Happy New Year!

Resolutions for 2010:

• To write something on current projects every working day, even if it's just for a little while.
• To grade papers right away. It's not as though they're marinating in that bookbag and will be more flavorful for the extra time.
• To dress a little less in MLA black casual and a little more in fashion fabulous. Picture at right? Totally my teaching outfit for May.
  
• To say this to myself when something (or someone) irritating comes along, sends me an irritating email, or otherwise disturbs a happy and uneventful day: "Do you really care that much, and is a response likely to change anything? Let it go."
  

Happy New Year, everyone!

NY Times: Books You Can Live Without

It's that time of year again, when you clean out your bookshelves in preparation for the new year, (or maybe you just want to forestall anyone submitting your name for future episodes of Clean House or Hoarders).

"Books You Can Live Without" asks several famous writers how they decided to clear out their libraries. Shorter version: (1) books I'm never going to read again; (2) outdated reference books; (3) books I'm tired of pretending that I'm going to read some day.

In a fit of cleaning not long ago, I did a version of this and got rid of a bunch of books, though not without a few pangs. Some I took to the used bookstore to be traded in for store credit (so I can buy more books, of course!) and some I took to Goodwill. Some, sadly, I couldn't even give away: I had to leave copies of old textbooks in the "Free" bin at the bookstore. I usually put them out on the Free Books table on campus, but I wasn't on campus this semester.

I needed to think about each book, but some were easier to chuck than others.

• Fodor's London 1992, from my in-laws' trip there? Other old reference books? Gone immediately.
• 10+ years of a print run of a journal now online? Gone.
• A couple of books of highly elaborate and stylishly difficult postmodern contemporary fiction from 10+ years ago that I bought from the bargain bin, never got around to reading, and have never heard about since? Gone to the bookseller's. Apparently they were neither pleasurable enough to read nor absorbing enough in a literary sense to make the effort of reading them worthwhile. Who am I kidding? If I need to read them--well, that's what libraries are for.
• Some ancient books of criticism--you know, the kind that talk appreciatively and in general terms about "innate female modesty and reticence" and "robust nature imagery"--that I picked up from a Free Books shelf when some equally ancient professors were retiring--gone.
  
• The one book I ever bought in the How I Went to Tuscany, Fixed Up an Old House, and Learned about Life from the Quaint Italians series or whatever that genre of book is called. I bought it in an airport one time but even a long plane ride couldn't make me get through it. This one--gone without a backward glance. Let's just say I never bought another book about privileged white women Finding Themselves while Learning Life's Heartwarming Truths from the Simple, Close-to-the-Earth People of Another Culture.*
  

But even though they might not pass the "will you read it again in 100 years test," I kept a lot of books. What are your criteria for getting rid of books, assuming that you have to get rid of some?

*[In case it isn't obvious, I think the whole idea is highly insulting to other cultures.]

More random bullets, or denial isn't just a river in Egypt

• I'm clinging desperately to a few remaining sabbatical days (think: by my fingernails while hanging off a cliff over an abyss that is the beginning of the new semester).
• At some point, the syllabus for the new course I've never taught before has to stop being like a jigsaw puzzle and become like a mosaic. I have to stop moving the pieces of the course around and glue them down so that the syllabus can be copied.
  
• In "Hybrid Education 2.0" over at IHE, Candace Thille of the Open Learning Initiative takes a few more swipes at what she sees as the dead horse/shibboleth of the lecture-only format. Apparently Carnegie Mellon has a new shiny way of teaching statistics and logic online (funded by Gate$$ fund$$) with an in-person assist from professors discussing the material according to student needs. The online logic course has only a "cursory level of instructor contact," though, and the instructors assigned to that are "glorified graders." What I want to know isn't being tested thus far: if a student takes Mr. Roboto's section of online logic in which choices are circumscribed, is he or she going to have the advanced (creative) thinking skills necessary for success in upper-division courses?
  

Random bullets of the season

• Getting a reprieve of two weeks on that piece of writing--now that's the holiday spirit. Thanks, editor!
• Yes, there are still some recommendation letters to be written. Aren't there always?
• Presents sent to the relatives--check. Cookies made and sent to relatives--check.
  
• I'm not going to the Big Conference this year, since I went to the other Big Conference in my discipline earlier this fall. To everyone who's going--enjoy MLA!
  
• Signs that the new semester may be approaching: a dream in which I show up at two different committee meetings, only to be told "you're not on this committee." Whew, I think--and then realize that it's time to meet my students for a new course, the one I haven't prepped at all.
  
• I read the MLA's new and grim report about the future of jobs but am not going to link to it, since everyone else has, but I will link to this spoof on the 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time (h/t Old is the New New).
  

Happy holidays, everyone!

Kate Chopin on writing schedules

Some wise man has promulgated an eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not preach," which, interpreted, means, "Thou shalt not instruct thy neighbor as to what he should do." But the Preacher is always with us. Said one to me: "Thou shalt parcel off thy day into mathematical sections. So many hours shalt thou abandon thyself to thought, so many to writing; a certain number shalt thou devote to household duties, to social enjoyment, to ministering to thy afflicted fellow creatures." I listened to the voice of the Preacher, and the result was stagnation all along the line of "hours" and unspeakable bitterness of spirit. In brutal revolt I turned to and played solitaire during my "thinking hour," and whist when I should have been ministering to the afflicted. I scribbled a little during my "social enjoyment" period, and shattered the "household duties" into fragments of every conceivable fraction of time, with which I besprinkled the entire day as from a pepper-box. In this way I succeeded in reestablishing the harmonious discord and confusion which had surrounded me before I listened to the voice, and which seems necessary to my physical and mental well-being.

from "In the Confidence of a Story-Writer"

Two sides of online teaching

From Inside Higher Ed and Clio Bluestocking. Let's call them "ideal" and "reality."

From Inside Higher Ed:

“Most of the professors who teach at the university level have had no experience with pedagogy or instruction in general,” says Janet Buckenmeyer, chair of the instructional technology master’s program at Calumet. “They’re content experts, not teaching experts." . . . Since most professors have spent their lives holding forth from the front of a lecture hall, many have not had to engineer their lesson plans with the sort of rigor required of a well-designed online course, Buckenmeyer says.

Puh-leeze. Not again. Most professors "holding forth in front of a lecture classroom" without a clue about teaching? Can't they let this monster die, along with the "teaches with yellowing notes from 1963" deadwood professor? They're like Bigfoot: everyone has heard of him, but nobody's actually seen him. There may be some, but this is more a 30-years-ago situation than the case today, isn't it?

Here's what I'd like to tell the "education consultant": While university faculty may not have taken education classes, most of them have been taught or have learned to teach well through observation, mentoring, talking with colleagues, and, well, the kinds of critical thinking that we apply to research.

Think about it. No one wants to fail at teaching, and it'd be a rare person indeed who wouldn't spend massive amounts of time figuring out how to succeed--that is, how to engage the students, construct good assignments, and so on. We're eager to find out different ways to do things, different techniques, and different assignments. We look at what's worked for online and traditional courses and reverse-engineer them so that we have the principles of a successful course as we design our own. We want to improve.

We know already that we need to have a sense of the goals for the class and what our students need to do to attain them. We also know to let them know what those goals are and what our expectations for them will be.

What I haven't liked about my dealings with "educational consultants" is this: they have a one best way to do everything (sorry, but that's my experience), and even if you have a better way, they don't want to hear it. Blackboard is the One Best Way. Using a rubric defined by them is the One Best Way. Having a pointless splash page with nothing but the course title instead of announcements on the main page is the One Best Way to set up Blackboard. And they're patronizing about it, too, as they inform you about how wrong you are--again, your mileage may vary.

So I read with interest Clio Bluestocking's run-in with a consultant who wants all the online sections of a course to be identical and--here's the thing--unchanging, with a "designing instructor" and lowly underlings non-designing instructors who can grade but not change anything about the course:

Maybe I'm being unfair. The non-designing instructors CAN change things, they just have to go to the designing instructor. The designing instructor then calls a meeting of the "team." The team then debates the change. Then, if the change is accepted, everyone must adopt the change. A year later.

In short, we are not stupid. We want to be good at what we do, and, guess what? many of us are. Please do us the courtesy of believing that we know a thing or two when we seek your advice instead of telling us that we are mere "content experts" and not "teaching experts." For what it's worth, I don't think you can be one without the other.

Thoughts?

Robert Caro on writing

Apparently I can't get enough of the whole "writers on writing" thing, so here are Robert Caro's thoughts from this month's Esquire (in the "What I've Learned" series). I haven't read his Robert Moses bio or Master of the Senate but I really liked The Path to Power.

Always type out your interviews before you go to bed, so you remember the expressions.

Research is fun. Writing is hard.

It's so easy to fool yourself into thinking that you're working hard. It's so easy not to write. So you use any trick you can to make yourself know there's work to be done. That's why I wear a jacket and tie when I sit down to write.

Every time one of my books comes out, profiles mention that I write on a typewriter that hasn't been manufactured in twenty-five years. And people send me their old Smith-Corona 210's for free. I used to have seventeen spares to cannibalize the parts. I'm down to eleven.

Hemingway said, "Always quit for the day when you know what the next sentence is going to be." I do that.

There is no bullshit with books. What's on the page is what's on the page. It's either good enough to last or it's not.

I live near Columbia, and I see a lot of college students. My best moment was seeing one of these kids carrying Master of the Senate. I could never ask him if he liked it. What if he said "Mehhh, it's not so great. I have to read it for class"? That would kill me. So I never do that.

Winding down

As this sabbatical winds down, I'm doing two things:

1. Obsessively checking the enrollment stats for next semester's courses. Here's an academic conundrum: I (and we, really) want the courses to fill, because, like Sally Field, I want reassurance that "they like me! They really like me!"--conveniently ignoring that what they like, really like, may be a noon class or whatever fits into their schedules. Yet more students = more grading authentic assessment and hours of time devoted to it next semester. But I still can't stop checking the stock market of enrollment, as someone called it a few years back.

2. Frantically trying to get some more writing done before it ends while realizing how woefully short I've fallen from the rosy sabbatical plan I laid out.

What the sabbatical has given me more time to do is harder to measure than a simple word count. It's allowed me to read more, including primary texts, than I've been able to do in years, and it has allowed me to conceptualize the work I'm doing in a different way.

Here's an analogy from, you guessed it, Mad Men. In rewatching Season One, I noticed that amid all the retro flash that had the critics agog, every time the copywriters brought something to Don Draper (the creative director, for those who aren't MM fans), he'd ask them two questions about the product before pouring himself a drink. The first one was "What are the features?" and the second one was "What is the benefit?" The copy they produced had to make sense in terms of both of those questions.

As we all know from the Microsoft jokes ("It's a feature, not a bug!"), they're not the same thing. The first part, I think, appeals to the "ooh, shiny!" brain area, but the second one, the benefit, is the real reason for creating the product in the first place--or should be. One of the things that the sabbatical has let me do is to think more seriously about that second question in relation to the project I'm working on: not just "how is it different?" but "what is the benefit in thinking about the entire concept in this way?" I had ideas about this before, of course--no one writes without a purpose--but I've been able to think about it in more different ways, and, I hope, more creative ways that I'd done before. And although the report I write after I get back from sabbatical won't mention Don Draper or indeed this kind of thinking, it's one of the most valuable things that the sabbatical has given me.

Slowcoach writing

I think I first heard the term "slowcoach," as in "Slowcoach McClellan," in the sonorous tones of David McCullough. At any rate, I think I'm going to adopt it as a cautionary epithet.

Tenured Radical, a blogger I admire, said something in passing this week a couple of weeks ago that made me think:

But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. [and in the comments, in response to someone who challenged that timeframe] Two days. And seriously, why would they ask you for the entry unless you were an expert in that field?

I agree entirely with her main point, but the "one day" or even "two day" timeframe gave me pause. That pause was filled with writing speed envy.

Book reviews--okay, yes, those can be done quickly. Blog posts--nobody drafts those ahead of time, do they? Reports? Piece of cake. I can churn out administrativese at the speed of light.

But encyclopedia articles, even when I know the material, take time (at least at a slowcoach writing speed), which is why I've been turning them down lately. Here's what goes through my head with every single sentence:

1. Is it true? Am I misrepresenting the subject or the text in some way?

2. Is it useful? Is there a better example that I could use?

3. Is it new? Or am I just unconsciously plagiarizing myself or someone else?

4. Does it explain the concept efficiently and (let's hope) gracefully?

5. Does it relate to the sentences around it?

6. Does it hit the right balance of detail to generality?

Most of these questions apply to regular scholarly writing as well, which is why it's possible to wrestle with writing and rewriting a paragraph for an entire four-hour period and still not be entirely satisfied. But it's good to have comparisons of how it could be done if I were more efficient. If I don't speed up, someone's going to remove me from the Peninsular Campaign.

I wake up writing

Not screaming, but writing.

Not as in "I make writing wake UP!" but as in "I wake up early, about 4 a.m., and since that's too early to get up, my brain busies itself by writing things in my head."

This morning's writing was about Sandra Tsing Loh's pieces for the Atlantic, and it was in response to Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted. Short version of my response: She's the humor component of The Atlantic, now that they've gone to an editorial policy of publishing only serious articles that tell us we're going to hell in a handbasket. If you're worrying because her essays don't have a structure, don't: they're really just long, ranty, and often funny blog posts, with moments of truth interspersed with outrageously solipsistic and just plain bonkers logic (e.g., my marriage is bad; therefore marriage as an institution is unsustainable). She's better than the totally bonkers Caitlin Flanagan who used to fill this role, so lighten up.

Sometimes it's a letter to the editor or to a congressman, or a screenplay, or a short story, or (too rarely) a new approach to the piece I'm actually supposed to be working on. Here are my questions: If you also wake up writing, do you get right up and write it down, even if it isn't something you're working on? Or does that take time away from your real writing?

[Update: Historiann has a new post about Sandra Tsing Loh.]

Stolen reading time

Profacero and some other bloggers keep up the practice of "reading for pleasure Wednesdays" posts. Although I'm not organized enough to do that, it made me think about stolen reading time.

Stolen reading time is the time you get to read when you're doing something else, although I guess it's technically multitasking reading time. Examples:

• Reading a book while you're stirring risotto = stolen reading time.
• Reading a book while waiting for the computer to boot up = stolen reading time.
• Reading while you're waiting in a long, slow-moving checkout line = stolen reading time.
  
• Reading while eating breakfast or lunch = not exactly stolen reading time, but one of life's great pleasures nonetheless.

The other day I felt as if I'd stolen some reading time. In the piece I was writing, I wanted to allude to a novel that I'd read years before but didn't remember very clearly. Ten seconds later, Google books had it ready for me. (For some reason, I'm getting fond of reading on the screen, sometimes even when I have a paper copy.) I got to the part I'd wanted to talk about but then just kept reading right past dinner, too absorbed in what was happening to stop; it was that good.

A few days later, still working, I pulled a book off the shelf that I'd always intended to read. It, too, was related to the project, and it was amazing. Are the books really that good, or are they just enhanced by the glow that stolen reading provides? And is it procrastination if the project is going to be much better for my having read those books?

*poofed*

*poof* The more I thought about this too-dramatic post, in which I argued that going to 5-year contracts would mean kicking everyone over 45 to the curb, the more uncomfortable I was with it, especially after reading the judicious responses from readers.

Read the comments--they're better than the post--and please chalk the original post up to too much caffeine. Sorry.

The 5-minute blog post

I'm not doing InaDWriMo or NaNoWriMo or any of those this month; I'm just trying to get through a piece of writing, so this blog post can only take me 5 minutes to write.

In the spirit of Merlin Mann's pep talk and a warning, besides the 5-minute limit for posting, here's what I'm trying today:

• More typing, less thinking. I know you can't really separate them, but getting the hands flapping on the keys is the action of the day. Turning pages? Reading more source materials? That can wait.
• Write first, edit later. That big, juicy, and awful introduction that's crying out to be edited? Can totally wait for two hours. First, generate the writing, however awful you think it is while your hands are flapping. Then edit it.
• Reading about writing a lot is not the same as writing a lot. Get moving.

Time's up!

HASTAC: Cathy Davidson on grading (redux)

Just for fun this morning, I've been revisiting the discussion of Cathy Davidson's "crowdsourcing grading" post over at HASTAC.

Davidson and the commenters make good points, especially about an internet culture in which everyone feels empowered--nay, entitled--to pass judgment on any random piece of writing available on the web. We're all being judged constantly anyway, goes the argument, and students will be judged by peers and outsiders in the workplace, so why not in a grading an assessment situation? I liked the clarification that Davidson offered in the comments:

Advocating crowdsourcing, contract grading, written evaluation and other forms of assessment (including self- and group-assessment, which studies show is often far more rigorous than external assessment if the forms of the assessment are set up in the correct way) is not to say we don't want standards. Quite the opposite. It is to say that there are forms of knowledge and standards of excellence that certain systems do not test, so having complementary systems is good.

She then goes on to say that feedback (comments) and not grades should be the focus, and I'd agree.

Davidson offers a more complete version at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/cathy-davidson/crowdsourcing-authority-in-classroom in which she says that her students asked her to rethink grading in terms of this new paradigm and she concludes "They were right." I'm not sure whether she means that she decided that she needed to give grades, or that she needed to hand over the process of grading to students, but she ends with this: "In the workplace and in our communities, we have to learn more about how to make judgments, to offer feedback, and to take criticism from those who are not 'the boss of us.'"

Well, yes, we do need to learn more about this process, but I'd say that part of learning about the process is giving feedback about what constitutes good and bad feedback. Nuanced, intelligent responses = good. (And you will never, ever, see a more polite and adulatory comment thread than the one at HASTAC.) Twitter piranha-like ganging up on a speaker = Lord of the Flies. Are the student graders assessed on their grading abilities, and, if so, who makes that determination--Davidson or the other students?

I guess what I'm trying to work through is that somehow, somewhere, there's always going to be an Invisible Hand of the Professor that's responsible for correcting the market forces of commentary and assessment. In reading through this material, I'm trying to figure out specifically where and how that invisible hand touches the grading process.

Don Draper Matt Weiner cures your writer's block

Conversation on a day when all I've done is read, take notes, think, and write? I got nothing.

But Matt Weiner can solve your problems. From Los Angeles Magazine (broken into bits for easy reading):
“I don’t get writers block. I really don’t. I’m not trying to be obnoxious about it. What I have is an idea I have not worked my way through. I’ve learned to have confidence in the fact that if I’m having trouble writing it, it’s not good and it’s not done and I need to do something else and loosen the machinery.

And I don’t care if it’s gambling or drinking or just talking a walk, which is probably what you’re supposed to do, but you need to change your state.

And I talk to people. I tell the story over, and over, and over again. . . . And you know, I bang my head against the wall and you can bang your head against the wall and do fine, but it’s the advice Don gave to Peggy: Think about it intensely and then do something else and it will be right in front of you. You can’t force it.

I also work well with a gun against my head. I’m not trying to invite writers block, but usually what writers block is, is imaging all the possibilities of a blank page.

And the other thing I do—oh my god, I can’t believe I’m about to say this—I have an amazing way to get over this, which is that I do not sit down at a typewriter and write or a computer. I dictate.

Now even if I’m on the phone and doing all the procrastinating things, when I’m dictating Don comes in, he sits at the typewriter…It works just like that. I get into the scene and at the end of the day I can write an entire draft in a day. It might be garbage, but I can rewrite it."

In a more moderate key: libraries as public spaces

I've been thinking about something that Rufus said in response to the earlier library post:

I can't listen to librarians talk about how we need to stop thinking of libraries as places with books without imagining a priest saying, "We need to really stop thinking of the church as a place where people come to hear about the scriptures and pray. Because, gosh, the new generation (digital natives- i.e. internet addicts) really just wants another place to hang around and dick around on their laptops."

Why are we so invested in the idea of libraries as a sacred, or at least special, place? Why are those who like libraries so outraged at the thought that they'll be dismantled for yet another Starbucks-like space?

Here are a few possibilities, but please--add your own.

1. They're one of the last public spaces around that don't require you to (1) do something or (2) buy something, and yet they offer you riches in return: books.
   
2. Yes, this is latent romanticism showing its face, but if you love books, you like being around them--leafing through them, admiring the covers, paying attention to the slick or rough feeling of old paper, the impress of the type, and everything else. You get ideas. The connection of past with present work and future possibilities is stimulating.
   
3. Browsing the shelves, you'll see things that you might not see with even the most assiduous and well-informed search.
   
4. You're around people, but you don't have to talk to them. Because it's a public space, it's energizing in a way that being at home isn't.
   
5. You can sit and read, and read, and read, without anyone asking you if you want anything (a refill, a different book). There's an assumption of privacy within public spaces that's hard to come by anywhere else.
6. A library is quiet, or at least mostly quiet. You aren't hearing people nattering away but saying absolutely nothing on cell phones.
   

If you grew up with books as an important part of your life as a child, I'll bet that you can conjure up a mental picture of your childhood library right now. Mine was a converted house, quite small, with scuffed, creaky wooden boards on the floor and most of the light coming in through some large uncurtained windows. If you sat on a bench by the window, you could read Alcott and decide to check it out, or P. L. Travers and decide that it wasn't for you (because when you come right down to it, Mary Poppins in the books is really Scary Mary).

I'm not saying that time, or libraries, have to stand still because of what they may mean to a few of us, but the idea that the library has functions other than just another place to chat and drink coffee needs to be considered.

Update on the "bookless library"

Two items from today's news.

1. From The Chronicle (behind the subscription wall--sorry) (now free, as JHoward notes in the comments; thanks, Chronicle!):

In Face of Professors' 'Fury,' Syracuse U. Library Will Keep Books on Shelves
By Jennifer Howard
A fight between humanities scholars and the library at Syracuse University over plans to send books to a remote storage facility has reached a temporary truce, with both sides agreeing to consider alternative solutions. The conflict began several weeks ago when the library announced it wanted to free up shelf space and save money by sending some of its print collection to a facility in Patterson, N.Y.
. . .
The reaction was so fierce because of the high value humanities researchers still place on hands-on browsing, Mr. Watts said. "The big issue in the letters and among humanists generally is the importance of being able to browse collections and not have them in a remote location," he said. Recent library renovations to create more computer and work space have caused books to be moved around, according to Mr. Watts, and "part of the fury has been fueled by what looks like the emptying of shelves."
. . .
[L]ast night, more than 200 students and faculty members attended a meeting of the University Senate to hash out the library situation, according to the university's student newspaper, The Daily Orange.

The senate meeting "was the most longest and most vocal in years," Suzanne E. Thorin, the university's dean of libraries, told The Chronicle. "It means there's a lot of burning passion on this." Humanities faculty members have made it clear they consider the library their "central laboratory," she said.

Yes, exactly: a "central laboratory." I don't have anything to add to this except to hope that the 200+ people who turned out have convinced Dean Thorin that (1) we're not just random kooks who have an unhealthy attachment to books and that (2) print culture isn't dead yet.

2. About print culture: over at Perplexed with Narrow Passages, Christopher Vilmar has a good post about Robert Darnton's thoughts on e-books versus printed books. A few excerpts:

The book is not dead.

As new electronic devices arrive on the market, we think we have been precipitated into a new era. We tout “the Information Age” as if information did not exist in the past.

Whatever the future may be, it will be digital.

Unless the vexatious problem of digital preservation is solved, all texts “born digital” belong to an endangered species. The obsession with developing new media has inhibited efforts to preserve the old.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. "Digital" is the future, but the future isn't here yet. We need both print and digital media right now. I'm hoping that conversations like the ones linked to here will increase our understanding. Didn't we learn anything from deconstruction? Both/and, not either/or.

Random conference thoughts

Sometimes, when I'm listening to a speaker and she starts making the air quotes sign, I wonder if she's going to start truckin'.

There is no greater clarity of vision in editing a paper than that which descends the night before, in your hotel room, when you look at the paper you've already sent to the rest of the panel and say to yourself, "No! I didn't say that, did I? I'd better fix it"--or unprintable words to that effect.

Altoids, or, barring those, strong peppermint Lifesavers will keep you alert and listening during that 4:00 conference panel that you really wanted to hear but are afraid you'll nod off during.

When did Starbucks become the official Hell Caterer to the conference world? If I don't eat another stale Starbucks bagel and scald my tongue on their hyperheated tea again for a few months, that'll be fine with me.

Dean of Libraries hates books, libraries; views on espresso machines, gym equipment unknown

Via The Little Professor, who has an elegant post about why this is a totally stupid perhaps an ill-advised idea:

“Let’s face it: the library, as a place, is dead,” said Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University. “Kaput. Finito. And we need to move on to a new concept of what the academic library is.”

And there's more:

Despite the objections of “a minority of very loud faculty members,” Thorin said, the days of wandering through the stacks are over. “People,” she told the audience, of whom many were librarians, “the world has changed, and so have your students, and so have your faculty!”

She's totally drunk the "digital native" Kool-Aid, hasn't she? Yeah, those pesky faculty members, with all their prattling on about "knowledge" and "humanities." If we could get rid of them, maybe we could afford a new espresso machine and maybe even some treadmills!

And here's something from Richard Luce: "“To interact with one another — to talk, to collaborate, to think, to communicate, to be with one another,” he said. “Isn’t that what we do in our best libraries?”" If you don't have any content to the information you're exchanging, or any permanence, you're transmitting chat. Libraries as Twitter? (Sorry, Twitter, but although I've seen "come see what I've done" tweets a lot, I haven't seen deep thoughts on there. It's more an alerting service for thoughts written elsewhere than a mode for transmitting ideas.)

I had a long argument one time in my one and only library science course (as an undergrad). I remember it because I was a terminally quiet student in this class, the kind everyone hates. "What's the function of the library?" the professor asked. My answer was vaguely Arnoldian--something about keeping books that people couldn't afford to buy, classics, keeping knowledge alive, best that has been thought and said. Nope! The purpose of the library is to serve the people, I was told. If they want 30 copies of Dan Brown, then that's what you buy, and if you have to chuck Dickens to do it, well, Dickens is toast.

Miriam Burstein (Little Professor) calls this a thought experiment. I'd call it a thoughtless one.

[Edited so I sound more rational on this topic; I could hardly be less so.]

Update on this post.
See also Historiann's take on this issue.

Job market signals from another planet

Dr. Crazy has a good post on the job market, with lots of great advice. I haven't written a post on the job market this year for fear of repeating myself (here and here and here), but there are a couple of things I've heard recently which have made me wonder if those of us giving the advice are operating on another planet from some other people.

1. Tailor the letter or not? I heard recently that some job candidates on the market had been given the advice "Don't bother to tailor your letter to the institution. It's a waste of time. Just give them the boilerplate and move on." My reaction wasn't very moderate; it was somewhere between "no" and "hell, no!" I've been on search committees and have chaired a few, and, like Dr. Crazy, I believe that tailoring the letter to the institution makes a difference. Part of the advice I gave in one of those earlier posts is "Don't make us guess. Connect the dots for us by showing why you fit our qualifications so well." I think that still holds true.

Let me put it this way: If you don't seem interested in the position--or interested enough to show some faint glimmering in your letter of who we are or what we're about, or even what the position is about, why should we think you'd be interested in coming to work for us? Let me be even more blunt: unless you are really, really exceptional, if you don't have time to show an interest in the institution, we don't have time to show an interest in you. Frankly, we receive too many applications to pay attention to those that are obviously sent as a pro forma exercise.

2. Lead with teaching or research? It depends on the institution, but for heaven's sake don't leave out the research entirely, even if it's a teaching institution (another piece of dubious advice apparently handed out by someone not trained on my planet). You need to have both. Oh, and please be specific about what you're doing in terms of research and teaching. "Student-centered learning," etc., is all well and good, but we get that in every letter. What do you do in class? Do you have an innovative exercise that makes the students respond really well to George Eliot? Tell us!

What I said a couple of years ago still holds true: Make your research sound exciting. When I think back to the search committees I've served on, after questions of fit and suitability for the position, the excitement generated by the possibilities of the candidate's research program is really what sticks in the mind and makes the candidate stand out. Also, don't make us do the math: if it's exciting and has great potential for changing a field, explain how that's the case. If you are the first person to study the social significance of lawn mower blades in consumer culture, you need to tell us why that is important. You recommenders will do this, too, but it's your letter that we read first.
3. Thank you/no thanks? "If you get a campus interview, don't send a thank-you note; it makes you look desperate." "Always send a thank-you note, even after the MLA or phone interview." What do you say, search committees? My take on this: I don't think it makes a huge difference, but since when is being polite considered "desperate"?

4. Have your dissertation chair give personal contacts in the department a call? What do you say, internets? On the one hand, it's nice to have a personal recommendation. On the other hand, as a search chair this always made me uneasy, since we just had to put that information in the folder for HR anyway, and we could never be sure how much weight to give this kind of informal recommendation.

I'd love to hear from those of you who are hiring this season so I know whether we're on the right track or whether it's time to get the old Interplanetary Passport renewed so I can go back to my own planet.

Update 11/16/09: Profgrrrrl has a good list of tips.