My plant wants to go home

I need to get back to posting soon, but there's something I've noticed in my office.

My plant wants to go home. More specifically, my plant wants this semester to end. I've always prided myself on not being one of those people who could tell you down to the last nanosecond how far into the semester it is. I had a colleague like that once: "It's week 6, and they're acting crazy, just as they always do," she'd say. I never knew what week it was, or, without looking at the syllabus, the date that the semester would end. But my plant knows.

Sure, the end of the semester is busy--isn't it always?--and I'm really pleased with how my students are doing. This should be a busy and a happy time, since they're doing good work. But the plant just sits there, wanting to be taken home, telling me through some kind of plant telepathy that we've only got a few weeks left and it is so done with this semester.

If it were me, I'd be embarrassed at how ready I am to pack it in and call the semester over with. But it isn't me. I'm pretty sure it's the plant.

Blogworld creativity

All right, it was a dream (hence the OT qualifier), but I think it says something about the relationship between blogging and "real writing," so I'm posting it. I think it was inspired by a message I received recently from an acquisitions editor at a press where I've reviewed several manuscripts, asking me to have coffee at an upcoming conference.

In the dream, a colleague and I were part of some focus group about academic blogging, and he began to pontificate at great length about it. In real life I like and respect this colleague, but you know that Mark Twain saying "it is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"? It became clear that he knew nothing about blogging, although that didn't stop him from expressing a lot of opinions dressed as theories, and that I had a whole lot of ideas about it just from reading blogs and from writing this one for three years.

The editor and I walked to a nearby coffeeshop through a thicket of blogs, which were posted on beautiful wooden signposts (all of your blogs on the blogroll were there) on gentle green slopes, and the comments pages were paper pages left beneath them where people could write things with the attached pencils. Once at the shop, I outlined something like a theory of blogology--if not like Mr. Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies--and the editor thought this should be a book.

Now, I'm not writing a book about blogs. Instead, I think it signifies a lot of things that blogs seem to mean to us all:

The ability to try out ideas and be heard by a supportive (but honest) community, even if it's largely a pseudonymous one.

The ability to be playful in writing.

The liberating quality of writing about what you know, and what you know you know even if it doesn't square with someone else's theories (as Professor Z often discusses).

The beauty of a writing space--for it was very much a space--in which writing does not need to respond to deadlines, is never stressful, and makes the writer feel as though the expression of ideas and emotions is a good thing.

In short, I think it was about the ways in which blogs foster creativity, and who could say that that's a bad thing?
[Title changed to be less confusing]

Reading criticism irreverently

When I'm reading a sentence like "My project is to stage an intervention into X," my first thought is "Why? Does it have a drug problem?"

(With apologies to profgrrrl for stealing her blog title.)

OT: Cat 1, Printer 0

I'm sure you all saw this a few years ago on YouTube. Apparently one of my cats watched it, too. Today as I was duplex printing (Save the trees! Save the earth!), Calm Cat came to watch, as he always does. The HP printer I use prints one side, spits out the page part way for the ink to dry, and then draws the page back in to print the other side. This is clearly an affront not to be tolerated, so Calm Cat kept grabbing at the page and tearing it up as it was drawn back into the printer.

Did Calm Cat vanquish the printer? Of course. The print head got stuck, and I spent the next half hour with a pair of tweezers, picking shreds of paper out of the printer's innards. The printer is working now, and it now has an ally against the depredations of Calm Cat: the Spray Bottle of Doom, which is going to work its magic if he gets near the printer again.

From the Chronicle: Are senior scholars abandoning journal publication?

From the Chronicle, "Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis":

Senior scholars, the A-list of academic publishing, seem to submit fewer unsolicited manuscripts to traditional humanities journals than they used to. "The journal has become, with very few exceptions, the place where junior and midlevel scholars are placing their work," according to Bonnie Wheeler, president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. . . .

Several journal editors said they had observed this trend, and had different theories about it. Maybe it's a natural winnowing, as disciplines evolve and careers move forward. Humanities fields like history and literary studies have become more specialized over the past couple of decades, making more-general journals like PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, perhaps less tempting as venues. Journals go in and out of fashion. Eminent scholars get busier. . . .

The vogue for edited collections may also be distracting scholars. In 2005, James Eli Adams, an associate professor of English at Cornell University, published an article in the Journal of Victorian Culture called "The Function of Journals at the Present Time," in which he argued that the "explosion" of edited collections has tended "to siphon off a great deal of article-length work from senior scholars."

The article goes on to quote Craig Howes as saying that "a book [of articles] is valued more," although as the author of the article, Jennifer Howard, points out, articles in journals are read by more people because of database access.

Any thoughts about this? The last I'd heard, journal publication was a kind of gold standard, with edited collections considered to be maybe 14K to the 18K of journal publication; also, I had heard that edited collections were even harder to place than monographs, due to publishing constraints. What have you heard?

No wonder full professors are disgruntled if they don't get promoted

From the New York Times, via University Diaries:
In a contentious Feb. 26 deposition between Dr. Biederman and lawyers for the states, he was asked what rank he held at Harvard. “Full professor,” he answered.
“What’s after that?” asked a lawyer, Fletch Trammell.
“God,” Dr. Biederman responded.
“Did you say God?” Mr. Trammell asked.
“Yeah,” Dr. Biederman said.

Tech tools and writing inspiration

From BoingBoing, via Academhack, comes Steven Johnson's account of "How to write a book" (it's all worth reading, but I've cut it up here because I don't want to steal the whole thing):

The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text -- and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink . . .

When it comes time to actually write the book, I usually have a pretty clear sense of how the chapters are going to be divided up. . . . And so in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered over the past year or so of research. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

. . . I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It's a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

I've never used Devonthink because I don't have a Mac. I've tried Evernote (seemed cumbersome) and OneNote (but I only have a trial version), but I keep coming back to plain old Word, which I use in somewhat the same way. Mostly, however, I rely on a blizzard of Post-It notes stuck in books that are piled 6 deep all around my desk, typed notes, scraps written during dull conference presentations, and so on.

Do these tools really make a difference? Or is it the part I've bolded at the end, about starting in a file already full of notes, that makes the difference? Do any of you use these tools?

In which Mr. Thoreau reads my mind

"It is a great relief when for a few moments in the day we can retire to our chamber and be completely true to ourselves. It leavens the rest of our hours. In that moment I will be nakedly as vicious as I am; this false life of mine shall have a being at length."

Henry David Thoreau.

When worlds collide

I was looking over the list of contributors to an essay collection in which I have a piece coming out and started musing "X . . X . . . where have I heard that name?" Then it hit me: X is someone who blogs under his or her own name. There will thus be two bloggers in that collection, at the very least, but only one of us will know that.

It gave me pause, for a minute, although I don't know why it should; I've seen other bloggers on panels at MLA and elsewhere, even though I've never been to a meetup or tried to learn the IRL identities of any pseudonymous bloggers.

But since meatspace and blogworld do ultimately intersect, wouldn't it be great if there were some way, some secret handshake or something, by which we could say to each other "I'm a blogger, too"? Maybe a Masonic handshake or something?

Writing is fun. Starting is hard.

At the risk of semi-disagreeing with Professor Zero's "A Heretical Post," I have to qualify what she says when she says "Writing is fun. Publishing is easy."

She's right about the writing books that moan about writing and about the Frail Souls who put their hands to their foreheads when telling you how busy they've been. Maybe they have been busy, but they haven't been busy shingling roofs when the temperature is 104 degrees, nor have I, so let's not kid ourselves about the kind of hard work we do. So when is writing fun for me? (Your mileage may vary.)

1. Writing is fun when you're in the flow of it. Unfortunately, that "flow" experience sometimes gets spent on other things, like a piece of grad student writing I was commenting on the other day. My brain was pumping, I was making suggestions that will make the writing better, and I was enjoying that "flow" experience through commenting--but it didn't contribute one word to my own writing.

2. Writing is easy, but starting writing, and thinking about what you want to write, is hard. Over the weekend, when my colleagues were variously skiing, hiking, enjoying conferences, and visiting tropical places, I sat stubbornly in front of the computer monitor while trying not to bang my head on the desk while I tried to think through some concepts for a deadline-driven proposal. I'd like to think that doing worthy things like going to the gym or washing the floor or finishing an article review would help by breaking up the process, but all that does is say to my brain, "Why, you've worked a lot already today, haven't you? I guess you're all done."

From various comments, I'm guessing that my colleagues don't go through this long, slow process of gearing up to write. I've asked them about how they get started writing or if they get stuck a few times, and they look at me as if I've grown two heads. They're more like the people Boice describes in Professors as Writers, or the ones that Silvia describes in How to Write a Lot, who never experience anxiety because they know that they will write every day at a set time, without any of that nasty agony about ideas.

3. Writing is fun once you've finished a piece. Have you ever noticed how right after you finish something, you sort of love it for at least a few minutes? Everything, however minor, gets some admiration right after I finish it, from a politely cranky letter to a state politician to an article that gave me grief. Of course, two hours later I am dissatisfied with it again, but in that immediate glow of relief over finishing something, I'm happy with it and with myself for getting it done.

4. Writing is fun when you see your work in print. Again, like the "I've finished it!" afterglow, this doesn't last. You get the book or journal, you start to read, and soon you notice a sentence that you would totally revise if you had the article back again. But that's the nature of creating anything, isn't it? I've heard of famous directors who had to be barred from the projection room even after their films were released, because they'd try to go in and recut things.

So yes, writing is (or can be) fun, else why be an academic or keep a blog? But if it were easy, I'd be a few thousand words into the next project by now instead of trying to procrastinate by writing a blog post.

Sven Birkerts mourns loss of cuneiform, clay tablets

I have a confession to make: despite all the rational reasons for not getting a Kindle, I have been reading far too many reviews of the new version and lingering over pictures and videos of the Kindle 2 in action. "Rational reasons" can't entirely stamp out the lingering techno-envy best expressed by "Shiny! Want it!'

So Sven Birkerts's "Resisting the Kindle" in The Atlantic ought to supply some more ammunition for rationality, shouldn't it? I thought so until I read this in a passage where Birkerts is bemoaning the ability to access the internet and look up something using a Blackberry, claiming that such an ability "abets the decimation of context":

Literature—our great archive of human expression—is deeply contextual and historicized. We all know this—we learned it in school. This essential view of literature and the humanities has been—and continues to be—reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious physical adjacency of certain texts, the fact of which telegraphs the cumulative time-bound nature of the enterprise. We get this reflexively. . . .
That is the trade-off. Access versus context. As for Pride and Prejudice—Austen’s words will reach the reader’s eye in the same sequence they always have. What will change is the receiving sensibility, the background understanding of what this text was – how it emerged and took its place in the context of other texts—and how it moved through the culture.

Here are the problems with that argument:

1. Umm, Mr. Birkerts? That ability to look things up instantly? Not going away any time soon.

2. Also, wouldn't the ability to look things up help to PROVIDE rather than erase context? Doesn't access enable context rather than erasing it?

3. And having a little knowledge about context creates a desire for more, doesn't it? That's why (trumpet flourish) investing in the humanities is a smart idea. "Context of other texts" and "how it moved through the culture"--wait, what's that murmur? Why, it's a chorus of humanities professors saying, "That's what we do! If you want to learn more, we have a wealth of information to share with you, and we want to hear your ideas, too!" For example, I've seen various history blogs make gentle fun of the History Channel enthusiasts out there, but honestly, doesn't the History Channel (at least until it eschewed history for "Haunted History" or "UFO History" or "Big Shiny Man-Gadget History" or whatever it's doing now) help to nudge people toward history courses?

4. Birkerts envisions this context as being transmitted through libraries and bookstores as people scan the books on the shelves. Now, nobody loves browsing in libraries and independent bookstores more than I do, but this option presupposes (1) the leisure to hang out in libraries and bookstores; (2) an acculturation process that values and promotes such an activity; and, for the bookstore, (3) the money to buy books.

I somehow don't think he's envisioning the kind of chain bookstore where Ten Things I Learned from My Dog Morley or Addiction Memoir Confidential or The 365-Day Cat Golfing Calendar are the featured big sellers. Here again is class privilege in action: he's picturing a big-city library or independent bookstore experience for people who have the leisure and means to appreciate it and the cultural tools, granted by a humanities education, to understand what they're looking at.

So the Kindle isn't the problem. Even a dead-tree book won't have the proper context unless there's some kind of additional learning involved. The answer isn't to fret about the Kindle and wish ourselves back in time; it's to support the humanities that make that context possible.

The influential writers meme

The estimable Professor Zero has tagged me for the influential writers meme, and, although I fear that my list can be neither as rich as hers or as critically astute as Lumpenprofessoriat's, here it is. As I understand it, this is supposed to name authors who've inspired you or made you think. I took this to mean writers who had influenced me at an earlier stage of my life (hence the "greatest hits" nature of the list). Also, they don't have to be great writers, but I've left some off that at one point were important to me (how else to explain reading the entire "Strangers and Brothers" series of C.P. Snow one summer?), though I now can't remember why.

Bear in mind that this is done quickly and in no particular order; also, some obscure authors' names have been omitted to protect the guilty (me), and I'm not including critics.

1. Raymond Chandler
2. Jane Austen
3. Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. George Eliot
5. Henry James
6. Emily Dickinson
7. Thomas Hardy
8. Andrew Marvell
9. T. S. Eliot
10. F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. William Shakespeare (it's true!)
12. Ernest Hemingway
13. John Milton
14. Charles W. Chesnutt
15. Kate Chopin
16. William Wordsworth (and Dorothy Wordsworth)
17. Edith Wharton
18. Emile Zola
19. Willa Cather
20. W. Somerset Maugham
21. Emily Bronte
22. John Webster
23. Jean Toomer
24. Charles Dickens
25. James Joyce

And now for the tags, also in no particular order (and since I can only tag 25, please consider yourself tagged even if your name is not listed. I tried not to tag anyone who doesn't seem to do memes.)

1. Bardiac
2. Mel
3. Profgrrrl
4. Lesboprof
5. Sisyphus
6. Dr. Crazy
7. Horace
8. Fretful Porpentine
9. Heu Mihi
10. K8grrl
11. Bittersweet Girl
12. Dr. Virago
13. What Now?
14. jo(e)
15. Dance
16. Philosophy Factory
17. Dr. Brazen Hussy
18. The Salt Box
19. Moria
20. 10eleven
21. Historiann
22. New Kid
23. PhDme
24. MuseyMe
25. Cheese and Responsibility

The magic box of writing talent

Bardiac has a great post about teaching composition, and I was with her right up to the point where she suggested driving somewhere and asking a comp specialist for suggestions about how to approach teaching certain things. While I respect the field and the research in rhet/comp, and I enjoy being in a group setting (like a conference or a meeting) in which such ideas are discussed, I'm a little wary of this approach. Over the years, I've had some great advice coming out of such one-on-one meetings, and I've also had some less-than-inspiring advice. To wit:

• A venerable Mina Shaughnessy-inspired exercise that would have had me counting the numbers of errors and keeping a chart of them so that I could then comment on papers by saying things like "Great job! You have 4 fewer apostrophe errors than before!" At least I think this was the idea, because I never followed through with it, because here (although no one asked) is my philosophy of teaching writing: You and I are working together to make you, the student, a better writer. Any exercise that makes me spend more time on your writing than you do by keeping such charts on your writing makes me the owner of your writing, not you. But successful writers have to own their writing, warts and all, or it isn't theirs. If you want to be a successful writer, you have to take responsibility for your writing, and this kind of record-keeping (which I'd find a little creepy and humiliating if I were the student) makes your writing my responsibility and undermines your success.

• An opposing philosophy that said, in effect, don't pay attention to things like agreement errors ("his, her, their--what's the difference? The language is changing! Get with the program!"), apostrophe errors ("It's dropping out of the language anyway"), and comma splices. If the students wrote enough, they would figure it out eventually, and, given that explanations that didn't rise out of their own experience were useless, it was best to spend the time on writing rather than explanations. Focus on content, not on style--or, to reverse an old saying, "Count the pounds, and the pence will take care of themselves." I do believe in focusing on content, but I also comment on structure, punctuation, sentence construction, and style.
  

Here's where the magic box of writing talent comes in. I've had a sense sometimes from my upper-division students that they believed that the composition courses they had taken had absolved them from paying attention to these issues. I am not saying that this is what they were taught; as we all know, it's possible to teach something in depth and have a student claim never to have heard of it when it is mentioned the next semester. (I've probably done the same thing when zoning out in a committee meeting.)

No, what I'm saying is that some juniors and seniors come in as if they have been given a magic box of writing talent that they carry into the classroom with them by virtue of their standing as juniors and seniors. This magic box, or certificate, or whatever it is, doesn't need to be opened and erases the need for comments on grammar, style, and punctuation. They're then shocked, and not in a good way, when they get their first papers back and see that comma splices, misplaced quotation marks, and labored sentences have been marked and do count, along with the ideas in the paper. "No one's ever told me not to do that before," some will say (which may not be the case), or "I didn't know you'd be looking at punctuation."

But the thing I want to convey to them is this: no one ever gets a magic box of writing talent, at least one that doesn't have to be opened occasionally to brush up the talents within. It's in fact not a magic box but a toolbox that has to be used consciously, with additions made throughout a writer's lifetime. The tools are accumulated through contact with teachers and editors and the editorial self, who may be even more attuned than editors to the stylistic tricks that a writer overuses ("not just as . . . so too again!"). It's a toolbox and not a magic box because writing is work, not magic, and it's work we all need to learn how to do.

Respect for humanities, not humanities, in decline

The New York Times is wringing its hands over the decline in the humanities, and, as usual, Dean Dad nails the flaw in the argument, noting that the money quote, near the end of the piece, states that the number of humanities degrees has remained constant for the past ten years.

The real problem is that for much of the past decade, the culture isn't listening to what the humanities have to teach. Let's just take a few examples from English, American history, rhetoric, and philosophy, shall we?

• Rhetoric. A culture that took rhetoric seriously wouldn't have fallen for the fallacious arguments (concluding with "He tried to kill my dad!") that had the U.S. searching for terrorists in Iraq instead of Afghanistan just because "Iraq had better targets." Some columnist said at the time that by that logic, you should look in the garage for the keys you lost in the driveway, because the garage has better lighting. But by stating contrary propositions on different days as though they were fact--and were reported as such with a straight face by, yes, The New York Times and other news media--enough people were duped to lead the country into an unstoppable series of events.
  
• Writing. An economic culture that took writing and language seriously (not to mention math) would have said that the Emperor of Derivatives had no clothes. Difficult terminology doesn't necessarily mean that you're stupid for not understanding it. It may mean that the language, as Orwell predicted, is designed to hide chicanery--and so it was.
• Literature. Speaking of Orwell, those who had read 1984 in one of those despised humanities courses would know what was being said, when, after 6 years of being told "stay the course," we were told that the president was "never about stay the course." It's the same as being told that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia in Orwell's novel, as Leonard Pitts pointed out at the time.
  
• Philosophy--logic and critical thinking skills. An education in critical thinking skills would have told a prospective homebuyer that paying no money down + no interest + more money than she makes in a year = massive FAIL. The figures don't add up, didn't add up at the time, and will never add up. Did the executives at Countrywide and the other mortgage lenders really not grasp this?
  
• History. The only glimmer of historical memory in all this is the refusal of the U.S. population to go along with the dog-and-pony show of 2004-early 2005: "Let's privatize Social Security! C'mon, it'll be fun! The brokers will make a fortune! And the stock market can never go down, so what's to worry about?" Somebody, somewhere, had a dim recollection of October 1929 and subsequent events, and enough of those people refused to go along with the hype so that the cumulative disasters mentioned above weren't compounded by this one.
  

So to all this talk about cutting back on the humanities because they aren't useful, I would say this: they aren't useful if you don't use them. If you do, and if we had, we'd be in a much better place in this country right now.

Happy Terminalia!

According to my rusty recollection of Roman history courses and the ever-trusty Wikipedia, February 23 is the day (Terminalia) that splits the month into two odd-numbered parts and is the end of the religious year. Did the Romans split it up because it was both unbearably long and ridiculously short? Was it called Terminalia because the Romans had reached the end of their patience with eternally gray skies by the 23rd?

After all the administrative tasks of recent weeks, I want to make a fresh start even if spring is still months away, so here are some Terminalia resolutions:

• In the spirit of Terminalia, I replaced my aging computer and its faulty monitor, which everyone in my family refused to use because they said it gave them eyestrain. I can now have the new computer on AND talk on the phone at the same time, something that the noise factor of the old one made impossible; also, my eyes aren't red and watery by the end of the day, which together with my family's approval makes me think that this monitor is A-OK. Also, new and shiny (but not expensive, amazingly enough) is even better than chocolate for revving up excitement about writing, wouldn't you say?
• I'm going to try to get back to writing in the mornings, especially if I wake up early (4 or 5 a.m.). Productivity rules, or so I hear, and it sure beats the bad dreams that happen if I fall back asleep. This morning's dream after waking up at 4: I had to write my Ph.D. prelims by hand, using one of those slow Bic ballpoint pens. On black paper, where no one could read what I'd written. Yes, that was surely worth staying asleep for.

So is Terminalia a do-over for those January resolutions that didn't quite get off the ground? I sure hope so.

Edited to add: I wrote this on the 23rd but put it into a draft post from Saturday, one of many that never got finished recently--sort of in the spirit of Terminalia, really.

Rainbows, lollipops to sprout from trees shortly thereafter

Another long, long week, and . . . oh, wait, you mean it's not over yet? I will get back to posting soon.

In the meantime, here's "Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes":

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

Okay, we've all seen that scenario. But at the University of Wisconsin, there are special seminars for first-year students that are designed to combat this attitude:

The seminars are integrated into introductory courses. Examples include the conventional, like a global-warming seminar, and the more obscure, like physics in religion.

The seminars “are meant to help students think differently about their classes and connect them to real life,” Professor Brower said.

He said that if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.

I'd like to think that this is true and that the people at Wisconsin are tracking the program to see if students develop a keen interest in "holistic and intrinsically motivated learning" instead of grades. As long as the "external rewards" of med school, business school, and jobs are on the line, however, do you think that concern over grades will take a back seat to "intrinsically motivated learning"?

[Updated to add: I just saw that Female Science Professor has posted about this, too.]

Stanley Fish's straw man

In the New York Times, Stanley Fish has a column about Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa, who was apparently fired for (1) announcing on the first day that all his students in a physics class would receive an A+ and (2) defending what he calls "academic squatting" (teaching about the oppression of the system rather than physics), which he cast as an exercise in academic freedom.

I don't know about the case and suspect there's more to it than Fish lets on, but it's this statement that caught my attention, a hypothetical instance that Fish poses to his course in the law of higher education: "Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?" Fish goes on to say that, a la Rancourt, you'd be celebrated for standing up for academic freedom instead of being fired, as you would in industry.

Is he right? Not where I teach.

1. "Skipped meetings or came in late." The crucial part here is which meetings? Skipping class meetings? A professor who's habitually absent or late for class is going to get crucified on student evaluations, which are, in many cases, the only evidence that the administration admits for the "teaching" part of the teaching/scholarship/service component of yearly evaluation.

Skipping department meetings is another matter. Some people don't show up for years at a time, unless something upsets them, while others try to go to every one. In what seems to be an academic parable of the vineyard, both are apparently treated equally at evaluation time, so Fish may have a point about that.

2. "Blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims." Absolutely not. Aren't we now in the era of the iron-clad syllabus, where we're held to the syllabus as we are to any other contract? Students may like exciting classes and variable activities, but when it comes to assignments, they hate change. Like most reasonable people, they want to know what they have to do and when they have to do it.

And how is Fish defining "whims"? One person's "whim" may be another person's brilliant idea of how to make the pedagogy work better. There's usually a way to make those kinds of changes, and they aren't "whims." "Whim" is just a pejorative way of saying "idea."

3. "Abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients." Okay, Fish may have us there. Everyone knows or has heard of the academic whose rudeness or ruthlessness is legendary but whose scholarship/grant productivity is such that he or she is untouchable by ordinary mortals and their disciplinary procedures. Still, these types are more rare (aren't they?) than they used to be, or is that just a Panglossian view of the academy?

So would this person be an academic hero in your department? Fish says he would.

Nobody knows anything

By "nobody," I don't mean the estimable Dr. Crazy, New Kid, and Sisyphus, all of whom have excellent posts (responding to Thomas Hart Benton at the Chronicle) about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of attending grad school in English, with New Kid emphasizing that the often-offered panacea of teaching at a community college isn't one and Crazy rightly protesting that Benton's formula would have only the super-privileged continuing to be the super-privileged. They know something, all right: that the job market is terrible and that getting a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline is risky.

But when those eager undergrads come to us holding out a dream that goes "I want to be a professor!" we ought to be able to do something more productive than smash it. What are the alternatives?

This is why I say "nobody knows anything." We gesture toward some alternatives, sure, but what do we know about them?

• Law school? But there are a lot of unemployed or underemployed lawyers out there. As I understand it, the law profession has been undergoing the same adjunctification, if that's a word, as the academy, with big firms scooping up fully qualified attorneys and paying them a pittance without the prospect of being an associate or making partner (equivalent of t-t and tenured).
• Tech writing? Yes, this is a good option in normal times. But in a job market where even the mighty Microsoft is laying off employees, is it a realistic one? What are the prospects out there?
  
• Foundation work and grantwriting? Again, communication skills are important, but what are the prospects like in this economy?
• High school teaching? I tell my students (truthfully) that high school teachers are better paid than professors, but they still would need to get certified, unless they're willing to teach in a private high school. If the "want to be a professor" dream is really about wanting to teach, this would be a good option. But several states put caps on the number of teachers that can be trained, so this could be a limited option.
• Going into another field--science, maybe? It's not as farfetched as it sounds. If the student is generally strong academically, apparently medical schools are looking for people with varied backgrounds, as long as the person can also pass organic chemistry or whatever. And if it's research that attracts the student, why not get a Ph.D. in nursing? The desperate shortage of nurses is due in part to a lack of faculty, since practitioners can make more than Ph.D. nurses who teach, so there's a growth industry.
  

If you look at a list of what English majors do when they graduate, it's really eclectic. Some go into their family's business, or go into sales, or work as a tech writer, or teach, but the paths that take them there are individual paths. But I don't think it's enough when they come to us about wanting to go to grad school and we say, dramatically, "Do something else, anything else." That's probably the same advice they're getting from their history, art history, and languages teachers.

The question is this: what do we (the academy) tell them? I don't know enough. Do you?

Nobody knows anything.*

[*For the record, this is William Goldman's famous quotation about Hollywood in Adventures in the Screen Trade. I'm stealing it but didn't want to plagiarize or anything.]

From the Chronicle: Who needs library chairs?

From the Chronicle about a new library opening at Fresno State:

“The collection level below the first floor is arguably the largest single-floor open compact shelving in the world,” Mr. McDonald said. It “can hold on a single floor upwards of 1.3 million items. So the books as such remain in the building, it is just that they are significantly compacted to make room elsewhere in the building for user centered services and seating.”

Although I still tend to think that books and not "user centered services," should, you know, be the focus of a library, I'm very glad that they've found places for the books and haven't thrown them away, even if it does mean Adventures in Compact Shelving.

And I'm willing to bet this: if Fresno State is like most campuses, it probably has a lots of chairs stashed away somewhere. Think about what chairs it probably has and what the library could do with them:

1. Those light-colored maple chairs from the 1950s could go in one area, along with the carved-in-graffiti tables from the era--a piece of history.

2. The steel chairs from the 1960s that were meant to withstand a Soviet atomic blast. You can bet they're still around.

3. Those plastic Eames chairs that came in back when the world was groovy. They were supposed to be so, so comfortable because they were shaped like your body and were so, so not.

4. The library chairs with padded seats and backs covered in woven fabrics that someone unwisely judged would be impermeable to spilled coffee and general crud. Those came in in the 1970s, and that's what most places have now. You can judge their vintage from the colors: 1970s = mustard yellow/avocado green; 1980s = patriotic red or blue, etc.

In short, there's probably only really a NEW chair shortage. If you grouped the old ones and made them seem a piece of library history, you could probably have a chair-filled library that would work for the present.

What's valued and what counts

It's annual review season, and as usual, we are asked for the same information sliced-and-diced in different ways for different purposes. One of the forms for upper administration asks us to count things and has specific requirements for what we can include.

1. What counts: number of books published.

• What doesn't: time spent warming a chair in colleagues' presentations in order to show support.
• Attendance at faculty meetings.
  
• Showing up at various university functions for which the organizers get a vita line and glowing praise for putting on such a successful and informative event.
  

2. What counts: articles published.

• What doesn't: time spent preparing courses, grading, and talking with students. Advising.

3. What counts: giving papers at national and international conferences.

• What doesn't: working at the organizational level (committees) to make those conferences happen.

But at the department level, all those things are valued. As a recent meeting made clear, at a department level, we ask those questions: who's advising students? Who does a good job in the classroom? Who, at the most basic level, is here and doing the things that make the place run?

The old Woody Allen dictum is that eighty percent of success is just showing up. Upper admin only cares about the other 20%, but the department does care about the 80%.