"Dare to write clearly and engagingly whatever the audience, Helen Sword urges junior and senior scholars alike in a myth-busting guide to good academic prose."
Yes, dare. Don't be a moral coward like everybody else.
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Monday, September 10, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
Sciences:
Humanities:
SMH.
The post-doc system is “dysfunctional and not sustainable in the long term,” Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman told top brass at NIH in June.
Humanities:
For Ph.D. graduates in the humanities and social sciences, postdoctoral fellowships are becoming increasingly attractive as a way to build research and teaching expertise before entering the academic job market, five current ACLS postdocs at Yale interviewed said.
SMH.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
The politics of disciplinarity at the undergraduate level
We academics like our disciplinarity decidedly inter-, or at least we spend a lot of time saying so.
Yet we're also quite aware of deep-seated political (understood broadly) differences stemming from institutional structures, funding structures, and disciplinary cultures:
The physical sciences and philosophy are famously hostile to women and people of color. Humanists resent their relatively lower pay and status, but breathe a sigh of relief that they don't have to depend on large corporate grants, and cling fiercely to the intellectual autonomy they enjoy. Humanists are also quietly glad that nothing they make turns a profit, because they're disgusted by the notion that the university would own the patent for it. Science disciplines think the humanists don't do real research. Humanities disciplines think the scientists can't teach for beans and don't care to. Graduate students in the science disciplines resist unionization because they know if they're paid the same as the humanities grad students, they'll be paid less.
These are just a few of the political dimensions of disciplinarity within the university that I can think of off the top of my head.
We tend to think of these as internal squabbles, by, for, and among academics. We tend not to see this disciplinarity as particularly relevant to our undergraduates, who switch majors seemingly at whim and in any case seem to graduate knowing so very little about what we, steeped in it as we are, think of as "the discipline" and "the profession."
But it's increasingly obvious that disciplinarity's politics are not contained among us academics. They are profoundly present in our undergraduates' lives, and guess what? Undergraduates graduate. And their disciplinarity goes with them.
This is not a polemic against disciplinarity, by the way. I believe in disciplinarity: the notion that certain objects of study demand the nuanced development of methods for studying those objects. I believe interdisciplinarity is only meaningful when it truly engages multiple disciplines.
I am only observing that the political dimensions of disciplinarity, which are of course inevitable, are not just an academia thing.
Recently in higher education, there have been a number of flirtations with the idea of charging undergraduates differential tuition based on the income a graduate holding a degree in a given major can expect to command (assuming, laughably, that there is a job available in the aforesaid graduate's field). The University of California, where I did my graduate degree, is one of the schools that has entertained this notion.
I am not aware of any schools that have yet adopted such a tuition plan (which, needless to say, I find revolting). But the idea is always lurking, because undergraduates are continually subjected to anxious/reproachful queries about what their degrees are "worth," or whether college is "worth it." Thus the logic of capital that underwrites the university is made plain: education is a commodity "worth" what it will gain back in economic returns, not the leading-from or drawing-out of the Latin word e-ducare.
(Aaron Bady's excellent post on the subject is worth revisiting. I also highly recommend Historiann's pointed questioning of why it is that college is so often deemed "not worth it" specifically for poor people.)
This is just one example of the way that the politics of disciplinarity plays out at the undergraduate level.
I was reminded of another this afternoon when a certain Daily Cal article popped into my Twitter feed.
The Daily Cal is the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, one of the major centers of student protest around the systematic dismantling of public education, and where some thirteen protestors have been criminally charged for infractions like blocking the sidewalk and—in the case of Professor Celeste Langan, who walked toward police with wrists held together and said, "arrest me," and who was subsequently dragged to the ground by her hair—"resisting arrest."
In my last few years at Cal, it was obvious that the protests were led and sustained by students in the humanities and social sciences, while students in engineering, preprofessional majors, and the sciences often disdainfully said they had "real work to do" and rejected the idea of protest. Political activism, even on behalf of the university itself, was understood as profoundly extra-academic and extra-disciplinary by those students, while it seemed (and seems) a core value for many humanities students—not just a core personal value but also a core academic value.
The Daily Cal article is about the ASUC (Association of Students of the University of California) senate election. There are two major parties at UC Berkeley, in addition to the usual spate of single-issue and joke parties: Student Action and CalServe. CalServe has historically been an activist, antiracist, relatively liberal and occasionally genuinely leftist party, while Student Action has been more conservative and devoted itself to "student life" issues like promoting athletics and getting film screenings on campus. The article is titled "Student Action senate candidate’s past Facebook posts elicit controversy."
The mapping of national political alignments, local campus political parties, and disciplinarity is made plain by the Facebook posts in question:
I have to take a moment to say: I've taught dozens of students like Andrew Kooker. He's a college freshman, new to college, new to the idea of having a major, who probably doesn't even have a major yet (most declare in the spring of second year). If he's a Berkeley freshman, it also means he's not a transfer student, which means there's a whole world of reality—junior college, working your way through school, really figuring out what you need out of an education—that he doesn't know about. If there's one thing a young person should be allowed, it's leeway to make mistakes, to hold dreadful opinions and then change them, to speak out thoughtlessly and not especially pithily and then have those words vanish. This student is young. I'm not condemning this student; to do so would be unethical. For all we know, or he knows, in two more years he'll be a happy Art Practice major. Or a happy engineering major! There's no holding a freshman to his beliefs about college majors, and as the article notes, Kooker apologized for the statement, saying it reflected a belief about the engineering major that he held when he entered UC Berkeley, but no longer holds.
But this particular student is not my concern, so much as the way that this instance models the political ramifications of disciplinarity. I remember my own undergraduate years, the way a certain physics concentrator would loudly proclaim that all non-physics majors were "bullshit concentrations." And the economics majors—at Chicago, well before 2008? Oh, goodness.
I'm particularly interested in this moment in the article, in which the student election politicizes engineering:
"Student Action's main base are engineers and Greeks." What is this tiny universe? It's an election in a place where everyone by definition goes to college, which serves as a strange political microcosm. Certainly no one in any national election is going for "the engineer vote." No one's even going for the "academic vote"—such a tiny, pointy-headed minority are we, whose political irrelevance must be proclaimed loudly over and over.
And yet, as we see, the political irrelevance of the academy—and of our arcane, oh-so-internal interdisciplinary squabbles—must constantly be re-announced only because the academic disciplines do ramify. They are matters of policy, of ideology, of politics.
And then, too, they are matters of knowledge—the reason we all got on board in the first place.
[UPDATE 3/26: This piece by Emily Jensen in the McGill Daily likewise reveals the politics of disciplinarity: the McGill Department of English Student Association (DESA) held a town hall that led Jensen to conclude that political activism is a form of "education, happening outside the lecture hall." She writes:
***
UPDATE 4/01 It's come to my attention that this post was linked in the comment thread to the original Daily Cal article, where it was characterized inaccurately. The commenter construes this post as in some way supporting Andrew Kooker's comments or suggesting that they are not objectionable (or, say, wrong), which is of course quite backwards. My point is rather that anti-intellectualism and the politics of disciplinarity are quite a bit bigger than any given college freshman.
By the way, that comment thread is its own little cesspool of horror, where you can see the politics of disciplinarity, and the death of the art of rhetoric, in full swing.]
Yet we're also quite aware of deep-seated political (understood broadly) differences stemming from institutional structures, funding structures, and disciplinary cultures:
The physical sciences and philosophy are famously hostile to women and people of color. Humanists resent their relatively lower pay and status, but breathe a sigh of relief that they don't have to depend on large corporate grants, and cling fiercely to the intellectual autonomy they enjoy. Humanists are also quietly glad that nothing they make turns a profit, because they're disgusted by the notion that the university would own the patent for it. Science disciplines think the humanists don't do real research. Humanities disciplines think the scientists can't teach for beans and don't care to. Graduate students in the science disciplines resist unionization because they know if they're paid the same as the humanities grad students, they'll be paid less.
These are just a few of the political dimensions of disciplinarity within the university that I can think of off the top of my head.
We tend to think of these as internal squabbles, by, for, and among academics. We tend not to see this disciplinarity as particularly relevant to our undergraduates, who switch majors seemingly at whim and in any case seem to graduate knowing so very little about what we, steeped in it as we are, think of as "the discipline" and "the profession."
But it's increasingly obvious that disciplinarity's politics are not contained among us academics. They are profoundly present in our undergraduates' lives, and guess what? Undergraduates graduate. And their disciplinarity goes with them.
This is not a polemic against disciplinarity, by the way. I believe in disciplinarity: the notion that certain objects of study demand the nuanced development of methods for studying those objects. I believe interdisciplinarity is only meaningful when it truly engages multiple disciplines.
I am only observing that the political dimensions of disciplinarity, which are of course inevitable, are not just an academia thing.
Recently in higher education, there have been a number of flirtations with the idea of charging undergraduates differential tuition based on the income a graduate holding a degree in a given major can expect to command (assuming, laughably, that there is a job available in the aforesaid graduate's field). The University of California, where I did my graduate degree, is one of the schools that has entertained this notion.
I am not aware of any schools that have yet adopted such a tuition plan (which, needless to say, I find revolting). But the idea is always lurking, because undergraduates are continually subjected to anxious/reproachful queries about what their degrees are "worth," or whether college is "worth it." Thus the logic of capital that underwrites the university is made plain: education is a commodity "worth" what it will gain back in economic returns, not the leading-from or drawing-out of the Latin word e-ducare.
(Aaron Bady's excellent post on the subject is worth revisiting. I also highly recommend Historiann's pointed questioning of why it is that college is so often deemed "not worth it" specifically for poor people.)
This is just one example of the way that the politics of disciplinarity plays out at the undergraduate level.
I was reminded of another this afternoon when a certain Daily Cal article popped into my Twitter feed.
The Daily Cal is the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, one of the major centers of student protest around the systematic dismantling of public education, and where some thirteen protestors have been criminally charged for infractions like blocking the sidewalk and—in the case of Professor Celeste Langan, who walked toward police with wrists held together and said, "arrest me," and who was subsequently dragged to the ground by her hair—"resisting arrest."
In my last few years at Cal, it was obvious that the protests were led and sustained by students in the humanities and social sciences, while students in engineering, preprofessional majors, and the sciences often disdainfully said they had "real work to do" and rejected the idea of protest. Political activism, even on behalf of the university itself, was understood as profoundly extra-academic and extra-disciplinary by those students, while it seemed (and seems) a core value for many humanities students—not just a core personal value but also a core academic value.
The Daily Cal article is about the ASUC (Association of Students of the University of California) senate election. There are two major parties at UC Berkeley, in addition to the usual spate of single-issue and joke parties: Student Action and CalServe. CalServe has historically been an activist, antiracist, relatively liberal and occasionally genuinely leftist party, while Student Action has been more conservative and devoted itself to "student life" issues like promoting athletics and getting film screenings on campus. The article is titled "Student Action senate candidate’s past Facebook posts elicit controversy."
The mapping of national political alignments, local campus political parties, and disciplinarity is made plain by the Facebook posts in question:
In Facebook posts made in November, UC Berkeley freshman Andrew Kooker said, among other things, that “taking the easy way out and doing an easy degree” allows students to “have time to protest something.”
“The American Dream is to be in the 1%; to be ultimately successful in society,” he said in a post. “Granted, you and your liberal arts degree surely won’t yield any results like that.”
I have to take a moment to say: I've taught dozens of students like Andrew Kooker. He's a college freshman, new to college, new to the idea of having a major, who probably doesn't even have a major yet (most declare in the spring of second year). If he's a Berkeley freshman, it also means he's not a transfer student, which means there's a whole world of reality—junior college, working your way through school, really figuring out what you need out of an education—that he doesn't know about. If there's one thing a young person should be allowed, it's leeway to make mistakes, to hold dreadful opinions and then change them, to speak out thoughtlessly and not especially pithily and then have those words vanish. This student is young. I'm not condemning this student; to do so would be unethical. For all we know, or he knows, in two more years he'll be a happy Art Practice major. Or a happy engineering major! There's no holding a freshman to his beliefs about college majors, and as the article notes, Kooker apologized for the statement, saying it reflected a belief about the engineering major that he held when he entered UC Berkeley, but no longer holds.
But this particular student is not my concern, so much as the way that this instance models the political ramifications of disciplinarity. I remember my own undergraduate years, the way a certain physics concentrator would loudly proclaim that all non-physics majors were "bullshit concentrations." And the economics majors—at Chicago, well before 2008? Oh, goodness.
I'm particularly interested in this moment in the article, in which the student election politicizes engineering:
Andrew Albright, the ASUC presidential candidate for CalSERVE– which has historically been Student Action’s primary rival student political party – said it was “shameful” for Student Action to include Kooker on their senate slate.
“When (Student Action) says ‘every student, every year,’ who are we talking about?” Albright said, referencing the party’s slogan. “Student Action’s main base are engineers and Greeks – Mr. Kooker’s comments reflect that.”
"Student Action's main base are engineers and Greeks." What is this tiny universe? It's an election in a place where everyone by definition goes to college, which serves as a strange political microcosm. Certainly no one in any national election is going for "the engineer vote." No one's even going for the "academic vote"—such a tiny, pointy-headed minority are we, whose political irrelevance must be proclaimed loudly over and over.
And yet, as we see, the political irrelevance of the academy—and of our arcane, oh-so-internal interdisciplinary squabbles—must constantly be re-announced only because the academic disciplines do ramify. They are matters of policy, of ideology, of politics.
And then, too, they are matters of knowledge—the reason we all got on board in the first place.
[UPDATE 3/26: This piece by Emily Jensen in the McGill Daily likewise reveals the politics of disciplinarity: the McGill Department of English Student Association (DESA) held a town hall that led Jensen to conclude that political activism is a form of "education, happening outside the lecture hall." She writes:
Previous to the town hall, I had a very selfish reason for not fully supporting the strike: I did not wish to forgo the opportunity I currently have to attend the incredible classes I am enrolled in. But I am one of the people for whom the opportunity to attend those classes has never been challenged. I have never been asked to give up that opportunity; to be asked to do so now is a reminder of just how valuable it is. It is perhaps a necessary step to take to attempt to make that opportunity equally accessible to everyone.
However, someone intimated that the strike would have more negative consequences for our GPAs than our government, and it is not ridiculous to suggest that missing class would impact our GPAs. But, quite frankly, my GPA can suck it. My parents are not paying out the nose for a piece of paper that says I have a 4.0. I wouldn’t have chosen McGill if that were the case. In losing the opportunity to inch closer to that 4.0, aren’t I gaining the opportunity to participate in another type of learning? Isn’t engaging in discussion and standing with my fellow students as valuable a learning experience as taking lecture notes? The ultimate goals of the experience outside the classroom may not be as easy to achieve. If they are, then you have still helped yourself take down one barrier to pursuing a degree. This includes the added bonus of having helped more than yourself.
***
UPDATE 4/01 It's come to my attention that this post was linked in the comment thread to the original Daily Cal article, where it was characterized inaccurately. The commenter construes this post as in some way supporting Andrew Kooker's comments or suggesting that they are not objectionable (or, say, wrong), which is of course quite backwards. My point is rather that anti-intellectualism and the politics of disciplinarity are quite a bit bigger than any given college freshman.
By the way, that comment thread is its own little cesspool of horror, where you can see the politics of disciplinarity, and the death of the art of rhetoric, in full swing.]
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Two quick links on NTT labor
1. Bérubé on New Faculty Majority and non-tenure-track academic labor. See also the brilliant Goldstone's point on the importance of advocating for tenure and the tenure track as part of improving NTT working conditions.
2. Josh Boldt's already (in)famous adjunct spreadsheet. Well done.
2. Josh Boldt's already (in)famous adjunct spreadsheet. Well done.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Facts for graduate students
When your friends take a qualifying exam, you should:
1. bake them cake
2. take them out for drinks after
3. yes, even if your own quals are the next day.
Furthermore, it is not acceptable to allow any member of your cohort to take quals without said cake or drinking, or equivalent celebratory/stress-relieving activities. Moreover, it must not be incumbent on the examinee to arrange the festivities.
This has been Collegiality 1-0-frickin'-1.
1. bake them cake
2. take them out for drinks after
3. yes, even if your own quals are the next day.
Furthermore, it is not acceptable to allow any member of your cohort to take quals without said cake or drinking, or equivalent celebratory/stress-relieving activities. Moreover, it must not be incumbent on the examinee to arrange the festivities.
This has been Collegiality 1-0-frickin'-1.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Grads writing on the web
One very salutary effect that blogs have on the publishing economy is that they bring work across my radar that print publishing, with its rather parsimonious gatekeeping, would never have brought out. I'm thinking particularly of graduate work; when the Google Books n-grams database came out, for instance, freakin' everybody had an opinion, but some of the smartest and most widely read assessments were by grad students, specifically Natalie Binder and Ben Schmidt. My Berkeley colleagues Lili Loofbourow and Aaron Bady likewise write widely appreciated, if less academically oriented, blogs. And Ladysquires, if you ever decide to depseudonymize, let me buy you a drink for writing the best lit pedagogy blog on the whole damn internet. There are economies of prestige on the internet and everywhere, but they're different ones than those that operate in academia, and for that reason, while the golden age of online scholarly communication may well lie ahead, blogs are already serving as a much-needed corrective to the manifold foibles of academic print publishing.
[UPDATE: I just came across Alex Reid's very smart post on the value of academic blogging. He wisely observes that it ought not become obligatory.]
[UPDATE: I just came across Alex Reid's very smart post on the value of academic blogging. He wisely observes that it ought not become obligatory.]
Monday, October 25, 2010
Moral panic in the profession: two cases
I was recently asked to serve on a panel for graduate students on applying for grants and fellowships. It was pretty fun, and I distributed useful arcana that no one else will tell you. (For instance: the left margin on the department letterhead is 0.65625 inches. The more you know!)
But here's the thing about useful arcana that no one will tell you: it freaks people out when somebody decides that, hey, maybe somebody should tell you--somebody like your peers. Not about the margins on the department letterhead; no one cares about that. I'm talking about two oddly powerful sources of fear and moral panic in our profession: Rate My Professors and the wiki.
I get the impression that in the minds of many academics, these--as much as, if not more than, the budget cuts and casualization of academic labor that are endemic everywhere--pose a threat to the integrity of the university. What we have to fear, many insist, are underinformed undergraduates and underinformed job-seeking junior scholars. In other words, people who are almost completely powerless. The puzzling thing is why anybody would give a crap about either site.
Now, it would be foolhardy to take the contents of either Rate My Professors or the Wiki purely at face value. (This is also true of anything on the internet, on the air, or in print, as trained researchers know perfectly well.) But let's look a little more closely at each of these web sites, both aimed at allowing a relatively underinformed, institutionally marginalized, almost universally young population to share impressions, opinions, and (yes, sometimes unverified) information. What's so threatening about them?
Let's look at Rate My Professors first.
The thing that strikes me about it at first glance is how boring it is. It's not salacious; it's not scandalous; it's not gossipy; it's not even informative. It's boring in the way that most Amazon reviews are boring. Some students post with more or less vitriol or fan-like devotion, but basically it's "yup, this class was pretty cool" or "dude, this prof is boring." Much as a grade on an academic essay tells you next to nothing about its contents or style, a rating tells you almost nothing about what a professor's actual teaching is like. (Also, yes, the chili peppers are sexist, as are many things on the internet.) It's not a useful site. So why does it inspire fear and loathing?
Well, there's its badness. From a social science perspective, it's bad sampling; the students who post on RMP aren't likely to accurately represent the total student population or the students of any given professor. So, okay, professors are being misrepresented. And I get the sense that a lot of people think that the students posting are acting thoughtlessly or maliciously, which may be disproportionately the case given the sample. But if most students were really posting specifically to spread vicious gossip, then you'd think there'd be some funnier stuff on there.
But here's what you really see on RMP: very, very dull, vague evaluations on the basis of criteria that seem to utterly miss the point of taking classes in the first place, given by students who believe that they are performing a public service by making their unincisive opinions known.
What's threatening about that? Well, in it we see the things that really do threaten higher ed: students' apathy; their misapprehension of the academic mission; the degree to which our pedagogical choices seem arbitrary and opaque to students; the degree to which college has been sold to students as either a vocational school or a luxury cruise, or sometimes, oddly, both; the fact that high school graduates whom we have accepted to our institution of "higher learning" almost universally cannot wield a comma worth a damn. That students feel and write this way--or share those writings--isn't the real threat. It's merely a symptom of the far more serious problem: that we as a profession have utterly failed to make the case for learning per se not only to the public but to the very people who are supposed to be engaged in it.
Now you might object that to read RMP as an accurate, and damning, symptom of the structural problems in higher ed is to assume that, if we were really such good professors, students would always be on board with the project of learning and say nice things about us. And that's clearly not true.
But that may be the most unnerving thing of all. For despite the sampling problem, and chili peppers aside, RMP very closely mirrors our own internal teaching assessment tools, the ones we use for hiring, promotions, and teaching awards. The piety that the graduate teaching center at Cal preaches is that student evaluations are a wonderful, accurate assessment tool that we should take very, very seriously. Evaluate early and often, and learn deeply from every one!
But a multitude of studies (just a few of which are cited below) suggest that there's a broad variety of confounding factors that affect teaching evaluations, including gender, race, student expectations of gender norms, the "course effect" (professors teaching unpopular required courses are likely to receive lower evaluations), and grade inflation. And let's not forget the infamous chocolate study--the one that found that evaluations were higher among students who were offered chocolate before the evaluation. The evaluations on Rate My Professor are sadly familiar: the lack of specificity, the contradictions, the complaints that there was homework, the recommendations that the class not be scheduled so early in the morning, or that the prof bring in doughnuts. Let's face it: sometimes our course evaluations are quite useful, and sometimes they really aren't.
Does it mean that evaluations are worthless? Of course not, but they have to be considered with care. Our own internal teaching assessments are not much more methodologically sound than RMP. In other words, you never get an "out" for evaluating your sources, and you certainly can't just rely on a numerical score. It's no more reasonable to unthinkingly trust course evaluations than it is to unthinkingly trust RMP. The need for critical thinking is just a little more obvious with one of them, because it advertises its lack of methodological care with chili peppers and smiley faces.
So is RMP a threat? I think it's nothing compared to the threats that it reveals within the structure of the profession itself. It's depressing that such a significant percentage of students are in an academic institution for non-academic reasons, and it's chilling that one of the principal ways that we assess a central component of our jobs is a relatively inaccurate, little understood tool.
* * *
In any case, the RMP panic is old news. You know what really sends (some) faculty into fits of terror? "The wiki," as it's known. Kind of like "the whale."
Here's the story. Some enterprising junior scholars, some years ago, made a free wiki for posting information on ongoing academic job searches. As lore has it, the idea was to share information among job-seekers, in solidarity in the face of a brutal market with an enormous power imbalance.
The way I often hear faculty talk about the wiki, it's a viper's nest of gossip, misinformation, and drama, something that will poison your mind and destroy your soul. And I guess it could get to be that way if one were to read or check it obsessively. But then, if you're checking the wiki obsessively, you've already got a problem, and it wasn't caused by the wiki. Since many faculty also freely admit that the academic job market itself has the capacity to poison your mind and destroy your soul--and that also goes for those who are on search committees--one suspects that we have another case of shooting the messenger on our hands.
I don't post to the wiki, and I don't read it with any frequency, but I have it bookmarked. Why? Because nobody is more likely to ferret out obscure fellowships than a large group of desperate, underemployed junior scholars. And seeking out fellowships for which to apply is a normal part of every research academic's life, so while doing one's usual fellowship trawl, why wouldn't one check a lengthy, highly inclusive list crowd-sourced by people in a position to care? It's far more comprehensive and up-to-date than the fellowship lists published by the MLA, for instance (sorry, MLA). No one list of fellowships is ever going to suit you perfectly or be highly accurate, so if you're going to have to double check all the information anyway (and believe me: YOU DO), you may as well avail yourself of others' obsessive information-gathering.
Is the wiki unreliable? Of course--like everything on the internet, on the air, and in print. But is it a viper's nest of gossip, misinformation, and drama?
Here's a screen shot of one of the "notes and queries" (heh) sections, for a position at Baker University (Baldwin City, KS):
SCANDAL! There's a ... clarification of the job posting, and a note about the department structure. Oh.
Unlike RMP, this does seem like actual information, which one could check up on if one wanted--probably pretty easily. What's so threatening about the wiki?
Perhaps what's threatening about it is that it isn't a viper's nest of misinformation and rumor--that it holds a mirror up to the irrationalities of the academic labor situation and gives the lie to the notion that there is anything that we could reasonably call a "market" with some kind of regulating invisible hand. Let me be clear: I'm not complaining about my personal situation (I currently have the best postdoc I could possibly want), nor am I claiming that the wiki is a thoroughly accurate source of information. (I mean: it's a wiki.)
But I do believe that, in the aggregate, the wiki is a testament to the lack of transparency and unreasonable burdens in the process, and the large number of junior scholars who suffer for it. I happen to know it's not a walk in the park for the hiring committees, either; it's neither fun nor actually useful to have to evaluate five hundred applications, and the most freakish part of the tight job market is that so many searches actually fail. No suitable candidate, after reading all those files and interviewing all those people, is found. The very existence of the wiki is a symptom of a much bigger problem in academic labor that affects tenured professors as well as ABDs, postdocs, and other junior scholars (and of course the perpetually lamented, rarely actually helped adjuncts). But it's much easier to condemn the wiki and run yet another search, having the already overworked faculty stay up nights exhaustedly skimming five hundred abjectly well crafted cover letters, than it is to try to effect a systematic change in the academic labor situation--a task so monumental as to be nearly unthinkable.
I'm not saying anything new or even, I think, controversial about the structural problems in higher ed. The job "market" barely functions and exacts a lot of collateral damage, and undergraduate teaching faces an significant crisis of legitimacy because the public is neither clear on what learning is nor convinced that undergraduates actually ought to do it. What the moral panic around the Websites of the Frustrated (that's my new umbrella term for RMP and the wiki) tells us is that we'll do anything to avoid addressing either problem at its root.
Algozzine, Bob et al. “Student Evaluation of College Teaching: A Practice in Search of Principles.” College Teaching 52.4 (2004): 134-141. Print.
Baldwin, Tamara, and Nancy Blattner. “Guarding against Potential Bias in Student Evaluations: What Every Faculty Member Needs to Know.” College Teaching 51.1 (2003): 27-32. Print.
Chism, Nancy Van Note. “Teaching Awards: What Do They Award?.” The Journal of Higher Education 77.4 (2006): 589-617. Print.
Eiszler, Charles F. “College Students' Evaluations of Teaching and Grade Inflation.” Research in Higher Education 43.4 (2002): 483-501. Print.
Laube, Heather et al. “The Impact of Gender on the Evaluation of Teaching: What We Know and What We Can Do.” NWSA Journal 19.3 (2007): 87-104. Print.
Romney, David. “Course Effect vs. Teacher Effect on Students' Ratings of Teaching Competence.” Research in Higher Education 5.4 (1976): 345-350. Print.
Youmans, Robert J., and Benjamin D. Jee. “Fudging the Numbers: Distributing Chocolate Influences Student Evaluations of an Undergraduate Course.” Teaching of Psychology 34.4 (2007): 245. Web.
But here's the thing about useful arcana that no one will tell you: it freaks people out when somebody decides that, hey, maybe somebody should tell you--somebody like your peers. Not about the margins on the department letterhead; no one cares about that. I'm talking about two oddly powerful sources of fear and moral panic in our profession: Rate My Professors and the wiki.
I get the impression that in the minds of many academics, these--as much as, if not more than, the budget cuts and casualization of academic labor that are endemic everywhere--pose a threat to the integrity of the university. What we have to fear, many insist, are underinformed undergraduates and underinformed job-seeking junior scholars. In other words, people who are almost completely powerless. The puzzling thing is why anybody would give a crap about either site.
Now, it would be foolhardy to take the contents of either Rate My Professors or the Wiki purely at face value. (This is also true of anything on the internet, on the air, or in print, as trained researchers know perfectly well.) But let's look a little more closely at each of these web sites, both aimed at allowing a relatively underinformed, institutionally marginalized, almost universally young population to share impressions, opinions, and (yes, sometimes unverified) information. What's so threatening about them?
Let's look at Rate My Professors first.
The thing that strikes me about it at first glance is how boring it is. It's not salacious; it's not scandalous; it's not gossipy; it's not even informative. It's boring in the way that most Amazon reviews are boring. Some students post with more or less vitriol or fan-like devotion, but basically it's "yup, this class was pretty cool" or "dude, this prof is boring." Much as a grade on an academic essay tells you next to nothing about its contents or style, a rating tells you almost nothing about what a professor's actual teaching is like. (Also, yes, the chili peppers are sexist, as are many things on the internet.) It's not a useful site. So why does it inspire fear and loathing?
Well, there's its badness. From a social science perspective, it's bad sampling; the students who post on RMP aren't likely to accurately represent the total student population or the students of any given professor. So, okay, professors are being misrepresented. And I get the sense that a lot of people think that the students posting are acting thoughtlessly or maliciously, which may be disproportionately the case given the sample. But if most students were really posting specifically to spread vicious gossip, then you'd think there'd be some funnier stuff on there.
But here's what you really see on RMP: very, very dull, vague evaluations on the basis of criteria that seem to utterly miss the point of taking classes in the first place, given by students who believe that they are performing a public service by making their unincisive opinions known.
What's threatening about that? Well, in it we see the things that really do threaten higher ed: students' apathy; their misapprehension of the academic mission; the degree to which our pedagogical choices seem arbitrary and opaque to students; the degree to which college has been sold to students as either a vocational school or a luxury cruise, or sometimes, oddly, both; the fact that high school graduates whom we have accepted to our institution of "higher learning" almost universally cannot wield a comma worth a damn. That students feel and write this way--or share those writings--isn't the real threat. It's merely a symptom of the far more serious problem: that we as a profession have utterly failed to make the case for learning per se not only to the public but to the very people who are supposed to be engaged in it.
Now you might object that to read RMP as an accurate, and damning, symptom of the structural problems in higher ed is to assume that, if we were really such good professors, students would always be on board with the project of learning and say nice things about us. And that's clearly not true.
But that may be the most unnerving thing of all. For despite the sampling problem, and chili peppers aside, RMP very closely mirrors our own internal teaching assessment tools, the ones we use for hiring, promotions, and teaching awards. The piety that the graduate teaching center at Cal preaches is that student evaluations are a wonderful, accurate assessment tool that we should take very, very seriously. Evaluate early and often, and learn deeply from every one!
But a multitude of studies (just a few of which are cited below) suggest that there's a broad variety of confounding factors that affect teaching evaluations, including gender, race, student expectations of gender norms, the "course effect" (professors teaching unpopular required courses are likely to receive lower evaluations), and grade inflation. And let's not forget the infamous chocolate study--the one that found that evaluations were higher among students who were offered chocolate before the evaluation. The evaluations on Rate My Professor are sadly familiar: the lack of specificity, the contradictions, the complaints that there was homework, the recommendations that the class not be scheduled so early in the morning, or that the prof bring in doughnuts. Let's face it: sometimes our course evaluations are quite useful, and sometimes they really aren't.
Does it mean that evaluations are worthless? Of course not, but they have to be considered with care. Our own internal teaching assessments are not much more methodologically sound than RMP. In other words, you never get an "out" for evaluating your sources, and you certainly can't just rely on a numerical score. It's no more reasonable to unthinkingly trust course evaluations than it is to unthinkingly trust RMP. The need for critical thinking is just a little more obvious with one of them, because it advertises its lack of methodological care with chili peppers and smiley faces.
So is RMP a threat? I think it's nothing compared to the threats that it reveals within the structure of the profession itself. It's depressing that such a significant percentage of students are in an academic institution for non-academic reasons, and it's chilling that one of the principal ways that we assess a central component of our jobs is a relatively inaccurate, little understood tool.
* * *
In any case, the RMP panic is old news. You know what really sends (some) faculty into fits of terror? "The wiki," as it's known. Kind of like "the whale."
Here's the story. Some enterprising junior scholars, some years ago, made a free wiki for posting information on ongoing academic job searches. As lore has it, the idea was to share information among job-seekers, in solidarity in the face of a brutal market with an enormous power imbalance.
The way I often hear faculty talk about the wiki, it's a viper's nest of gossip, misinformation, and drama, something that will poison your mind and destroy your soul. And I guess it could get to be that way if one were to read or check it obsessively. But then, if you're checking the wiki obsessively, you've already got a problem, and it wasn't caused by the wiki. Since many faculty also freely admit that the academic job market itself has the capacity to poison your mind and destroy your soul--and that also goes for those who are on search committees--one suspects that we have another case of shooting the messenger on our hands.
I don't post to the wiki, and I don't read it with any frequency, but I have it bookmarked. Why? Because nobody is more likely to ferret out obscure fellowships than a large group of desperate, underemployed junior scholars. And seeking out fellowships for which to apply is a normal part of every research academic's life, so while doing one's usual fellowship trawl, why wouldn't one check a lengthy, highly inclusive list crowd-sourced by people in a position to care? It's far more comprehensive and up-to-date than the fellowship lists published by the MLA, for instance (sorry, MLA). No one list of fellowships is ever going to suit you perfectly or be highly accurate, so if you're going to have to double check all the information anyway (and believe me: YOU DO), you may as well avail yourself of others' obsessive information-gathering.
Is the wiki unreliable? Of course--like everything on the internet, on the air, and in print. But is it a viper's nest of gossip, misinformation, and drama?
Here's a screen shot of one of the "notes and queries" (heh) sections, for a position at Baker University (Baldwin City, KS):
 |
| (From the C20-21 American wiki.) |
Unlike RMP, this does seem like actual information, which one could check up on if one wanted--probably pretty easily. What's so threatening about the wiki?
Perhaps what's threatening about it is that it isn't a viper's nest of misinformation and rumor--that it holds a mirror up to the irrationalities of the academic labor situation and gives the lie to the notion that there is anything that we could reasonably call a "market" with some kind of regulating invisible hand. Let me be clear: I'm not complaining about my personal situation (I currently have the best postdoc I could possibly want), nor am I claiming that the wiki is a thoroughly accurate source of information. (I mean: it's a wiki.)
But I do believe that, in the aggregate, the wiki is a testament to the lack of transparency and unreasonable burdens in the process, and the large number of junior scholars who suffer for it. I happen to know it's not a walk in the park for the hiring committees, either; it's neither fun nor actually useful to have to evaluate five hundred applications, and the most freakish part of the tight job market is that so many searches actually fail. No suitable candidate, after reading all those files and interviewing all those people, is found. The very existence of the wiki is a symptom of a much bigger problem in academic labor that affects tenured professors as well as ABDs, postdocs, and other junior scholars (and of course the perpetually lamented, rarely actually helped adjuncts). But it's much easier to condemn the wiki and run yet another search, having the already overworked faculty stay up nights exhaustedly skimming five hundred abjectly well crafted cover letters, than it is to try to effect a systematic change in the academic labor situation--a task so monumental as to be nearly unthinkable.
I'm not saying anything new or even, I think, controversial about the structural problems in higher ed. The job "market" barely functions and exacts a lot of collateral damage, and undergraduate teaching faces an significant crisis of legitimacy because the public is neither clear on what learning is nor convinced that undergraduates actually ought to do it. What the moral panic around the Websites of the Frustrated (that's my new umbrella term for RMP and the wiki) tells us is that we'll do anything to avoid addressing either problem at its root.
Algozzine, Bob et al. “Student Evaluation of College Teaching: A Practice in Search of Principles.” College Teaching 52.4 (2004): 134-141. Print.
Baldwin, Tamara, and Nancy Blattner. “Guarding against Potential Bias in Student Evaluations: What Every Faculty Member Needs to Know.” College Teaching 51.1 (2003): 27-32. Print.
Chism, Nancy Van Note. “Teaching Awards: What Do They Award?.” The Journal of Higher Education 77.4 (2006): 589-617. Print.
Eiszler, Charles F. “College Students' Evaluations of Teaching and Grade Inflation.” Research in Higher Education 43.4 (2002): 483-501. Print.
Laube, Heather et al. “The Impact of Gender on the Evaluation of Teaching: What We Know and What We Can Do.” NWSA Journal 19.3 (2007): 87-104. Print.
Romney, David. “Course Effect vs. Teacher Effect on Students' Ratings of Teaching Competence.” Research in Higher Education 5.4 (1976): 345-350. Print.
Youmans, Robert J., and Benjamin D. Jee. “Fudging the Numbers: Distributing Chocolate Influences Student Evaluations of an Undergraduate Course.” Teaching of Psychology 34.4 (2007): 245. Web.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
A little linkspam for today, courtesy of Twitter.
1. Here's a hilarious video by Ron Charles on "Booklette," a new online tool that, takes "the flesh-crawling weirdness of Chat Roulette and combine[s] it with the total uselessness of crowdsourced reviewing."
2. Jen Howard's much-tweeted Chronicle article (paywall) on link rot and other perils of postmodern citation.
3. Kevin Dettmar's lovely post on "the tender-hearted professor":
1. Here's a hilarious video by Ron Charles on "Booklette," a new online tool that, takes "the flesh-crawling weirdness of Chat Roulette and combine[s] it with the total uselessness of crowdsourced reviewing."
2. Jen Howard's much-tweeted Chronicle article (paywall) on link rot and other perils of postmodern citation.
Links don't last. The "Disappearing Act" authors found that "49.3 percent of the original 2,011 cited resources could not be located at the cited URL," according to the paper's abstract. "The older the article, the more likely that URL's in the reference list of that article were inactive."
As part of her study, Ms. Wagner did a literature review of about 95 other link-rot studies across all disciplines, including a few in the humanities. (If you know of humanities-related work on link rot, please let me hear about it.) The universal conclusion: Too often "the stuff was just not there anymore," she told me. "It is a problem that affects all fields."
3. Kevin Dettmar's lovely post on "the tender-hearted professor":
College professors take a lot of heat from the general public, and we deserve much of what we get; and humanities professors get the worst of it. And arguably, English professors the worst of that: we represent, apparently, the absolute nadir of contemporary culture.
I said that to some degree we deserve it; what I did not say, you’ll notice, is that it’s true. Untrue, but we deserve it? Well, yes: I think that college professors as a group, and English professors as a high-visibility (and high-risibility) subset, have done a terrible job of explaining just what it is that we do, and actively countering the most pernicious caricatures of our work that circulate in the larger culture.
One of the received ideas about profs, of course, is that we’re incurably self-absorbed. It’s hardly convincing for me to argue that I’m not self-absorbed, of course; here I am, sitting at my laptop, writing on my blog, and if I were a world-class narcissist, presumably I’d be the last to know. But I can tell you about my colleagues (by which I mean not just those with whom I work at Pomona, but my professional colleagues nationally and internationally); they sometimes disappoint, but far more often, I’m stunned by their generosity.
Monday, October 11, 2010
THATCamp SF
I went to THATCamp Bay Area this past weekend. Roy Tennant from OCLC blogged about it briefly. I learned some new things, met some cool people. I'm exhausted, though, I have to admit!
I'm still puzzling over why digital humanities folks are so obsessed with space. I'd say at least 40% of the sessions were about space and place. But surely the temporalities of digital media are at least as interesting--more, in my opinion. I suspect much of the interest has to do with the availability of existing digital tools (Google Maps, etc.) for making stuff, often pretty pictures. Time is almost necessarily distorted as soon as it's visualized, and in any case, I'm not sure that there's anything we're really want to make with time data. This blog post is going to have a time stamp -- a marker, to the minute, of when this post appeared on the public web. It won't tell you when I wrote it (Sunday afternoon, right after the last session? this morning, after mulling it over?), or how long it took me, or whether or how much I revised. Nearly everything on the web is time-stamped, usually to the minute, quite often in GMT. The web's apparent homogenization--and punctualization--of time belies the multiple synchronous, asynchronous, proleptic (how far in advance to queue a post?), stream-of-not-exactly-consciousness modes that operate in and around it. We've never had many good ways of talking about time, but somehow this philosophical difficulty is exaggerated when it comes to digital humanities.
I often find digital humanities as frustrating as it is productive; "narrative" means different things to a programmer and to me. I keep having those "you keep using that word" moments. It's not a bad thing. It's a good reminder that we need to return to basics sometimes and let people outside our fields know about our basic concepts and vocabulary. In one conversation that turned rather freewheeling, the issue of attention on the internet came up, and no one else at the table was aware of the discourses of attention that pervaded my own period of specialty (according to Jonathan Crary, the obsession with attention starts around 1870, and you can see it running through Benjamin, among others). It's absolutely relevant to DH discussions, but it hadn't occurred to me before to talk about it at THATCamp.
It strikes me that all of the "bootcamp" sessions (where someone instructs the group in "real skills") were tech-oriented. If I go to another THATCamp, I will definitely propose a humanistic bootcamp involving some philosophy of history and an intro to some relevant literary and historical concepts, or maybe a Foucault or a Bakhtin bootcamp. Programmers can be taught these things, after all!
Update: notes by
Phillip Barron
Casey Bisson
Candace Nast
Jana Remy
Katherine Harris
I'm still puzzling over why digital humanities folks are so obsessed with space. I'd say at least 40% of the sessions were about space and place. But surely the temporalities of digital media are at least as interesting--more, in my opinion. I suspect much of the interest has to do with the availability of existing digital tools (Google Maps, etc.) for making stuff, often pretty pictures. Time is almost necessarily distorted as soon as it's visualized, and in any case, I'm not sure that there's anything we're really want to make with time data. This blog post is going to have a time stamp -- a marker, to the minute, of when this post appeared on the public web. It won't tell you when I wrote it (Sunday afternoon, right after the last session? this morning, after mulling it over?), or how long it took me, or whether or how much I revised. Nearly everything on the web is time-stamped, usually to the minute, quite often in GMT. The web's apparent homogenization--and punctualization--of time belies the multiple synchronous, asynchronous, proleptic (how far in advance to queue a post?), stream-of-not-exactly-consciousness modes that operate in and around it. We've never had many good ways of talking about time, but somehow this philosophical difficulty is exaggerated when it comes to digital humanities.
I often find digital humanities as frustrating as it is productive; "narrative" means different things to a programmer and to me. I keep having those "you keep using that word" moments. It's not a bad thing. It's a good reminder that we need to return to basics sometimes and let people outside our fields know about our basic concepts and vocabulary. In one conversation that turned rather freewheeling, the issue of attention on the internet came up, and no one else at the table was aware of the discourses of attention that pervaded my own period of specialty (according to Jonathan Crary, the obsession with attention starts around 1870, and you can see it running through Benjamin, among others). It's absolutely relevant to DH discussions, but it hadn't occurred to me before to talk about it at THATCamp.
It strikes me that all of the "bootcamp" sessions (where someone instructs the group in "real skills") were tech-oriented. If I go to another THATCamp, I will definitely propose a humanistic bootcamp involving some philosophy of history and an intro to some relevant literary and historical concepts, or maybe a Foucault or a Bakhtin bootcamp. Programmers can be taught these things, after all!
Update: notes by
Phillip Barron
Casey Bisson
Candace Nast
Jana Remy
Katherine Harris
Friday, October 8, 2010
A few links:
- The Chronicle of Higher Ed on yesterday's protests nationwide
- There's now a petition up protesting the cuts at SUNY Albany, which I signed.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Today's protests
I wasn't able to blog about today's protests at UC Berkeley, in part because the fire alarm in Wheeler Hall went off twice, resulting in my temporary decampment to area cafés. The Daily Cal blogged and tweeted the day's events:
Speaking of public education as a whole, let's not forget about SUNY Albany's decision to phase out Italian, French, Russian, Classics, and Theater, which Roland recently blogged about.
On Tuesday there will be a public forum on law school dean Chris Edley's proposal for a UC cybercampus, a proposal that, when I first heard it last year, I fully thought was a parody or a joke. Evidently, not only was Edley serious, but UC admin is taking his suggestion seriously.
That's not to say that there's no such thing as a good online course, or a good course with online components. But developing and maintaining such a thing is difficult and time-consuming, and depends on serious pedagogical and intellectual decisions. There are people out there thinking online education through in very interesting ways (Cathy Davidson, most prominently, but also Kiri Miller, among others)--it's called research. If only Dean Edley had heard of it. There's so much wrong with this whole online campus idea that I'm going to stop writing now to prevent my blood pressure from spiking.
It's about 6:30 and the sun is setting. Now that there are no fire alarms going off in Wheeler Hall, I can hear the sound of either students or hippies, or possibly both, out drumming in Sproul Plaza. Doe Library is still occupied.
Students, faculty and staff across the nation are gathering on Oct. 7 in defense of public education. After California faced a $24 billion budget gap last year and cut $637 million in funding to the UC system, the university took steps to fill its own funding hole, implementing a furlough program and a 32 percent fee increase for students.
Campuses across the system made their own cuts, the impacts of which are still being felt this year. And with the announcement that UC Berkeley will cut some 200 positions in January, a freeze in faculty hiring, a proposal to develop online courses at the UC, a rise in out-of-state student enrollment and the elimination of four intercollegiate athletic teams this year, protesters say they still have much to rally about in regards to the changing nature of the university and public education as a whole.
Speaking of public education as a whole, let's not forget about SUNY Albany's decision to phase out Italian, French, Russian, Classics, and Theater, which Roland recently blogged about.
On Tuesday there will be a public forum on law school dean Chris Edley's proposal for a UC cybercampus, a proposal that, when I first heard it last year, I fully thought was a parody or a joke. Evidently, not only was Edley serious, but UC admin is taking his suggestion seriously.
That's not to say that there's no such thing as a good online course, or a good course with online components. But developing and maintaining such a thing is difficult and time-consuming, and depends on serious pedagogical and intellectual decisions. There are people out there thinking online education through in very interesting ways (Cathy Davidson, most prominently, but also Kiri Miller, among others)--it's called research. If only Dean Edley had heard of it. There's so much wrong with this whole online campus idea that I'm going to stop writing now to prevent my blood pressure from spiking.
It's about 6:30 and the sun is setting. Now that there are no fire alarms going off in Wheeler Hall, I can hear the sound of either students or hippies, or possibly both, out drumming in Sproul Plaza. Doe Library is still occupied.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
I was pretty upset to hear that SUNY Albany is cutting its programs in French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theater. Is this the future of public universities?
According to Brett Bowles, graduate chair of French Studies, the reason these programs were singled out was that there was a low student-to-faculty ratio in them (something usually considered a good thing, but apparently too great a luxury now!). And you have to figure that, sure, there can't be that many Russian majors at any given school. But even leaving aside the bleak vision of a world without Russian majors, what happens when you phase out the department altogether, as the school seems to be trying to do? Is SUNY Albany really comfortable more or less ensuring that their engineering majors, their English majors (!!), and their biology majors haven't taken French, Italian, Russian, Latin, ancient Greek, or theater? Like, ever? What kinds of graduates are they planning on turning out, exactly?
[Article at Inside Higher Ed.]
[More as of 10/05/2010.]
According to Brett Bowles, graduate chair of French Studies, the reason these programs were singled out was that there was a low student-to-faculty ratio in them (something usually considered a good thing, but apparently too great a luxury now!). And you have to figure that, sure, there can't be that many Russian majors at any given school. But even leaving aside the bleak vision of a world without Russian majors, what happens when you phase out the department altogether, as the school seems to be trying to do? Is SUNY Albany really comfortable more or less ensuring that their engineering majors, their English majors (!!), and their biology majors haven't taken French, Italian, Russian, Latin, ancient Greek, or theater? Like, ever? What kinds of graduates are they planning on turning out, exactly?
[Article at Inside Higher Ed.]
[More as of 10/05/2010.]
Friday, September 17, 2010
In a recent review, David A. Bell compares Mark C. Taylor to Thomas Friedman -- it's cold, but apt. Taylor isn't a public intellectual so much as a public anti-intellectual, an outlier who can't possibly represent higher ed in general but whose voice is disproportionately amplified by the mainstream media. In fact, it may be Taylor's own tunnel vision that's the most powerful argument against (a segment of) the academic system that he decries, for the problems he rails against, when they are real problems at all, only exist in his highly idiosyncratic situation. As Bell puts it:
It's like Tina Fey told us: if you can't see outside it, then being in a bubble causes you to become a little bit dumb. Historiann has recently written about the failure of the national "conversation" on higher ed to meaningfully acknowledge state universities; Dean Dad similarly points out that such polemics never even consider the single most powerful component of public education: community colleges. The discussions of higher ed that are being privileged in the mainstream press totally ignore the vast majority of higher ed, at no risk to the people making their pronouncements but to the great detriment of most of higher ed and the students and public it serves. Mark C. Taylor, his book contract, and his repeat invitations to the New York Times are exhibit A.
He dismisses—in a few sentences—the idea that [tenure] might protect academic freedom, noting that he has never personally seen it under threat, and that in forty years of teaching he has never met a professor “who was more willing to express his or her views after tenure than before.”
On the second of these points, I can only conclude that Taylor and I know a very different set of academics. As to the first of them, well, Taylor’s personal experience came at Williams College and Columbia University. Perhaps he should think for a moment of what it might be like to teach at a large public university in a state where Tea Party members increasingly dominate the legislature, denouncing “radical professors” and calling for the further slashing of university budgets. Would he feel entirely free, at such an institution, to start a research project on, say, homoeroticism in American poetry? The evolution of dinosaurs? The history of racial discrimination in American evangelical churches? Corruption in the state senate? Lifetime tenure, for all its problems, still provides a very real safeguard for the advancement of unpopular ideas.
It's like Tina Fey told us: if you can't see outside it, then being in a bubble causes you to become a little bit dumb. Historiann has recently written about the failure of the national "conversation" on higher ed to meaningfully acknowledge state universities; Dean Dad similarly points out that such polemics never even consider the single most powerful component of public education: community colleges. The discussions of higher ed that are being privileged in the mainstream press totally ignore the vast majority of higher ed, at no risk to the people making their pronouncements but to the great detriment of most of higher ed and the students and public it serves. Mark C. Taylor, his book contract, and his repeat invitations to the New York Times are exhibit A.
Higher ed has a PR problem. I recently griped on Twitter that when the name of a university is trending, you know it's for one of two reasons: sports or a shooting.
That's an idle complaint, I know. And there's a certain extent to which you can't really expect the general public to give a crap about research. I mean, I don't give a crap about a significant percentage of the research that's out there. (CERN did trend, briefly, however!) Still, universities are run like corporations now, and they have PR people. Shouldn't they get on this? Don't we want to be known for something other than sports and violence? What ever happened to ye olde teaching, research, and service?
That's an idle complaint, I know. And there's a certain extent to which you can't really expect the general public to give a crap about research. I mean, I don't give a crap about a significant percentage of the research that's out there. (CERN did trend, briefly, however!) Still, universities are run like corporations now, and they have PR people. Shouldn't they get on this? Don't we want to be known for something other than sports and violence? What ever happened to ye olde teaching, research, and service?
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Lofgeornost
Whom, under what circumstances, and how should we praise?
One needs a certain facility with praise in this profession. Every time I respond to a piece of writing, some praise must come in, and it must be honest. This is true of the work of the fragile freshman writer, and it is true of the work of a peer. It's a challenge to bring out the right praise, the praise that will be well placed and insightful as well as cheering.
I started thinking about praise recently, when called upon to engage in another kind of praise that we do professionally. It's the kind in which the person you're praising must not know what you say, but must know that you are praising her or him! The knowledge that the reference letter is a genre of praise makes it, for me, exceedingly awkward to ask for one. "Please," you are asking some senior scholar, "go on record praising my work!" What a thing to ask. I am so lucky to have the references I have.
Mary Beard humorously recounts the horrors of writing reference letters, "an average of about 30 minutes a reference, or 8 hours a week at peak times." Of course, that's Mary Beard's life -- in my juniority I write far, far fewer references. So for me the interesting question is not how to manage the influx, but how best to praise one person for another's benefit.
We do this in casual conversation from time to time -- it's hard not to tell your friends when a student asks, unprompted, for feminist history of science references. (That's just the kind of thing that makes your day. And yes that has happened to me.) But the thing you're writing also belongs to a genre of praise, which must itself be mastered.
That we have professional genres of praise is interesting. I've heard the tendency toward hyperbole in reference letters lamented (I think by Mary Beard, in fact); I've also heard it lamented that book reviews are rarely negative. But there is an art of praise; it must not be generic or canned; it must be stylized, but it must be real. To do it properly it's necessary to distill bright essences from weeks or months or years of small interactions and, perhaps, a few essays.
When I think of praise as a genre, I think of some quite formal poetic modes. I think of the stylized praise of Old English poetry, and the ambivalent praise of the ode. I once wrote a poem of praise for a colleague--a silly one, doggedly (and annoyingly) dactylic, but praise all the same. The formality of praise can be a help.
I think praise is a compelling competency to have to develop. Perhaps we should begin to compose our references in verse, the better to foreground its craft--the better to say, look, I have crafted this complex and well balanced thing on behalf of my student, who, after all, deserves it.
Beard, Mary. "How many references do you write in a week? A Don's Life. Times Literary Supplement Online Blogs. Web. 3 April 2010.
One needs a certain facility with praise in this profession. Every time I respond to a piece of writing, some praise must come in, and it must be honest. This is true of the work of the fragile freshman writer, and it is true of the work of a peer. It's a challenge to bring out the right praise, the praise that will be well placed and insightful as well as cheering.
I started thinking about praise recently, when called upon to engage in another kind of praise that we do professionally. It's the kind in which the person you're praising must not know what you say, but must know that you are praising her or him! The knowledge that the reference letter is a genre of praise makes it, for me, exceedingly awkward to ask for one. "Please," you are asking some senior scholar, "go on record praising my work!" What a thing to ask. I am so lucky to have the references I have.
Mary Beard humorously recounts the horrors of writing reference letters, "an average of about 30 minutes a reference, or 8 hours a week at peak times." Of course, that's Mary Beard's life -- in my juniority I write far, far fewer references. So for me the interesting question is not how to manage the influx, but how best to praise one person for another's benefit.
We do this in casual conversation from time to time -- it's hard not to tell your friends when a student asks, unprompted, for feminist history of science references. (That's just the kind of thing that makes your day. And yes that has happened to me.) But the thing you're writing also belongs to a genre of praise, which must itself be mastered.
That we have professional genres of praise is interesting. I've heard the tendency toward hyperbole in reference letters lamented (I think by Mary Beard, in fact); I've also heard it lamented that book reviews are rarely negative. But there is an art of praise; it must not be generic or canned; it must be stylized, but it must be real. To do it properly it's necessary to distill bright essences from weeks or months or years of small interactions and, perhaps, a few essays.
When I think of praise as a genre, I think of some quite formal poetic modes. I think of the stylized praise of Old English poetry, and the ambivalent praise of the ode. I once wrote a poem of praise for a colleague--a silly one, doggedly (and annoyingly) dactylic, but praise all the same. The formality of praise can be a help.
I think praise is a compelling competency to have to develop. Perhaps we should begin to compose our references in verse, the better to foreground its craft--the better to say, look, I have crafted this complex and well balanced thing on behalf of my student, who, after all, deserves it.
Beard, Mary. "How many references do you write in a week? A Don's Life. Times Literary Supplement Online Blogs. Web. 3 April 2010.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
On access
One thing I really enjoy about being at UC Berkeley is the genuine diversity of the undergraduate population. When I was an undergraduate at a private university, I rarely encountered transfer students, and when I did, they had transferred from Columbia or Smith. That's not to say that the population there wasn't diverse in its own way (geographically, for instance, it beat Berkeley by a mile), but here there's a regular stream of transfer students, and "transfer" almost universally means "transferred from a community college." Cal is an élite university, but it's also part of a much wider state higher education system.
One of the big concerns with the current budget crisis is its impact on UC's commitment to access. It's obvious that access will be reduced: UC and CSU are taking fewer students and raising fees. At UC Berkeley, Chancellor Birgeneau has estimated that reduced course offerings will cause students to graduate a semester later on average, which is in essence another fee hike, not to mention time that those students will never get back. This is all happening while private colleges are dropping their need-blind admissions policies, further shutting down opportunities for lower-income students.
So it will be harder for many Californians to get to campus.
But access is not just about being physically present, or being able to afford the fees. Pierre Bourdieu wrote some very famous books about this, in fact!
Power is coded in the university; hierarchical relationships are shifting and unclear (the eternal TA problem, for instance), and boundaries between the professional and the personal are invisible. I suspect this is one reason the "customer" model of the university is so attractive to some students; they don't know how to be part of an academic community and negotiate those invisible boundaries, but they do know how to be consumers. It's a system they know.
To really benefit from going to college, you need to go to class and do the reading, of course. And that's clear-cut for most people; the syllabus says "do this," and you do it or you don't do it, but in any case you know what you were supposed to do.
But that's just the beginning. College is also a place for building peer networks, for becoming acculturated in academic life (which is also a certain class acculturation), for gaining experience, confidence, professionalism, and kinds of social capital that can't show up on a transcript. And for that, you also have to venture out into the gray areas.
Suppose you want to better your lot in life by applying for a Rhodes scholarship. If the "access" we offer is meaningful, then this should be perfectly possible. But when my sister applied for the Rhodes, she needed twelve letters of recommendation. How do you get those twelve faculty letters? You have to feel entitled enough to the attention of your professors that you can persistently show up at office hours, ask them to read your work, and ask them to write nice things about you. In some ways, it very much resembles asking for a personal favor.
And you have to ask even if you went to a public high school where you had to go through a metal detector every day; even if, unlike some of your classmates, you've never traveled abroad or gone skiing or worn expensive shoes. Even if your childhood friends or your parents seem to suspect that by going to an élite school, you've abandoned them. Even if you're short on cultural capital, in other words, and feel that perhaps you're not entitled to ask.
Meanwhile, a high student-to-faculty ratio means long lines of students camped outside professors' offices, and work-study means having fewer daytime hours in which to do that kind of camping. Two sociologists found that
One of the most disheartening things about the current budget cuts is the reduction in small seminars that's resulting around the UC. UC Irvine even looks to be canceling its transfer seminars, which are supposed to help transfer students orient themselves in their new university. This will disproportionately affect the students who do not come from privilege.
While administrators are right to worry about brain drain in the faculty ranks, we should also worry about brain drain among undergraduates--undergraduates who don't come pre-marked as "brain" because they don't come with cultural capital or a diploma from Exeter, but who are some of the UC's most important people.
One of the big concerns with the current budget crisis is its impact on UC's commitment to access. It's obvious that access will be reduced: UC and CSU are taking fewer students and raising fees. At UC Berkeley, Chancellor Birgeneau has estimated that reduced course offerings will cause students to graduate a semester later on average, which is in essence another fee hike, not to mention time that those students will never get back. This is all happening while private colleges are dropping their need-blind admissions policies, further shutting down opportunities for lower-income students.
So it will be harder for many Californians to get to campus.
But access is not just about being physically present, or being able to afford the fees. Pierre Bourdieu wrote some very famous books about this, in fact!
Power is coded in the university; hierarchical relationships are shifting and unclear (the eternal TA problem, for instance), and boundaries between the professional and the personal are invisible. I suspect this is one reason the "customer" model of the university is so attractive to some students; they don't know how to be part of an academic community and negotiate those invisible boundaries, but they do know how to be consumers. It's a system they know.
To really benefit from going to college, you need to go to class and do the reading, of course. And that's clear-cut for most people; the syllabus says "do this," and you do it or you don't do it, but in any case you know what you were supposed to do.
But that's just the beginning. College is also a place for building peer networks, for becoming acculturated in academic life (which is also a certain class acculturation), for gaining experience, confidence, professionalism, and kinds of social capital that can't show up on a transcript. And for that, you also have to venture out into the gray areas.
Suppose you want to better your lot in life by applying for a Rhodes scholarship. If the "access" we offer is meaningful, then this should be perfectly possible. But when my sister applied for the Rhodes, she needed twelve letters of recommendation. How do you get those twelve faculty letters? You have to feel entitled enough to the attention of your professors that you can persistently show up at office hours, ask them to read your work, and ask them to write nice things about you. In some ways, it very much resembles asking for a personal favor.
And you have to ask even if you went to a public high school where you had to go through a metal detector every day; even if, unlike some of your classmates, you've never traveled abroad or gone skiing or worn expensive shoes. Even if your childhood friends or your parents seem to suspect that by going to an élite school, you've abandoned them. Even if you're short on cultural capital, in other words, and feel that perhaps you're not entitled to ask.
Meanwhile, a high student-to-faculty ratio means long lines of students camped outside professors' offices, and work-study means having fewer daytime hours in which to do that kind of camping. Two sociologists found that
fully a third of all Rhodes Scholars between 1947 and 1992 earned undergraduate degrees from just 3 universities: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Harvard alone produced 1 in 5 Rhodes Scholars over this 50 year period. (10)When you consider even the logistics alone, it's not surprising.
One of the most disheartening things about the current budget cuts is the reduction in small seminars that's resulting around the UC. UC Irvine even looks to be canceling its transfer seminars, which are supposed to help transfer students orient themselves in their new university. This will disproportionately affect the students who do not come from privilege.
While administrators are right to worry about brain drain in the faculty ranks, we should also worry about brain drain among undergraduates--undergraduates who don't come pre-marked as "brain" because they don't come with cultural capital or a diploma from Exeter, but who are some of the UC's most important people.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Non-plagiarized essays for your plagiarizing pleasure
Found in my spam folder:
Subject line: "Outstanding Quality & Professional Custom ESSAYS for only $7.9 -- Non-Plagiarized."
Yes, it appears that these quality essays that are available to you for $7.9x are "non-plagiarized."
That is, they haven't been plagiarized yet.
A technicality.
Subject line: "Outstanding Quality & Professional Custom ESSAYS for only $7.9 -- Non-Plagiarized."
Yes, it appears that these quality essays that are available to you for $7.9x are "non-plagiarized."
That is, they haven't been plagiarized yet.
A technicality.
Works cited
I've finally come up with a title for this blog.
Citation, appropriation, and pastiche are the postmodern techniques par excellence, and yet for some reason this seems to go hand in hand with a willful resistance to documentation of any kind. Yesterday I read a review of a book that I respect; the reviewer excoriated the author for being "an appalling writer." The crime? Referring too frequently to her scholarly predecessors and interlocutors! Evidently that's just too boring to be allowed. Heaven forbid that a reader be made to take notice of a heterogeneous intellectual tradition. I've even heard someone complain about an editor noting textual variants in the endnotes. What?
I love citations. They help me do my work, follow up on interests, figure out the terrain. I hate it when books have endnotes but not a comprehensive bibliography. I despise an edition that has no note on the editorial principles. The more apparatus the better.
So here's to works cited in the age of appropriation.
Citation, appropriation, and pastiche are the postmodern techniques par excellence, and yet for some reason this seems to go hand in hand with a willful resistance to documentation of any kind. Yesterday I read a review of a book that I respect; the reviewer excoriated the author for being "an appalling writer." The crime? Referring too frequently to her scholarly predecessors and interlocutors! Evidently that's just too boring to be allowed. Heaven forbid that a reader be made to take notice of a heterogeneous intellectual tradition. I've even heard someone complain about an editor noting textual variants in the endnotes. What?
I love citations. They help me do my work, follow up on interests, figure out the terrain. I hate it when books have endnotes but not a comprehensive bibliography. I despise an edition that has no note on the editorial principles. The more apparatus the better.
So here's to works cited in the age of appropriation.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
UC Regents committee has voted
From the Daily Cal:
More:
Saree Makdisi, "The Last Crisis at the University of California?"
And in the spirit of free inquiry:
Rhetoric nerds will agree that the ad hominem fallacy has been invoked here.
Amid rancor and outcry from employees, a committee of the UC Board of Regents voted Wednesday morning to force its employees to take unpaid days off in an attempt to balance its unprecedented $813 million budget deficit.
The full board is expected to approve the plan when the meeting resumes Thursday.
[...]
Most faculty will see an 8 percent reduction in salary as a result of the furlough days, decreasing salaries already 20 to 25 percent below those at top private peer universities, an effect UC professors said would make it nearly impossible to attract new faculty and retain senior professors.
"As a department chair, I cannot retain these people as well as hire people," said Sandra Faber, chair of the astronomy and astrophysics department at UC Santa Cruz. "We do not have that long because our professors, particularly the assistant professors, are gong to bolt, and we are going to enter an irrecoverable slide."
Before the meeting, a number of UC professors said many junior faculty are already considering leaving the UC system. If the furlough program should last longer than a year, Mary Croughan, chair of the Academic Council, said it will damage the UC system.
More:
Saree Makdisi, "The Last Crisis at the University of California?"
And in the spirit of free inquiry:
Rhetoric nerds will agree that the ad hominem fallacy has been invoked here.
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