Books: not dead yet!

The New York Times can't get enough of quoting--and refuting--Steve Jobs on the Kindle and the death of the book. In case you've been under a rock and haven't seen the Jobs quotation, here it is:
"It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

The latest response is by Randall Strauss, a professor of business at San Jose State. After the inevitable "we do too read, so there!" statistics, he says something interesting:

The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users.

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell.

It seems to me that Strauss has two kinds of "books" in mind here: the physical, dead-tree object that people are as passionate about as Mac users are about Macs, and the "object we are accustomed to calling a book," which exists somewhere between cyberspace and the reader's eye. What this separation does is raise more questions than answers about Steve Jobs's comment:

A lot of us are passionate about books, the dead-tree physical object that makes us as obsessed as Mac owners. Is it this kind of readership/ownership that Jobs is talking about when he says that people don't read books any more?

Does the second kind, the book "stripped of its physical shell," count for anything? Does Steve Jobs mean that, say, an online version of Jane Eyre doesn't count as a book? For that matter, if I listen to it on my iPod, as I listen to a lot of books, it's still a book, isn't it?

And does reading necessarily mean reading a book? That's important for the Kindle with its downloading-on-the-fly capabilities, but is the Internet maybe also a book?

How are we defining a book, anyway? I'd be willing to bet that more people are voluntarily writing--if not reading--now than they used to 25 years ago, if only so they can weigh in on fanboy sites and opine about the latest troubles of Britney Spears. I don't say it's good writing, but it is writing, and I'm about the thousandth person to observe that more people have a voice and a larger audience for that voice than ever before because of blogs, fan sites, newsgroups, and the rest.

For the record, I like my books served up dead-tree style, with a side order of interesting -looking covers and decent fonts, so that I can mark them up and find things. (No SEARCH function on a Kindle can be as fast as my blizzard of Post-It notes stuck to pages.) But I'm willing to recognize that that's an old-school, increasingly esoteric notion, as evidenced by the few students I've had who bring laptops with the texts online instead.

Maybe what Steve Jobs is really saying is that a taste for reading books on paper is what's passé and that those of us who like them are going the way of eccentric button collectors in an age of zippers.

The calm within the storm

As I mentioned, being sick put me behind on a number of deadlines, and though I tried, I couldn't ignore Outlook forever. The messages from patient editors and collaborators came in over the course of a few days: "Could you let me know when . . . ?" If not a perfect storm, it is indeed a storm of deadlines.

The answer, I found, was to get up earlier and get to work earlier. I've always been an early riser, but I've usually used that time to read blogs, read the newspapers. After all, the world doesn't start work at 7, right? That makes it all right to read the Chronicle and the New York Times until a decent hour, like 9 or 10, doesn't it?

Not if you have a storm of deadlines. Instead of reading the news online until 10 or so, I started work at 7. This seems like a no-brainer, and yet I hadn't been able to do it before.

The results surprised me.

1. By starting right away, I didn't feel the need to check news or blog sites. I didn't even need to turn off the internet connection.
2. When I began, I'd start working on Project A but think, "Why aren't you working on Project B?" When I switched to Project B, I'd think, "Why aren't you working on Project A?" What I realized is that this was the lazy part of the brain trying to take over again by interfering with concentration. Eventually this voice quieted down.
3. I was looking forward to passing all the little mileposts I'd set up: number of words written before noon, etc.
4. I felt calm.

The last one was a surprise. How can you feel calm when you also feel incredibly stressed out? But even though the work isn't yet done, I went to bed the other day feeling the truth of this statement by Emerson as I hadn't felt it before:

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

Raise your hand if

. . . you would be willing to throw money at Google Books and university presses IF they would let you have access right away, immediately, now (not days later through Amazon) to the books you see through limited preview.

Anyone? Anyone?

Would you pay, say, $15 to download the book without getting a paper copy?

Would you be willing to pay, say, $7.50 for a week's or a month's access to it?

I would.

Think about it. Why do academic authors write? They work for royalties, of course, but those don't amount to much unless you have a crossover popular title. But what academic authors really want is citations in the work of others, and wouldn't we be able to cite more this way?

They say academics aren't creatures of impulse, but whoever does this first is going to have more of my bank account than I care to contemplate.

Random bullets of "there went the weekend"

The bad:

I've been sick with a cold and have had the usual experience of more or less total brain freeze: I can read the words in a book, but that's no guarantee that they've made an impression on my brain.

As a consequence of that, I'm behind on everything I was supposed to do.

As a consequence of that, I am dodging my email as though it has eyes to accuse me of massive slackerdom. I have muttered "leave me alone" to Outlook no fewer than three times today.

I am also wondering why, when everything has turned to ice, the road crews spread the sand around about as liberally as though they were scattering individual pieces of Godiva chocolate on the road and were paying for them out of their own pockets.

The good:

The nice thing about teaching for a long time is that that there are apparently teaching muscles that spring into action even if springing into action is the last thing you feel like doing.

The other nice thing is the students: they energize you, you energize them, and you come away from the class feeling better than you did before--oh, and they learned something, too.

Class dodgeball

Bringing up class a few posts ago reminded me of another subject. At Profecero's a few weeks back and now at Whatever , as Dance pointed out, there was a discussion about an exercise in class privilege wherein students have to stand up and move forward or backward depending on whether they had SAT prep courses, television sets in their rooms, trips to Europe, etc.

A lot of people responded by saying, "Well, I had X but I worked for it myself" or "I didn't have a television set but I had books" or "This test is measuring the wrong things." There are lots of good points on all sides, so read the comments, too, at both places, which like the posts are excellent.

I think that what the exercise is trying to do--reveal the existence of class privilege to students in a real way--is important, but one thing was troubling: if you were a student, and especially if you had been bullied in the past for being different in some way, how would you feel about being forced to do this exercise in class? The teachers who chimed in on the comments all said versions of "oh, we don't make it mandatory; they can sit it out if they want to." Some said that they just had students write the answers on a piece of paper and turn it in.

Right. Would you sit it out, if you were 17 years old and your grade was on the line? Would you sit it out if you could see that your instructor thought this was a crucial part of the class and was clearly enthusiastic about the exercise? Would you write nothing or refuse to turn in the paper, again, if you believed that you'd be losing the good will of your instructor--and a grade--for doing so?

Since the admitted object of the exercise is to make students aware of and uncomfortable (in a good way, the authors imply) about their class privilege, most students would probably learn from it and shrug it off. Some are probably going to have their every statement greeted with eye-rolling about class privilege from then on, as I've witnessed when students in my classes volunteer information about trips to Europe or other markers of privilege.

But for a few, those who have been singled out and bullied for having the wrong haircut or being too smart or wearing the wrong clothes or being the nondominant race, it's going to make them feel like dodgeball targets all over again. Remember dodgeball, where some were out there flinging balls at the opposite team and aiming for those cowering in the corner, the ones you knew couldn't catch the ball on a bet, the dodgeball targets?

What's your take on this?

[Edited to add: I can see this as a class discussion, since students often love to share their experiences--as, indeed, do commenters; look at all those testimonies in the comments at the sites linked above. It's the forced marching around that is a problem for me. On the other hand, those who use this would probably say that a simple discussion wouldn't make the point strongly enough.]

[Edited to add: I couldn't find this post at chaser's when I first posted this, but check out her additions to the list: http://lisachase.blogspot.com/2007/12/social-class-meme.html]

On not stopping by woods on a snowy evening

with apologies to Robert Frost

White snow driving across a winding road
and piled deep on the road
unsanded and unplowed.
White knuckle driving.

An SUV roars up behind
flashes its lights,
wants me to pull off the road
and let it pass.

Where exactly do you want me to go, genius?
Off to the woods, lovely, dark, and deep
where the granite boulders would make short work of my car's front end?

Or onto the shoulder, where driving one foot too far to the right
sends me over a cliff
unmarked by reflectors
unguarded by guardrails?

He surges past
splattering slush on my windshield,
blinding me.

I keep my pace, for I have miles to go before I sleep.

Teaching literature

Dr. Crazy recently wrote an interesting post on her reasons for teaching literature,. Unlike those of the panelists, her working-class students don't necessarily assume that reading is a pleasurable act(a given for the panelists), and, in addition to teaching reasoning and reading skills, she sees one part of her mission as giving them the tools for upward class mobility.

Another response to the MLA panel on "Professing Literature" is the one in the Chronicle:

“The scholar-driven professional model is becoming obsolete,” [Elizabeth Renker] said, giving way to “a bottom-up model in which the power resides with the students,” much the way sites like Wikipedia and citizen-journalism have democratized the publishing of scholarship and information. “Student desires will preside,” she said. “The question for us is whether we decide to treat them as invisible.”

These two approaches aren't antithetical, but they do propose some different directions. We do need to take student desires into account, as Renker says, but to ignore that the "power," however invisibly wielded, resides with an elite with a set of rules of its own is to do a disservice to students, as Dr. Crazy points out. Class exists in this country, and Larry the Cable guy or his academic equivalent, however brilliant he or she may be, is never going to be president of Harvard.

There's a problem in saying that people can simply follow their own "bottom-up," Wikipedia-model tastes: such a standard sets its own invisible test, wherein if you share the values of Henry James (or his modern equivalent) you're assumed to have good taste, but if not, you fail the test. "Natural" good taste or critical judgment is something of a fiction. People may have a greater or lesser degree of critical discernment, but it's an artifact of learning, of the person's perceptiveness, rather than a "natural" attribute. In a way, learning about literature is like learning about wine. You can say all you want about individuals having their own "taste," but if you say you like Boone's Farm or Mad Dog 20/20 better than Pétrus, people are going to form their own opinion about your ability to judge quality. This makes us wine stewards, in a way: in addition to opening their eyes to the beauties of literature and all that, we're educating literary palates so that students can choose intelligently on their own.

I think we're mistaken if we don't think they understand this. Over the break, when hanging out with family members I got roped into watching a couple of episodes each of shows that I don't usually see, America's Next Top Model and Project Runway. What struck me, besides the direct, even brutal, quality of the criticism given, was that the young designers/models understood very well how the whole judgment of taste worked. They knew that the people judging them had expertise in the field they hoped to enter, and that the critiques were designed to open their eyes to standards that they (the aspiring models or designers) weren't aware existed. They knew that despite their "I've got to be me" individuality, they'd have to meet challenges and standards if they wanted to succeed. In short, they understood that they didn't know all the rules but could see the benefit of being taught what those rules were, because ultimately that knowledge would benefit them later as they progressed in their profession. That seems to me as good an explanation as any for what we'd like our students to understand about what we're doing, and what they're doing, when we meet in the classroom.

The optimism of editors, or Edith at the bat

Imagine that you are an editor. Now imagine that you're writing to one of the most famous (and famously formidable, aristocratic, icy, and rich) women writers in the world, Edith Wharton. Would you write this? This anecdote from Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton made me laugh out loud.

She [Wharton] kept a collection of what she considered her most absurd fan-letters and editors' requests from America, sometimes marking them "funny," like the letter to "Miss Wharton" from the Globe in Minnesota, offering her one cent a word for an article with a "light touch" and "local colour," which "should not shrink at portraying the little quirks of human nature," and should be "true (authentic, authoritative, believable, etc.)." "We hope you will go in to bat for us," the letter concluded. "The deadline was yesterday."

Ah, those "yesterday" deadlines! Lee doesn't say whether Wharton wrote the piece, but I'm guessing a big NO. And the idea of Edith Wharton, like Casey, being at the bat, metaphorically or otherwise, is just too good.

Discoveries

If you're reading and your attention is wandering, a cup of tea will revive you even better than a square of Dove chocolate. Sadly, this is true.

If the tea doesn't work, a walk does, even if it's 20 degrees and the sun is just a faint white memory behind the bank of dense clouds that's passing for a sky these days.

Snow at this temperature looks and crumbles like pie crust, if you're walking in the road. You feel that you are walking on the edge of a pie.

A reward for the day: trying to catch one of the classic Twilight Zone episodes on the SciFi marathon, a New Year's tradition.

Academic resolutions

In the past five "found" days (i.e., days when I'd normally be at or traveling to MLA but have had restored to me this year), I've rediscovered the gym, spent time with my family, and coaxed my ancient PalmPilot back to life with new drivers that don't crash my XP computer. What I haven't done is a lot of work that I'd intended to do.

Here are a few work-related resolutions I'm hoping to keep in 2008. Some of them may be tough to keep, but I still want to try.

Just say no. I'm not talking about various mandatory reports and things that you can't get out of, because, well, you can't get out of them. But in looking back at this year, I can tell that I took on too many things that weren't necessary, just because someone asked me to do them. Manuscript reviews for presses are a prime example. Many of them were worth doing because of the subject matter, but some weren't, and since they take a lot of time and thought that could be spent on my own writing, I need to learn to say no unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise.

Start writing earlier in the day. Although I try to work earlier in the day, my writing brain doesn't naturally kick in until the evening. The problem is that there aren't enough evening hours to do the writing I need to do, so I have to figure out how to get that same writing juice in the morning.

Not every call for papers has your name on it. It's easier to keep this resolution than it used to be, now that the CFP list at Penn has stopped sending emails and you now have to search actively for calls for papers at the site. It's still enticing, though, to see a CFP and think "hmm, I'd like to go to that conference; I'll submit an abstract and see what happens." What that statement should be is this: "I'd like to present a section from this particular work in progress; I wonder what conferences might work for that?"

It's easier to stay caught up than to get caught up. The hardest thing for me to remember that work doesn't do itself: papers don't grade themselves, writing doesn't magically appear on the computer screen, and simply lugging a book around doesn't mean that it gets read. You know how Method actors try to preserve a sense memory of an experience so that they can call it up when they have to act? Maybe remembering the misery of being behind with tasks will help with staying on time and on task.

What resolutions are you making?
[Edited to add: Bardiac, who is heading off soon for a great new adventure, and New Kid have a great one that encompasses all these: be mindful.]

Happy holidays!

Merry Christmas, Happy Boxing Day, and happy all other holidays!

Activities since the last post: Sleep, eat, read, go to a party, talk and laugh with family members, open presents, watch old TV shows from Netflix, Skype with faraway relatives, eat some more, go to the gym, and eat.

Food:

Warm pear cobbler.

Omelettes with chevre, fresh herbs, and smoked salmon for breakfast.

Pancakes (amaranth, cornmeal, and local unbleached flour), also for breakfast, with maple syrup.

For dinner: Roast beef for the omnivores; stuffed mushrooms for the vegetarians; a big salad with balsamic vinaigrette, apples, pears, dried cranberries, mesclun, and a sprinkling of local (well, within the state) bleu cheese for all.

And Yorkshire pudding. It's dramatic because if the ingredients aren't room temperature, and if you don't beat it enough, it won't rise, and if you leave it in the oven too long, it'll fall. It's just egg, milk, flour and salt, with a little butter on the bottom of the muffin cups, but when it works (as it usually does, for this is one of my hidden talents), it's beautiful with the roast beef.

So as you can see, it's been a little bit Alice Waters and a little bit Charles Dickens (Yorkshire pudding). And now back to the holiday.

A non-MLA Christmas

I am not going to MLA this year, for what seems like the first year in ages. Despite the stress of getting ready for the holidays, it feels so peaceful. Here's how the tasks are stacking up:

Differences from MLA years:

I am not frantically trying to fine-tune/write/rewrite the MLA paper, which despite good resolutions always still needs work before MLA. This means that I've actually been able to notice, and interact with, family members. Talk. Watch movies. Hang out. All the stuff called "normal life." It's wonderful.

Since I am of a personality type (INTP) that dreads any kind of commitments, even parties, once I'm committed to them, this is one thing I don't have to dread over the holidays.

I am only vaguely, but not, as is usual, obsessively, aware of bad weather, plane delays, and so on.

I am not reviewing job candidates' information in preparation for interviewing them at MLA.

I am actually looking forward to a family day tomorrow instead of scheming about how quickly I can get away from the festivities to continue with the incessant work (and anxiety) of getting ready for MLA.

Similarities with MLA years:

I still refuse to read the xeroxed letters that come in Christmas cards this time of year, since they provoke such unseemly emotions as envy ("How did she get to spend the summer at Oxford?"), cynical curiosity ("Vacations in Belize AND Hawai'i? On a professor's salary? Really?"), and despair ("Why isn't my book done yet, as his is?").

I still hate writing Christmas cards.

I still get to make lots of cookies, except this time I won't feel guilty about taking the time to decorate them.

I feel as though I am trying out a new product: "Christmas 2.0, new and improved with more time. Now with less MLA and less guilt!"

Calculating grades: the eyeball test

I've been thinking about the grading process--not the grading itself, but calculating grades. Like Profgrrrl, I'm a big fan of Excel . Because of my death-match struggles with WebCT/Blackboard, I don't trust it to upload and download grades into Excel accurately, but keeping a separate gradebook in Excel isn't any extra work.

I used to figure everything by hand, using a calculator and more than a few pages of yellow paper. Somehow, though, the process was agonizing, and not because of the calculations. The internal dialogue went something like this: "SmartGirl is so close to an A. Isn't her class participation worth more? So what if she bombed a couple of quizzes? But if her class participation grade gets bumped, shouldn't I also bump Dull but Diligent up and downgrade SleeperGuy, who says little but says it brilliantly?" Out would come the calculator again as I refigured everyone's grade and agonized some more.

I tried a few grading programs, including one that promised that it could drop grades but did not, as I found when checking the results by hand. Once I learned to figure grades out in Excel, though, and to drop grades using the spreadsheet, the prolonged agonizing was done. Because you can plug in different numbers for a more or less subjective category like participation, it became clear that a point or so did not make a substantial difference in most grades, and it also made applying standards of fairness easier.

One unexpected result was that using Excel helped me to see more clearly whether the percentages I'd assigned to various tasks worked well. Since the syllabus contains a combination of "effort" grades (that reward diligence) and, for lack of a better word, "performance" grades (that reward excellence, brilliance, or what have you), I can see immediately if I've weighted one over the other too heavily. For example, if Brilliant Student can flame out too easily by missing a couple of the "effort" grades, maybe those are weighted too heavily.

This is where the eyeball test comes into play. Because the grades are all in Excel in a straight line (as they aren't in the multiple pages of the paper gradebook), I can get a better sense of the whole picture. I look at the paper grades, the quiz grades, and the rest, and it's clear when things are out of whack. Are the "performance" grades all at a C level and the "effort" grades at an A level, and is this bumping up essentially average performance too high in the final grading scheme, or vice versa? Does the eyeball test say that Student X should be getting an A because of paper grades, when her average is closer to a B range because of the "effort" grades?

Because the percentages are set in the syllabus, they can't be changed for the current semester; also, usually the "eyeball test" just confirms what Excel is already saying: that the grades seem fair and reasonable. But using the eyeball test to check for fairness helps me to set the percentages for the next semester so that the class is graded equitably for both kinds of students.

Just the facts, ma'am

From "MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship," Profession 2007, pp. 27-28:
Estimated percentage of English and Foreign Languages Doctorate Recipients Who Become Tenure-Track Faculty Members and Achieve Tenure at the Institution Where Hired

Completed doctorate degree: 100
Hired to tenure-track position within five years: 60
Considered for institution at institution where hired: 38*
Awarded tenure at institution where hired: 34

*According to the report: "The MLA survey indicates that the largest number leave one tenure-track appointment for another. We have no way of tracking tenure outcomes for these junior faculty members" (27).

For a reasoned analysis, read the report. The short version of the "Is the glass half full or half empty?" question seems to be that if you get a position, as 40% will not, and are considered for tenure at the same institution, you're pretty likely to get it. I'm not sure if this counteracts any of the gloom about MLA interviews and job anxiety, but I hope so. It's still a bad market.

Updated to add: Miriam Burstein has a good summary of several of the articles.

OT Tech tip: making e-books for ipods

The grades are in, and now I can get to work on some writing. But first: a tech reward!

As you can see from my Kindle-envy, I want to be able to carry books to read when I'm waiting. I've lost my more recent Palm Pilot, and the old one is too old to sync with any XP or later machine, so that leaves the iPod as a free device on which to read ebooks. The problem is that it only lets you copy a document that's really tiny (a page or so), but there is a solution.

Here's how to put a whole book on your iPod:

1. Go to Project Gutenberg and get a book (or convert your own file to .txt format in Word or another program).
2. Go to the converter site at http://www.ambience.sk/ipod-ebook-creator/ipod-book-notes-text-conversion.php . Upload the file, and the site will convert it.
3. Download the zipped file and extract it.
4. Drag and drop the folder to the Notes folder in iTunes. Instructions are here; other instructions are here. You need to make sure that you have "Enable disk use" checked in the sync menu for your iPod.
5. Sync the iPod.

The conversion program breaks up the text document into small enough pieces so that the Notes program can read them, and it puts Forward and Back arrows into the document so that you can move around in it. The text on the iPod is tiny, but if the thought of being stuck waiting in a car or doctor's office without something to read makes you wish that there were an alternative, here it is.

Bad professor, good professor

Like just about everyone else on the blogroll, I am grading and having some Sweeney Todd fantasies about running amok with the red pen.

Apparently, though, there's an internal mechanism that translates Bad Professor thoughts into Good Professor words.

Bad professor thinks: "Your paragraph is so chaotic that I have no idea what you're trying to say."
Good professor writes: "A stronger focus in this paragraph would make your point more clearly."

Bad professor thinks: "If you cut out the wordiness, you could take a Caribbean cruise with the time you save."
Good professor writes: "Using active verbs and specific nouns (instead of words like "aspect") make your writing more vivid."

Bad professor thinks: "George Eliot won't care if you praise her writing with empty words like 'wonderful' and 'full of human interest,' and neither will I. These are page-filling words, not meaningful ones."
Good professor writes: "Can you make a more specific point about Eliot's writing and support it with evidence from the text?"

And so on. Have any more?

In which my students and I outsmart each other (in a good way)

As one option for their final project, students can collaborate on a web project, a presentation, a wiki, a paper--whatever best suits their analytical purposes. The requirements are the same as they are for a person doing a paper or project alone; the students don't have to have twice as much information or twice as many pages even if there are two of them. All members of the group receive the same grade, and they know this going into the project. And the writing tends to be better, too, perhaps because they're working together.

I suspect that the students think something like this: "If we pair up, or work in a group of three, that's only one-third the work for each of us! We've outsmarted her."

I know that I think something like this: "Four fewer projects to grade because they've collaborated? Hallelujah!"

OT: The rewards of ecovirtue

I discovered today that you don't have to let virtue be its own reward when it comes to bagging groceries.

I have cloth bags from local stores as well as places like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods that don't have locations in Northern Clime. These aren't the fashionable "I'm not a plastic bag", just the regular ones. Usually they grace the floor of the car, since I rarely remember them until I'm standing at the checkout counter, when it's too late.

Today, as I was walking into the store, sans bags as usual, a girl yelled, "Stop! Don't make me carry that!" Turns out that she was yelling into a cell phone, and, with the clueless voice-volume-up-to-11 habits of a cell phone user, had no idea she'd made me jump. Somehow, though, in my sleep-deprived state I took this as a direct message from the bags, turned on my heel, and got them out of the car.

Did you know that the store gives you a 5-cent credit for each bag? I didn't. I guess I hadn't been paying attention when I've used the bags before. I know it's just a token (it was 5 cents back in hometown fifteen years ago, too), but it's a nice token.

So, to answer an age-old question: virtue is not its own reward. The reward of virtue is (drumroll) 5 cents.

Gnomic utterances

I have spent most of the day (about 10 hours, with breaks) on a paragraph and a half.

It is still not done.

It is still not good. (Not yet, anyway.)

I have been inside this paragraph so long that it has become overly allusive of concepts that reside nowhere except in my head. It reads like shorthand or gnomic utterances.

Only Yoda can understand it at this point. Or should I say: Understand it only Yoda can do?

Back to work.

Professor Volcano

From "How to Get What You Want in Academe" by Gary Olson at the Chronicle:
(Shorter Olson: This isn't the way.)

At a recent professional meeting, a department chairman described being yelled at by a faculty member disgruntled over not being assigned to teach a favorite course.

"I was flabbergasted," the chairman said. "This newly promoted associate professor hollered at me right out in the busy hallway as if I were a misbehaving child." He was especially annoyed because the complainant had chosen to adopt an adversarial tone from the outset. "The scene in the hallway was not the culmination of a long discussion or debate," the chairman said. "He simply acted out from the get-go."

It was a department chairman who did the shouting in another recent incident I know of, yelling at the dean of his graduate school because of the dean's newly imposed restrictions on doctoral-defense committees. The dean reported the incident to the chairman's academic dean, who sighed and responded, "Yes, he often behaves badly, especially when things don't go his way."

Explain to me please, someone, why the chair did not say "I will not discuss this until you speak politely and rationally," turn on his heel, and leave. I'm old school about this stuff: if you can't restrain your rudeness, you don't get to talk to me. Period. I don't care who you are.

Did you notice the response? Both the dean and the chair acted as if Professor Volcano and Choleric Chair were tantrum-throwing two-year-olds. "Acting out," "behaves badly, especially when things don't go his way"--those are the explanatory terms you'd use for someone under the age of three. If you're under the age of three, you ought to get cut some slack on this stuff because maybe you missed your nap. A tantrum in your thirties and beyond? Not so much.