Getting started for the 8th Time

I love the first couple of days of school, when I can come into a class and surprise them a little with the way I present myself. I'm sure some of them have heard that I'm a certain way...but the majority are expecting a high school replay.

Of course, this means many more things to keep track of.

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Taking Stock, Pt. III

I am a bit distressed that I view the upcoming year with weariness rather than anticipation. But it is what it is. Some of the things that make me weary (and I do understand that these are my issues):

1. Colleagues who poor mouth every little thing. Every single day. The Perpetually Aggrieved Grad Student is an okay stance for a while, but maybe at some point north of 40 years of age one needs to find a new approach.
example:  today's "outrage" was that the Chancellor of this institution remarked in a department meeting that he doesn't really bother with reading the NYT or the WP every day.  ZOMG! Doubleplus ungood crimethink!

2. Colleagues who wrangle about word choice as a way of controlling the direction of conversations...and the ways other people think.
example: In our department meeting the other day, I remarked that since the English Society (a former student organization attached to our department) had died, we need to do a better job actively communicating with our students.  One of the department's most notorious busybodies took it on herself to correct me--"you mean to say it's inactive," she said.  Those who know me can anticipate how I responded.

3. Constant breast-beating about the debt burden students face . . . while the students post on Facebook about spending their "refund" checks on electronics and video games.

4. Constant uses of the following words, even by fellow academics, no matter whether they make any logical sense: vitriol, outrage, hate, rights, diversity.
example:  All last year, this institution celebrated 50 years of "diversity."  What they meant is that it was the 50th anniversary of certain milestones of racial integration on campus, but they didn't even take it on themselves to say "racial diversity."  It was just "50 years of diversity."  At an institution of higher learning. 

5. That one colleague who is now insisting on "pay parity" across colleges and departments on campus, apparently in the service of some mythical-yet-authoritative notion of "equal pay for equal work." He has been in higher ed for more than 40 years.  When he used part of our department retreat to pose this question statement to the provost, I admired the provost's restraint in not responding, "how long have you been in this business?  Since when has pay parity ever existed?" 

Taking Stock, Pt. II

Let's think more specifically about how I can make my characteristics work for me. Or as the Dread Pirate Roberts says, let's list our assets.

1. I am congenial and kind and engaging toward my students. I generally have a good rapport with them and enjoy a measure of popularity as a result. I know this is one of the ways I succeed at my job, but I also know that it demands a lot of me and my time and my emotional energy. It is also far too easy to get trapped by the notion that popularity and admiration are things to be sought...I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy my reputation.

2. I am a careful, methodical worker who seldom shows brilliance but does demonstrate a kind of steady reliability. I am not a self-promoter or a terribly creative sort. But when it comes to the kind of scholarship I am able to do, this may serve me well. We in the humanities are plagued with books, with "creative" approaches to our disciplines. Perhaps a slow but careful approach will yield a greater work in the end.

3. I have tried to create and maintain a reputation for honesty and discipline and hard work and even-handedness. Maybe I will be called on at some point to exhibit those qualities in a way that can really do my colleagues, my institution, or my profession some service. If I am not granted that chance, at the very least I can look myself in the eye.

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Taking Stock

Given that the school year is about to begin with me still grappling with some doubts about my place, a bit of self-examination seems in order.  What strengths do I possess, and how are they balanced against my weaknesses?

1.  I am an analytical thinker.  I am not particularly creative.
2.  I am a skillful and engaging teacher.  I am not as good at the research phase of my job.
3.  I do not speak overly much.  Sometimes I think I've said more than I actually have.
4.  I am usually kind and compassionate.  I am quick to avoid conflict.
5.  I have a sense of humor about myself.  That sense of humor can be overly self-deprecating.
6.  I mind my own business.  I imagine this can seem cold.
7.  I know the difference between what's important and what isn't.  This can also seem cold.
8.  I am unselfish and loyal.  Not always able to say no when I should.
9.  I am introspective.  Too introspective.  For an example, see this entry.

An encouraging word

Comment I got today on my GSH evaluation:

• Dr. Hill simply lit up my world. He made sure we understood the text and was patient when we did not. He also taught me how to think differently, I wish I could learn under him again.



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A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 10

With our department "retreat" (i.e., our all-day meeting to start our academic work year) tomorrow, it's time to move from grappling with concerns about my career and profession to grappling with what's required over the next few weeks.  So I'm drawing this little series to a close with a set of things I might do to move forward from here.

1.  Choose an entirely new set of service activities to invest myself in.  I've been doing many of the same committees for years now; maybe it's time to take on something I wouldn't have considered even a few months ago.

2.  Rid myself of interactions that bring me no peace or enjoyment.

3.  Look for work elsewhere.

4.  Spend more time exercising and less time in the office.

5.  Double down on my own academic projects and let everything else take care of itself.

6.  Resign myself to the way things "have to be."

Something has to change...just not sure in what way yet.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 38

Two statements involving Number One Son, both from yesterday evening:

1) "guess what? I have a girlfriend." 

2) "yes, sometimes in class he visits Jonathanland, but he come right back to us when I get his attention."

A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 9

In a continuation of my reflections from yesterday's post, I want to discuss the remainder of the article I mentioned yesterday.  One of the chief intellectual problems I face is the question of just how valuable in a broad sense my work can be.  The writer points to at least one way the humanities remains valuable even in an increasingly commodified higher ed climate:

To say that excessively specialized humanities scholarship today is irrelevant is not to say that the humanities are irrelevant. The humanities are that space in the university system where power does not have the last word, where truth and beauty as well as insight and eccentricity reign supreme and where young people come into contact with the great traditions, writing, and thinking that have made us whom we are today. The humanities introduce us to our ancestors and our forebears and acculturate students into their common heritage. It is in the humanities that we learn to judge the good from the bad and thus where we first encounter the basic moral facility for making judgments. It is because the humanities teach taste and judgment that they are absolutely essential to politics. It is even likely that the decline of politics today is profoundly connected to the corruption of the humanities.

"The corruption of the humanities?"  This is where I would be likely to be looked at askance by some of my colleagues.  I don't think there's any question that the disciplines of the humanities are in themselves the most worthy to be studied:

What unites culture and politics is that they are “both phenomena of the public world.” Judgment, the primary faculty of politics, is discovered, nurtured, and practiced in the world of culture and the judgment of taste. What the study of culture through the humanities offers, therefore, is an orientation towards a common world that is known and understood through a common sense.  The humanities, Arendt argues, are crucial for the development and preservation of common sense—something that is unfortunately all-too-lacking in much humanities scholarship today.

What this means is that teaching the humanities is absolutely essential for politics—and as long as that is the case, there will be a rationale for residential colleges and universities. The mania for distance learning today is understandable. Education is, in many cases, too expensive. Much could be done more cheaply and efficiently at colleges. And this will happen. Colleges will, increasingly, bring computers and the internet into their curricula. But as powerful as the internet is, and as useful as it is as a replacement for passive learning in large lectures, it is not yet a substitute for face-to-face learning that takes place at a college or university. The learning that takes place in the hallways, offices, and dining halls when students live, eat, and breathe their coursework over four years is simply fundamentally different from taking a course online in one’s free time. As exciting as technology is, it is important to remember that education is, at its best, not about transmitting information but about inspiring thinking.

Sadly, most of my colleagues would take the above as an ideological attack aimed at their chosen disciplines/values/etc.  As long as this kind of critique is seen as a kind of anti-intellectual demagoguery (I have heard similar critiques--and their authors--be summarily dismissed with just this language), the necessary adjustments (and I do believe they are utterly necessary) will not take place until the market forces our hand--which it may have already done, given the kind of conversations I hear when the state secondary and higher ed curricula come up.  

The article does counter one oft-suggested solution:

The focus on pedagogy is a mistake and comes from the basic flawed assumption that the problem with the humanities is that the professors aren’t good communicators. It may be true that professors communicate poorly, but the real problem is deeper. If generations of secondary school teachers trained in pedagogy have taught us anything, it is that pedagogical teaching is not useful. Authority in the classroom comes from knowledge and insight, not from pedagogical techniques or theories.

The pressing issue is less pedagogy than the fact that what most professors know is so specialized as to be irrelevant. What is needed is not better pedagogical training, but a more broad and erudite training, one that focuses less on original research and academic publishing and instead demands reading widely and writing for an educated yet popular audience. What we need, in other words, are academics who read widely with excitement and inspiration and speak to the interested public.

More professors should be blogging and writing in public-interest journals. They should be reviewing literature rather than each other’s books and, shockingly, they should be writing fewer academic monographs.

To say that the humanities should engage the world does not mean that the humanities should be politicized. The politicization of the humanities has shorn them of their authority and their claim to being true or beautiful. Humanities scholarship can only serve as a incubator for judgment when it is independent from social and political interests. But political independence is not the same as political sterility. Humanities scholarship can, and must, teach us to see and know our world as it is.

The critique he levels against "pedagogical" thinking is apt, I think.  My experience has been that while some of my students who focus on Education are quite bright, the qualities they bring to the classroom (when and if they become teachers) will have very little to do with the theories they know (especially that blasted "Bloom's Taxonomy" which is apparently gospel) and much more to do with the actual things they know--how much and widely they have read, how intellectually curious they are, how carefully they are able to analyze not only their own thinking and writing but that of others.  Conversely, I have observed many colleagues both in graduate school and later--and there were some whose teaching could not be saved, yea, even by years of workshops on classroom management techniques.

But because this sounds suspiciously "conservative," it would be dismissed right out of hand, especially in the current climate.

A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 8

What I have been trying to do these past few weeks, as I've written my way through some pretty difficult personal and intellectual problems, is chart out a course for the next few years. Up until this point, there have been some pretty significant markers of progress--objectives that had to be hit.  I had to earn each degree--B.A., M.A., Ph.D.  I had to earn a job and then earn tenure and promotion at that job.  Now that I am tenured . . . what, exactly?

The usual answer is publish.  But I am forced to admit that I don't see it happening--not only because I'm frankly not smart or focused enough to put together a book, but I'm not sure I believe in the degree-book-tenure-book pattern taught to me by my beloved mentors at UNC.  The other day, I stumbled across this article, which seems to encapsulate a lot of what I've been thinking.  Here are some excerpts:

Railing against college professors has become a common pastime, one practiced almost exclusively by those who have been taught and mentored by those who are now being criticized. It is thus only fair to say upfront that college education in the United States is, in spite of its myriad flaws, still of incredible value and meaning to tens if not hundreds of thousands of students every year.

That said, too much of what our faculties teach is neither interesting nor wanted by our students. This is a point that Jacques Berlinerblau makes in a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Observers of gentrification like to draw a distinction between needs and wants. Residents in an emerging neighborhood need dry cleaners, but it’s wine bars they really want. The application of that insight to the humanities leads me to an unhappy conclusion: Our students, and the educated public at large, neither want us nor need us.

What is amazing is that not only do our students not want what we offer, but neither do our colleagues. It is an amazing and staggering truth that much of what academics write and publish is rarely, if ever, read. And if you want to really experience the problem, attend an academic conference some day, where you will see panels of scholars presenting their work, sometimes to one or two audience members. According to Berlinerblau, the average audience at academic conference panels is 14 persons.

I am under no illusions about the importance of the things I study.  I do find them interesting and even valuable to my understanding of the way rhetoric is employed in political, religious, and literary contexts in the Tudor and Stuart eras in England.  I am well trained enough to extrapolate points to other periods and contexts as well.  I think the rigor of what I study helps me be more rigorous as a thinker and as a professor (i.e., teacher).  However, I know that a book published on the things I study, assuming I could produce such a thing, would not be what anyone actually needs.

While there are exceptions, little original research is left to do in most fields of the humanities. Few important books are published each year. The vast majority are as derivative as they are unnecessary. We would all do well to read and think about the few important books (obviously there will be some disagreement and divergent schools) than to spend our time trying to establish our expertise by commenting on some small part of those books.

The result of the academic imperative of publish or perish is the increasing specialization that leads to the knowing more and more about less and less. This is the source of the irrelevance of much of humanities scholarship today.

As Hannah Arendt wrote 50 years ago in her essay On Violence, humanities scholars today are better served by being learned and erudite than by seeking to do original research by uncovering some new or forgotten scrap. While such finds can be interesting, they are exceedingly rare and largely insignificant.

As a result—and it is hard to hear for many in the scholarly community—we simply don’t need 200 medieval scholars in the United States or 300 Rawlsians or 400 Biblical scholars. It is important that Chaucer and Nietzsche are taught to university students, but the idea that every college and university needs a Chaucer and a Nietzsche scholar to teach Chaucer and Nietzsche is simply wrong. We should, of course, continue to support scholars, those whose work is to some extent scholarly innovative. But more needed are well-read and thoughtful teachers who can teach widely and write for a general audience.

There's plenty more in the article which, for the sake of space and in order to not weary my reader, I will save for another related post.  Still, this strikes me personally because I see so many colleagues and former classmates publishing wonderful stuff, and I greatly admire the work of my graduate school mentors.  I wonder why I cannot contribute in the ways they have, but almost immediately have to ask myself if anything I would write would in fact be a contribution.  Does this mean that I am a small-potatoes teacher in a small-potatoes college and must resign myself to that?  I have been able to tell myself that this position I am currently in, though it doesn't realistically allow for serious research or "scholarly" development, does fit my introverted personality and unwillingness to aggressively market myself.  It fits my service-oriented outlook.  I have told myself that because I am good at teaching, and because that teaching  (at least in the way I do it) is an important work, I should be satisfied with where I am and what I'm doing . . . and what the prospects appear to be.

Unfortunately, I'm losing confidence in all those things.

A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 7

Yesterday, I overheard a conversation in the lounge (this was at the office) between some of my co-workers.  One of them, who is no doubt in a position to know such things, was talking about some of the curriculum changes in secondary ed, and how they are likely to affect the way things go for higher ed.  Apparently (and I knew this was coming anyway), there are some plans in place to have a majority of students in our state come to college with composition credit already earned.  This would be a big change for my department, of course, because at least half of our total sections are composition sections.  And frankly, given the constant competition on campus for students to fill out sections, missing students from composition sections also means missing the opportunity to recruit them for literature survey classes.  This means, unfortunately, that the makeup of our department is apt to change.  It also means that the amount of resources to which the department is entitled is apt to change.  It also means that the makeup of the courses we teach is apt to change.

We (my colleagues and I) might be forced to make the case for why our discipline matters in a 21st century regional state university.  And frankly, if we can't make that case, we shouldn't have the positions we have.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 37

Second grade! Time to get back to it!

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A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 6

Work begins in earnest this week, as Number One Son goes back to school, as we settle into the Fall routine, and as I get ready for my slate of classes for the term.

Before that, though, comes the annual department "retreat" (the word "retreat" is misleading because it's only an all-day meeting...apparently you can use department funds for food at a department "retreat" but not for food at a mere "meeting."), in which we will discuss yet again how to increase the visibility and appeal of the major for the sake of numbers.  We will discuss how to communicate the benefits of the degree, how to attract more students to the major, whether nor not to purchase marketing materials, and so on.

This all puts me at a real disadvantage because I am torn between the institutional demands of the department and the demand of truthfulness.  More specifically, I can tell people that the English major is important--but I can't truthfully say it's important for the reasons I am "supposed" to say it's important.  Especially nowadays.  I can no longer tell students that graduate study is a good option.  I cannot tell students, given the employment climate they are likely to experience for the foreseeable future, that a humanities degree will be useful for getting them a job.  I've taken to hedging, saying that English is a good degree because it meshes well with just about anything else and allows you to heighten and broaden the strengths you already possess.  The problem is, to really benefit from a degree in the traditional humanities (English, History, Philosophy), a student has to invest more time reading than everyone else, has to figure out how to join the various disciplines into a unified whole, and has to love learning for its own sake.  Put bluntly, almost none of my students have that ability--or even that desire.

In a climate where everyone wants to know how their education dollars are contributing to measurable results, it's hard to be a cheerleader for my discipline--at least the way it is currently practiced.