thanks for not being a zombie

Your reading list:

1. "Serious Bloggers," by Jeff Rice at Inside Higher Ed
2. " To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me " (New York Times)
3. "Thank You, Professor Powerful," by Tim Burke
4. "goodbye, 15 minutes" and "please, 15 minutes -- just go" at Xoom

Jeff Rice argues that we should not treat academic blogs so seriously, and that if we do, we run the risk of stagnation:

When we become too serious about novel ideas too quickly, we deny ourselves the ability to experiment with and develop the very innovations in communication we are attracted to in the first place. In turn, we replicate processes already in circulation; i.e., we maintain a status quo and fail to explore possibilities raised by the new medium.

The NYT article had the potential to explore some of the interesting ways in which new media are affecting professor/student communication, but instead turned into yet another "Those darn kids!" piece. Meg, at Xoom, writes of her displeasure of being misrepresented in the article, and even chimes in on Tim Burke's blog to respond to his criticism of what she's quoted as saying.

One important thing that blogs let those of us in academia do is represent ourselves. Ideally, this would lead to a new image of who academics are. Of course, readers will often be able to see what they want in what they read, so that blog content will always be received by some as confirmation of the worst academic sterotypes already in existence. However, there's a great deal to be said for the way we make our work public in our blogs, not just the finished product of the syllabus, the article, or the book, but also the process by which we got there.

For example, I think the material found in the Teaching Carnivals does a great job, for the most part, of giving readers a window on the thinking behind what goes on in the classroom, and it allows for a kind of cross-disciplinary pollination that is too rarely found in other venues.

Academic bloggers also often create a persona in which the fullness of their lives is visible, from research and teaching to cooking and dating. There are naysayers in the IHE comment thread who argue that blogging about personal subject mattter is "lame," but they overlook the ways in which our personal experiences affect (positively as well as negatively) our research and our performance in the classroom. I'm not saying "anything goes" with blogs, but I guess I'm agreeing with what Rice argues about experimentation; let's not fear the unexpected in style, in content. Let's not assume we already know what's best for this brand new form.

It is not yet possible to classify and explain what academic blogging is, to create implied rules, to assume that there are neat generic boundaries that define the different kinds of bloggers. The genre is too new. We're still trying things out. If you're going to write about academic blogging, write about it as an emergent form, constantly changing, not yet (if ever) settled.

There are plenty of venues in which the only thing the reader sees is the starched shirt facade of the professional academic, and it would be foolhardy to argue that there's nothing wrong with leaving things this way. May we please give ourselves permission to explore a genre of writing where something different might take place?

Update: Links via Technorati of other bloggers addressing Rice's essay.

Posted by at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (1)

Comments were not working because of a denial of service attack on the 'Herders server, so Vika wrote me this email in response to my previous entry:

That sounds lovely! You mean a get-together place online, yes? IRC would be great for that...

Actually, I was writing about a face-to-face gathering, but online would be nice, too. Is anyone up for it? What are you working on in your research lately? Need help thinking through some issues? What's going on in your classroom?

If you're interested, let's figure this out and set up a time that we might spend an hour or so communicating in real time.

Posted by at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...then why aren't you dead?"¹

Things are going pretty well chez Zombie (Midwest division). I'm gettin' fit at the gym regularly with a new gym partner. My classes are going well. Time with friends and colleagues has been generous lately. Aside from living 1,000 miles away from L,² I have no complaints.

Here's something I proposed to the little group of us who go out to dinner about once a month. Inspired by Scrivener's standing invitation dinner parties,³ I suggested that we have a standing invitation get-together every week somewhere. If you can make it, great. If not, no problem. And let's make these gatherings into an opportunity to talk informally about what research we're working on, or what's going on in our classroom, or some other issue related to our fields of study. We already have a system whereby we share some writing every month or so, but this new tradition will be something different, something where we can feel comfortable sharing half-baked thoughts and ideas to see where they might go.

Everybody seems on board with the idea, so I'm hoping it helps make this a good semester for all of us.

1. Please forgive the seemingly hostile entry title. I love you, dear reader. Really I do.
2. Oh, yeah. That.
3. Sorry, too lazy to find the specific blog entry.

Posted by at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's time, once again, for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.

• "Blogging MLA," by Clancy Ratliff
• "MLA: The Random Example," by Scott Eric Kauffman
• "Nine Theses for the MLA Convention," by John Emerson
• "Three MLA Observations, one of them tangential," by The Little Professor
• "And I'm Off...," by Mel
• "And Finally, Done!," by Dr. Crazy
• "Incheckning," by Dr. Gaffel
• "Guilt Free," by KF
• "MLA! Hooray!," by Collin Brooke
• "MLA at Home," by Chuck Tryon
• "Off to MLA," at What Now?
• "Word Play at the MLA," at Inside Higher Ed
• "IHE on MLA," by Robert KC Johnson
• "Who's Afraid of the MLA," at TCS Daily

For now, my only observation will be (as I've said here in the past) that it is a shamefully shallow argument that is based solely on a familiarity with the titles of a few papers at the current or at previous meetings of the MLA.

UPDATE: As Henry and John Emerson point out in comments below, I should have been clearer in the last sentence above. Nick Gillespie writes

Despite its preeminence within academic literary and cultural studies, the MLA convention is the Rodney Dangerfield of such confabs, getting little or no respect not just from right-wingers who reliably scoff at the unmistakable left-wing bent to the proceedings but from liberal mainstream media who eye the jargon-choked pronouncements of the professoriate with equal helpings of disdain, derision, and dismissiveness.

Yet most of the "mainstream media" who bother to pay attention to the annual meeting of the MLA don't actually take a very in-depth look at what goes on there. Last year, I pointed to the annual offering on the MLA from the New York Times, "Eggheads' Naughty Word Games." As Gillespie notes, "somehow, the paper of record never seems to stop chuckling long enough to get around to actually reading the essays in question." Unfortunately, articles like this have successfully shaped the public's understanding of the annual meeting as a gathering of out-of-touch kooks, as the comments threads in various locations online demonstrate.

I would much rather read an article in which a writer attends the MLA and looks for (and actually attends) the panels that are most interesting to that writer, rather than the panels that appear most ridiculous. Although the MLA is not my favorite conference (too big, too chaotic) I've never had difficulty filling up my days with panels addressing topics that appeal to me: early modern literature, the digital humanities, and book history. Furthermore, the book exhibit (enormous!) and the cash bars are essential parts of the experience. And any account that fails to address the job interviews taking place at the annual meeting is really not worth reading. All of those elements are what make up the conference, not just the handful of silly titles one finds.

UPDATE 2: del.icio.us bookmarks for "mla2005" can be found here.

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (1)

Sometimes it feels like we wake up every morning only to have the same arguments over and over and over again as if the arguments we had yesterday had never happened.

Case in point: John Unsworth's 1994 essay, "Electronic Scholarship or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public," should be required reading for any future columnists who want to address academic blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In many quarters of our profession, and among some of its immediate neighbors, the electronification of scholarly communication has become the occasion of more than a little anxiety over the past five or six years. This gradual but apparently inevitable change in the way we go about our business is affecting scholars and students in many different disciplines of the humanities and the sciences, as well as academic and commercial publishers, tenure-committees, university administrators, MLA policy-makers, private and government funding agencies, and librarians. The change that is taking place has profound implications, implications that are ethical and philosophical, economic, formal and generic, legal, and--sometimes overwhelmingly--practical and procedural.

Our responses to this change and its implications have covered the full range from despair to rejoicing, but for the most part they have focused on the local effects of the situation, rather than on understanding our circumstances as a limited and special case of a much more general shift in the culture as a whole. With few exceptions, academics have not successfully addressed the public on the more global effects of computers, networks, and electronic communication, and where they have, their discourse has generally fallen prey to the impulse to celebrate or to condemn the imagined, rather than to analyze or even extrapolate from the real.

People, he wrote this in 1994. It's one thing to disagree with what scholars have been saying about electronic communication and academia for well over a decade. It's another thing altogether to just ignore--a la Ivan Tribble--what they've said.

Posted by at 8:19 AM | Permalink

Last night, I was IM'ing with Weez, who's currently attending HCI 2005 in Edinburgh, about this and that, and we were looking for other bloggers who might be at the same conference. We came upon one computer scientist whose blog is all business, which led to the following exchange.

Continue reading "crackalackin'" »

Posted by at 11:07 AM | Permalink

Poor Ivan Tribble. So misunderstood. He's back to defend his original column on why it's a bad idea for academics to keep blogs.

Bill Tozier thinks Tribble may have a point:

if I wanted to work in a slow-witted, risk-averse, tyrannically hierarchical, self-importantly pompous, committee-burdened, navel-gazing hidey-hole tucked far away from the world and its concerns ... well, I'd be in trouble then, wouldn't I?

Collin Brooke reveals the (small) kernel of advice at the heart of the columns:

I suspect that CHE isn't paying a whole of money these days to folks writing essays about "How I Hate Blogs." So you've dressed it up as market advice, a column "to help some people land tenure-track jobs." And if your point was "Don't blog; it'll get you in trouble" then even though I disagree, at least there was some point to your essay. Of course, that point, as you seem aware, requires more evidence than a "trend" (?!) identified from a single search in a single discipline at a single school. Originally, you seemed more than willing to make that particular leap in the interests of poking at the blogosphere.

If your basic point is "Be careful what you say," then I'm looking forward to seeing whether or not CHE bothers to pay you for a third column. Because that's not a warning that will help people land jobs--it's a bumper sticker.

Tribble thinks the bloggers who responded to his original column were missing his central point:

As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, I just don't "get it." That's right, I don't. Many in the tenured generation don't, and they'll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.

Here are a couple of other things I'm sure Tribble doesn't "get":

• del.icio.us links for "tribble" (add your own if you have an account)
• Technorati links for "ivan+tribble"

Tribble assumes that "many in the tenured generation" think just like him. "Many" is a useless word to job seekers. "Many in the tenured generation" haven't kept up with the scholarship in their field, either. Should job seekers try to appear to be equally clueless about the latest developments? "Many in the tenured generation" don't like people who drive imports. "Many in the tenured generation" have model train sets. Who cares?

The fact of the matter is that "many in the tenured generation" will be turned off by job applicants with a dismissive attitude towards academic blogging.

Matt K accumulated examples of the benefits of blogging. What has Tribble accumulated? Anything outside his own experience and opinion?

*crickets*

It's one thing to be ignorant. It's worse to be incurious. But worst of all is to be smug and willfully ignorant. Whether you blog or not, you'd better hope the hiring committees considering your application can't figure it out if the third of these describes your intellectual profile.

Posted by at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Via Slashdot:

Dogers writes "Robert Hare, creator of the Psychopathy Checklist, has recently been applying his test 'Is your boss a psychopath' to businessmen and has found some disturbing results. From the article: 'Why wouldn't we want to screen them? We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?'. Citing Enron and Worldcom management as an example, it seems a reasonable argument. The same source also has a quiz (magazine produced it seems) which allows you to test your own boss, too!"

Given that conservative critics of higher education believe that professors are running amok--filling their Renaissance Lit classes with reading assignments denouncing the war in Iraq (or something like that, apparently)--I wonder if they'd be interested in applying the same strict monitoring standards they want to legislate for, say, adjunct teachers of composition at the local community college to the occupants of corporate America's most influential boardrooms. What say ye?

Posted by at 11:43 AM | Permalink

I think this article would make interesting reading for universities that award modest grants to their faculty members through application processes involving review by faculty from multiple disciplines.

"The Sociology of IRB's," by Scott Jaschik (Inside Higher Ed):

For decades, but especially in recent years, social scientists have been frustrated by institutional review boards, campus bodies that must approve studies involving human subjects.

...there is...the question of how much deference IRB members give to different kinds of research projects. DeVries has been observing IRB meetings at a large medical center to study the dynamics, and he spoke at the sociology meeting about two projects that were reviewed by the board on the same day. One was a social science project — research on new ways to work with victims of sexual assault to find out what happened to them. The other was a medical proposal — on new drugs to treat serious skin diseases.

On the sexual assault study, nearly every member of the IRB offered suggestions on the study, regardless of whether the IRB member had any particular expertise in the subject area. On the drug trial, only “housekeeping details” were discussed.

DeVries said that many IRB members act as if they believe that there is “a softness” about social science research. “People feel that everybody can do sociology.”

But there is “deference” shown to medical research, he said. In addition, because medical researchers tend to appear before IRB’s frequently, there is “an easy rapport” between the researchers and the IRB members, while a sociologist may “be kind of novel.”

Posted by at 8:56 AM | Permalink

A recent New Yorker article ("God and Country," by Hanna Rosin) describes the mission of Patrick Henry College to provide a college education to conservative, home-schooled students and to streamline their path to positions of influence in the federal government.

This morning, we get an article from the Washington Post on the intellectual climate of the school ("Divide on Doctrine Fuels Fight Between Va. College, Ousted Clerk," by Rosalind S. Helderman). Jeremy Hunley works for Patrick Henley College, and he's a Christian who believes that one must be baptized to be saved.

College administrators told Hunley, a member of the Church of Christ, that the belief put him at odds with the school's statement of faith, which he was required to sign before taking the job. According to the 10-point document, salvation is found only through faith in Jesus Christ.

Patrick Henry was founded in 2000 to be an Ivy League-type college aimed at attracting academically gifted home-schoolers. The school's president talks unabashedly of birthing a new generation of conservative leaders who will reclaim the country from years of liberal sway. It is a bold mission that has attracted national attention.

Skeptics, however, suggested that the ouster of a low-level evangelical employee over theological differences could spell trouble for the school, spotlighting an exclusionary attitude that could turn off prospective students and make employers wary of graduates.

Not only did the college force him to resign, they sued him for making these remarks: "No Christian would deny Christ to save his job; certainly no Christian would ask him to do so." Nice.

Cf. Mark Bauerlein's Chronicle of Higher Education essay, "Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual," from November 2004.

Groupthink of any kind--not just liberal groupthink--is anti-intellectual, right? I wonder how (or if) the more strident conservative critics of higher education will respond to this story.

Posted by at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After thinking about the Tribble issue for several days now (and about some of the responses which seem sympathetic to some of what he has to say), I think that underlying the argument against academic blogging is some combination of the following:

1. You are inherently unlikeable. There is something (and there are possibly several things) wrong with you. If people find out about the real you, they will not want to hire you or tenure you. So keep your mouth shut. Reveal as little as you can get away with.
2. Your potential future colleagues are so narrow-minded and cranky that they are likely to reject you for any sign that you are a real, flesh-and-blood human being.

I do not believe in either one of these assumptions. And if they were widely held, who in their right mind would want to work in academia?

Another underlying assumption is that bloggers are on one side of the academic power divide and everyone else is on the other, as if only those without tenure-track jobs and without tenure are blogging. This is demonstrably false.

Careful. If you keep blogging, you won't land a tenure-track job. Not true.

Careful. If you keep blogging, you won't make tenure. Nope, not true, and not even close.

Let's say you've applied for a job, and I'm on the hiring committee, or any one of the bloggers who are tenured or in tenure-track jobs.

Do you really think we're going to say, "Blogging?! Why in the world has this person been wasting their time blogging?"

Please.

Four more thoughts concerning assumptions about academic blogging:

Answer: No they don't. Or rather, correct me if I'm wrong. What blogger has ever said this?

2. If you are spending your time blogging, then you are not working on publishing in peer-reviewed venues.

Answer: Many blogs function in part as launching pads for ideas that will later appear in peer reviewed venues. The initial thoughts are posted, feedback is solicited, an article is written, and publication ensues. Matt K has blogged portions of his forthcoming book from MIT Press. The writers at Crooked Timber, have, from time to time, discussed the ways in which blogged items have turned into peer-reviewed publications. A couple of things like that have also gone up at the Valve, as well.

Answer: Right. So don't blog. And don't wear a wedding ring in your interview. Don't give them any hint you might be gay. Don't talk about your kids. Don't order the only vegetarian item on the menu. Don't speak with any sort of accent. Don't wear anything but the blandest clothes. Don't talk about what kind of music you like, or the movies you recently watched. Don't express any opinion that anyone anywhere at any time might disagree with. In short, behave as much like a humorless robot as you possibly can. Job offers are sure to come rolling in because if there's one thing academics are looking for in a colleague, it's humorless, paranoid fear. We just can't get enough of it.

Answer: Come on. Someone who would say this is not even paying attention. The comments in Matt K's entry on the subject reveal that blogging has had many professional benefits for people. The Tribble piece sparked quite a conversation: over 300 posts and counting, according to Technorati. This conversation should make clear, there is an academic network that has been established by blogs (just as an academic network exists around listservs, around journals, and around conferences). Those who participate are part of that network, graduate students included. Being a part of this network has value, whether everyone outside of this network realizes it or not.

4. Academics should admit to doing nothing but work.

Answer: One can do things other than work and also complete an impressive amount of one's work.

I refuse to believe that we have reached the point in the academic workplace where one risks unemployment by answering yes to the following question: "Do you do things other than work?"

The strong negative reaction to the Tribble essay comes for the most part not from a sense that blogging should be considered serious scholarship, but from a sense that the Tribbles seem to consider everything you do besides work on your scholarship as an excuse not to hire you. It certainly doesn't make sense to list a very informal blog on your CV, but Tribble makes it clear that he'll use Google (and the Google cache, if necessary) to find out what you've been up to. That's pathetic, frankly.

But let's say you should heed his advice. Let's say that you hide as much about yourself as you can in order to get hired. And let's say you do get hired at Tribble University.

To land this job, you had to hide many aspects of yourself from your future colleagues. You had to make sure that you did nothing online that the people who apparently go to Google to look for dirt on you would find inappropriate. Now what?

Do you think suddenly your new colleagues are going to turn into warm and fuzzy, supportive friends?

You've got six years to make tenure. Those will be six long years of keeping your mouth shut, refraining from any discussion online that might come back to haunt you, refraining from doing anything that Tribble could use to deny you tenure, which seems to be just about anything.

Have fun.

On the other hand, let's say you didn't get hired by Tribble. I'd say you dodged a bullet.

And finally, let me make this statement (sorry if it sounds inappropriately grandiose): If I am ever on a hiring committee for a job to which you have applied, and you have included your blog on your CV, or I happen to find out that you have a blog, or I already read your blog...I pledge to treat you fairly as a job applicant and not to use the mere fact of your blogging as an excuse to discard your application.

Update: Thanks to everyone for your comments.

On a related note, today, Dooce links to this BBC News story: Digital Citizens: The Blogger.

I like that phrase Digital Citizen. It conveys a certain dignity to what we do in our blogs, and (as Kari points out) on del.icio.us, on Flickr.

You know who Dooce is, right? She's the blogger who inspired the term "dooced." She also talks a lot about poop, which I guess throws off the whole "certain dignity" thing, but what the hey.

She does offer some good advice in a sidebar to the article:

If you choose to blog under your own name never write anything about anyone in your life that you wouldn't say to them face to face.

I also think she's right on to say

The power of personal publishing is only going to get bigger. It's intoxicating.

Posted by at 6:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

I realize that in saying that blogging makes our work (the teaching, the research) public, I am implying that blogging itself is not the work we do. I'm saying, in effect, if I blog about writing an article, then I'm making my work public. However, if I post a blog entry about an issue related to language and literature, then that's just blogging.

Hmm.

Clearly that's an arbitrary boundary I'm drawing between blogging and work.

I thought about this after reading a thoughtful post by The Little Professor concerning historical fiction, a post that is both about the work that she is doing, but also an example of the work that she is doing.

One might say that the question should be something like, Will your blogging count towards tenure? or perhaps Can you list this blog on your CV? If so, then what you blog is, in fact, your work.

No, those questions aren't really satisfactory, are they?

Posted by at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday afternoon I met Cath Feely for a few hours worth of conversation about various topics including interdisciplinarity, theory, and the field of book history. Cath, a history PhD student here at the University of Manchester, has an online essay--"'Interdisciplinarity run riot': the pleasures and pitfalls of research design in book history"--touching on some of these issues at the Book History Research Network.(1)

One comment she made in our conversation struck me as particularly well expressed, and so I wrote it down:

People are realizing that they can engage with theory without being beholden to it. You can take something away from Foucault without becoming a Foucauldian.

This is certainly my sense of where things currently stand in the humanities, where it seems that scholars are willing and able to embrace a kind of self-conscious eclecticism without abandoning a sense of intellectual consistency.(2)

We talked awhile about studying the history of reading, and she encouraged me to get my hands on Robert Darnton's "Readers Respond to Rousseau" in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. And so I shall.

Of course, we talked about blogging, too. Cath doesn't have a blog, but she's a good candidate to contribute to a group project that's just a spark in my imagination at the moment.(3)

Oh, and Cath's mother is a school teacher who, back in the day, had as students the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. Apparently, somewhere there's a video of a school production of Jesus Christ, Superstar featuring a young Gallagher lad in one of the roles.

1. Cath notes that this is not a fully polished essay, and that she is not sure she still maintains all of the opinions expressed in the essay.

2. On a related note, this week sees the launch of a discussion of Theory's Empire over at The Valve. I think the discussion is a worthy project, but I'm just not that interested. The topic does not speak to my current scholarly interests or needs...I think. That statement may come back to haunt me.

3. Speaking of such group-authored endeavors: it will take me just an hour or two of work to get the teaching-oriented Palimpsest back online, which I promise to do before the next school term starts. Hosting complications appear to have been resolved.

Posted by at 3:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Matt K once asked "Will blogs kill listserv"?

As with blogs, academics have been using listservs for many years to exchange ideas, argue, rant, ask and answer questions. Would any hiring committee in their right mind look upon a job candidate's use of a listserv as a reason not to hire them? Hopefully not; the electronic exchange of ideas is one of the best features of academic life on the Internet.

Yet in a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Bloggers need not apply," the pseudonymous "Ivan Tribble" writes of those foolish, foolish academic bloggers who shoot themselves in the foot by putting their thoughts online.

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

Let's do a bit of cut and paste, shall we?

The pertinent question for [users of academic listservs] is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

Interesting, no?

Are listservs somehow exempt from the worst excesses of blogs? Hardly. Take a look at the July 2005 archives of C18-L (a listserv ostensibly devoted to all things eighteenth century) for discussions of this week's bombings in London.

I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, and to be understanding of one's need to vent from time to time. If hiring committees think that weeding out all the bloggers is going to keep the hard-to-handle folks out of their candidate pool, they are being hopelessly naive.

Attention world: I use my blogging powers for good.

But come to think of it, I need to start working on some sort of "Blogging statement of purpose" so that new readers coming to my blog can get a sense of why I do what I do...you know, I'll work on that in all my free time.

(via Bitch PhD. See also The Little Professor, Planned Obsolescence, and Acephalous, who links to many other bloggers' observations.)

Update: Here is what Technorati says about links to the essay.

Update 2: For an alternative take on academic blogging (i.e. informed and non-technophobic), check out Ralph Luker's "Were There Blog Enough and Time." (via ScribblingWoman)

Posted by at 3:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's a sunny, cool Sunday morning here in Manchester. The weather up north is not as warm as it was down in London, and that's just fine with me. I'm working on fulfilling Laura's suggestion regarding local pix. A local coffee shop features a free, 30-day trial of their WiFi service, allowing me to check in periodically. I had ethernet in my room in London, which is why I was blogging (and reading online) more.

Yesterday I became the last person in the world to buy a copy of the (so far very enjoyable) Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell. I also saw Batman Begins. My verdict? Best. Batman. Ever.

You know what? I feel good. Although L is currently several thousand miles away, and we will have spent a total of eight weeks apart this summer, I am made quite happy by being in the archives, reading otherwise inaccessible materials, and writing rough drafts that will (with any luck) appear as articles and/or as a book.

Happiness is not something I've blogged about a great deal. And happiness runs the risk of being boring. I believe it was Tolstoy who first observed that "Happy bloggers are all alike; every unhappy blogger is unhappy in his or her own way."

Continue reading "happiness is a warm blog" »

Posted by at 5:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The 2006 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies will take place in Montreal. (Or is that, ...will take place in Montreal, eh?) The calls for paper are now online.

Posted by at 1:55 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, I spent too much time poking at a troll with a sharp stick in the discussion following K.C. Johnson's essay, "Disposition for Bias," appearing at Inside Higher Ed.

I think an accurate summary of Johnson's argument looks like this (let me know if you think I'm being unfair):

Recent surveys have demonstrated that most higher education faculty are liberal. "[T]he faculty’s ideological imbalance has allowed three factors — a new accreditation policy, changes in how students are evaluated, and curricular orientation around a theme of 'social justice' — to impose a de facto political litmus test on the next cohort of public school teachers."

I.1 Many colleges (or divisions) of education have the phrase "social justice" in the descriptive language to be found on their websites.
I.2 Although "social justice" could be interpreted to mean different things, the fact that faculty are liberal must mean that teachers are being indoctrinated to accept only liberal ideas of "social justice."

II.1 Criteria used to evaluate future teachers now include a category called "dispositions."
II.2 One conference described this category as a way to train “teachers who possess knowledge and discernment of what is good or virtuous.”
II.3 Although "good and virtuous" could be interepreted to mean different things by different people, the fact that faculty are liberal must mean that teachers are being indoctrinated to accept only liberal ideas of "what is good or virtuous."

III.1 The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education guidelines require education programs that include social justice as essential to their programs to measure their students' commitment to social justice.
III.2 The fact that most faculty are liberal must mean that teachers are being evaluated according to a liberal understanding of what social justice means.

IV. One example from Brooklyn College is used as an exemplar of nationwide trends. As with many such examples brought up by conservative critics of higher education, this one involves Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

The concerns I have about this essay are pretty straightforward:

1. On Johnson's faculty website is a list of a little over 3 dozen examples of education college websites that indicate "social justice" is a goal of their programs. How was this sample constructed? What percentage of the total number of such programs in America does this sample represent? How prestigious are these programs? How many educators do these programs produce every year?
2. Points I.2, II.3, and III.2 are hypotheses that we could test with available data. Look at the syllabi being used in teacher preparation classes. What do they reveal about what's actually taking place in the classroom? Additionally, why not survey the students of these programs in a systematic way to ask them about their experience? Does any data like this exist?

In the comments, I pointed out that a study (PDF) completed by the conservative American Enterprise Institute provides data complicating the picture painted by Johnson and perhaps contradicts the conclusions in the essay. The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) puts it this way:

[The report] analyzed a national cross section of 31 principal-preparation programs and reviewed more than 200 course syllabi, covering almost 2,500 weeks of courses. They found that only about 12 percent of the course weeks focused on exposing principal candidates to different educational and pedagogical philosophies, to debates about the nature and purpose of public schooling, and to examinations of the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic context of education.

At this point, it was game on for "Art," who identifies himself as a "Graduate Student at Midwest university." If you cut through all the snark and ad hominem attacks, it looks like Art's main objection is that principal preparation and teacher preparation are so different, that to bring up a report on the former is irrelevant to the latter.

However, principal preparation programs and teacher preparation programs take place within the very same colleges and divisions of education. So why would the high-minded language about "social justice" that these colleges and divisions put on their websites result in liberal indoctrination in one program and not in the other? My requests for clarification were ignored.

I pointed out that the AEI study was a detailed survey of a great deal of data reflecting what actually takes place in the classrooms of principal preparation programs, and I asked if there was any similar data regarding teacher preparation. Art asserted, angrily for some reason, that this data does not exist.

One would think that at this point, Art would realize he'd just taken the legs out from under his own belief in the liberal indoctrination of teachers. But no, he seems to think he's won the argument. He throws in a great deal of rant about John Kerry, for good measure. (You see, the problem with Kerry and his followers is that they lack sufficient honesty. Unlike, you know, Bush.) And he seems to think calling me a zombie is a particularly clever insult. Gee, I hope that nickname doesn't stick.

Posted by at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Mel suggests a reading group to work though Donald E. Hall's The Academic Self: An Owner's Manual (Ohio State UP, 2002). Interested? Drop her a comment.

Posted by at 5:45 PM | Permalink

• The Home and the World: Why the frustration, Mano?
• New Kid on the Hallway: From student to professor
• Jill/Txt: happy not to be a PhD student anymore
• In Favor of Thinking: 31 Flavors of Guilt

Posted by at 6:43 AM | Permalink

In a comment to this entry, Limadean points to this editorial by Paul Krugman: "An Academic Question."

Surprisingly, not many bloggers have linked to this piece.

You wanna know why conservatives think there's a problem in academia and liberals don't? Here's a theory:

• When liberal students' ideas are challenged by their professors, they respond like this: Hmm. I hadn't thought of that. Interesting.
• When conservative students' ideas are challenged by their professors, they respond like this: Waaaah!

I kid! I kid!

Posted by at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A few thoughts regarding ASECS 2005:

• Giles Bergel, Katherine Ellison, and Eve Tavor Bannet each gave a stellar paper on the panel I chaired. As an added bonus, there was a good-sized audience for that panel, and they asked a number of insightful questions. Be on the lookout for Bannet's forthcoming book, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820. I do not know what Bergel and Ellison have in the pipline with regard to publishing their work, but those of you interested in book history would do well to keep an eye out for these names, and those of you interested in scholars doing a long history of information technology and media studies should attend particularly to Ellison's work.
• My new favorite way to read my papers at conferences is to blow up the font size, turn them into PDFs and read them off my laptop with Adobe Acrobat in full-screen mode. It's much, much easier than reading from paper, even if it's more time consuming to create and doesn't allow you the leeway of last-minute additions, deletions, or marginalia. People tend to frown upon reading from latops. Why is this? Do they think it's evidence that you've been working it right up to the conference? This would be bad because...? To pre-empt any frowning-uponing, I explained my composition process (longhand on a legal pad, then typed into a word processor, then converted to PDF) and why I use the laptop. I wasn't just being self-indulgent with this quick little preface, however; I was giving an example of cultural associations we have with technologies of communication and linking the example to the work that I do in the eighteenth century.
• My professional network is growing bit by bit. I have to work at this aspect of academic life, but it seems to be getting easier. One task I hope to fulfill this week is email followups with all the people I talked to. For example, I made an agreement with one person to exchange writing (like, right now), and I need to get that article draft in the mail to her.
• The grad student who corresponded with me about my diss came up to me to introduce herself. She said--approximately...I'd had a few drinks at the reception at this point--"Someone told me I should look into your work, and I wanted to introduce myself to you." Wow. I really need to wake up to the fact that people notice and respect the work I do, that I'm not a fraud who's masquerading his way through this, and that there are things I know and know how to do that can be helpful to people who are not as far along in their development as academics as I am. One person I met told me she'd been reading my blog for a year and was actually kind of intimidated by my authoritative persona. Really? Hmm. Even when you found out I can't even get my own university to give me summer research money?
• As much as things have been bothering me the last few months, talking with colleagues from all over has reminded me of the things in my (personal and professional) life that are quite good. Getting stuck in the imagined narrative trajectory of your life can be intensely counterproductive. Author your way out of it and into another.
• If you've attended 5 hours of papers being read from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., that's probably enough for one day.
• At the conference book exhibit, I took advantage of the 50% display copy discount to acquire Sensory Worlds in Early America by Peter Charles Hoffer, (a book with an Amazon page that led me to another interesing find: How Early America Sounded, by Richard Cullen Rath.)
• Someone who only knew what I look like from this pic said, "Oh, I wouldn't have recognized you without the blonde hair." And I replied, "Yeah, it looks kind of boring, now, doesn't it?" I need to get something tattooed or pierced, maybe.
• When waiting to use one of the hotel business center computers to check email, I noticed someone was writing an entry up for her LiveJournal site. Catching the username, I read her site when it was my turn to use the computer. She's an ASECS attendee, too. Was this unethical of me to look? I wouldn't have tried to see what the username (or even what she was typing at all) if I hadn't recognized the distinctive LiveJournal interface from a distance.
• The business center printer wasn't working at all during the conference. That's convenient. A little too convenient, if you ask me.

And so to bed.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I learned today that I'll be getting a substantial summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support my research.

Man, I needed that jolt of happiness!

Edited to sound more dignified and less cryptic.

Posted by at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

...with a bunch of people who study the eighteenth century.

I'll be going to ASECS 2005 in a few weeks; I'm chairing a panel and giving a paper. If you're going, please let me know. I hope to make the most of this trip. Sometimes it seems I miss out on networking opportunities when shyness kicks in. Any suggestions for overcoming this?

Also, for some reason the only flight home I could get leaves at 1:00 in the morning on Monday, so I'll have all day Sunday in Vegas to entertain myself. Any suggestions? It's a far cry from Boston.

Posted by at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of my colleagues tried to get the university library to scan some 19th-century documents to put online as part of her electronic reserves.

We can't do that. She was told. Someone may have bought the copyright.

No. No they may not have.

Posted by at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This link is a placeholder for me, but those of you working on academic monographs might find it useful, too.

Posted by at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Four or five of us plan to meet at 4:00 today (December 29) at the entrance to the book exhibit here at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Be there or be square.

By the way, weird comment spam problems continue here on Wordherders. I have temporarily changed the settings on this blog's comments so that you need to sign in to TypeKey in order to leave a comment. I anticipate being able to change back to open but moderated comments in the very near future.

Posted by at 9:30 AM | Permalink

Courtesy of the New York Times:

Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 120th of which begins today in Philadelphia.

Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from "Victorian Buggery" to "Bambi on Top" and the tragically hip "Judith Butler Got Me Tenure (but I Owe My Job to K. D. Lang): High Theory, Pop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Queer Studies."

The convention has become a holiday ritual for journalists, as routine as articles on the banning of Christmas crèches in public places, and every year a goodly number of those scholars tempt journalists to write articles, like this one, noting some of the wackier-sounding papers presented.

...What any of it has to do with teaching literature to America's college students remains as vexing a question to some today as it was a decade ago. There is, in fact, something achingly 90's about the whole affair. The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop.

As I've written before, articles like this are fundamentally dishonest.

[Update: comments taking place at Crooked Timber]

Posted by at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

While at MLA 2004, I'll meet with two of my professors from grad school (not at the blogger meet-up, mind you), people whose approach to their subject matter has had an important influence on my approach to my subject matter. They are, I would venture to say, my mentors. Saying that, however, causes me to feel a bit of embarrassment, like a grown-up who still sleeps with a security blanket: "Do you still need a mentor? Don't you have your PhD, now? Aren't you a professor, yourself?" Well, yes. But I still have my doubts and uncertainties, and I'm still not entirely sure how best to accomplish certain things in my career, like getting my book published.

On the one hand, we all develop into mostly self-sufficient individuals, but on the other hand, it's still helpful to have someone say, "Yes, I went through what you're going through, and here's what I did." On the third hand, I am not always comfortable admitting to my senior colleagues when I am having trouble with something because it sounds, in my own ears, like whining.

My questions for you, dear reader, are these (answer anonymously, if you like):

If you're in academia...

1. Are you still in grad school or are you finished, now?
2. Do you have a mentor?
3. What role does your mentor play?
4. What role do you wish your mentor played?
5. Are you a mentor to someone else? In what way?

If you're not in academia...

1. Do you have a mentor?
2. What role does your mentor play?
3. What role do you wish your mentor played?
4. Are you a mentor to someone else? In what way?

Posted by at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

...and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

This is truly outrageous news from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Education Department has canceled its annual grant competition for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education because Congress has earmarked the bulk of the program's $163.6-million budget for pork-barrel projects.

The program's budget, set in the spending bill for the 2005 fiscal year that Congress approved last month, contains more than 400 pork-barrel projects ranging in size from $25,000 to $5-million and costing a total of $146.2-million. That leaves only $17.4-million to continue support for existing grants, which means that Fipse program managers will not be able to finance any of the 1,530 preliminary proposals that have already been peer-reviewed.

What kinds of things has FIPSE paid for in the past? Well, for one thing, The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture. But now, instead of paying a few thousand dollars for an educational resource (and perhaps a few dozen others every year), built by world-class scholars, that can be used the world over for free, Congress has decided to support projects like the $5 millon Strom Thurmond Fitness and Wellness Center at the University of South Carolina? (Is that a joke? What's next? The Jayson Blair Center for Journalistic Integrity or maybe the Charles Manson Center for Peace Studies?)

Apparently Congress is getting its porky fingers on the FIPSE money because the tax cuts and the war in Iraq have drained the budget of a good bit of discretionary money.

See, and y'all thought I was just being sarcastic when I made fun of Bush during the debates.

Continue reading "how to f' up higher education..." »

Posted by at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last year, I posted the titles of all the papers on British Literature that were presented at MLA 2003.

This year, I'm doing it again. Why? Because people in the press and in the blogosphere tend to pull out a few paper titles, argue that they're silly or worthless, and then imply first that most of the papers at MLA are silly or worthless and second that contemporary scholarship in language and literature is.

It makes for amusing commentary.

But not only is such commentary intellectually shallow (mocking paper titles? please); it's demonstrably wrong. As I wrote last year, the majority of papers presented at MLA are "the kind of interesting work one would expect scholars of language and literature to be doing."

Continue reading "again with the mla?" »

Posted by at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The 2004 meeting of the Modern Language Association will take place in Philadelphia, 27-30 December. I would like to repeat my suggestion that academic bloggers who will be at the conference get together at some point.

Interested? Let me know.

Please also consider putting a notice on your own blog.

Update: Participants so far

• Matt Kirschenbaum
• Chuck Tryon
• Amardeep Singh
• Ryan Claycomb
• The Other Miriam

Posted by at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

"When the academic humanities are finally, definitively destroyed by the studied, self-important irrelevance of theorists' dogmatically inaccessible progressivist stance, no one will be able to complain that there were not cogent warnings of what was to come." -Erin O'Connor

If the academic humanities are finally destroyed--and reports of this impending destruction are greatly exaggerated--it will not be because of theorists. Death will come when people finally give in to the notion that institutions of higher education should be financially profitable enterprises run like corporations, and when they give in to the notion that the purpose of higher education is to allow those who partake of its benefits to earn more money at their jobs. What chance do the humanities have then? It won't matter if humanities academics are writing like Jacques Derrida or like Cleanth Brooks. All the good writing in the world will not save the academic humanities at that point.

"This thing upon me like a flower and a feast. This thing upon me crawling like a snake. It's not death, but dying will solve its power ... And as my hands drop a last desperate pen in some cheap room they will find me there and never know my name, my meaning, nor the treasure of my escape." -Charles Bukowski

Posted by at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Via a number of sources: "Cracks in the Ivory Towers," bu Polly Curtis and John Crace, in the Guardian.

Although the article is about a report on academic life in the UK, it presents much to think about concerning what's going on in America, too.

Posted by at 12:30 PM | Permalink

I'll be heading back east to visit family and friends in December. And yes, I'll be in Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association at the same time as many of the folks who read this blog. I'd be happy to meet as many of you as want to get together at this annual shin-dig. Last year, I met up with Chuck and Kathleen in the hotel bar (and I met Steven Shaviro briefly).

This year there seem to be many more likely-to-attend-MLA bloggers who are aware of each other. With that in mind, I've taken the liberty of creating MLA Bloggers. If you'd like to contribute, send me an email.

Also, let's all write to the organizers of the MLA to ask them to put the entire conference program online, so that misrepresentations of the work we do will not be quite so easy to get away with. What the heck, let's all write MLA President Robert Scholes.

Bonus Links: " The Academic Job Interview Revisited," by Mary Dillon Johnson (via Prof Grrrrl).

Posted by at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am generally disappointed with what's been written on the occasion of philosopher Jacques Derrida's death because so much of appears to be just plain wrong or poorly informed. I'm not just talking about people who refer to his writing as "drivel" or "nonsense." Those people are either stupid or intellectually lazy, and I've never been very interested in interacting with people who display those qualities. My mama didn't raise me that way.

I would never take a strong, public stand for or against some intellectual movement about which I am not very knowledgeable. If I don't understand something, my strategy is to defer extensive or ostensibly definitive commentary. This is what scholars are supposed to do. If you are irritated with Derrida because you read an essay or two in grad school that rubbed you the wrong way, or because someone told you what he stands for and you don't like the sound of it, then you are not qualified to pass judgment upon his work or its influence. I am as impatient as the next person with Derrida's often-opaque writing style, but comprehension is as much a function of the abilities of the reader as of the clarity of the writer.

If a student were to ask me to define deconstruction, the movement that Derrida is credited with founding, I would say something like this, "All seemingly coherent and self-contained systems actually contain within themselves the seeds of their own undoing. Something that seems to be one thing could actually be said to be its exact opposite." However, I would also acknowledge that this two-sentence description is probably violently reductive, and smart people have written reams on the subject. I would then help that student find some of that writing.

Here's something I did like, something that provides as accurate (to me) a summation of Derrida's intellectual project as we might ask for. Scott McLemee links to a 2003 piece by Terry Eagleton, who writes:

[Derrida] did indeed comment that "there is nothing outside the text", but he did not mean by this that Mme Derrida or the Arc de Triomphe were just thinly disguised pieces of writing. He meant that there is nothing in the world that is not "textual", in the sense of being made up of a complex weave of elements which prevents it from being cleanly demarcated from something else. "Textual" means that nothing stands gloriously alone. He has never argued that anything can mean anything, rather that meaning is never final or stable. No system of meaning can ever be unshakeably founded. "Decentring" human beings does not mean abolishing them, but denying that they can ever be independent of the forces that went into their making. To deconstruct does not mean to destroy, but to show that terms which seem to be opposites (say, "man" and "woman") violently suppress the ways in which they are secretly in collusion. Or, more generally, to show how every coherent system is forced at certain key points to violate its own logic. It is, Derrida has insisted, a form of political critique, not just a literary method. Indeed, he has recently described deconstruction as a kind of radicalised Marxism - a claim which is hardly likely to endear him to the killjoys of King's Parade, but which is scarcely consistent with claiming that he believes in nothing but writing.

Posted by at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

What a week! Two very smart people appear in high profile news outlets. First, Chuck, whom I've been friends with for over a decade, is one of the bloggers mentioned in a Guardian article on academic blogging. Then Seth Silberman, with whom I went to grad school, is quoted in a CNN story. I have a feeling the academic conference on Michael Jackson is going to attract criticism from the usual reactionary quarters (haven't looked yet). Seth is no stranger to controversy: when he taught a course on sexuality at the University of Maryland, there were those who were up in arms over the use of the film Showgirls in the classroom.

Posted by at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm working on a lot of things at one time, and the stress is at just about the right level. Too much stress: bad. Too little stress: arguably bad, too. I think my low-grade mania is the result of this stress. Either that or all the allergy medicine I'm taking. Not even counting the personal stuff, here's what's going on:

• I've organized my ASECS panel, so that's done, but I'm hoping to put another one together, which will be chaired by someone other than me.
• I found myself a roommate for ASECS so the hotel costs will be half what they would ordinarily be. I need to go ahead and make the reservations just to get that task out of the way (or maybe that's the allergy medicine talking).
• For the first time ever, I've been invited to give a talk. Actually, two of them.
• I've been asked to submit a paper to a special journal issue on Charles Wesley.
• I need to get cracking on editing a special issue of another journal on the eighteenth-century English sermon.
• I considered, then turned down, a request to organize next year's meeting of MWASECS. I just can't afford to take that kind of time until after I have tenure.
• About a half-dozen proposals and/or applications are due in the next two weeks. Stuff I'm excited about. Stuff I don't want to screw up. Stuff that will take me to England next year and/or buy me a semester or two away from teaching so that I can work on the book.
• I'm revising an article for a journal. I'm late. That's okay, right? I mean, turning in a revised article beyond the deadline is not a fatal flaw, is it?
• I need to finish my book proposal and circulate it among potential publishers.
• Classes are going well (I'm very happy with both of them), but I have a stack of grading I need to take care of.
• I have two students doing independent study with me this semester, and I really need to engage with them more actively than I have so far.
• I'm also involved in the UMKC Honors Program as their first faculty fellow, and that taking a lot of ideas out for a spin to see how they handle. Hopefully I won't crash.

Here's what I need from you: What advice do those of you who have had some success at academic grant writing have for me? And are any of you willing to read over something I write and give me your feedback?

Posted by at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The SHARP panel at ASECS 2005 (my original CFP here):

Chair: George Williams

Panelists

Giles Bergel (Queen Mary, University of London), "Shifting the boundaries of 'the shift from script to print': the case of engraved lettering."

Katherine Ellison (Emory University), "Tracing the Way of an Eagle in the Ayre: Script and Print in Seventeenth-Century Cryptography Manuals"

Betty Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University), "Vicarious Reading, Manuscript Culture, and Johnson’s The Rambler"

Rory Wallace (Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design), "Wish You Were Here"

I received enough good proposals for a second panel on the topic, and I've asked the conference organizers if they could accommodate an additional panel. I'll keep you posted...

Posted by at 7:21 PM | Permalink

...at ASECS 2005:

Panel Title: Between Anachronism and Antiquarianism: 18th-Century
Experiences and 21st-Century Interpretations

Chair: Jeffrey S. Ravel, MIT

Paper 1: Kevin Berland, Pennsylvania State University , "The Author vs. the Archive: Historiographical Problems in William Byrd's Dividing Line Histories"

Paper 2: Carol Martin, Texas State University-San Marcos , "From Fascinated Gaze to Fetishistic Construction: A Reading of Antiquarianism and Anachronism in the Context of 18th Century Studies"

Paper 3: Downing Thomas, University of Iowa , "Staging Early French Opera"

Paper 4: George H. Williams, University of Missouri-Kansas City , "Rewriting Religious History: the Case of Methodism"

I'm still putting waiting to hear from those I've accepted for the panel I'm chairing, so I can't post those titles yet, but it looks like it's going to have some great papers. Info to come later.

Posted by at 4:40 PM | Permalink

"When the devil came, he was not red. He was chrome, and he said, Come with me." - Wilco, "Hell is Chrome" [listen online]

Wow. While I wasn't paying attention, a bunch of new academic blogs sprang up over the summer months:

• This Academic Life: "Academia als Beruf," or, an occasional record of the various aspects of my life as an academic.
• Bitch Ph.D.
• The Chronicles of Dr. Crazy: Thinking for a living is serious business.
• The Cul de Sac: Living the Burbs, Where the Margin is the Center The Center, the Margin and Everyone wants to live on a road going nowhere.
• Professor Dyke: A Writer and Professor Talks Smack About Writing, Publishing, Teaching, Misadventures on the Tenure Track, and the Perils of Being the Only Single, Non-Student Dyke in Smalltown-Collegeville
• Eudaemonia's Horizon: A light-hearted romp through life, love & philosophy at the bottom of the atmosphere...
• In Favor of Thinking: life in academia, yoga, movies, books, ideas, general rants ...
• Just Tenured: A recently tenured associate professor at Little-Known U rediscovers life in academia and beyond. Is there light at the end of the tenure-tunnel? Where am I going and what am I doing?
• New Kid on the Hallway: Negotiating a new job and a long distance marriage, while trying to avoid the bullies and hang out with the cool kids on the academic playground.
• No Fancy Name: No fancy description. I'm really quite boring, not creative at all. I also can't match my socks.
• Playing School, Irreverently: Whee! Adventures on the tenure track ... and beyond. All aboard!

I'm not caffeinated enough to have anything to say about all this, yet, but you might find interesting the recent (and perhaps unfinished) conversation about identity and blogging. As Chuck speculates, maybe this time of year encourages such reflections.

Posted by at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I started reading Deborah Tannen's Argument Culture (Booksense) today because I am considering using it for my election-themed composition course this fall. Tannen's view of the contemporary state of argument and debate is strikingly different than that of Gerald Graff, who basically advocates acknowledging and even embracing conflict. (Granted, these are pretty different projects: one on academia and the other on public discourse.) Tannen, by contrast, questions the prevalence of argumentative conflict to begin with, asking if it sometimes gets in the way of real understanding and, importantly for my purposes, the democratic process. At the end of her first chapter, she writes

Philospher John Dewey said, on his ninetieth birthday, 'Democracy begins in conversation.' I fear that it gets derailed in polarized debate.

In conversation we form the interpersonal ties that bind individuals together in personal relationships; in public discourse, we form similar ties on a larger scale, binding individuals into a community. In conversation, we exchange the many types of information we need to live our lives as members of a community. In public discourse, we exchange the information that citizens in a democracy need in order to decide how to vote. If public discourse provides entertainment first and foremost - and if entertainment is first and foremost watching fights - then citizens do not get the information they need to make meaningful use of their right to vote.

Of course it is the responsibility of intellectuals to explore potential weaknesses in others' arguments, and of journalists to represent serious opposition when it exists. But when opposition becomes the overwhelming avenue of inquiry - a formula that requires another side to be found or a criticism to be voiced; when the lust for opposition privileges extreme views and obscures complexity; when our eagerness to find weaknesses blinds us to strengths; when the atmosphere of animosity precludes respect and poisons our relations with one another; then the argument culture is doing more damage than good.

I offer this book not as a frontal assault on the argument culture. That would be in the spirit of attack that I am questioning. It is an attempt to examine the argument culture - our use of attack, opposition, and debate in public discourse - to ask, What are its limits as well as its strengths? How has it served us well, but also how has it failed us? How is it related to culture and gender? What other options do we have?

...There are times when we need to disagree, criticize, oppose, and attack - to hold debates and view issues as polarized battles. Even cooperation, after all, is not the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict. My goal is not a make-nice false veneer of agreement or a dangerous ignoring of true opposition. I'm questioning the automatic use of adversarial formats - the assumption that it's always best to address problems and issues by fighting over them. I'm hoping for a broader repertoire of ways to talk to each other and address issues vital to us (25-26).

I hope to finish this book in the next day or so, but I'm already leaning towards using it.

Posted by at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hey, you! Yes, you! Non-academic reader. This post is for you as well as my academic readers. What are your thoughts? Apropos of my previous post (and future ones), I like these paragraphs on the gap between scholars in academia and the general public from Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education:

Part of the problem lies ... in the peculiar difficulty of representing intellectual developments in the press. A vulgarized version of a theory or critical approach is inevitably easier to describe in the confines of a brief news article than the best, most sophisticated version of the theory or approach. A doctrinaire assault on 'dead white males' can be easily summearized in a column inch or two, whereas it would take many pages to describe intellectual movements that are complex, diverse, and rife with internal conflicts. Glib falsifications can always be produced at a faster rate than their refutations.

Then, too, few readers of the popular press are in a position to recognize misrepresentations of academic practices, a fact that relieves anyone who wants to debunk these practices of the responsibility to do their homework. So feminism, multiculturalism, and deconstructionism are understood not as a complicated and internally conflicted set of inquiries and arguments about the cultural role of gender, ethnicity, language, and thought but as a monolithic doctrine that insists, as D'Souza formulates it, 'that texts be selected primarily or exclusively according to the author's race, gender, or sexual preference and that the Western tradition be exposed in the classroom as hopelessly bigoted and oppressive in every way' ['Illiberal