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%.

Conference panels: a pop quiz

I'm getting the Inspiration Award post ready (thank you, profacero!), but in the meantime, here is a pop quiz about putting together conference panels. You may think these are no-brainers, but I've heard arguments put forth for all the options over the years. (My answer to #3 is below.)

1. You are putting together a panel for Big Conference, which encourages you to have an "expert in the field" (i.e., a famous person) on the panel or as a respondent. A friend of yours, very junior, has submitted a brilliant proposal. Which one do you include?

a. Famous person. Academe is cutthroat, and having Big Conference on my vita is important.
b. Friend. I am not THAT soulless yet.
c. Get them both, if I can.

2. You're in charge of a panel that you know will run because you're the Division Head or Discussion Group Head or whatever. You have a number of really good proposals from graduate students and several that could be good from Dr. Famous and the Oldbloods, who have been writing about these issues for years. What do you do?

a. All grad students. Dr. Famous has had his say; let's hear from some new blood.
b. Grad students and Dr. Famous or one of the Oldbloods. Dr. Famous is a draw, so having him on the panel brings exposure to the grad students.
c. Dr. Famous and the Oldbloods. They're famous for a reason.

3. You want a panel that will go well and people who won't go over their allotted time so that you have to suffer through a terrible presentation or use the hook. Whom do you choose?

a. Graduate students.
b. Mid-level scholars who've been doing this for a while.
c. Dr. Eminent

4. Panelist A wants to use A/V media in her presentation. Where do you put her on the panel?

a. At the beginning to draw people in.
b. In the middle, so that it wakes people up.
c. At the end, because fiddling with the tech stuff and using PowerPoint or media always, always takes longer than expected. Besides, this gives people something to look forward to.
d. I can't believe you're shallow enough to think about this. Put the presentation wherever it fits thematically and don't worry about it.

5. What is the best method of giving the hook to a panelist who is well over his or her allotted time?

a. a card or note saying that time is up
b. tapping on your watch
c. an air horn

Answer to #3: Trick question! All levels can give great papers, and all can give poor ones. Think about how often you've seen these:
--the grad student who brings in an unedited diss chapter and flips through it while muttering "I'll skip this part, but here's what I say in it"
--the mid-level person who has a paper of the appropriate length but feels compelled to gloss every sentence with commentary
--Dr. Eminent's intense love affair with his own voice and confidence in his mad skilz at extemporizing, which results in a scenario in which you get, say, 25 minutes of background on something that everyone already knows. No kidding: I once heard a presentation for which the closest analogy would be telling a group of American historians who Abraham Lincoln was.

What are your answers? There's extra credit on the line here.

Blog trifecta: human hibernation, Malcolm Gladwell, and writing

I guess you'd call it a trifecta of blog obsessions, anyway: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers not only has a lot to say about what creates success in writing (and everything else) but also, yes, weighs in on human hibernation.

It's a really interesting read (er, listen), even if it does have a little of the "2 + 2 = 5" quality I mentioned earlier. A sample of what I have learned:

• The 10,000 hour theory. Exceptional performance has less to do with natural ability than with the capacity to work hard and consistently at a task. The Beatles got to be The Beatles by playing the Reeperbahn in Hamburg 7 days a week for 8 hours a night. Bill Gates was ready when the opportunity came because he'd already been programming for, yes, about 10,000 hours. This is also why a longer school year would be better, as Gladwell shows with statistics.
  
• Being born at the right time helps, too. If you're a hockey player, it helps to be born early in the year so that you're big enough to get the extra practice and coaching (see: 10,000 hours) that will help you succeed. It helps to have only a few people in your cohort (fewer New York lawyers born in 1930) or to have skill sets that no one else does (Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York who could sew in the early 1900s.) Oh, and privilege (better schools) helps for some things, too, you'll be shocked to learn.
• You are your ancestors, basically. The nineteenth-century "culture of honor" in the South originated in rocky highland regions (Gladwell cites Scotland and Ireland, but the same would be true for Albania) where herdsmen had to defend their property--goats, cattle, or sheep--because the property could be taken from them if they weren't prepared to fight to the death for it. Gladwell shows that this persists in Southern students even in the North in the 21st century, but is this the only reason?
• There are three things that make work meaningful, and two kinds of intelligence. Unfortunately, I can't remember the names of them but will look them up when I get the book version.
  

A couple of things seemed a little too pat; maybe they're footnoted in the book version, but my eyebrows went up.

• I had no idea that European farmers were such lazy people* (I'm paraphrasing) in medieval times, especially in comparison to Asian rice farmers. I thought Piers Plowman and company worked pretty hard, but according to Gladwell they worked only until noon in the spring and fall and then sat around all summer. Life after noon was just hanging out waiting for the next kermess or for harvest, whichever came first. This doesn't sound like the farmers I've known or read about, who work very hard indeed, but maybe I'm missing something.
  
• Annnnd--human hibernation. Gladwell accepts uncritically the accounts of travelers who said that the French peasants and the Russians went to sleep after the first frost; he even quotes the same accounts that I had posted about previously. "They deliberately weakened themselves so as not to use up too much food or energy," snuggling together spoon fashion to keep warm and sleeping all the time. So I ask again:
  
• If this is true, how did they get their strength back in time for spring planting?
• Who took care of the animals, if they slept all the time?
• Cooking anything, and making bread especially, is a muscle-intensive activity, as the bakers among you know. Assuming that the hibernation cases ate, what did they eat? Who nursed the children? Or was it just the men who slept while Gretchen and Matilda kept the pot stirring? And how did they get the two-year-olds down for a six months' nap, when any toddler worth her salt won't sleep for two hours without a fight?
  
• Now that we've mentioned toddlers, what about the conventional wisdom that more babies are born in August, September, and October than in other months? Was this not true in medieval times?

[*Edited because I felt like it.]

OT: Obama and Fred and Ginger

President Obama, Inaugural Address: "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking."

I knew that our new president had echoed Thomas Paine and Lincoln, but Fred and Ginger? Nice.

OT: Inauguration

To repeat a post from November: Obama! Yay!

His speech was just right. He is just right. I hope there's a moratorium on all the pundits' dissections of speeches, because, just now, for once, let's dispense with rhetorical analysis and just revel in the moment of hope that he's providing.

Next stop: Academic Idol

From The Chronicle :

The chancellor of the Texas A&M University system wants to give faculty members bonuses of up to $10,000, based on student evaluations, but some professors are raising concerns about the plan, saying it could become a popularity contest, The Bryan-College Station Eagle reported.

Faculty members can decide whether to participate in the pilot program, which is being offered at the system’s flagship, in College Station, and at its Kingsville and Prairie View campuses. Though details are preliminary, officials said, the goal is to offer awards starting at $2,500 to the top 15 percent of participating instructors.

Instructors, you've won a ticket to College Station to compete on Academic Idol, except that the voting will be without the benefit of comments by Simon Cowell and company.

What might this change?

1. Teaching styles. There's no question that this could affect people's teaching styles, but would it do so for the better? Philip J. Tramdack, one of the commenters at the Chronicle, says that if he had to teach again (he's a librarian), he'd pull out his popular "lounge act" style of teaching instead of the "casino act" in which he actually asked students questions. Sometimes you can teach students difficult concepts AND entertain them, but not always.

2. Syllabus. Hmmm, what to choose--800 pages of Bleak House or the graphics novel version of Bleak House? Or Bleak House in text-message format?

And what about writing assignments? Writing is hard, and no one likes to hear anything but "superb job! brilliant!" when turning something in. We all, professors included, have to learn to take criticism about our writing, however, and it's only natural to have a hard time separating the messenger from the message. With a fortune like $2500-10,000 hanging over your head, would you be more likely or less likely to wield the red pen as usual, even it if means student displeasure?

3. Academic rigor. Another commenter mentions that the evaluations ask about things like "this course challenged me" and so on--in other words, students are asked to judge the academic rigor of the course.

Here's the problem with those kinds of questions: students all want to take challenging courses as long as they can get an A in them. There's no glory to getting an A in an easy course. On the other hand, if the student doesn't get a good grade, it's the instructor's fault for making the course, as students sometimes put it, "to hard" with "to much writting."

It would be nice to reward good teaching, but making evaluations the sole criterion is daft. To quote our soon-to-be-ex-president, the question that's not being asked is "Is our children learning?"

Archives and fresh starts

Mel's post on archiving and cleaning out old letters (with a link to Flavia's post) struck a chord.  Yesterday I was on a cleaning out rampage, and a lot got thrown away.

What got thrown away (or put in the recycling bin) are things like empty spice jars and a couple of broken colanders.  What is still sitting in the garage and in my filing cabinets taking up space is the detritus--or should I say impedimenta?-- of academic teaching and service: notes from meetings, final exams from classes that have long since graduated, and reports on long-dead issues that have since either been resolved by policy changes, or, in the usual course of things, left to gather dust.  In any case, none of this is material that needs to be saved.  

I've gone through a few of these boxes and have gotten rid of some things.  About twice per box, I'll come across a teaching exercise that I had developed and forgotten about that could still be useful.  The rest of it is just paper, and it gets dealt with accordingly:

1.  Anything with student numbers on it gets shredded.

2. Anything printed on one side that won't wreck a printer gets put into a pile for draft printing.

3. Everything else, including anything with a staple in it, gets tossed.  

What isn't clear is why I kept a lot of this stuff in the first place. Documentation in case anyone ever wanted to know what a committee said in Section V, subsection 3 of a report? Backup in case a disgruntled student came back 10 years later and wanted to know why he got an 88 instead of 90 on his final exam?  Teaching notes in case all the computers on which I'd stored ecopies (office and home) went up in flames at once?  This last one is particularly puzzling, since I try to reinvent the teaching each time I teach a course anyway. 

The only good side to this is that the flip side of the impulse to archive is an impulse to get rid of things, for there can't be an archive without selection, can there?  As the semester begins, that impulse to get rid of things takes over. It gives the filing cabinets some breathing space, anyway, and us a fresh start.

What I'm wondering is how much of this kind of stuff is what academics usually keep and how much of it is extra.  What do you end up keeping--class notes? Papers that students don't pick up? Meeting minutes? Old photocopies of articles? Any of it? Or have you gone entirely electronic with these?

A noble ideal, but will it fly?

At Inside Higher Ed there's article on a joint report by the MLA and the Teagle foundation. (Read it. I'll wait.)

While I can see where the recommendations are coming from and I like them overall, I'm trying to fit these ideals into the university systems that we all know and love. Here are the four and some possible real-world reactions.

1. English majors should be able to read literature in a second language. The short version is that about 4/5 of universities had this requirement forty years ago and about 1/5 have it today. Is the MLA on crack?

No, that's too harsh. I think this is a praiseworthy requirement for all the reasons that the report mentions. But is this a realistic requirement? At a minimum, English majors could decamp in droves for less demanding departments. Also, there are only so many credits that a university can require, so many courses that it can offer with a given number of faculty, so many classrooms, and so forth. So what gets tossed out of the Graduation Credits Lifeboat to make room for, say, 15 hours of foreign language instruction?

2. Coherence of course sequences and requirements. Nobody ever says, "Hey, let's make an incoherent course sequence." All the reasons for course requirements seem logical at the time.

But over time, course requirements are subject to mission creep. Maybe the administration has a pet idea that it thinks all students should be exposed to and mandates* required courses in that area. Maybe Dr. Famous Senior Scholar thinks all students should learn about the poetic qualities of widgets and bullies the curriculum committee into making a required course in Widget Poetics. The best use of this part of the report may lie in getting departments to rethink these requirements.

3. The primacy of the study of literature. Again, I like the idea (this being my job, after all), and at first couldn't see any harm in advising that students learn to read complex texts and write well about them. On second thought, though, I can see how all this talk about richness of literary texts, discussing complexity, etc. is going to bring out faculty with the long knives who hate any signs of life in F.R. Leavis and the Great Tradition. Also, new forms of media get mentioned only as "information retrieval systems." Ouch. That isn't going to please people working in this area.

4. Inclusion of all faculty ranks in decisions and teaching. Absolutely right, although again: how might this work in the real world? I don't mean shared decision-making; I mean the recommendation to have senior people teach first-year and gen ed courses.

This would be beneficial in a lot of ways, but here's the problem: How will you get them to do this, aside from making some kind of mandate? Who's going to tell Professor Senior Scholar, Endowed Chair, that he's been assigned an Intro to Lit instead of Widget Poetics? Unless every, and I do mean every, senior person signs on to this and understands its value, it won't happen.

So am I being too much of a pessimist here? How would these work at your university?

*[Edited to add: Not "mandates," of course, but "suggests," as in suggesting that if you ever want to see adequate funding again, you will consider teaching courses in this area.]

I am the captain--no, make that the James T. Kirk-- of my fate

As I sat at my desk today, not wanting to go out (if you saw the weather here, you wouldn't, either), I looked around the study.

Extreme left on the bookshelf: books for teaching.
Near left: books for project I've been working on.
Nearer left: shame pile of a book for review.
Piled high on the left-hand side of the desk: books and journals I've just finished using.
Above the desk: books for another project for which I'm making some minor revisions.
Right side of the desk, both on the desk and on the floor: file folders in wire holders.
Two lamps, one on either side of the monitor.
Straight ahead: computer with writing and .pdf articles on it.

Then it hit me: this feels like the command deck of the Starship Undine, and it has a mission to get as much possible done before classes start. No wonder I'm treating incoming email as if it's the Tholian web.

OT: Themes and resolutions

Since everyone's posting either end-of-the-year memes, themes (here , resolutions (here and here), or no resolutions, here's mine:

It's just one, and I had thought about this one even before Profgrrrrl wrote about it in a more elegant post than this one: mindfulness. Instead of a resolution, I'd like to call it a theme or maybe even (so as not to jinx it) a suggestion.

Mindfulness means a lot of things. It means paying attention to what I eat instead of eating out of stress or work avoidance.

It means distinguishing between what really needs to get done, what I need to do, and what someone else wants me to do. Their wishes do not have to become my to-do list, and their wish for an immediate response to something that isn't important doesn't need to push that item to the top of my to-do list.

It means making time for the things I need to do, not being on campus just because people like to see me in my office in case they happen to want something. Chief among those things I need to do is making time for writing.

It means wasting less time on news sites and checking email, because, all dreams aside, I'd rather let Obama handle the anxieties of managing this country and, as my experiments with turning off the internet have shown me, email can almost always wait.

It means treating reading blogs as an after-dinner dessert instead of something to snack on all day.

In short, mindfulness means paying the same amount of attention to my own life and priorities that I routinely pay to those of others.

Last bullets of 2008

• I dreamed last night that I was at the inauguration. In fact, I was Obama. Do I want to take over the world, or what?
• Reading all the MLA reports makes me feel both relieved that I didn't go and sad to have missed some of the good times.
  
• Eager colleagues are at it again, going through their to-do lists and firing emails at me. The next one gets a throwdown challenge: "Do you want to meet tomorrow at 8 a.m.? No? Then shut up and leave me alone." No, what I'm really doing is much more insidious: I am rudely not wishing anyone a Happy New Year who contacts me with it-surely-can-wait work details. Yes, no one will probably notice.
  
• I have been loving having this time to read and work. I've written a fair amount during the break, and now I'm getting ready for classes in a very random and relaxed way. It's actually a lot of fun.
• Happy New Year to you all!
  

Brave new technologies: online manuscript submissions

The publisher of one of the pieces I had promised to do this fall (now finished and submitted--hooray!) required the work to be sent to the editor AND uploaded to its manuscript submission site. MLA does its program copy for the convention this way, of course, and ASA has an elaborate online system for panel and paper proposals, as do some other conferences. Most of the manuscript reviewing and program committee work I've done for conferences, however, has been done the old-fashioned way--via email and sometimes paper.

Here's what I want to know: I know that online submission of manuscripts to a database is common in the sciences, but is it widespread in the humanities?

If you've had experience with this (as either a submitter or as a reviewer), what was that like? Is it a better system? Worse? Easier? More frustrating?

The grass is greener, academic edition

After several years in a row of going to MLA, I'm glad that I didn't go this year. Grateful. Relaxed. Happy. Christmas was wonderful with the family.

And yet . . . lots of the cool kids are at MLA, so there's a little twinge that says "we're having a party, and you're not there."

Proof positive that academia is an addiction, don't you think?

Edited to add: I didn't realize that What Now and Sisyphus were there, too.

We pause for this message from the holidays

Despite two more messages tonight from eager colleagues (stop, already!), I'm going on an academic fast for the next week--nothing but family, too many cookies, and a little writing, if I'm lucky.

Happy holidays, everyone.