Lingual Tremors

Gene Nichol's Letter of Resignation from William and Mary

The text of Gene Nichol's astonishing letter of resignation as President of William and Mary.  Wow! 

Fantasy Academic Leagues: Yeah. What She Said.

ESPECIALLY the part about department meetings, and other such bureaucratic wastes of time.

Politics in the Classroom? How Could It Be?

So, as some of you know, I dabble in academia when I'm not leading a fabulously feminist existence on the web.  (I know, I know--a job?  How utterly capitalistic of me...).  Since many of you who follow this blog are also academics, I thought you might be interested in the following new report. 

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has just released a ground-breaking report on "Freedom in the Classroom."  In response to many of the recent, high profile attacks on academia by the likes of David Horowitz, and several state legislatures' "Academic Bill of Rights," this report really engages critics of academia and answers the question:  why academic freedom?  It's well worth a careful read.  And, if you are at a college or university, it's well worth passing around and engaging both your faculty and your administration in a conversation about the report.  We can't presume the legacy of academic freedom--we have to fight to protect it and the exigencies of free speech.  So, please do your homework!  Click here.  See also Michael Berube's 11 September 2007 "Freedom to Teach" column in Inside Higher Ed.

Terrible Truth

Writing academic articles is not as much fun as blogging.  Seriously.  Thus, it is 12:11 a.m. and I am 23 hours and 4 minutes from a deadline.  It's going to be a long night.  And longer if I keep blogging.

Creative Writing and Virginia Tech

I was stuck in traffic on the L.A. freeway when I first heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech. It was almost unimaginable, but when I got back to the hotel, that sense of unreality all too quickly diminished as I saw the first footage of the day's horrific unraveling.

Like everyone, I've been thinking a lot about the events that unfolded and have been haunted by the tragic loss of life. On my college campus, faculty and students alike are visibly unsettled, raising questions about campus safety. Nikki Giovanni, who is a favorite poet of mine, is a poet-professor at VT and had Cho in one of her writing classes. She has been referenced in several articles on the VT killings (as has professor Lucinda Roy) in saying that Cho's writing was disturbing and intimidating.

Several list servs I am on have been asking about how we should respond to students who write disturbing material. People have been sharing their "disturbing writing student" stories; anyone who teaches creative writing or composition has one--it's the nature of personal writing. And, in each iteration of the "disturbing student writing" people are questioning the relationship between creative writing and counseling in the university.

I don't have any clear answers to these questions; on the one hand, I tend to stand firmly on the side of encouraging students to explore the depths of their feelings and emotions in writing classes. On the other hand, it seems that Cho's deeply disturbed state of mind was evident on the page, as well as in person. I don't want to overreact to material my students write (and all too often, for beginning writers, genres like horror or fantasy come too easily to hand when they try to create plots. Over the years, I've read a lot of chainsaw stories); I don't want to censor them. But, I am going to think more carefully about whether I should be referring them to counseling based on what emerges from their writing and trying to determine the line between fiction and fantasy.

Vampire Academia

As a student, I always used to get jazzed about the end of the semester.  I just loved the way everything came together and I started making connections about the work I'd read in a particular course.  I always felt, for lack of a better word, smart at the end of a semester.  I would revel in my productivity as papers rolled out of the printer;  I calculated my stamina by the number of hours I could study or write without sleeping.   And, as a poet, it was perhaps my favorite time of year because I had an absolute deadline and nothing gets me going like a good deadline.

And...years later... as a faculty member, I dread this time of year.  I watch my students fall apart, missing deadlines and assignments.  My heart goes out to them as they fail or miss a particular goal that they set for themselves.  I'm cranky, beleaguered and very ready for it all to just be over.  My house is decorated with sets of students papers;  meetings crammed into the end of the term seem endless.  I feel consumed by everyone else's agenda.  I feel like I'm always someone's Girl Friday, trying to get things done on someone else's schedule.  And worst of all, I lose my time to write as I grade, grade, grade.  And when I resurface, I feel so drained that I have to rejuvenate before it begins again.

FFF: Funniest Film of the Fall

Okay, at this point in the semester, any film that has the following one-liner:

I'm teaching 5 classes this term, advising 2 doctoral students, and I'm the faculty lifeguard. ~Dr. Jules Hilbert

gets my vote for funniest film of the fall!  How can film get any better than wet literary critics?

The Quixotic Tremor and I took in Stranger Than Fiction over the weekend.  In the vein of Adaptation, The Truman Show, and Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stranger Than Fiction delights with its hilarious take on "reality."  Emma Thompson is fabulous as a histrionic, chain-smoking, novelist with writer's block.  That woman looks horrible fabulously.  And, she excels at the art of getting over writer's block, complete with staking out an emergency room to find "the really sick patients."  That is, the ones who are dying.  Will Ferrell is less annoying than you'd think, given his usual comic shtick.  But Dustin Hoffman steals the show as Dr. Jules Hilbert, the literary critic and contemporary fiction specialist who tries to assist Harold Crick, the narratively-disabled protagonist (Emma Thompson's Kay Eiffel narrates IRS agent Crick's dismal life and predicts his early demise).  From reading his books in plastic bags while in the lifeguard chair to trying to determine the plot of the novel Crick is in, Dr. Hilbert is a hilarious anecdote to the end-of-term blues!

More Academic Blogging

Update to:  "Ivan Tribble:  Do Not Apply"

There's a great forum over at the Chronicle of Higher Education on academic bloggers.  It loosely follows Juan R. I. Cole's recent "loss" of a job at Yale because of his political blogging.  However, 7 prominent academic bloggers (Michael Bérubé! Ann Althouse! Daniel W. Drezner!) weigh in on their perspectives about the politics of blogging in academe.  For me, the most powerful argument is Cole's at the end of the forum.  He writes, "Maintaining a Web log now is no different in principle from writing a newsletter or publishing sharp opinion in popular magazines in the 1950s."  Throughout the forum, the different writers talk about the stark rhetorical difference between academic writing and blogging.  Blogging, they maintain, is more to the point, less veiled, and more political (really Michael?  In some cases, I'm not so sure...).  Cole also talks about the importance of the public intellectual and the way in which the Internet allows him to really influence public opinion on important issues like the crisis in the Middle East.  And that just makes good sense.  What he has to say today about Israel and Lebanon is more important, in many ways, than what he might say in an article he writes today and is published 2-3 years down the road in a peer-reviewed journal.

Last Word

What the Hell is Wrong With You? posts that a number of academic bloggers are posting the last word in their dissertations.  Mine is "grade."  What does that say?

The Horowitz Hoe-Down

Okay, seriously.  I didn't have an advance copy of Horowitz's speech when I posted about him last Thursday.  And yet?  Here's a snippet of his exchange with vociferous PSU students:

To one student, Horowitz said "you are obviously deaf and brain-dead." To another, "you don't have the mental capacity to understand it." Finally, in response to a question he didn't care to answer, "what are the requirements for getting into this school!"

Dave, I think this more than explains the pie-in-the-face routine.  Don't insult your audience!

(Quote and links via Michael Bérubé)

Free Exchange on Campus

Aldon Lynn Nielsen on Horowitz's PSU visit.

If It's Thursday, It MUST Be David Horowitz Day at Penn State!!!

Attention American College Students:

Now Hear This:  You are all too stupid to know anything.  Therefore, David Horowitz will beneficently teach you how to think the correct (read right) way.  Congratulations.  End transmission.

David Horowitz is visiting Penn State today and you can read about the visit via Michael Bérubé's blog here:  Left Wing Media Day and Thug Life (Statement of BIAS for undergraduate readers of this blog:  Dr. Bérubé is a dangerous, left-wing liberal professor.  If you read or listen to anything he says, you might be corrupted forever.  I suggest that instead of reading Bérubé's blog, you go home and study a copy of the Patriot Act so that you can better learn how to be a good U.S. citizen.). 

As always, Bérubé brings to this situation a delightful sense of humor and ironic wit that makes me less crazy about this stuff.  While my tendency is to scream McCarthyism and run for the shelter of Benjaminian discourse, Bérubé handles it all with an irascible good charm.  More lefties need a good sense of humor!

Now, as for matters Horowitzian.  Yes, it will be a day full of cognitive dissonance, but that’s just fine with me.  We’re Cognitive Dissonance Central around here.  At 5:15 today, the good folks at Radio Free Penn State are having me back, this time for a 45-minute conversation with Professor of Education David Warren Saxe.  Then at 6:30 this evening, I’m taking part in a Celebration of Horowitz on the steps of the Penn State library.  It should be fun!  My float is almost done.  Thanks to everyone who stopped by and helped with the carnations!

I'm rather sad that I couldn't get to Penn State today, so here's my cyber-carnation for Dave:

(Via Wicked Good Art)

I've been thinking about Horowitz since his book came out a few weeks ago.  So, today, in honor of his visit to Penn State, I have a thing or two to say about the current state of mania on college campuses.  I posted on the higher education culture wars a few weeks back when I was commenting on the UCLA's "Dirty Thirty" List.  To begin with, I think Horowitz's campaign maligns the intelligence of the American undergraduate population.  I find that the undergraduates I teach are far less like lemmings and more like Bono and the Dixie Chicks when it comes to all things political.  That doesn't mean students are all liberals;  it means they aren't afraid to offer their opinion and their analysis.

Academic Freedom: Redefinition

The Cranky Liberal has a good post on H.R. 609--check it out.  More to come from me later on Academic Bills of Rights.

Burqa Brouhaha

I am about a week behind here in the brouhaha that has erupted over the Tennessee Guerrilla Women's "The Red Burka for a Red America" Campaign.  I have followed the comment threads on TGW and on Culture Kitchen and on Woman of Color blog.  This post originally started out as a comment on Brownfemipower's blog, but grew too big, so I decided to make it a post of its own.

The central question in everyone's debate about TGW seems to be, is the use of the red burqa (this will be my preferred spelling throughout), as a symbol of what TGW foresees as an oppressive future for American women, racist or culturally insensitive?

What I find disturbing about the nature of the debate here is the ease with which people are polarizing the issue.  I am troubled by the femmisphere's inability to grapple with conflicting ideologies, being pushed instead into militant definitions of "right" and "wrong."  Either it's racist or it's not.  Those extremes don't help us to negotiate the actual complexity of the image.

So, let me begin by reframing the argument:

Do we, as feminists, celebrate the religious autonomy of a wife in a fundamentalist Christian relationship?  Or, more often, do we see her as a product of patriarchal oppression perpetuated by a religious hierarchy that doesn't include women in the power structure other than reifying their places as mothers and wives?  We have no problem condemning traditional structures of western power and we rarely ascribe to such situations the complexity, that perhaps, they deserve.

But, when this extends beyond countries operating on a largely western ideology, we become increasingly concerned about the ways in which we frame our arguments.  I would argue we should do this all the time.  We need to always frame our arguments--at home and abroad--in multicultural terms.  That's not easy.  Part of a complicated, mature multicultural feminism is the work of living in intentional complexity.

So, into the complexity we go:

Mad Lib U Strikes Again: Testing for Everyone!

The Bush/McGraw Hill family ties are old news in K-12 education.  But, there's money to be made in higher education too, so, a new movement (surprise!) is afoot to push standardized testing in colleges and universities.  This move "would be greatly beneficial to the students, parents, taxpayers and employers" according to Mr. Charles Miller, president of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. 

Karen Arenson of the New York Times reports today:

A higher education commission named by the Bush administration is examining whether standardized testing should be expanded into universities and colleges to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality.

 Charles Miller, president of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, advocates standardized tests to measure college learning.

Charles Miller, a business executive who is the commission's chairman, wrote in a memorandum recently to the 18 other members that he saw a developing consensus over the need for more accountability in higher education.

"What is clearly lacking is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats," Mr. Miller wrote, adding that student learning was a main component that should be measured.

The good old days of Animal House on campus are over!  It's a Kaplan education for everyone (or, make that an Ignite Incorporated education brought to you by the Bush family). 

In addition to standardized tests, Ignite Incorporated is taking standardized curriculum to new levels.  You can also receive curriculum in a box (c.i.b. for teachers too dumb to know how to teach to the test).  Ignite Incorporated's take on c.i.b. is the "COW," or "curriculum on wheels."

It's purple!  It's white!  It has cute, adorable spots!  It looks like a...wait for it...COW!  Yes, I went to school for 12 years past high school so that I could push a button on the COW instead of making up my own lesson plans.  Can't wait to see the COW colors for college.  Maybe we'll be able to order them in our school colors.  Say, red and white cows for Florida State and orange and blue for Syracuse.  Color coded cows (do you think they can code the material by state too--say, a "red" state and a "blue" state cow version?).

And, I kid you not.  The website says: 

The SuperCOW is Easy, Aligned, and Moootivating!

Because nothing defines a good education like standardized tests and "moootivating" curriculum...

Hat tip to Bitch, Ph.D. for the Arenson article.

Earn 10 Pizzas, Piss Off Your Profs and Earn the Love and Admiration of Young Conservatives Everywhere...

We don't need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
~Pink Floyd

Forget the Avian Flu. The real epidemic lately is bugs.  Everything from your phone to your e-mail to your classroom is now subject to surveillance. 

Perhaps you've been feeling like you haven't had time to get reading done lately?  Feeling removed from your graduate classes?  Feeling like you don't know "who's who" in academia anymore?  Well, thanks to the UCLA Bruin Alumni Association, I'd like to offer you a quick reading list:

Douglas Kellner
Peter McLaren
Daniel Solorzano
Carole Pateman
Karen Brodkin
Sharon Dolovich
Carol DuBois
Sondra Hale
Eric Avila
Juan Gomez-Quinones

These are only a few of the faculty on the "Dirty Thirty" list compiled by the UCLA Bruin Alumni Association for being "too radical."  Among their "crimes" are the organizations they donate money to, their nationality, their family-relations (one professor is the nephew of Edward Said), the petitions they sign, their publications, and, of course, the content of their courses.

And now, students at UCLA are being paid $100 to hand in tape recordings of their professors' lectures. 

Charlotte Simmons: A Feminist Call to Reform Academia

Late this summer, I posted a few amusing quotes from Tom Wolfe's new tome on academia in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from the perspective of an up-and-coming member of the new intelligentsia, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

I picked up Wolfe's new book because I wanted a fun read before the semester began;  little did I know how the book would haunt me during a semester when I taught my classes bursting with first year students, wondering who among them was a Charlotte in hiding.

Months later, the book continues to resonate with me as I wonder how American public schools are failing young women,  how colleges and universities fail young women, and how basic gender education fails to make its way into our curriculum.  Almost 40 years after the feminist revolution, I can't believe we find ourselves in a place where Charlotte Simmons, bright and shining academic star of Sparta, North Carolina, is undone by a man.

Because Standardized Tests Ensure Equality

Yes, standardized tests:  the definition of equality in any educator's vocabulary.  Read Greg Palast's discussion of yesterday about New York City tests  and celebrate the fabulous gains of No Child Left Behind (insert sarcastic monotone...)

Everybody's a Critic!: An Academic Conference First...

Let me record an absolute FIRST in the age old art of reading an academic paper...

Some of the conference was held in an annex building to one of the old, old churches in Mexico  The building itself was a glorious example of early colonial Spanish architecture.  The building was built around a series of courtyards.  Inside, the corridors wove around the courtyards in extensive rectangular paths.  The high ceilings were bubbled, with one tiny cupola leading into the next.  The doors to rooms were a deep, polished wood with etched glass above each door announcing the name of the room.  I offer this setting so that you can better understand what happened next.

In the middle of our panel, as Female Parental Unit, Ph.D. was reading her paper, a sound that can only be described as the wailing of the dead began as a low, soft moan that built up to a hyenaesque chorus of screams, interrupted her reading.  Fellow academics:  she had to STOP reading her paper because it sounded like we were being invaded!  And indeed, it was a parade of the dead, raucously making their way down each corridor of the building in a parade of the dead for Dia de los Muertos.

Here's the group that interrupted our panel:

Women in Academia: Create Community!

I'm having a "reimmersion" fall.  In the two years leading up to tenure, I was consumed by projects on campus that sometimes had little to do with my area of research & scholarship.  So, I'm spending this fall writing papers & reading & presenting at conferences that are strictly within my area of critical inquiry.  Accordingly, having recently spent a weekend at a feminist studies conference & going to a meeting off campus about women' in academia,  I've been thinking a lot about feminist practices and feminist classrooms;  specifically, I've been struggling with how you establish a feminist community within a department that has many women, but doesn't seem to have a community established on feminist principles. 

Just in the nick of time, Three & Eight has a great speech on the importance of women & collaborative feminist communities of practice.  Read it!  Be inspired! 

Thanks to Bitch, Ph.D. for the heads up on the speech.

Another Reason to Hate Walmart

As if you needed another reason to hate Walmart?  Call it "extreme corporate curriculum":

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

Yeah.  The Secret Service and Walmart:  a great taste that tastes great together! 

The full article is here, from The Progressive.

Sigh. The IVAN TRIBBLE Question Again! Get Some Style!

The beloved and wickedly smart (and tenured full professor) Michael Bérubé on the latest casualty to academic blogging:  Daniel Drezner and Sean Carroll.  Among the challenges Berube offers to blog-critics (i.e. academic elitists) is Laura Kipnis' fabulous 1999 "Public Intellectuals Do It With Style":

What it means to be a “public intellectual,” then, is not only to be interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary and surprising rather than fetishistic, but also to seduce an audience that isn’t compelled by any particular compulsion (be it requirements of a major or “keeping up” with the profession), and that isn’t composed of enablers and co-dependents of the knowledge-fetish (who are non-academics, in other words), into donating its attention.  Thus, being a public intellectual demands modes of mediating one’s private fascinations and the driven aspects of one’s intellectual engagements in order to establish connections and rapport whose terms and publics are not dictated in advance.  I will designate these modes of mediation, style. . . .

 

It’s pretty obvious why the subject of “public intellectuals” arouses such antipathy in the academy: it poses a request, even a demand, to produce different and enlarged forms of mediation. . . .  Insofar as this demand represents an interruption of business as usual in our small corner of the world, insofar as it constitutes a critique of existing practices, it resonates with other critiques of entrenched privilege and power in the academy.  The demand for style—in the largest sense of the word—interrupts a largely unexamined academic privilege of largely unself-examining academics, that is, the privilege academics have long enjoyed to be boring with impunity.

The entire Laura Kipnis piece.

Academia: A Global Disease

Snicker... Snicker...A few global academic moments from Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons...

• At that moment the paranoia factory opened for business, tooled up for a day of capacity output.
• Now, I gather we all agree that Mr. Johanssen's paper was suspiciously far above the rhetorical level of any other work he had submitted.
• Plaudits for what you have achieved.  Strength for the fight ahead.  Never stop battling the fire, which has not died out.  Remember the prison-bound citizens.  Be scrupulous in your academic work.

Are You A Binger? I Am!

In Favor of Thinking has a great post today on Binge Writing, "the intense bouts of writing performed by those of us hooked on the adrenaline of a deadline."  In Favor of Thinking writes that the practice of writing, for many of us in academia is "the definition of tenure-track is Working For a Deadline.  A Huge Deadline." 

Like many others, I am definitely a binge writer.  I am putting the editing touches on a manuscript that started out as my dissertation, and then I will be launched into the world of "what's the next book"?  I have lots of ideas about this;  but I, too, am still having trouble breaking with the mildly romantic practice of staying up all night, pounding away against a deadline.

New Orleans: What about the Hospitals?

It's hard to begin to respond to the tragedies of Katrina.  From the personal to the collective, the stories of horror continue to unfold.  One of the most chilling stories, for me, however, continues to be the three hospitals in New Orleans.

Last night I taught my first class for my cultural studies of medicine course (csm).  I was preparing a lecture defining csm and outling our semester study.  Again and again, I came back to the videos I'd seen briefly on ABC and NBC of the hospitals running, without power, without backup generators, without provisions & I wanted to talk about what those images meant.  And interestingly, when I searched for images on the web to share with my students, I found very few that documented the horrific conditions of the hospitals;  it's almost as if the media itself was drawing a line about the kinds of horrors the American public could see.  Sure, there were the horrific pictures on the front page of the New York Times on Saturday, but those images were taken outside of the physical hospital building.  There were plenty of verbal descriptions, but few images.  Because to see the conditions that those doctors and nurses and other staff were working in was to question some of the very basic rights we have all come to expect as Americans.

The fleeting video images have haunted me over the last week;  they are, I believe, a microcosm of what went wrong in New Orleans and a powerful testimony to the failure of the government to respond in the midst of a crisis.

Gotta Phone? Get Busy!

Bitch Ph.D. reminds me that my e-mail box has been getting lots of visits from NARAL.

In honor of a lovely summer day, why not make a few calls to your senators on Thursday? 

PA readers:  Rick Santorum--(202) 224-6324 & Arlen Specter--(202) 224-4254

NY readers:  Hillary Clinton--(202) 224-4451 & Charles Schumer--(202) 224-6542

Cali readers:  Barbara Boxer--(202) 224-3553 & Dianne Feinstein--(202) 224-3841

Everyone else:  http://www.senate.gov

Here's the email from NARAL:   This Thursday, July 28, we're asking you to help us generate as many
phone calls as possible to the Senate. Here's what we need you to do:

1. This Thursday, call both of your senators:
  - Either call the Senate switchboard:
(202) 224-3121
  - Or get your Senator's direct line:
http://www.senate.gov

2. Tell your senators you oppose the confirmation of anti-choice
nominee John Roberts.

"Hi, my name is _________ and I'm one of Senator ___________'s
constituents. I'm calling to urge the senator to oppose the
confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. I know
Roberts has led a distinguished legal career, but he also has a
clear record as a legal activist who has advocated for the
overturn of Roe v. Wade and has used public positions to further
this goal. This is in direct opposition to the position of the
vast majority of Americans and Sandra Day O'Connor's legacy. I
ask that the senator oppose any nominee who will not respect my
right to personal freedom and personal responsibility.

I'm following this issue closely and will be paying attention to
how the senator votes on this issue. Thank you for your time."

Ivan Tribble: Do Not Apply

Max Barry has a wonderful little read called Jennifer Government that takes place in the near future where people's individual identities have been consumed by the corporations they work for.  John Smith, then, becomes John Nike when he works for the Nike corporation.  As those who live and work in Academia know, our work is becoming more and more corporatized;  the age of globalization has led to the corporatization (and cooptation) of everything from life-saving drugs to formerly "public" education.  Yet even within the midst of our changing workplace, faculty and student rights to freedom of expression continues to form the basis for a free and unfettered exchange of ideas. 

Many people have already written in to comment on Ivan Tribble's piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Bloggers Need Not Apply."  Mr. Tribble, hiding behind the safety of a pseudonym, sets out to inform job seekers of the trouble their blogs cause.  Tribble objects to blogs for a variety of reasons, some of which include:

Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.

We've all done it -- expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we're giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person's attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off.

I don't know where Mr. Tribble works, or what his institution privileges in its promotion and tenure process.  However, I'd like to suggest that Mr. Tribble seems to live in a universe where he believes himself to be the gatekeeper of the worst kind;  he holds the keys to a job where future employees must demonstrate their worthiness (on top of vitaes, publications, graduate school credentials) by demonstrating their "employability" through acceptable presentations of all spoken and published work.  The job market in higher education continues to be tough;  many more Ph.D.s earn their degrees each year than jobs for them to fill.  Accordingly, many of today's new assistant professors already have vitaes that challenge the vitae of an associate professor 15 or 20 years ago.   Now, Mr. Tribble wants to add to this requirement a new level of academic censorship.  So, the president of Harvard can publicly deride women's intelligence, but bloggers need not apply for a job or have an opinion.

To take Mr. Tribble's argument to the extreme, he seems to suggest that faculty words, ideas and publications must be vetted by the university in order to be published.  And so, we might find ourselves quite close to a Jennifer Government world where instead of having our own nomenclatures, we will now take on the names of our colleges and universities, embodying them in our own names and our own thoughts.  What's the next step?  Burning books whose ideas and opinions we don't like?  Banning books if we don't like the publisher? 

Mr. Tribble's analysis also overlooks the way in which blogging serves as a powerful democratic exchange of ideas;  to label it 3 a.m. whining is to seriously misunderstand the power and meaning of blogs in our contemporary society.  Do some people use blogging as a therapeutic forum?  Yes.  Do other people use blogging to share ideas?  Yes.  Blogs are a changing and malleable form;  blogs offer an interesting challenge to our uni-focal media.    

I agree that bloggers shouldn't publish things they don't want to be the source of public debate, comment and discussion.  And, when advisable, some bloggers--myself included--may decide to write without using their names, but that should be a choice, not a job requirement.  I don't want to teach at a college with colleagues like Mr. Tribble.  Instead, I am interested in working, teaching, and collaborating with faculty who value the power of democratic ideas shared in an unfettered forum. 

And The People Say:

Bring Me the Head of Ivan Tribble

The Trouble with Tribble

Either You Have a Job or a Blog

Coffee Grounds on Ivan Tribble

Ivan "McCarthy" the Tribble

David Glen's "Scholars Who Blog"

Culture Cat's entry on blogging

Against Other People's Words: My BlogHer Entry

Thanks to Technorati and BlogHer for the impetus for this prompt.  Why Blog?  WHY BLOG????

I have arrived, professionally, at a place in my life where I often feel like I spend my days speaking someone else's vocabulary and words are often no longer my own.  Every linguistic interaction becomes an act of compromise and translation.  Every written interaction becomes a document possibly destined for posterity.  The language of others:

assessment     remediation     basic skills     high stakes     rubrics     full intake     management     mediation     backstopping     control     budgets     leadership     cost/benefit analysis...you get the point.

In this milieu, I sometimes feel like I'm losing my voice.  Or rather, I felt like I had lost it.  From administrators to senior faculty to students to editors, it often feels like every interaction I have with other people revolves not around a shared vocabulary, but an acquired vocabulary necessary to survive.  I have learned to talk other people's talk.  I have learned to bend my words, both written and spoken, to other people's needs.

I was losing my belief in the efficacy of words, the power of language, the musicality and beauty of a single syllable.  I have always loved words that are mouthfuls, small fruits of language. 

plummet     pummel     scoon     ecstatic     architecture     burst     brittle     lingual     eclectic     labyr     superfluous     tremor    

And just as I was losing my language, I began to blog.  I began to blog about everything:  the small moments in my day, my political opinions, snapshots from a harried life, the moments I wanted to still in time. 

But even better than the public permanency of those thoughts was the dialogic possibilities it opened up.  I loved that people responded to my thoughts and my ideas.  I was learning to use language to connect with people again.

I'm not convinced that what I have to say is particularly original or particularly brilliant.  I am convinced, however, that the power to communicate--to put one's ideas out there and to receive responses to those words, is a powerful way to think about the way the world works and the way we find new ways to talk with one another.  The way words can change the world, one letter at a time.   

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Mad Lib U: Teaching Writing in an Era of High Stakes Testing

I became an English teacher, in part, because I love language; since I was a child, I have loved the way words sound, the way they look on the page, the way they come together in unusual and evocative combinations.

And lately, I sometimes think I am going crazy as I try to teach writing in an era of high stakes testing & assessment.  While much has been written and debated about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in K-12 public education, very little has been written about the ways in which NCLB has begun to enter community colleges under the same rubric of "standards" and "excellence."  Public institutions are particularly vulnerable to scrutiny.  Colleges are held accountable--in newspapers, in articles, and an public discourse--for every element of education.  Within a public system that was, until very recently, an open admissions system, this has also meant that my students, many of whom have come to our college under-prepared and under-served by their previous educations, are equally subject to public scrutiny.  Or, more accurately public derision.  Instead of viewing education as a right, a belief that drove me into public higher education, the "standards" movement within education increasingly means that our weakest students are driven out of the educational system because they can't produce and they can't pass these tests.  They are offered neither the time nor the nurturing nor the creativity of our very best teachers so that they can grow, learn and succeed.  The very clear message becomes, "If you can't meet the norm, you don't belong in school." 

While this is a controversial subject, with research and data to back up multiple positions on this issue, I'm most concerned about the way in which high stakes tests transform classrooms from creative spaces where minds blossom to reductive and restrictive spaces.  Call it "Burger King education" or "McDonald's U" where education becomes an assembly line of multiple choice tests and formulaic essays that are mass produced to calm the savage public's concern about "standards."  If every student receives the same education, minimal standards are met.  I want to be clear here:  by definition, the "highest" standards cannot be met.  So, the era of high stakes testing for "high standards" is a crock.  These high stakes tests are nationally "normed" which means that they appeal to a middle score--the "norm."   To get students to pass the tests, you have to teach to the norm. 

And our classrooms are increasingly defined by "norms," even if our students aren't.  In my case, that means classrooms that are reduced to using, quite possibly, the worst pedagogical approaches to serve the weakest students. My school uses a "nationally normed" examination that asks students to write a high stakes essay in 60 minutes.   As scores on these exams are increasingly used for hiring & promotion decisions, college teachers now face the same concerns as K-12 teachers. 

Our writing program is increasingly bastardized as instructors teach to the test, abandoning any principle of good writing.  I have started to call our version of teaching to the test the MAD LIB Approach to Writing Instruction, where students are taught that good writing amounts to a formula:  insert a particular phrase here, a particular example there, fill in the blanks and you have an essay.  Instead of teaching these students to harness their voices and to learn how to speak, this era of high stakes testing replaces their voices with a "normed" voice that uses weak logic & weak writing.  The passing essay on a "normed" test is an essay that fails these students, underpreparing them for success in college and suggesting to them that good writing isn't an art that can be practiced and honed;  it's a formula that gets memorized and reproduced.  Every Burger King whopper and Mad Lib story follows the same construction:  you put in the required elements and end up with a product.   And, of course, a whole industry springs up around this as the Mad Lib Approach to Writing Instruction increasingly requires specific texts and exercises to guarantee that students pass the exam.  So now, the Mad Lib Approach to Writing Instruction isn't just a boring, formulaic paragraph on the board;  it's a whole textbook that, quite literally, looks like a Mad Lib.

It certainly makes me love the art of teaching writing just a little less, but more importantly, high stakes testing angers me as it robs our students of their voices and their understanding of education as a significant means of social & cultural empowerment and transformation. These students are yet again pushed to the margins of society as students at elite colleges and universities learn cutting-edge writing with cutting-edge techniques and our students learn mediocre writing born of pedagogically regressive techniques.  Students at elite colleges and universities--and private K-12 institutions--are not subjected to the same level of constant public scrutiny, a form of class warfare on our students, all of whom deserve the very best educations that we can offer them.

Mad Lib U:  Where Writing Isn't An Art, It's a Formula! 

Not-So-Random Side note:  Thanks to Chris for leading me to Majikthise's discussion of Pearson Testing and automatic scoring.  Hey, if writing is formulaic, then why can't a computer score it?

This posting is PBU19 in conjunction with the Progressive Blogger Union.

References:
Harvard University's Civil Rights Project
The National Center for Fair and Open Testing
Rethinking Schools
Radical Teacher
The National Council of Teachers of English

Another Fired Blogger--From Starbuck's to SMU: You do NOT Have Freedom of Speech!

Today's post starts with Jon Brion's It was happy at the start when you offered me the part.  I didn't think it would turn out this way....As for my defense I can swear it made sense at the time...

The previously unidentified "Phantom Professor" has not been offered classes next term at Southern Methodist University.  While the university says "it had nothing to do with the blog and that they didn’t know for sure that the author was Liner. But they acknowledge that they were worried about the blog."  The author of the blog, Elaine Liner, and her students, however, think she is being punished for sharing her observations about the campus and its students.  Her blog, like so many other academic blogs, is veiled--the school is never mentioned--and students are not named specifically.

Many people have already commented on other sites about the relationship between blogging and academic fiction.  Richard Russo's Straight Man is a thinly veiled representation of Penn State Allentown.  And I could go on and on...

What interests me more is the idea of loyalty inherent in drawing a paycheck from somewhere.  I observed a class yesterday where the professor was teaching about "loyalty oaths" in relationship to Japanese Internment camps.  It occurs to me that the rash of blog-related firings suggest that when we begin to work for a company--from Starbuck's to the increasingly privatized University system--we are being asked to sign away our critical consciousness in return for a check.

For more on this: 

Bitch Ph.D.'s "A Cautionary Tale" and Adam Kotsko's "Academic Free Speech"
And from The Papal Bull, "A List of Fired Bloggers"
And, from the journalistic perspective:   Inside Higher Ed

Kudos to Sean Massey: Boycott McGraw Hill's Dangerous Sex "Education"

Sigh.  Some days, I just wish I was as witty and bold as I often think I am...or at least as cool and bold as my friend...

Last week, as I was hanging out during my office hours--unusually bereft of students--working on generic, ridiculous memos and who should come to my door but the McGraw Hill book sales representative?  Now, since taking my current teaching position, I have discovered that book reps are the scourge of the earth.  They wander our halls looking for any open door to enter and sell their wares.  It reminds me of the peddler scenes from old movies.  "Wares for sale!  Wares for sale!"  I have a general practice of sending them away, no matter who they are.  I have too much to do to sit around ogling the latest textbook (anyway, I don't USE textbooks.  I use books!).  But this time, I really missed my opportunity.

My friend sent the representative packing over their recent Texas "health" textbook which has redefined marriage as only between a man and a woman;  it also takes an abstinence only position on sex.  I wish I had taken the time to share my own views of McGraw Hill's insidious new textbooks.  Missing that opportunity, I take the time here. 

McGraw Hill has drawn fire for 2 reasons in the last few years.  First, as reported by Stephen Metcalf in a 2002 Nation article, the Bush family and the McGraw Hill family have a long history of working together and "cross-pollinating" one another's work.  In Texas,

over the years, Bush’s education policies have been a considerable boon to the textbook publishing conglomerate. In the mid-1990s, then-Governor Bush became intensely focused on childhood literacy in Texas. For a period of roughly two years, most often at the invitation of the Governor, a small group of reading experts testified repeatedly about what would constitute a “scientifically valid” reading curriculum for Texas schoolchildren. As critics pointed out, a preponderance of the consultants were McGraw-Hill authors. “Like ants at a picnic,” recalls Richard Allington, an education professor at the University of Florida. “They wrote statements of principles for the Texas Education Agency, advised on the development of the reading curriculum framework, helped shape the state board of education call for new reading textbooks. Not surprisingly, the ‘research’ was presented as supporting McGraw-Hill products.” And not surprisingly, the company gained a dominant share in Texas’s lucrative textbook marketplace. Educational Marketer dubbed McGraw-Hill’s campaign in the state “masterful,” identifying standards-based reform and the success of McGraw-Hill’s “scientifically valid” phonics-based reading program as the    source of the company’s eventual triumph in Texas.

The McGraw Hill/Bush connection and synergy around the "No Child Left Behind" legislation has raised liberal concerns for years now.  More recently, HIV/AIDS activists and educators have decried the new textbooks which provide misinformation by censoring health information for kids in Texas schools.

While the Texas education system pleads "abstinence" as the only viable approach to sex ed, the state's HIV rates are climbing.  According to the Texas Department of Health,

The overall AIDS rate for Texas was up in 2003, at 16.9 AIDS cases per 100,000 population, from 13.7 in 2002 (Table 2). Although AIDS case numbers had been falling in the late 90's through 2000, they have recently demonstrated increases: 2981 cases reported in 2001, followed by slightly lower numbers (2,956 cases) of AIDS cases in 2002, then increases of AIDS cases reported in 2003 (25% increase to 3,689).

So, cheers to to my friend for laying out the reasons she won't use McGraw Hill textbooks for her classes.  And, cheers to Binghamton University School of Education and Human Development professor Sean G. Massey who is leading the way by sending McGraw Hill an even stronger message.  He is the author of an on-line petition to boycott McGraw Hill's health "education" textbooks.

Action Steps:
Sign the petition

Quick Conference Papers--More Time for Margaritas!

Beloved Academics,

May I suggest this instead of writing your conference paper on the plane next time?

Thanks to Margo for the heads up...

Truth Becomes Fiction: Academic Satire

Following up on last week's "Do Not Throw Sand in the Sandbox" post, I neglected to mention the other time-honored tradition of post-tenured professors "having their say":  the academic satire.  Earlier this year, I prescribed myself a heavy dose of academic satire as a way of proving to myself that the wackiness wasn't just all in my head...

Recommended Fictional Rants:

Alfred Acorn's Murder in the Museum of Man
Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim
Marleen S. Barr's Oy Pioneer!
Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys
Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position
Don DeLillo's White Noise
John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts
James Hynes' Publish and Perish
Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution
David Lodge's Small World
John L'Heureux's The Handmaid of Desire
Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe
Ishmael Reed's Japanese By Spring
Richard Russo's Straight Man
Jane Smiley's Moo

Best Use of Pie Ever

Make mine lemon chiffon!  Check out the Midwest Pie Rebellion--and the interesting comments that follow the article on Academic Freedom.  Care to weigh in?

Do NOT, I Repeat NOT, Throw Sand in the Sandbox

This is today's "random bitching about academe" post.  I am sitting here dreading an hour from now when I have to leave for random, pointless academic meeting.  Writing day has turned into "let me waste your time with dumb meetings" day.  Like, for the whole semester.

So, I take this opportunity to offer my own theory about academia (rather than actually working on my book manuscript for 45 pathetic minutes.  *Sigh*).

All academics are seriously dysfunctional.  Therefore, all academic departments are seriously dysfunctional.  Why?  Because academics are the kids who got locked in the (insert any noun here):  mailbox, locker, "inappropriate gender" bathroom, etc.  Academics are socially retarded.  They don't know how to act around *NORMAL* people.  (And yes, I do include myself in this)

However, the degree of dysfunction clearly depends on the particular person and his/her baggage.  When all of the dysfunctional academics get into the sandbox (read department or division) together, some kids throw sand.  Others bury themselves.  Others leap into piles and spray everyone else with sand.  We can't just play nicely in the sandbox together. 

So, the process of getting tenure is learning how to negotiate everyone's dysfunction without getting caught in the middle (or learning how to get out of the middle).  Oh.  And build up random resentment in the process!  Oh!  And, constantly become disappointed by confronting other people's dysfunction. 

The result?  The blogging world dominated by newly tenured assistant and associate profs who finally feel like they can catch up on their lives and try to make some sense out of what their lives have become (and perhaps, while they contemplate new jobs outside of the academy...).  And who can finally say things like, "Foucault is not a new idea.  Foucault is not a new idea.  --OR-- Derrida did not create psychoanalytic theory.  You are WRONG!  WRONG!  WRONG!  But I couldn't say it until tenure!--OR-- I'm tired!  I don't even know what I like to do in my free time anymore!"  Blogging is a form of academic therapy.  You have to figure out just where your life went wrong.  And I'm betting it was one too many times in the sandbox before tenure...

How well you succeed in academia depends on how well you played in the sandbox as a kid.  Academia=sandbox.  My advice?  Don't throw sand.  And seriously?  STOP THROWING SAND AT ME.

Favorite Sites of Commiseration:

Bitch Ph.D.
Subterranean Homesick U
Playing School, Irreverently
The Little Professor
Advice at Your Own Risk
(and amen to her description...

I Am: An assistant professor in the social sciences with a long list of grievances and shorter list of things that are working in my life....

In Favor of Thinking
Tightly Wound,especially for the following entry:

If you must preface your comments with disclaimers such as "Please don't think I'm being an asshole for mentioning this," odds are you shouldn't be mentioning this.

Addendum - If you're the head honcho in charge and you feel compelled to use such disclaimers in a large meeting, the above rule still applies. In fact, the above rule becomes even more important.

This public service message has been brought to you by Big Arm Woman.

Crazy Ph.D., especially for this entry:

  Things accomplished since last I wrote:
1. Finished novel I'm teaching in my upper-division class.
2. Got in a crazy stress-induced argument with my mom in which we both made each other cry (but then we made up).
3. Felt sorry for myself.
4. Procrastinated.

Things I must accomplish between now and Wednesday:
1. Grade the papers that were supposed to be graded for today. (I blame the hour I lost with Daylight Savings for my failure to accomplish this.)
2. Grade papers/proposals to hand back tomorrow (which I must do since we don't have class on Thursday).
3. Read for my lower-div. class.
4. Write the conference presentation that I'm giving Friday (yes, it's not written).
5. Attend Ridiculous University Committee meeting.
6. Attend Annual Student Awards ceremony Wednesday afternoon.
7. Pack for conference.
8. See Freud to give him keys so he can check on Man Kitty.
9. Clean the wreck that is my home (not that much of a wreck, but with the writing it's kind of a swirl of papers at the moment).
10. Pay bills.
11. Meet with grad student I'm doing that i