Academia: June 2004 Archive Page

Let's say a mother finds an application to Duke University's Ph.D. program in English under her daughter's mattress. Obviously the mother is devastated. If she does nothing, in a year her daughter will be dressed in black and sneering in obscure jargon at the Thanksgiving turkey and Aunt Sally's cranberry Jell-O mold. Where can a concerned parent turn for help?

To serve this need, former academics could reinvent themselves as counselors; they could coordinate interventions with the friends and loved ones of people who are flirting with graduate school, or who have been enrolled for several years but lack the will to leave, or who are trapped in dead-end adjunct positions. These "academic exit counselors" could foster the kind of loving, supportive environments that "academic captives" need to return to a normal life. --"Thomas H. Benton"

--Is Graduate School a Cult? (Chronicle)

I had a pretty good experience in grad school, though it was research assistantships on humanities computing projects that made me want to get out of bed each morning, not really the classes or the solitary work on my dissertation (a literary and theatre-history examination of the theme of technology in American drama).

Those who complain loudly about how many jobs have been “exported” to other countries because of international free trade totally ignore all the jobs that have been imported to the American economy because of that same free trade. Siemens alone employs tens of thousands of American workers, and Toyota has already produced its ten millionth car in the United States. --Thomas Sowell --Low Taxes Do What? (Hoover Digest)

I'd never considered this perspective before. Here's another fascinating quote, an attempt to counter the meme that Regan cut taxes for the rich and soaked the poor, leading to defecit spending:

What Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” actually cut were the tax rates per dollar of income. Out of rising incomes, the country as a whole—including the rich—paid more total taxes than ever before.

As Sowell puts it, "Simple stuff like this is not very exciting for economists, and there is no payoff in one’s professional career for clarifying such things for the general public." That kind of explanation won't fit on a bumper sticker as easily as something designed to get you in the gut, like "AIDS: The Reagan Vietnam."

Sadly, I think that regardless of their political persuasion, this topic would probably put the average freshman comp student to sleep, so I won't bother Googling for a good counter-opinion to present as a pair of readings. Someday maybe I'll teach an upper-level rhetoric course...

Blogging is dead, long live blogging. I suspect that over the next few years we will see a lot of calls suggesting that blogging has died, and I suspect that in a sense they will be right. The act of keeping a "Weblog" as a separate entity will become something of an anachronism. The broader world of collaborative Web publishing will continue to grow and converge with other technologies, including IM and e-mail. Imagine asking someone today if they are an "e-mailer." That question made sense, among a certain group, 15 years ago, when you weren't sure if someone had e-mail or not. I have a feeling that the production of public media -- whether in the form of Weblogs, wikis, collaboratively filtered lifelogs, or some form that I am too shortsighted to predict -- will be the moving force of a new era. --Alex Halavais participates in an e-mail interview by Mark Glaser
--Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication (Online Journalism Review)

Only getting around to blogging this now.

The genre of "e-mail questions to a bunch of people and compile their answers" certainly speeds up the process of getting the news out, but of course it only works when the people you interview want to talk about their subject.

The way that desks and chairs are arranged in a professor's office send subtle signals. If you use your desk to block your doorway with a confrontational barrier like they do at, say, a police station, well then you're not only being uninviting, you're also responsible for all those nervous tics the students make when they do come talk to you. Think of the angles of the furniture: are they more "open" than "closed"? Do they invite conversation and informality, or do they put too many barriers between you and the student. While it's true that you may not want to be completely open and intimite with your students -- like, say, sitting beside them on a big puffy couch -- you might find that rearranging the furniture liberates some of the angst students have when they come to your office. So will little details like having family pictures on the desk, putting art on the walls that reflects your personality, having knick nacks or other things that students can look at when they want to avoid eye contact, or conversation pieces to get the shy ones talking...etc., etc. Be professional, yet open. --Mike Arnzen --Tips for Office Hours (Pedablogue)

A good collection of musings on office hours.

I've always arranged my office so that there isn't a barrier (such as a desk or bookcase) between me and the door, so that students who stop by won't feel they are imposing.

I generally work with the office door open. I will shut the door partway or completely in order to signal various degrees of isolation that I desire. When I really want to concentrate, of course, I take a stack of papers or a book and I find a quiet corner on campus.

Oxford and Cambridge interviews have long been the stuff of legend, or more probably, urban myth. Most people have heard the story of the candidate who is supposed to have set fire to his interviewer's newspaper when asked to surprise him, or the student who, when asked to describe bravery, said "this" before walking out of the interview.

Other questions asked of Oxbridge applicants included:

English: "How does the author use hay fever as a metaphor in Howard's End?

Philosophy and psychology: How do you test social stereotyping?

Philosophy and Spanish: "If everything is predetermined, should we punish criminals?"

English: What is the point of me teaching you?"

History: "To what extent is it possible to trace the history of the use of sound?

Social and political science "What do you think is the effect of the Japanese mafia on Brazil and America?"

--Sarah Womack --How Santa's reindeer can lead to Oxbridge (Telegraph)

When Sandy called to tell me that she had been fired over the essay she had written for class, I felt like Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial?arrested without charge, guilty of something, but uncertain of what. I had been teaching writing since 1971, and to my knowledge a student had never before been fired for writing an essay for class. After the phone call, I tried to convince myself that I had done nothing wrong, merely given an open-ended writing assignment. I wanted to believe that my sense of having been arrested was caused more by moral outrage over an abuse of political and economic power than by anything for which I personally could be held responsible. Now, nearly a year after Sandy's phone call, I still feel a sense of outrage; but I also recognize that I was culpable, that in my teaching I had perhaps not committed a crime of commission, but that certainly I deserved to be charged with a crime of omission: in my naivety, I had failed to tell students the whole truth about writing. --Michael Kleine, in an article co-authored by Sandy Moore
--Toward an Ethics of Teaching Writing in a Hazardous Context?The American University (JAC)

Via This Public Address.

The grading system for courses offered by CCS is focused on accomplishment, a combination of Pass/No Record grading and variable unit credit. For each course taken in the College, the student enrolls for a specific number of units of work that he or she plans to do during the quarter, from 1 - 6 units. (See Course Descriptions and ask your instructors regarding unit level guidelines in various courses). At the end of the quarter, the instructor of each course determines the number of units each student'swork merits (based on the quantity of work done at high quality level). If you earn no units of credit, the course does not appear on your transcript. You should request specific information from your instructors at the beginning of each quarter on what is expected in order to earn the number of units you desire. Though there are no letter grades in CCS classes, students are expected to maintain a high level of quality in all the work they do to fulfill academic requirements. --CCS Grading System (UCSB College of Creative Studies)

Fascinating. Students still need 180 credits to graduate, but a bright student could theoretically graduate in half the time.

I have done something like this on a small scale at my previous job, giving students some flexibility in setting their own deadlines. I did have some problems with students turning in no work for a month, then doing all-nighters to turn in three papers in the last week of class -- expecting me to get them back in enough time for them to revise and resubmit the next week. So I had to set some limits -- e.g. students couldn't submit paper 2 until I've approved paper 1; they couldn't submit first drafts of paper 2 and paper 3 in the same week (since the point of paper 2 is to give the student practice that will help them produce paper 3).

I spent a lot of time explaining this method, and I think it really did help me spend most of my time with those students who were most motivated to learn, but I'm not sure it helped those students who overestimated their abilities and only got serious about the course in the last month. Some of the same students who hated being nagged early in the term complained that I gave them too much freedom... and the more I tried to emphasize the importance of sticking to deadlines, the more negative my "welcome to the class" lecture got to be.

I really think the sequenced assignments were a beautiful thing, because they established a direct link between a student's academic habits and their consequences. Students who chose to take a little vacation ended up running out of time before they got to the major assignments -- and the class was designed to reward those who kept up... which is a polite way of saying it was designed to make sure that student procrastination didn't create extra work for me.

My thought is, in a writing class, I'd rather a student write and re-write two papers until they are A-level quality, even if it means they run out of time and can't even start the next two papers, than get Cs on all four papers without revising any of them. I greatly simplified my system when I came to Seton Hill, but I'd like perhaps to bring it back on a smaller scale.

Link found via Jocalo.

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. --ImageText 1:1 (University of Florida)

Via join-the-dots. Bobby, take note!

The York Corpus Christi Cycle, a collection of brief plays that together tell Biblical history from Creation to Doomsday, was the most complex of the medieval mystery cycles. The surviving manuscript of 48 plays (with a combined length four times that of the longest Hamlet text) and the civic and guild records of the town of York give us much information on the nature of those productions, which took place annually on the feast of Corpus Christi from the late 14th century to the early 16th century. The scholarly debate over how the plays were performed has settled down in favor of what had been the traditional view -- that each short play, mounted on an individual stage-wagon, was pulled through the streets of York, stopping to perform for audiences that had gathered at predetermined "stations" along the route. --Dennis G. Jerz --The Staging of the York Corpus Christi Plays (PSim: York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator)

This article is getting musty, but I like trotting it out as the Feast of Corpus Christi nears.

I update the home page fairly regularly, considering I did the programming 10 years ago (during the summer before my wedding) and got the article published 7 years ago. (Egad, what a horrid background image I used...)

We have often noticed, as we stroll down the hallways of academic buildings, how the doors of the faculty beckon to us -- with whispers and insinuations, exhortations and declamations, jeers and jests -- via a motley collection of decorations: cartoons, articles, quotations, posters, advertisements, photographs, and artwork.

What motivates such postings by that increasingly threatened species, the North American professor? How do those office doors reflect upon the professors or the disciplines in which they study and teach? --James Lang --Office Doors of the North American Professor  (Chronicle)

On my office door:

A printout of my home page (redesigned so it fits on one page).

A brand spanking new nameplate (everyone on the floor seems to have gotten one, which sends a nice unifying, inclusive message).

A small number of business cards, stuck by the corners in the windowpane and fanned out for the taking. They disappear at the rate of about one a month. (Every so often I rearrange them so it looks like one has just been removed, and then for some reason they disappear quickly after that... maybe because they fall out and get swept up... I don't know.)

To the side of my door:

Articles from The Onion: deconstructing a Mexican take-out menu, and "English Replaced to be New Syntax With." Maybe one more that I can't remember. (I'm blogging this from home.)

A feature from the local paper on Pittsburgh weblogs, forwarded to me by an administrator. (Two pages, with artsy pictures of computer keyboards and bloggers.)

Ditch the reader and have students purchase a choice game or two, or perhaps an anthology of classic games (which are also available for free). Have students play games and reflect on their experience rather than work with print texts. I would like to say to an incoming class, "We won't be reading any novels in this class. We don't be doing any reading, as a matter of fact. Instead, we're going to play videogames." Is this insane? --Matt Barton --Videogames in Composition & Rhetoric (KairosNews)

Er... yes.

While I agree that it's not necessary to read novels in order to learn freshman composition, students have to read essays if they are being asked to write essays.

I'd say about half of college students consider themselves "gamers," though many of those who don't say they used to play games. If there's a meaningful selection process, by which students can select a section with an emphasis that appeals to them, then a games-focused freshman comp course sounds wonderful.

In passing, Matt suggests that Quake could help students learn how to drive the Martian rover. The distance between Earth and Mars results in such a great time delay (about 20 minutes) that the skills one develops in a twitch game really wouldn't help much. Chess would probably be better (as it forces you to see multiple alternatives and plan ahead for them).

But, as Matt notes, the purpose of a rhet/comp course is not to train people for specific jobs. I think he's much closer to the target when he mentions political simulations and other ideological games. I also like his observation that there is a demand for slide presentation skills, but that we aren't doing a very good job teaching those skills.

While my school requires all students to demonstrate basic PowerPoint skills, I actively discourage slide shows in my classes, since I find them typically to be of such low quality and I haven't the time to teach how to use a slide presentation effectively. I'll be teaching a "Writing for the Internet" course this fall again... maybe that will be the right place to tackle this issue.

I felt one paragraph called for a more detailed response:

Perhaps videogames are the last tool available to modern compositionists that can actually inspire students to learn to write. Of course we could allow students to "play games" with the texts they produce, constructing choose your own adventures. I see things on a deeper level; teach programming (or at least a game making software tool) so that students may express themselves in the language of their generation.

The last tool? No, just the latest tool. And all that is playful is not games... that is, "playing games" with existing works of literature is completely different from what goes on when you interact with a computer game.

The narratological approach that Matt uses makes a great deal of sense in the particular branch of computer games that I study, namely interactive fiction. But I think it's probably too much, at this point, to ask the average student to learn a computer programming language and construct a game in a freshman comp course. At an engineering school? Sure! But at a liberal arts school? Sadly, no.

See also a recent blog conversation under "Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies." Both kinds of scholarship are important, and I did spend one day introducing my upper-level English students to IF programming, but these were juniors and seniors, whom I could assume had already mastered the basic reading and writing skills that a freshman comp course is supposed to give them. But "user mods" and the "remix culture" are certainly valid and important topics to address, in terms of the attitude of today's youth towards the dissemination of intellectual property, and the open source philosophy (of which Matt is a devoted supporter).

A college writing class is a good place to get students to think about their own creation of intellectual property. And having a freshman comp class create and peer review wiki articles may be a useful way to get them to think about the function (and limitations) of peer review.

If videogames have not yet risen to the elite status of famous novels, it is no fault of videogames, but rather money-hungry developers, narrow-minded players, and traditionalist literary critics unwilling to replace their pen with a joystick.

Don't forget the importance of the cult of the author as celebrity. Modern videogames may be inspired by brilliant designers, but they are products of huge committees of highly-specialized workers and outsourced labor -- including many people who have no narrative skills at all, and whose daily activities aren't in the slightest comparable to what a novelist does. The people who do this work have to feed their families, so naturally a huge commercial videogame project is going to follow the corporate model.

Matt's doing some important work getting people to talk about the issues. He's not yet at the fist-shaking, "Fools! I shall crush them all!" stage, which is probably good for society in general.

I agree with him whole-heartedly when he writes the following:

It is of utmost importance that we teach people to see a videogame with the same critical apparatus they bring to bear on poems, novels, screenplays, and films.

You bet. But replacing the reader with videogames? That's going too far.

It seems that what we really need is a reader, geared towards college freshmen, that covers videogames intelligently -- along with reality TV, "cool hunting," weblogs, text messaging, and other cultural practices that our students know well.

Crisfield, a crabbing hub on the southwestern tip of Maryland's Eastern Shore, and Smith Island are separated by just a dozen miles of choppy water known as Tangier Sound.

But Smith Island has a distinct identity. An archipelago of fiercely independent villages, it is so isolated that many residents still converse in an Elizabethan-era dialect descended from the British who settled there in the 1600s.

Jenny, a lover of World War II books who has her eye on a law career, walked off the stage at graduation Thursday with an armful of medals, certificates and scholarships. She was accepted by her first-choice schools - the Naval Academy Preparatory School and Salisbury University.

So the lawsuit, she says, is about something more closely resembling hometown pride. She lost the chance to become the first Crisfield High valedictorian from Smith Island. --Suit exposes cultural clash (Baltimore Sun)

Geography and class combine to make this year's valedictorian lawsuit more culturally interesting than last year's. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

''Students felt more empowered,'' said Frank Klapak, an education and communication professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, one of the schools participating in the study. Klapak let his students help decide how to structure the course as a way of showing them the results of democratic involvement.

The study also found that by semester's end, students participating in the project showed greater improvement than other students in their ability to find compromises and make sound moral and ethical decisions. --Christina Gostomski --Cedar Crest looks to raise civic interest (The Morning Call)

Frank Klapak is a colleague of mine just two office doors away.

There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question. --James Wood reviews The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England? by Randall Stevenson --The Slightest Sardine (London Review of Books)

I felt a very odd sense of guilt while teaching a course on media aesthetics this year... it felt like a decadent indulgence to be able to talk about things like beauty, morals, happiness, and pleasure. I recall briefly talking about such topics while discussing The Portrait of Dorian Gray in Stephen Arata's class at the University of Virginia, but I recall getting upset that nobody was paying attention to the structure of the novel (which went through a revision in which Wilde added whole subplots, presumably to make it more marketable). The tone and philosophy of the added material was so different from that of the rest of the book. Was it better with or without that addition?

While I think the class was annoyed at me for wanting to talk about something so pedestrian, I do recall that he offered a few prompts that encouraged class discussion of the issue, for which I was grateful. Still, when I later asked him for a letter of recommendation, he politely declined. Oh, well -- them's the breaks!

(Which reminds me... I have a letter or two to write for former students.)

The other day, I finished reading The Hobbit to my son for a bedtime story.

On my own reading list for this summer: Galatea 2.2 and The Color of Money.

--American Drama and Theater from the Beginnings through 1960

A detailed bibliography, by Udo Hebel. This isn't a mechanically generated collection of web pages that turn up after keyword searches for "american drama" -- this is a hand-edited list that reflects some actual editorial work. It deserves PageRank karma, so it gets my link.

"I was treated like a god," the former Nebraska quarterback says. "I had pretty much everything given to me out there from the start. | "I never thought I had to work for anything. It was pretty much understood, 'Hey this kid is going to take over the program.' I don't like things given to me. I like to work." --NU football program fell short, Dukes says (Omaha.com)

A Nebraska quarterback transferred to Duke, where he still plays football, but feels better about the pre-med education he's receiving.

I subscribe to a Google News alert, which sends me an e-mail every time the words "Seton Hill University" appear in a news story. I'm getting a steady trickle of announcements that so and so from such and such a hometown will be attending Seton Hill. It's funny that these are almost all being published in the sports pages.

Are we as a society that disinterested in the future careers of the budding writers, artists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and scientists? Of course, athletic scholarships can help to produce any one of these professions.