Dear Ms. Undine answers self-evident questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

Ms. Mentor calls October "exploding head month" because of all the grant applications due then.  A whole lot of local ones are due next week. How can I deal with applications that want to know how much money I need to spend on June 10, 2015 when I can barely get through the stuff I need to do for next Tuesday?

Signed, Future Shock

Dear Future,
Here are some possibilities:
1. Start last year.
2. Start tomorrow for next year.
3. Seriously, practice a little time management.
4. Comfort yourself in the knowledge that with grant support so tight (NEH funds 6% of its individual scholar grants) you are likely only to be bragging fodder for its glossy brochures anyway: "We got 10 zillion applications and only funded 5! Look how selective we are! Yay for us!"

Dear Ms. Undine,

Clay Shirky, a famous person on the Internet, has pronounced laptops a distraction in the classroom and restricted their use, something I figured out and did a long time ago.  Now the fanboys who have called me a Luddite and blamed me for not liking the Shiny Things are falling all over themselves pronouncing the Wisdom of Clay.  Why is this so?

Signed,

Not Ned Ludd

Dear Not Ned,

Because you are not famous on the Internet, and because, I fear, you are not a guy and hence to fanboys do not have the mental equipment to think intelligently about Shiny Things. Think of yourself as the secret Queen of the Internet who predicts all things but whose power would be diminished if anyone listened to you.  In other words, get over it.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Out of idle curiosity, I looked at the MLA Job List and discovered that there are only 5 jobs in the country, 3 in something resembling my specialty, at the associate or full level!

Signed,

This is a job market?

Dear This,

Unless you have spent the last 30 years in silent meditation and prayer, surely this cannot be a surprise to you.  Ms. Mentor had a column about this recently, which if the CHE had a search feature instead of a Ouija Board, I would seek out and link to.  Surely you can find better things to do with your idle curiosity, like putting your books in some kind of order, or writing something, or taking a walk around the block, or, better still, helping your students and junior colleagues to get prepared for their job applications. 

Was there ever a time of idealism in college?

Dean Dad has an interesting post about artists and the advice being given to them:
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But where some variation of “follow your dreams” would have gone when I was in college, I heard “learn a trade” and “get good at living on very little money.”

He continues:

What I didn’t see, though, was youthful idealism.  I didn’t see what I used to think of as teenage bravado.  I saw some very young people who had been forced by circumstance to act in ways that used to be the province of their elders.  I saw young adults, rather than teenagers. 

In many ways, that’s great.  Given the very real economic obstacles many young students face, a certain gritty realism is appropriate.  And if memory serves, teenage bravado can be wearing in its own right.

But that “bulletproof” teenage stage -- that, in retrospect, relies on a base of economic security -- serves a purpose.

Dean Dad's take on this is interesting, for he sees it as a generational issue, whereas I see it as a class issue.

Although I went to college in a time that was supposed to be somewhat idealistic, the people I knew at public universities never went through a "bulletproof" stage of economic security where they thought "follow your dreams" was good advice. Idealism costs money, either immediately or in the future, and they knew it.

That's not to say that people weren't idealistic, or that they didn't do the same stupid things that college students have always done, but they understood the "gritty realism" of the consequences. The idea that you could throw yourself on the economy like a trampoline and bounce back wasn't part of the equation.

Private universities or elite publics--sure.  My friends who came from upper-middle-class professional backgrounds knew they could do whatever they wanted. If they made money in the summer working for their parents' friends, it went toward backpacking in Europe and not toward next year's expenses.  It's not that one was wrong and the other right, but they were different experiences.

I've been thinking about this because of reading other Mid-Century Males, Jack Kerouac and other Beats in particular.  Kerouac didn't want to be tied down, which may be the understatement of the decade, but whenever he got the urge to travel, which was most of the time, he had two things going for him: (1) plentiful manufacturing or service jobs that he could get easily and then leave and (2) like Allen Ginsberg, a family that, though not wealthy, would scrape up the money for bail for him when he got in trouble with the law.

The same seems to be true for the following decade, the 1960s, as I mentioned in a post about a year ago in talking about Sara Davidson's Loose Change:

What I actually took away was that people in those days could quit, drop out, or do any damn thing they felt like doing, and there would be someone or something to pick them up afterwards: plentiful jobs, more jobs than there were applicants, seemingly;  a network that would allow the main character, with just a phone call from one of her parents, to go to Europe and work as a translator in Italy; and a generous system of social service benefits that wouldn't let them fall into poverty.  They could change the world--or at least the upper-middle-class white women in the book could--because the world was going to support them financially no matter what they did.  I realize that that's probably not true, but it has a truthiness to it and seems true, given what Davidson describes.

  I think Dean Dad is right, but only partially so.  The idealism gap, if you can call it that, was always there for some students, but now it's hitting the class that used to be told "follow your bliss," and that's what speaks to the troubling reality that he's talking about.

Solving for X, where X = time to write

It's that time in the semester when it's late enough to see how the trajectory of meetings, classes, admin, etc., is going to go but early enough to correct the course. What's vanished, as usual, are the two things that matter most: time to get out and exercise, and time to write.

The usual distractions are under control, I think.  I stopped checking email on weekends, and the sky hasn't fallen, although I did miss out on a couple of opportunities by ignoring email until Sunday night.  I've blocked Facebook during work hours, even during department meetings, and my Twitter presence has dwindled to about nothing.

 No, this is about other variables: the carefully planned day of meetings that, when one of them gets shifted, means another full day on campus and no writing or exercise. That's a variable I can't control.

Another variable I can't control is administrative deadlines. These aren't a problem in themselves, but they require big blocks of time to do the tasks. Imagine if you had 1,000 widgets to put into a complex set of boxes but got called away in the middle.  You'd have to restart the process, so these tasks can't be done in 15-minute blocks with interruptions.

A variable I can control is clock time--getting up earlier, for example, as many people advise. But since I don't always sleep well, getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. to write can lead to sleepiness when driving.  I can't control fatigue, either, after a day on campus.

I did try the 10-15 minute "write when you have time" method the other day and was nearly late for a meeting, since I got absorbed in the task at hand.  The research journal I started a couple of years ago has been the best way to keep engaged with the writing, though.

In short, I'm still solving for X, but I think the answer may lie in (1) regular writing in my research journal; (2) ignoring email as much as possible; and (3) getting some more sleep.  (3) may not be immediately achievable, but (1) and (2) certainly are.

Any suggestions?

Roundup: Now with writing inspiration

*Poofed* part of this because it was entirely too cranky, even for me.

• Historiann's lovely writing space, which inspired me to clean both my office and my home desk.
• "Less is More" in writing by GetALifePhD (Tanya Golash-Boza) has some writing inspiration. 
• Inspired by Flavia Fescue's posts about writing in journals,  I downloaded Day One, a journal app. It tries desperately to post whatever I write to Facebook and Twitter and is hell bent on getting me to put in information so that it can report to our Alien Overlords of Social Media.  I haven't given it any information, but I don't trust it. Isn't a journal supposed to be private, or is exposing your private thoughts to the known world the new function of a journal?
• Karen Kelsky says it's a mistake for job applicants to use a dossier service. Having been on many, many search committees as chair and as just a member, I don't agree.  The key thing is going to be the candidate's letter, CV, writing, and general tenor of the letters.  I can and do write those job letters for my students on the market, although it takes time, but is there really an Interfolio disadvantage? Readers, what say you? 
• Speaking of writing recommendation letters, if you have not yet read Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members, do it. Your local library probably has it, it's a quick read, and it's both hilarious and uncomfortably close to the truth about how many of these letters we have to write for everything and the place of humanities in the university pecking order. 
• John Oliver takes on student debt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8pjd1QEA0c

Don't email me? Welcome to my bunker, and pull up a chair

This article at Slate (originally from IHE)  describes the experience of a professor at Salem State who banned student emails.

The good news is that more students came to her office as a result and her evals went up, so I guess if it works for you, you ought to keep doing it.

But are professors really "assaulted" by email?  That's a pretty strong verb.

Duvall’s frustration is shared by many in academe -- or anyone with an email account -- from faculty members beset by questions they have answered both in class and in writing to students inundated by university email blasts. This spring, when Duvall taught at the University of South Carolina at Aiken, she adopted a new email policy to cut down on emails from students telling her they would be late, or would miss class, or would have leave early, or any of the countless others that could be handled face-to-face.

Instead of wasting class time on walking her students through an increasingly complicated flowchart diagram of when they could and could not email her, Duvall stopped the problem at its core: No emails -- unless you’re scheduling an in-person meeting

A flowchart for email, really?

I know that professors complain (in blogs, at CHE) about massive numbers of emails from students, but since we're dealing with a "my experience is data" topic anyway, I haven't experienced this. Students have usually been respectful and not asked pointless questions, unless my memory has erased those emails.

Wouldn't you rather have an email than have the student show up at your office, sneezing and coughing and shedding used Kleenex into your wastebasket,  to tell you she's not going to be in class? Or am I the only recipient of these "see, I am really, really sick and not lying" visits?

Don't you think if a student emails you to say she'll be late or absent that it shows some attempt to be engaged with the class or respectful of your expectations that she'd be there?  Yes, it's better if they stop after class to tell you that they'll be absent, and most of them do that anyway.

If there's some special circumstance or absence, like a sports team event, wouldn't you rather have it in an email where you can document it instead of relying on your memory?

I'm all for more in-person interaction with students, but this would, for me, be a sealing wax policy too far.  What do you all think?

Dear Ms. Undine dispenses more wisdom

Dear Ms. Undine,

In between admin, prepping classes, meeting, and still trying to keep some time for writing, I take out a few minutes to read higher education sites for distraction, which are filled with stuff I already know--teaching tips, how to handle email, and the like as though it is a fresh, new thing. I could have written them myself. This annoys me, because it violates my prime directive of not wasting my time. What should I do? 

Signed, Been there, done that

Dear Been there,

You know the answer to this one: you are looking for distraction in all the wrong places, and you, not they, are wasting your time.  

Those sites are for people who are just starting out, and to them, those things are exciting and new.  You know how kittens and puppies get intrigued by things that your cat or dog now ignore, and how nice you think it is that they are excited by them?  This information is valuable, just not to you. Be happy that people find them valuable, and stop reading them, or you'll be saying, "hey, kids, get off my lawn" at the next faculty meeting.  Oh, and pick up a book instead.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I noticed that you wrote about your lengthy syllabus with lots of policies, and there is a recent Slate article about the same thing. I have two questions. First, how did two people decide to write about this at the same time?  Second, do you agree with the article about just writing tl;dr and protesting the syllabus?

Signed,  Mysteries of the universe

Dear Mysteries,

There are only two explanations  for your first question: either (1) I have massive powers of telepathy and the ability to make the universe bend to my will by echoing my thoughts or (2) it's the beginning of the semester and everyone is making up a syllabus. Obviously the first is the rational explanation. 

About your second question: No, I don't agree that the long syllabus is the decline of academia as we know it.  When you explain the syllabus, you can emphasize certain parts, but if it's all there, they can read (or, okay, ignore) it on their own. They are not going to follow a link, and everyone knows it, so that's a non-starter. My only regret is the absence of sealing wax. 

Dear Ms. Undine,

I had a conversation today in which someone observed that her male teachers were more apt to share information about themselves when introducing themselves to the class than her female teachers.  Do you think this is true?

Signed, Gender difference or coincidence?

Dear Gender,

I don't know, but I'm curious about this.  Readers, what do you do when you introduce yourselves, or what do you think? 

First day impressions

• I hope they're going to like the class. I worked hard on the syllabus and readings.
• I don't do much more the first day than explain the syllabus and introduce some of the assignments, since there's a lot to cover.  
• If your university is like mine, it now has lots of policies, goals, and so on in specific boilerplate language that has to go into the syllabus. The syllabus now resembles Henry VIII's divorce petition to the Pope with all the wax seals. 
• I wish I could add an interesting wax seal for each of the policies.
• I wish we could have a day of experimenting with sealing wax without giving the fire marshal a heart attack.
• It was nice to see colleagues when they are (and I am) relatively rested after the summer, even if we all worked all summer. 
• It felt strange to be on campus instead of out for a walk/run early in the morning, looking at the deer in the fields and speculating about which little buildings behind people's houses might be writing houses.

Through a glass eye, darkly: listening to the Alternavoice

Flavia has good a post up about a book that she read and that, quoting Dorothy Parker, she says she wants to hurl with great force out of her house.  It's a book about a guy having a mushy, lukewarm crisis of faith. She also says that she doesn't necessarily finish books any more once she's given them a fair (100 pages, more than fair) chance.

Finishing books? Not necessarily, any more.  I recently tried a modern classic, but after reading the preface about how it would be challenging, frustrating, and confusing, even a little boring with all the digressions, but that the 1000+ pages would be totally worth the effort, I let the Kindle app quietly return it to the library without forging ahead.  Maybe I'll try again in twenty or thirty years. If I'm going to work that hard, I'd rather work, if you see what I mean.

No, the thing that worries me a little is that in rereading some classics, including my recent stretch of visiting the mid-century males, my first reaction is often no longer "This is a Timeless Classic with Enduring Themes and Universal Truths," the gospel I was taught, but "Oh, great--more twentysomething guy problems."  As Mark Twain once said of James Fenimore Cooper in a very different but totally hilarious context, I'm seeing through a glass eye, darkly.

I can't tell whether this is a gender issue or an age one, since I've read so many more novels since first encountering those classics. I can still appreciate all the formal stuff and even a little stylistic fancy footwork, but in the big Crisis of Faith moments, a still, small voice in the back of my head is saying something like "Dude. You are worrying about this, really? Get a grip."

The Alternavoice hasn't always been there when I read. I think reading all the junk on the web has cultivated it, from listicles to the faux questions at Slate and HuffPo and now all the news sites.  It's not there with everything I read, which is a good thing.

And the Alternavoice isn't all bad.  It slips out in class sometimes, in some almost-snark pointing out problems in a text. I don't want to go all trollish on a piece of writing, of course, but it's good for the students to see that what we're reading isn't holy writ and that there's another way to look at the hero's dilemma.

Maybe I need to write up an assignment where they can let their Alternavoices loose, but once it's out of the cage, as evidenced in my brain in the last year or so, it's out for good.

Do you have this voice when you read literature? Is there some situation or plotline that especially brings it out?

Dear Ms. Undine answers more questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

From Shutterstock

Someone just wrote a book that is entirely composed of tweets about writing a book. People post about how they are writing (#amwriting) and how good they feel about it. The author says that it's not cruel to make fun of these people. The book sells for $9 on Amazon.

If I cite this using MLA, do I put it as an edited book? Did I miss the boat on collecting other people's words for free and charging for them? Is it possible that making fun of random strangers who post on Twitter could be considered cruel?

Signed, Soft-hearted Susan

Dear Susan,

Yes.

---

Dear Ms. Undine,

I want my class to be a success on the first day. Do you have any advice?

Signed,  Newbie

Dear Newbie,

You can find a good list at Vanderbilt or your own university's teaching and learning center.  That list is mostly great advice, although I don't follow this part under the "sharing information" section: "Personal biography: your place of birth, family history, educational history, hobbies, sport and recreational interests, how long you have been at the university, and what your plans are for the future."

I figure if they know that I'm a humanoid life form and where my office is, that will about exhaust their interest in me.  If they want to know more, they will ask.

---

Dear Ms. Undine,

I would like to save paper by not printing a syllabus but by putting it in Blackboard/Canvas instead. Students will read it there before they come to class, right?

Signed, Dances with Trees

Dear Dances,

Long ago, in a classroom far away, a dewy-eyed Ms. Undine believed as you do.  Then she checked the usage statistics to see how many students had looked at the syllabus and emerged a broken woman.

You don't have to hand out print copies of everything, but a print copy of a syllabus is like a contract for the class.  Just the physical act of handing out something on paper will help them to take it more seriously.  They are online all the time, and what's there is ephemeral to them. Since a piece of paper is no longer the norm, it has more weight than a bunch of pixels.

At NY Review of Books: The Hi-Tech Mess of Higher Ed

As a distraction from the national news, here are snippets of a review of the film The Ivory Tower  from the NY Review of Books, starring our old friend the MOOC. Below are the usual claims and the reality.

1. MOOCs will free up professors from the drudgery of lectures through the flipped classroom model and will allow them to "teach" through hands-on help with students. Professors will not become glorified teaching assistants or handmaidens to greatness. because that's just stupid fear-mongering on the part of thuggish teachers' unions. It won't happen because trust us, it won't, universities being unlike any other business in that they will provide free services for the public good once they can't charge for them.

A conventional delivery system for “the personal touch” in the MOOC format is the so-called “flipped classroom.” Here a teaching assistant circulates in a roomful of students who have watched the assigned video, and helps them to sort out questions about details. The assistant—as Ivory Tower suggests with a single understated caption—will often turn out to be somebody who was once a professor but whom economies facilitated by MOOCs have demoted to the status of section leader.

2.  Students will learn better and more efficiently in a MOOC.

 In 2013, the company [Udacity] was awarded a trial of its offerings in a contract with San Jose State University; and in July of that year, scores were posted for its spring term entry-level courses. The pass rate in elementary statistics was 50.5 percent; in college algebra, 25.4 percent; in entry-level math, 23.8 percent. Teachers have been fired en masse for results like these by administrators or politicians who would not sit for an explanation.

3.  A rock star teacher in a MOOC makes a world of difference and will do a much better job than, well, 500 ordinary teachers.

What you really want, [a Udacity adept] thinks, is the academic equivalent of a “rock star” to project knowledge onto the screens and into the brains of students without the impediment of fellow students or a teacher’s intrusive presence in the room. “Maybe,” he adds, “that rock star could do a little bit better job” than the nameless small-time academics whose fame and luster the video lecturer will rightly displace.

Note that there's no proof here, because why do you need proof when you have one anonymous stockholder's or employee's opinions? We all know that people learn from celebrities.  Maybe Kim Kardashian could teach a class.

4. MOOCs have always been about the greater good of reaching thousands with free learning. That's why university administrators, a notably starry-eyed bunch unconcerned with the bottom line, are so keen to implement them.

Still, however fanciful the conceit may be, the MOOC movement has a clear economic motive. Many universities today want to cut back drastically on the payment of classroom teachers. It is important therefore to convince us that teachers have never been the focus of real learning.

Don't multitask; partition your day. Your brain demands it.

No post today, but "Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain" at the New York Times describes what the brain struggles with when interrupted. Read the whole thing; it's worth it.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

If you want to be more productive and creative, and to have more energy, the science dictates that you should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done during a designated time, not as constant interruptions to your day.
 Email, too, should be done at designated times. An email that you know is sitting there, unread, may sap attentional resources as your brain keeps thinking about it, distracting you from what you’re doing. What might be in it? Who’s it from? Is it good news or bad news? It’s better to leave your email program off than to hear that constant ping and know that you’re ignoring messages.

And this from the Wall Street Journal: 

“People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” said MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller. “The brain is very good at deluding itself.” Simply put, we can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. What we do is shift focus, trying to manage multiple threads. “Switching from task to task, you think you’re actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you’re actually not” said Miller. Researchers like Miller say they can actually see the brain struggling. “You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That’s because of what’s called interference between the two tasks” explains Miller. “They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there’s a lot of conflict between the two of them. 

The challenge is to define the problem – and the solution. “The current system lets other people add things to my to-do list” says Esther [Dyson]. 

Writing house fantasies: a picture

Over at the New York Times, "Plot Thickens as 900 Writers Battle Amazon" informs us about the Hachette Publishing/Amazon struggle.

I know that this is an important controversy, but what the NY Times published and what I read were two different things.

What it says:

ROUND POND, Me. — Out here in the woods, at the end of not one but two dirt roads, in a shack equipped with a picture of the Dalai Lama, a high-speed data line and a copy of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” Amazon’s dream of dominating the publishing world has run into some trouble.

Douglas Preston, who summers in this coastal hamlet, is a best-selling writer — or was, until Amazon decided to discourage readers from buying books from his publisher, Hachette, as a way of pressuring it into giving Amazon a better deal on e-books. So he wrote an open letter to his readers asking them to contact Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, demanding that Amazon stop using writers as hostages in its negotiations.

 What I read:

Blah blah blah blah WRITING HOUSE PICTURE.

Dear Ms. Undine answers some more of your academic questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

IHE recently reported that colleges in Michigan are outsourcing their hiring of adjuncts to something called EDUStaff.  The colleges are delighted because they can chisel even more money from adjuncts stop retirement contributions to faculty and, in one case, "ending retirement contributions saved the college at least $250,000 in the first year." I'm guessing the money went toward a climbing wall, more luxuries for the football team, and a new no-books atrium for the library, but I'm concerned that individual schools won't get to know the people who are teaching their students.  Am I right to be concerned?

Signed, Miffed in Michigan

Dear Miffed,

Yes.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Recent essays on being published and on mistakes humanities scholars make in trying to be published  seem to say that publication is a possibility and that, in fact, "if you're not a writer, you're not a player." Being a player makes me feel like Frank Sinatra at the Sands circa 1960.  Do I have to be a player to be a writer?

Signed, Ring-a-ding-ding

Dear Ring,

Not unless you have Sammy and Dean and Angie Dickinson on speed dial.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I want to submit an article, but I am now terrified of the "mean girls" who constitute a totally vicious academic universe. I'm picturing Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, but meaner. Is it true that peer reviewers live to inflict pain?

Signed, Anesthesia

Dear Anesthesia,

No. Although there are exceptions, they live to carve time out of their own writing time in order to provide what they hope is helpful feedback to improve someone's article.  Some academics are mean, but then, some people are mean, and the internet is a whole lot meaner.


Dear Ms. Undine.

All I do is get up and write or revise all day long. Sometimes, just to shake things up, I recite poetry to the cats.  I'm pretty sure they listen to me. Is this normal behavior for a writer? Is this normal behavior for cats?

Signed,  Wonder while I wander

Dear Wonder,

Your question is in two parts, so I will answer both.

1) Yes, totally, totally normal, no problem here at all, no sir.
2) Yes. Cats will listen to anyone with opposable thumbs and access to the food dish.

On writing and rewriting: the spinning wheel

Yes, it's another writing post.

Jonathan links to a post called "How I Wrote Certain of my Books," which is inspirational but also depressing (note the plural form on "books"):

And then there’s the drafting, my absolute favorite part of the process. At first I write a paltry few hundred words a day, but with the outline in place, the materials at the ready, and everything referenced exactly, I soon hit a stride and can write thousands of words a day. I get up in the morning excited to write, I go to bed wishing the night would pass faster so I could get back to it.

 See why it's inspirational? I thought no one but Anthony Grafton and Joyce Carol Oates could write this way.

But what about rewriting?

Let's take the piece I've been working this month on as an example. In looking at my Excel sheet where I track just word counts, here's what I found:

1. I started with about 6,000 words already pretty polished and written, or so I thought. 
2. I spent 2 days rereading and taking new notes on source materials.
3. I spent 11 days, from 2 to 4 hours a day, just rewriting and re-looking at sources, moving the word count needle from 6500 down to about 5800 and back up to 7200. 

The piece is much better, several drafts later; in fact, I'm putting on the final edits before sending it.  And this wasn't a case of being stuck: I knew what I wanted and needed to write. 

But with rewriting, sometimes I feel as though I am standing at a spinning wheel and respinning the same wool. It has all the time-consuming properties of writing without the joy of writing hundreds (let alone thousands!) of words a day and, for you record-keepers out there, the joy of seeing those numbers go up in the spreadsheet. 

Random bullets of academic writing thoughts

• I plan to leave out cookies and milk to catch the evil troll who rolls back the progress on my manuscript every night. I toil over it all day long, and leave it as, if not a shining thing, at least a respectable one with shining bits.  "It's 100% better," I say when leaving it for the evening. When I look at it the next morning, though, imperfections bounce out at me, and I realize that it is maybe 20% better, so clearly a troll did something terrible to it overnight. 
• I read Rebecca Schuman's article on peer review over at Slate (who didn't?). She suggests that everyone who submits an article for review should be forced to read in order to get reviewed, sort of a "take a penny, leave a penny" approach.  Since this ought to happen through goodwill and scholarly collegiality, I'm a little worried about sullen teenager syndrome--you know, where you make a reward contingent on raking the lawn but you don't exactly get a stellar job if the teenager doesn't feel like doing it. I'd like to think that being professional shouldn't mean coercion.
• Crowdsourcing reviews, although successful as an experiment in Kathleen Fitzpatrick's case, leaves open the possibility of "and thanks to the anonymous hordes who spent many many hours of their life reading and commenting on my prose and made my Fabulous Book so Fabulous." Part of being a reviewer is knowing that your thoughtful comments (not mean-girl screeds, as Schuman suggests) will improve the article, or at least ask the right questions. Will scholars really spend that time in reviewing, which is already a time-consuming task, if they're just part of an anonymous horde instead of one of a couple of experts sought out by the journal or press? It worked for Fitzpatrick, but her project had this as an integral and novel part of the book. Multiply this by hundreds of books and articles. Would you spend your research time this way? Jonathan has another objection: the non-expert factor.
• Gregory Semenza has a nice writing inspiration post about the value of 10 minutes: if you have 10 minutes between classes, use them to write. I like the idea of using small increments of time well, especially the "touch your writing every day" part, but that might be just enough time to get absorbed in the material before having to go off to class.
• Not about academic writing, but the death of James Garner seems to have moderated internet trollery in the comments on the obituaries of him. He seems to have been a decent human being and a good actor, and it was nice for once to scan comments and not see the awfulness of humanity that people usually display there. I shouldn't read comments, but sometimes I get sucked in by them. This comic at xkcd.com says it all, really:
  

Nonacademic books I'd like to write

While working endlessly on this book, I keep fantasizing about the books I would write if I weren't, you know, writing a book.

When I'm struggling with a paragraph ("The subject of this is WHAT? The point of this is WHAT? It's necessary because WHY?"), my brain whispers to me about them.

"If you wrote a biography," it begins, knowing that I like to read them, "you would already have an idea about the structure.  You could spend all your time in an archive. People would line up to buy it, unless, of course, you insist on writing about an obscure author."

"Or," it continues, "you could write one of those books that are about how meaningful it is to read a book and how much it meant to you, like those books about Jane Austen and Middlemarch and Laura Ingalls Wilder. You read. You have opinions, God knows, and a life that has been influenced by books. Why wouldn't people line up to buy your opinions? They buy everyone else's, and maybe you could be charming and funny enough to gain a readership."

Now the brain is really settling into the topic. "Why not a book of academic advice?" it continues.  "Your credentials are about like those of the other academics who give advice, and if you can learn to be more dogmatic, people will listen."

"Or maybe a novel? It might not sell, because you wouldn't want to write about vampires or zombies or space aliens or spies or mysteries or being an academic who can afford to live in Tuscany, but if there's an audience out there for novels where the conflict centers on meting out justice to rude people (hello, Jane Austen fans!), you could write one of those."

"Brain," I say, "shut up. If it were that easy, I would have done it already. And anyway, part of the appeal would be that this would sell."

The brain looks at me, injured.  "Fine," it snaps. "If all you care about is fame and fortune, then you can sell out and see if I care. Go write The 365-Day Cat Golfing Calendar . I'm sure people would line up to buy it," the brain ends with a sneer.

"And if you don't get back to work," it continues, "I'll wake you up at 4 tomorrow morning again so that you can fret for an hour before you get up."

[Edited to add: Wordpress has decided to hate me once again, so WP bloggers, I can't comment on your blogs right now--sorry. I've tried a couple of times at nicoleandmaggie's, etc., but the goddess of WP is implacable right now.]

Random bullets of a Thursday

• The nice thing about Twitter is that if someone says something monumentally stupid with a very self-satisfied air, you can just stop following him or her. 
• Ditto for Captain Obvious statements, of which there are many.  I have gotten very impatient with stupidity this summer, which would be a problem if I saw these people in person at a conference. But if you unfollow, they won't notice you're gone, so no hurt feelings, no harm, no foul.
• I want to get this piece done, so I can go back to the big project. I apparently don't want to start thinking so that I can write, though.  It's as though I have a gas grill all ready to start but don't want to push the ignition switch. 
• Profacero's post about productivity made me think about this. I don't have any emotional resistance, though. It's just laziness on my part. 
• There is just enough daily engagement with the leaning-in part of my new job that I can't ignore university messages.  It nibbles away at the corners of my concentration as if it's pretending not to touch the rest of the cookie. But if you're looking for distractions--as I often am, because: laziness--it's hard not to give it the whole cookie instead of the crumbs.

At Chronicle Vitae: Clueless faculty say to grad students "let them eat cake"

At Chronicle Vitae, a select group of STEM faculty are giving the profession the Marie Antoinette* treatment by responding to the jobs crisis as though it's 1968 all over again.  You've heard all these before:

• "The best students will always succeed."
• "Students just don't want faculty positions." 
• “It’s my JOB to create more people like me.

You can read the rest at the link.  Humanities professors aren't quoted in the article.

I'm taking it on faith that these are actual quotations and not random spoutings from an online cliche-generator sponsored by the people who hate tenured faculty, which is what they sound like.

These are the people whose heads would explode if you called them climate-change deniers or quoted them as saying that Adam and Eve walked with the dinosaurs. But how is the failure to recognize this reality for their students any less irresponsible and damaging?





* I know she never said it, but this is kind of a fact-free post, wouldn't you say, so isn't it appropriate?

Leaning in means never having to say you're sorry

We've heard a lot of non-apology apologies over the past couple of decades, from the Gulf oil spill "it'll never happen--oh, wait, it did, so deal with it" to the Great Recession ("the economy can't go down--oh, wait, it did, but it's totally the fault of all you unemployed people not spending enough").

I guess I was hoping for better from Sheryl Sandberg, who has apparently reinvented feminism for a new generation. (I dropped my doubts at the door, or rather shelved them,  after seeing how much she meant to women bloggers I respect.)

But really, Sheryl Sandberg? "We never meant to upset you"  is the "Geez, lighten up! I'm sorry that you can't take a joke" of non-apologies.

And then she drags out the old chestnut of every corrupt business everywhere, "we take this very seriously."

"Again, what really matters here is that we take people's privacy incredibly seriously and we will continue to do that."

Yeah, we've seen over and over again just how seriously Facebook takes our privacy. "Seriously" as in changing the security defaults every couple of months to reveal more information? "Seriously" as in making us hunt down the now-hidden controls to go back to more privacy?

I take privacy seriously, too, enough so that I use an entirely different browser for Facebook and use it for nothing else and clear the history and cookies after each session.

And to be willing to mess with people's moods just to sell more junk in the sidebar? When Facebook already has a head start on making people unhappy? 

And not to tell them about it? And then to say, "Meh, what's your problem? That's our business model." That's just wrong.

I think I have had enough this week with corporations being granted more rights than people.  I can't do anything about the Supremes, but I don't have to shop at places that agree with that model, and I don't have to be on Facebook.

And anyone who gives that party line in excusing corporate shenanigans doesn't deserve my trust, even if we are All Women Singing and Leaning In Together.

Dear Ms. Undine Answers Your Questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

All the academics I know on Facebook are on vacation or hiking in the mountains or traveling in Europe, having a fabulous time. I am slogging away at writing. I am happy for them but also envious. What do you suggest?  -- Running in Jello

A. Dear Running in Jello,

Stay off Facebook. Sheryl Sandberg wants you to lean in and feel bad, and she's not a bit sorry about it, either.


Dear Ms. Undine,

I am supposed to write in the morning, but if I check email even for a second, I see a lot of messages requiring a reply. Many of them are about things that people want me to do for them. What should I do?  -- Curiosity killed the cat

A. Dear Curiosity,

I saw a message the other day that is just made for you.  It goes something like this: "An email inbox is a to-do list that is made for you by other people. It reflects their priorities, not yours."  If you pay attention to this message and don't check your email until late in the day, you will feel better.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Twitter is full of something called the World Cup and also full of outraged people.  Which do I have to pay attention to if I want to be well-informed about the news?  -- Christiane Amanpour, Jr.

A. Dear Christiane,

Neither.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I keep telling myself "this piece of writing won't write itself," but secretly I think it will if I just leave it alone so that the pages will multiply. Am I right in thinking that the pages will multiply?
-- Hope Springs Eternal

A. Dear Hope,

Sadly, no.  Pages are not like guppies. Instead, they are like books, which will move around on the shelves until you can't find the one you want. There will be the same number of pages that you left, but you will find yourself lost when you go back to them if you don't keep your eyes firmly on them.

If you have questions to ask Ms. Undine, please leave them in the comments.