time. By the time you appear on the scene, a great many people have a great deal invested in beliefs or behaviors that, looked at rationally, don't make a lot sense. Why isn't there a standard tenure and promotion document? Why does your academic unit operate according to some impenetrable patronage model?

One person's toxic workplace isn't always another's, however, and even among those who recognize the madness of a particular institution's culture, some will be able to tolerate it and others won't. So personality plays some role, but it's not the case that the bluntest or roughest-edged people are the most likely to be penalized; what you see as helpful, collaborative, bridge-building efforts may be exactly what those invested in an arcane and untransparent system find threatening.

I don't have first-hand experience with a toxic workplace--endless paperwork is more my jam--but what I've seen several friends go through has made me feel some of the helplessness of those unwillingly enlisted in someone else's delusion.

The particular stories I'm thinking of aren't mine to tell, but since I know some of my internet peeps have gone through similar experiences and lived to tell the tale, I'm wondering: can a toxic workplace get better? Can it be survived with one's integrity? Or is fleeing the only option?

Being a public intellectual on $10/day

One of the best sessions I attended at MLA was "The Semi-Public Intellectual? Academia, Criticism, and the Internet Age." Organized as a roundtable discussion, the session brought together a half-dozen scholars whose work as writers, critics, bloggers, and editors also addresses nonacademic audiences. Some were previously known to me but most were not, and their individual stories and experiences were fascinating. For the first time in my life, I found myself looking at the clock and longing for more time in a cramped and overcrowded ballroom.

For those of us who live half our lives on the internet, it's not news that there's a tremendous amount of writing talent out there. But this panel convinced me that, in addition to launching food and lifestyle bloggers into multi-million-dollar book-and-movie deals, the internet has also reshaped what it means to be a public intellectual--in part by reshaping the audience for their works. On the one hand, authority on the internet is dispersed, resulting in fewer "star" public intellectuals. On the other hand, the voracious reading habits of an audience willing to read not one but ten movie reviews makes this a golden age for the semi-public intellectual: the academic with both the skills and the desire to reach a larger audience. As several of the panelists noted, there really is an audience interested in what humanities scholars have to offer--who are eager for incisive analyses of politics, art, and pop culture that draw upon our depth and breadth of training.

The decline-and-fall rhetoric in the humanities and in traditional publishing has made this hard to believe: are there really more people writing well, in more places, for more readers? I don't know how to provide quantitative answers, but the anecdotal evidence is strong. To stick with academia: I'm only eight years out of grad school, but virtually all the PhD students I know now have at least a limited public presence on the internet (composing wry or evocative tweets is still public writing), and every third grad student I meet also seems to have a larger sideline as a reviewer, critic, poet, or journalist.

I love that, and not only because I love a grad student with a Plan B. I love that I can follow a random series of links on some friend's Facebook page and wind up reading something astonishingly good by someone whose name I don't know in a venue I'd never heard of. (I love, for that matter, that people I've never met keep reading me.)

But although I'm willing to believe that we're living in a kind of golden age for public writing, the gold we're talking about is strictly theoretical. As one of the panelists remarked about the rapid expansion of his online review, academics are more willing to write for free than journalists. Even if we don't care about the employment prospects for journalists (and I hope we do), this isn't good news. Most academics, after all, teach off the tenure track, so the convoluted proxy payment system that we full-timers enjoy simply doesn't apply. Me, I don't need to make a red cent from anything I publish. My academic writing helped me get a job, get tenure, and receive regular merit raises--and my nonacademic writing, in addition to bringing me great personal joy, has served as what Dr. Cleveland calls "a force multiplier" for my scholarship.

Most writers these days, academic or otherwise, do not have my job security, and as Tim Kreider's piece last fall in the NYT Sunday Review argued, writing for free ultimately devalues that writing--and all the thinking, learning, and training that precedes it. I'd like to believe that good writing is its own reward, but it's a reward that some of us enjoy more than others. (Moreover, I fear that none of us will enjoy it for very long: if we could tell our undergraduate English majors, with a straight face, that they could make money as writers, we might have more of them.)

This isn't the fault of the semi-public intellectual; it's a consequence of the hollowing-out of the middle class, the devaluing of the arts, and the rising cost of living in the kinds of urban centers where writers could once manage at least a modest, middle-class life. As the number of novelists now ensconced in the academy reminds us, even those who earn money from their writing rarely make a living off it.

I don't mean to end on a down note; I was genuinely invigorated by the panel and persuaded by case the panelists made for the appeal, relevance, and health of the humanities within the public sphere. But real health means people can support themselves with their work (or do that work from a place of love while supporting themselves with related work). If academics are to write for a public audience for free, they need secure jobs to underwrite that work. And if academia isn't providing secure jobs for current PhD students, they need an alternate career path that is, in fact, a career path.

The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

--T.S. Eliot

*

The Elizabethan and Jacobean court celebrated the twelve days of Christmas with banquets every day and entertainments every night. Not having quite the same resources at our disposal, Cosimo and I nevertheless wanted to find a meaningful way to celebrate Epiphany and wind down the Christmas season. So last night we lit the advent wreath for the last time and exchanged cards and a small gift apiece; today, we take down the tree and holiday decorations.

But since Epiphany, "the revelation to the nations," is fundamentally about seeing beyond the circle of one's family, friends and immediate community, I wanted to do something in that spirit as well. Since virtually all of my charitable giving is domestic--and most of it is intensely local, focused on my city, county, and state--for Epiphany, I'm starting a tradition of giving to a charity that focuses on the developing world (on the recommendation of Give Well, I went with Give Directly, which puts money in the hands of the extremely poor in Kenya and Uganda).

Here's hoping your day and your year are full of revelations large and small.

New Year's Meme

(Seventh in a series. See also New Year's Day 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.)

1. What did you do in 2013 that you'd never done before?
*Got a book contract (and completely finished everything to do with Book One)
*Rented out our house
*Started a year of Italian classes
*Set myself a blogging schedule and kept it

2. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes: one college friend had her first, another her second, and a post-college friend also had her first. (Can you tell 40 is on the horizon?)

3. Did anyone close to you die?
Our realtor, whom I felt close to despite the brevity of our relationship. She'd worked with us for months finding our house and was just finishing up the credit checks and paperwork for our renters when she died quite suddenly, only a few weeks after her father died.

4. What countries did you visit?
England and Canada

5. What would you like to have in 2014 that you lacked in 2013?
I would really like to spend it living with my spouse, full-time and for the long-term, in our house. But barring that, I'd like for the Article of Eternal Return to STOP RETURNING.

6. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Getting Book One out of my life (and into everyone else's! Mwahaha!)

7. What was your biggest failure?
I had some disappointments this year, but they were all comparatively minor.

8. Did you suffer illness or injury?
A couple of colds, a couple of migraines, and a minor infection that required too many different courses of antibiotics to knock out completely.

9. What was the best thing you bought?
Uh, a new coffee table? Nothing big or notable is coming to mind.

10. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Pope Francis

11. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Oh so many people on the internet.

12. Where did most of your money go?
Between repairs/upgrades to the house, renting a bigger apartment for my sabbatical, and two separate moves, housing expenses ate up a ton of cash.

13. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
a) Happier
b) Maybe a touch heavier, but who's to say? I LIVE in my yoga pants these days.
c) Poorer (but only because I'm on sabbatical and at half-pay)

14. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Reached out to old friends. I'm in touch with a lot of people, but there are some friendships I haven't been as active in keeping going as I wish I'd been.

15. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Fretted about the future

16. What was the best new book you read?
I read a number of books I expected to love and didn't (Telegraph Avenue, Bring Up the Bodies, White Teeth). But Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, which I'd never read, made up for all of them.

17. What was your favorite film of the year?
Either Frances Ha or Enough Said

18. What was your favorite album of the year?
Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City

19. What was the best play you saw?
The Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? was probably the best, but I'm glad we made the trek to Brighton to see the Globe's Henry VI (all three plays in one day).

20. What kept you sane?
Uh, being on sabbatical? That rules.

21. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2013.
Which of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to his life span?

Wishing everyone a marvelous 2014--may it bring you all you deserve or desire!

Writing as discovery

For my sins, I read David Brooks's column as many times a week as it appears (and for Cosimo's sins, I often read them aloud). Usually they're not worth the energy of mocking publicly, but today is an exception, because today's column opens with Brooks telling us how to write. Worse, he's telling us how he tells his students to write:

I tell college students that by the time they sit down at the keyboard to write their essays, they should be at least 80 percent done. That's because "writing" is mostly gathering and structuring ideas.

Obscured within this idiotic and irresponsible statement are two important ideas. The first is the useful reminder that "writing" involves an awful lot of thinking (and reading and researching) that goes on apart from the time spent at the computer or with pen in hand. The second is that the structure of a piece of writing is as important as the ideas it expresses.

But for most people, writing, developing ideas, and deciding on structure are mutually constitutive and not easily separable into distinct stages. Brooks seems to believe he's giving his students the same advice as John McPhee, whose elaborate and idiosyncratic approach to structure is the subject of a long New Yorker essay from last winter. But even a casual read reveals that McPhee does a tremendous amount of writing even as he's still figuring out an article's structure. Personally, I know writers who do extensive preliminary outlining and who spend days or weeks ordering their ideas in their heads and on notecards (or dry-erase boards, or whatever), but only a small number then find the subsequent writing an efficient and straightforward process. If this is true of Brooks, then that's terrific--but it isn't really what McPhee describes and it certainly isn't true of most writers. Indeed, I've found that for less-experienced writers, a preliminary outline often winds up foreclosing possibilities: students are anxious when their ideas start to go in directions that don't fit the script, and so they decline to pursue those ideas--or they keep them, but in a structure that no longer makes any sense.

Because I actually teach students writing semester in and semester out, and because I know how inclined they are to cling for dear life to whatever pronouncements previous instructors have made or whatever frameworks they've provided (DIE, FIVE-PARAGRAPH ESSAY, DIE), I don't say stupid shit like, "80 percent of your writing happens before you write" or "writing is just structuring ideas." Writing is how most of us have ideas, not simply the end result of them.

For my part, I teach students that structure is vitally important, but that the right structure isn't always apparent until later. It might make sense to start with an outline, but whether or not they start with one, they should take a hard look at the structure of their essay once it seems done and see what might need rearranging or reconsidering. (I tell them that I often outline my own essays only after I've written a good, coherent draft, in order to better see what the component parts are and to understand the larger logic at work; it's a way of stepping back to see the big picture.)

Writing is hard. Teaching writing is harder. But everyone who does both knows that there isn't a single right way to write--the right way is the way that works for you. We benefit from hearing about other people's processes and strategies and trying them on to see which might be helpful, but no method should be presented as definitive. John McPhee doesn't do that in his essay, and I'd thank David Brooks not to do it either.

And with that rant, I close out 2013. Catch ya on the flip side.

Irons in the fire

Among the things I planned to accomplish in the first semester of my sabbatical was a draft of one chapter of my second book. That could still happen--RU's classes don't resume until the 27th, and according to the Flavian Calendar I have until then to complete all tasks assigned to the fall semester--but right now I'm finding myself doing both more and less than focusing on that particular chapter.

In the past two weeks, I've done the following:

Continued working my way through Donne's sermons

Re-read old notes on Donne's polemical prose

Read a couple of articles on Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler

Read a couple of articles on early modern science and manuscript culture

Made some revisions to an essay on Merchant of Venice

Thought about Foxe's Acts and Monuments

Thought about All's Well that Ends Well and Jacob and Esau

Looked through some notes on Browne's Religio Medici

Read the first book of Bede's Ecclesiastical History

In case it's not clear, most of those things aren't related to one another. I find myself working on five or six discrete projects, but none in a sustained way. It's possible that this is just procrastination from the primary task I intended to focus on--that Donne chapter--but I'm also finding, for the first time in my life, that I'm enjoying doing a million things at once.

As I've mentioned before, I prefer to be a monotasker, especially when it comes to my scholarship: I like to focus on a single project until it's done (or, at any rate, until I reach some logical or necessary stopping point). Short-term projects can interrupt, but when they do, I focus on that project until it's done, and then return to Project A. The idea of having a whole bunch of half-written articles--or conference papers that I hadn't yet developed into articles, or extensive research that hadn't even graduated to the point of being a conference paper--has always seemed about as appealing as having a bunch of cars up on blocks on my front lawn.

But here I am, having fun. I'm not sure if this is just the result of being on sabbatical and having more freedom to dabble and draw connections across disparate texts and subfields (because it turns out? most of the things I've been doing secretly DO relate to each other!) or if this, too, is a way my temperament has been shaped and changed by academia. Scholarly time is slow and long, and maybe if we're to be sustained by this life--after the monomaniacal focus on What Comes Next that determines one's progress through grad school and tenure--we need lots of disparate projects, pleasures, distractions.

I'm just theorizing, and who knows whether I'll continue to feel this way. But it's good to realize that the world won't stop spinning if I take my eye off it, and to know that I'll probably even finish most of the projects I've started. . . eventually.

College as a luxury good (now half price!)

Over Christmas there was an interesting article in the Times about tuition pricing at private colleges--specifically, whether lowering the sticker price actually makes a college more appealing to its prospective applicants, or whether it makes more sense to retain a high official price (say, $35-45K) that in practice almost no one pays. It's an especially interesting read today, as we're bombarded with ads for after-Christmas sales promising us deep, deep discounts on goods that otherwise pass themselves off as luxury items.

Since I've only taught at public institutions and I don't have college-bound children, I haven't thought much about private-college pricing; I know it's high, obviously, and I've read that even those high prices don't fully cover costs, but I did not know that very few students actually pay sticker price, especially at less-selective colleges. According to David L. Warren, of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, "About a quarter of students at independent colleges are full-pay, and at institutions with small endowments and small name recognition, it's single-digit" [as the article makes clear elsewhere "single digit" refers to the actual number of students--not the percentage of students--paying full tuition]. Financial aid at such schools is definitely not limited to students with financial need, or even those of exceptional academic achievement. In other words, the price tag at many schools is a made-up number designed to convince parents and students that a college with only a very local reputation is actually extremely selective and prestigious.

I get some of this logic; growing up, I had a friend whose dad owned an antique shop. Whenever he had trouble selling an item, he raised its price. It's easy to see why people would assume that the no-name private school that charges Ivy League rates must be providing a high-quality product; and if that's their assumption, of course they'd thrill to any discount. According to the article, a majority of the prospective families surveyed by Roger Williams University in Rhode Island reported being more interested in a college that officially charged $36,000/year but offered students an average of $13,000 in aid rather than one that charged $23,000/year.

But although everyone loves a deal, not all discounts on artificially marked-up products are equally appealing; you first have to believe in the product's intrinsic value before you care about how good a deal you're getting. If I find something I love at T. J. Maxx or Nordstrom Rack and I pay a quarter of the (alleged) retail price, then sure, I'll crow about the deal. But I care more about finding something I like, at a price I can pay, rather than any specific savings. And if even your state's most selective, public flagship university is cheaper than a small private college, it seems harder to assert that there's an easy correlation between price and value.

I also wonder how off-putting a high official price tag might be: do all your prospective students and their families know that aid is available, and how much? $23,000/year may already be too high a price tag for many students, but I imagine there are families that figure they could swing that cost, with loans and work-study, who wouldn't pursue an application at a school they believed to cost $36,000. Put another way, I'm probably not going to go into the Hermès store, on the assumption that I'd never be able to afford anything there--even on sale.

But maybe that's the point: a certain kind of college wants the kind of student who will nose around the the Hermès store, hoping for a luxury good at a discount price, rather than the one who's content buying something put out by the Macy's store brand.

Readers: do you have any experience with artificial pricing in the college market--or any thoughts about how it works and whom it appeals to?