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CITIZEN OF SOMEWHERE ELSE

chiefly about Hawthorne governance academic public higher ed matters





THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 2008


FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TEN YEARS


I'm teaching what used to be called Third World Literature, got renamed
Non-Western Literature, and shall be renamed...what? Literature of the Global
South? World Bank Literature? Postcolonial Literature?

By The Constructivist - January 31, 2008 2 comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE Blegs



WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2008


AMAZING COLLEAGUES, PART II


With CitizenSE in danger of losing its status as the obscurest blog on teh
internets, thanks to Inside Higher Ed, now is as good a time as any to pick up
my series on the incredible people I work with where I left off last
October--with our creative writers. James Thomas Stevens, author of Combing the
Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations, A Bridge Dead in the Water,
Bulle/Chimére, and The Mutual Life, is one of the most impressive people I've
ever met. It's not just that he's a fantastic poet, essayist, teacher,
historian, and theorist--often simultaneously. Or that he has a gift for
languages, a knack for research, a zest for connections, and a healthy
disrespect for arbitrary borders. It's that you can always count on him to call
it as he sees it--after seeing it from angles few others could imagine. His only
flaw is an intolerance for science fiction--and a stubborn refusal to admit that
Almanac of the Dead is a science fiction novel--but nobody's perfect, eh?

By The Constructivist - January 30, 2008 No comments:
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Labels: A Bridge Dead in the Water, Almanac of the Dead, Amazing Colleagues,
Bulle/Chimére, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa, The Mutual Life



TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2008


ANNOUNCING SF@SF: SCIENCE FICTION AT SUNY FREDONIA


My science fiction course begins in less than an hour, so I'm officially
launching the course web site and course blog right...about...now!

By The Constructivist - January 29, 2008 7 comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE Metablogging, Teaching Tuesday



MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 2008


ON FUNDING PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION, PART IV: THE BILLION DOLLAR ENDOWMENT CLUB


Late last week, NACUBO released their 2007 report, which discloses that there
are now 76 colleges and universities in the Billion Dollar Endowment Club. That
same week, Inside Higher Education covered new developments in the world of
higher education endowments and their political repercussions. And the
always-thoughtful Timothy Burke, riffing on an Andrew Delbanco/Roger Lehecka
op-ed in The New York Times, considered alternatives to a renewed financial aid
arms race between the Harvards (#1; $34.63B) and Yales (#2; $22.53B) and the
Williamses (#1 small liberal arts college; #33 overall; $1.89B) and Pomonas (#2
SLAC; #38 overall; $1.76B) of the U.S. My goal in this post is to use Burke's
analysis and proposals as a lever to shift the discussion from relations between
the top and bottom of the Billion Dollar Endowment Club to relations between the
BDEC and the overwhelming majority of the 4000+ higher education institutions in
the U.S.--those with endowments less than $50M.

Let's start with Burke's insight that, particularly among peer institutions,
endowments matter:



> Each institution uses marketing literature to highlight its major sources of
> distinctiveness, like Swarthmore’s Honors program or Reed’s focus on
> individualized senior research projects. But these are like shiny decorations
> on top of a basically similar cake. The big difference, in the end, is the
> relative wealth of a given institution: that’s what determines how big and
> lustrous and tasty the cake really is. Swarthmore can support the range of
> subjects and favorable student-faculty ratio that it has because in the end,
> that’s what it spends its considerable money doing: having a curriculum that’s
> unusually wide for the small size of the institution without using large
> lecture courses or adjunct instructors as the primary vehicle for delivering
> that curriculum.



You don't have to get to the final analysis to conclude that Swarthmore is
wealthy. Its $1.44B endowment (#6 SLAC and #50 overall), is over twice the size
of Hamilton College's (#16 SLAC; #101 overall, $.7B)--the college I graduated
from--which, by the way, has an endowment around 40 times the size of the
institution's at which I work, even though we enroll more undergraduates than it
and Swarthmore put together (don't even ask what percentage of Princeton's
endowment ours is!). With its wealth, Swarthmore can offer about the same range
of majors and courses to about the same range of students as the much larger
institutions at the top of the BDEC, but distinguishes itself from them through
its choice to do so in small classes taught mostly by tenured and tenure-track
professors. Part of this is by necessity--they have no graduate students to
apprentice exploit. But a lot of it is seeking comparative advantage--they
believe that severely limiting the number of courses taught by non-tenurable
faculty on their campus will better prepare the students they choose and who
choose them to excel in their careers and donate enough over the course of them
so that they can continue to afford to try luring future students from the
larger highly selective private colleges and universities at the top of the
BDEC.

Burke would like to see the SLACs that can afford to make this gamble



> do a lot more to shoulder the responsibility of social mobility, to work
> harder to bring in first-generation college students. To a significant extent,
> I’d like to see Swarthmore and all of its peers shift some of the efforts we
> presently put into pursuing diversity across a very wide range into the
> dedicated pursuit of qualified applicants who would be first-generation
> college students, to look at economic diversity as Job #1.



Although Swarthmore could afford to add resources to this effort rather than
shifting them away from other kinds of diversity initiatives, Burke's proposal
is admirable for many reasons, particularly in light of Delbanco and Lehecka's
"scandalous fact" that



> between 2004 and 2006--an era of enormous private wealth accumulation--27 of
> the 30 top-ranked American universities and 26 of the top 30 liberal arts
> colleges saw a decline in the percentage of low-income (Pell-grant-eligible)
> students.



And it is clever, as well. Those schools that follow Burke's lead would be
gaining, at least for the short term, another comparative advantage on their
peer institutions, as there presumably are the same or perhaps greater
advantages from the experience of economic diversity as of other forms. Still,
implementing it would affect only the relatively few such students who could be
admitted into such highly selective small colleges. This is one of the key
problems with the social mobility model that Burke invokes here. Even if every
single private institution in the BDEC were to act on his proposal, we'd
continue to have a higher education system in which the most educational
resources were devoted to the students who, in a sense, least need them.

To be sure, there are several public systems in the BDEC, but take one guess
where most of the endowment resources typically flow in them. Yup, to the
"flagships," the Ph.D.-granting institutions--those that value research over
teaching, that substitute non-tenurable teachers for tenurable ones as often as
they can, just like the Harvards and Yales of the BDEC. The portion of the
endowment that escapes this gravitational field and makes its way to the
"satellites," the public regional universities, guarantees that no matter how
much individual administators and faculty in them value teaching, the percentage
of courses taught by the non-tenurable remains shockingly high.

Let's face it: probably about a dozen of the schools in the BDEC can afford to
do just about anything they want with respect to student target markets,
curriculum, staffing, tuition, fees, and aid, and institutional growth. The rest
are looking nervously over their shoulders at what those institutions decide to
do. But if they all were to ask themselves how they could have the greatest
effect on class in America, they would stop obsessing over intra-BDEC relations,
stop acting as if the relations between the wealthy and less wealthy were all
that mattered, and start paying attention to relations between elite and
non-elite colleges and universities.

The BDEC could, for instance, turn the table on the states and the federal
government. There's an easy way to shift public discussion from why the BDEC is
spending so little while their endowments are growing so much to why public
higher education is so underfunded. If most in the BDEC were to follow my advice
and get creative about donating 1% of their capital gains each year to deserving
colleges and universities that value teaching, they would not only be putting
their endowments to better use but also showing up the state. If they were to
act on the principle that quality education ought not to be a class privilege,
they might be able to shame the state into changing how, in Marc Bousquet's nice
phrase, the university works. But of course they'd have to get their own houses
in order, at the same time, and stop relying so much on non-tenurable teachers.

I hope that Burke would support such a strategy, even though in the long run it
could jeopardize the very comparative advantage that distinguishes the
Swarthmores of the world from the Harvards. The best SLACs, after all, benefit
from the exploitation of graduate employees and other casualized academic
workers that is the norm in the rest of the American academic world. Were that
exploitation to become the exception rather than the rule in U.S. higher
education, what would become of the formerly exceptional SLACs? This is where
Burke's emphasis on mission differentiation takes on added significance.



> Less wealthy institutions could make a different choice than throwing poorer
> students overboard in order to discount tuition to less academically qualified
> but financially attractive upper-middle class students. They could aim to live
> in the “long tail” of the education marketplace. Right now, there are
> relatively few selective colleges and universities that try to deliver a
> strongly distinctive kind of education....
> 
> I think the answer for less wealthy institutions isn’t to either keep up with
> the Joneses or complain bitterly about the inequity of Harvard’s tuition
> initiatives. It’s to get out of the game of trying to be all things to all
> possible students, to drop services and curriculum not because of a need to
> indiscriminately economize but because of a strategic, deliberate decision to
> specialize or seek distinction in some highly specific area or philosophical
> approach. Frankly, I think the wealthier institutions could use a shot of this
> kind of thinking, too.



To return to Burke's earlier "cake" metaphor that is recalled by his closing
"shot" metaphor, his advice is open to multiple readings. Perhaps Burke is
playing with the metaphor that in the American educational system primary
education is the appetizer, secondary education the main course, and
post-secondary the dessert. Diversifying dessert offerings makes sense within
this frame. Rather than trying to decorate the cake differently or use an
innovative icing--or even develop a new recipe--he is calling on those outside
the BDEC to stop assuming that cakes are the only dessert that need be served.
Or perhaps Burke is juxtaposing the meat and potatoes education available at
most colleges and universities with the luxuries of the BDEC and suggesting that
less wealthy institutions get out of the dessert business entirely.

In either case, while avoiding a certain "Let them eat cake" cluelessness about
class in America, Burke's metaphors obscure as much as they reveal. U.S. higher
education does need a shot in the arm. But no matter what an institution
specializes in or how it differentiates its mission from its peers, its students
still need well-balanced meals produced and served primarily by tenured and
tenure-track professionals. Unfortunately, as Bousquet shows in How the
University Works, what most get instead is a system modelled after the fast food
industry:



> Ask any thirty-seven-year-old graduate employee, with her ten or more years of
> service and just beginning to peak in her pedagogical and scholarly powers,
> yet soon to be replaced by a twenty-two-year-old master's degree candidate: Is
> this a system that teaches well? And she will answer: Heck, no, it is just a
> system that teaches cheaply.... [T]he system of disposable faculty
> continuously replaces its most experienced and accomplished teachers with
> persons who are less accomplished and less experienced. (42)



This is why Delbanco and Lehecka's proposals for federal action, while
representing a valuable first step toward solving the accessibility crisis in
private higher education, don't go nearly far enough toward addressing the
disease raging through the entire system.



> For every college to become accessible to talented students regardless of
> income, the federal government must create enhanced grant programs,
> progressive tax incentives and programs that reduce the debt of graduates who
> spend time in public service.



Making higher education affordable for all matters little if the way it is done
provides perverse incentives for the few colleges and universities that don't
follow the sickening labor and staffing practices of the Harvards and Yales of
the world into following their lead. If the best-endowed private institutions in
the BDEC were instead to follow the lead of the Swarthmores and the Hamiltons of
the world, their example might help restore the health of higher education in
America.

By The Constructivist - January 28, 2008 No comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE's Unsolicited Advice, How the University Works, On Funding
Public Higher Education



SATURDAY, JANUARY 26, 2008


TWO WAYS TO IMPROVE THE JOB SEARCH PROCESS IN ENGLISH


OK, this is only a half-serious post but there's no time even for a two-thirds
serious one. How to improve the job market for literature people?

1) The Reality TV Option. For the best job on the market in a given year,
produce a reality tv show. That is, use an American Idol format to narrow the
field down to the dozen most viable candidates, then Survivor to get down to the
three finalists, and then the Presidential race (a series of debates at peer
universities and votes by profs and grad students) to decide the winner. The
search committee could be involved in the first two stages in creative ways, but
after that it's out of their hands.

This would publicize just how amazing the talent pool is in literary studies.
The long time for it to develop would allow all kinds of looks at backgrounds of
the various candidates, spark interest in the humanities more generally, and be
much better for all involved than the usual process.

2) The Q-School Option. Author- and period-based professional organizations
(among others) could put on late-summer conferences in which applicants (only
those without and in search of a tenure-track job) can choose which of, say, 5
pressing questions in the field they want to address in their talk, narrow the
participants down to the top 5 on each, spend a day discussing the answers
proposed by the panelists on each question, rank the panelists at the end of the
conference, and, eventually, publish a book of the winners' expanded and revised
essays. The questions for the next summer's conference would be agreed-upon by
the officers of the society after the conference and posted by early fall, so
that everyone going on the market the following fall could have the academic
year to prepare their papers and submit them in early summer. As an incentive to
those who don't make the top 5, all papers from the top 30 applicants could be
posted on a conference blog, opening them up to comments and feedback from the
profession at large. [These numbers are customizable to the size of the
organization, of course.]

This would help get attention to what the leaders of the organization see as the
crucial issues in the field and help them indicate who among the
not-yet-tenurable they feel most deserve jobs. With the late-summer timing of
the conference and blog, candidates (in the top 5 or top 30) can include the
results on their c.v.s and those who are invited to present at the conference
would also benefit from the day devoted to their question and answers and the
chance to interact with more established people in their field.

***

I'm sure others can come up with better ideas. Let's get creative, people!

[Update 1/30/08: Craig Smith at FACE Talk answers my call! And I got Around the
Webbed by Inside Higher Ed for the first time evah. Just for the record, I wrote
this on a computer in the day care center playroom imoto and I were hanging out
in while onechan was in her yochien and revised it slightly when we got home.
There's a lesson there somewhere.]

By The Constructivist - January 26, 2008 8 comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE Meme-o-Rama, CitizenSE's Unsolicited Advice



FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2008


A THING THAT MAKES ME SAY "YAY"--NO, FOUR!


The Atlantic Monthly has opened its digital archives--which go back to 1857.

That is all.

No, wait! Marc Bousquet passes along the fantastic news about Adjunct Whore....

Oops--one more thing! Elizabeth at verbal privilege has posted her poetry
commonplace book. Now there's a meme I'd like to see propagate!

Oh yeah, this is my 200th post here, too.

By The Constructivist - January 25, 2008 2 comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday, CitizenSE Meme-o-Rama, Why
CitizenSE?



WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2008


"IT'S CROWDED HERE WITH 10 PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE"


I've found out a little bit more about Nashi and Kurari, the imaginary girls
from Spain that onechan invented recently. Turns out they are orphans and
they've come with their baby sister Narila to live with us. (For awhile there
was a lot of backstory on their parents, but then onechan decided to off them.)
They watch the house for us while we're out and give onechan all kinds of
scenarios to play out when we're home (often having to do with visiting the
doctor, because, I suppose, that's how we roll here).

So the title of this post is as close as my swiss cheese memory can get to a
verbatim comment from onechan late this afternoon. The Full Metal Archivist and
I have been batting around the idea of going for a boy sometime in the next few
years and every so often we ask onechan about her feelings on the matter. Well,
it turns out one of the reasons onechan would be happy to have a little brother
or sister is that she wouldn't have to have so many made-up characters
populating the house. Apparently it's tiring dealing with them all. At first I
thought she was exaggerating, but then I stopped to think how many we role play
as, make up stories about, and compare ourselves to.

So in honor of onechan, here's the updated list of extras among our dramatis
personae:


   
   
 * all her real friends and cousins, whom we often pretend to be
   
 * the Super-Prius
   
 * Nashi, Kurari, and Narila
   
 * Suweet and Saja, and their neighbors at the North Pole (Santa, etc.)
   
 * Carrie Mi, Karrie Yoo, and Keri Hu
   
 * Jumper and Kong-san
   
 * Sparkychan and Gojochan
   
 * Doremi, Pop, Hazuki, Onpu, Aiko, Momoko, and Hana-chan from Ojamajo Doremi
   
 * all the Pretty Cure girls: Nagisa, Honoka, and Hikari (and Okane-san) from
   Max Heart, Mai and Saki from Splash Star, and Nozomi, Rin, Urara, Komachi,
   and Karen (and Coco and Natsu) from Yes! Pretty Cure 5
   
 * My Melody, Kuromi, Uta-chan, the violin guy, and others from Onegai My Melody
   
 * Inu Yasha, Kagome, Miroku, and Sango from Inu Yasha
   
 * Chiyo-chan from Azumanga Daioh
   
 * Bubbles, Blossom, Buttercup, Miss Bellum, The Professor, The Mayor, and Mojo
   Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls
   
 * Dora, Boots, Isa, Tico, Benny, and Swiper from Dora the Explorer
   
 * Olivia
   
 * Rosemary Wells's Yoko, Max, and Ruby
   
 * Corduroy and his friends
   
 * Pooh and his friends
   
 * The Disney Princesses, whose names I still can't keep straight
   
 * thankfully, fewer of those annoying My Little Ponies, as we get further and
   further away from onechan's birthday
   



Just for the historical record.

By The Constructivist - January 23, 2008 No comments:
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Labels: Dramatis Personae



TUESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2008


CITIZENSE TEACHING MANIFESTO, PART I: THE LITERATURE/GOLF MOCK(ABLE)-EPIC SIMILE


I have to admit to having been a bit intimidated by Craig Smith's recent
decision to tag the humble proprietor of the obscurest blog on teh internets
alongside such bloggy luminaries as Michael Berube, New Kid on the Hallway,
Tenured Radical, and Sherman Dorn. When you consider how amazing Dr. Crazy's
post that inspired Craig was--not to mention those in response to it by A White
Bear, Aaron Barlow, Philosleft, and Craig himself, to name just a few--you have
to wonder what you can add to the conversation. At least you do if you are me.
So if you know where I'm coming from, you might be able to imagine how pleased I
was to discover that the idea I came up with enables me to build upon one of my
favorite CitizenSE posts in recent months.

Imagine, if you will, that a work of literature is like a golf course. Think of
the process of designing and constructing a golf course as similar to imagining
and composing a piece of writing. And think of how whether to play, which course
to play, and how to play it can be compared to the kinds of decisions that go
into whether to read, what to read, and how to read. What I am trying to get at
through this opening analogy (writer as golf course architect, reader as golfer)
is the notion that it is the experience (of reading, of golfing) that matters.
What I like about the analogy is that golf's image as an elite and elitist sport
corresponds rather well to the image of literature as an elite and elitist form
of writing. (And if you believe Caleb Crain, reading may become about as
prevalent as golfing this century.) For that matter, the humanities as a whole,
like golf, still have a rather clubby image in popular culture--both are often
represented as a luxury pasttime for the wealthy to dabble in, certainly nothing
useful or productive or innovative to contribute to society. But that's a matter
for another CitizenSE series....

Let's get back to teaching. Golf, like any sport, is neither a natural nor an
instinctual activity. You have to learn how to do it, from many people, over
time. You get better at it by doing it, again and again, though improvement is
hard to come by and even harder to sustain. At some point, you may decide to
become a serious golfer--you start playing more regularly, watching professional
tournaments on television or in person, reading golf publications for tips and
examples, researching equipment options, playing golf video games obsessively,
betting with your playing partners, and so on. Eventually you may decide to
become a competitive golfer--you start seeking perspective on your swing from a
book, pro, and/or machine, getting your clubs fitted,joining a team and learning
from a coach and your fellow players, playing in tournaments and learning from
your fellow competitors, and so on. To extend my analogy further, serious
golfers are like literature majors, competitive golfers are like literature
graduate students, professors at teaching institutions are like teaching pros,
and professors at research institutions are like touring pros.

Now, how does this mock(able)-epic simile help me answer the question of why I
teach and why it matters? Sure, I love pushing the serious golfers and mentoring
the competitive ones as much as the next teaching pro and am overjoyed when
former students make a splash in academia. And I love teaching the occasional
graduate seminar and sharing my limited experiences as a touring pro when
appropriate with my master's students here. But what I love the most is the
challenge of figuring out how to draw new golfers into the sport, helping
beginners master the fundamentals and enjoy the game, and encouraging
intermediate golfers to become serious golfers. That's why I teach so many
introductory and general education courses here. I want all the students I teach
to come away from my courses willing to consider acting on the idea that reading
literature, like playing golf, can be a worthwhile and rewarding lifelong
activity.

All well and good so far, but the reading literature/playing golf analogy has
much farther-reaching implications, which require me to unpack some of the key
terms I just used. What are some of the fundamentals of golf? Beyond obvious
things like learning the rules and etiquette of the game, developing a
consistent pre-shot routine, honing your grip, stance, alignment, and swing, and
building your repertoire of shots, pitches, chips, scrambles, and putts, I have
in mind analyzing and assessing the hole in front of you, imagining what shot
you want to hit next in light of the course and weather conditions, figuring out
what kind of swing you need to make to execute the shot, and learning how to
focus enough to do it increasingly consistently, under various degrees of
pressure and distraction, every time you address the ball. I won't try to give
the literacy/literary equivalent of every one of these golf fundamentals, but I
will point out that they all involve becoming more self-aware as a reader and
more attentive to the text in front of you--its form, the genres and conventions
it participates in, the allusions it makes to other texts and intertextual
dialogues it enters into, and so on. Just as you get more enjoyment out of golf
as you become better able to make solid contact with the ball and hit it closer
to where you are aiming, so, too, do you enjoy reading literature more and
appreciate what writers are doing better the more familiar you become with
various examples of effective uses of rhythm, imagery, metaphor, symbolism,
tone, point-of-view, irony, ambiguity, and so forth. The way I try to draw new
golfers into the game, then, is to teach an integrated combination of
reader-response, formalist, and structuralist techniques of reading and
responding to literary texts in introductory and general education courses. I
try to take students--many of whom, to the extent that they have been trained to
read literature, have been trained to cherry-pick a poem for a metaphor or
locate a story among four core themes (Man vs....) and write about it in a
cookie-cutter 5-paragraph essay--and show them that there's a bigger and better
rationale for understanding and acting upon the interrelation between
techniques, strategies, and experiences of reading literature.

Here's where my teaching--and, I believe, the teaching of the vast majority of
my colleagues in my department and across the country--departs most dramatically
from the paranoid vision of the David Horowitzes of the world. I'm not trying to
indoctrinate my students into what I consider to be the one best way of swinging
a club, playing a hole, and thinking your way around a course. Sure, I'll
demonstrate a few shots, show them clips of how various golfers have played a
given hole, and give them advice on playing a particular course. But I can't
play the game for them. What I can do is to try to give all my students the
tools and the opportunities to practice making their own decisions on how, when,
and why to play the game. Because I know from experience that each round of golf
is different, even when played on the same course by the same person, I take for
granted that every person is going to have their own experience on each reading
of a literary text. That doesn't mean they designed the course; it just means
they're following a fairly unique path around it. And it's worth their time and
effort to keep track of their path, compare it to others', and reflect on the
similarities and differences, not just to modify their techniques and strategies
for the next round, but to get a better sense of the range of experiences and
emotions golf offers, as well.

This is where the ambiguity in the term reading in my mock(able)-epic simile
matters most. Reading is not just the personal and individual and private
process of experiencing a text, it is also the social and collective and public
process of sharing one's experiences with others. Sure, there's a difference
between playing alone and playing with partners, random or regular, but both are
forms of golf. Very few people, that is, are satisfied with stopping after
having arrived as their own construals and interpretations of a text for
themselves alone--they want to share their responses with others, out of
confusion, curiosity, competition, and more. The dialogue and debate that
emerges from this process of intersubjective responding can have multiple
effects--appreciation of the nuances of the course/text and of the various ways
to play/read it, a desire to seek out other courses/texts by the same
architect/author, development of strategic and/or critical thinking skills,
self-knowledge of various kinds, understanding of and empathy with others,
values-clarification, community-formation, and more. But there's no guarantee
that any of these things will actually happen for every single golfer/reader in
every one of my classes. Making people write and read each other's responses can
help, as can responsible and responsive comments from their peers and professor,
but writing is no panacea, either. Unless my students discover they like playing
golf and want to get better at it, all the best teaching in the world won't
motivate them to benefit from the byproducts of entering into the discipline
that learning to be a better golfer/reader requires. (In this sense, learning to
play golf is like learning fencing or chess or dance or a martial art.)

If I were to stop here, no doubt you'd be justified in responding with some
version of "So long and thanks for all the [Stanley] Fish." Sure, I think Fish
is seriously mistaken when he concludes his recent New York Times piece on the
uses of the humanities with:



> So two cheers for critical thinking, but the fact that you can learn how to do
> it in any number of contexts means that it cannot be claimed for the
> humanities as a special benefit only they can supply. Justification requires
> more than evidence that a consumer can get a desirable commodity in your shop,
> too; it requires a demonstration that you have the exclusive franchise.



And I have problems with the way he answers his own questions here:



> The pertinent question is, Do humanities courses change lives and start
> movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be
> realized?
> 
> If the answers to these questions are (as I contend) "no"--one teaches the
> subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is
> contingent and cannot be aimed at--then the route of external justification of
> the humanities, of a justification that depends on the calculation of
> measurable results, is closed down.



But I think he's onto something about the implications of his answers there and
when he claims here that



> the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external to
> the obsessions that lead some (like me) to devote their working lives to
> them--measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an
> informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perceptions, or the lessening
> of prejudice and discrimination. If these or some other instrumental
> benchmarks--instrumental in the sense that they are tied to a secondary effect
> rather than to an internal economy--are what the humanities must meet, they
> will always fall short. But the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or
> bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their
> value.



This is something I'll take up later in a series on assessment, but my response
is actually implicit in my playing golf/reading literature mock(able)-epic
simile. Is there any good reason Tiger Woods made $100M last year just for
playing golf superlatively well? Should we begrudge Lorena Ochoa her
record-smashing $4.36M in winnings during the 2007 LPGA season? Although we
might question the motives of the corporations that invest in tournament (and
televised) golf and sponsor players, or critically analyze the systems that make
up the golf industry and connect it to others, we can't ignore that people
around the world are inspired by Tiger's and Lorena's play, want to watch them
compete against the best in the world at what they do, and want to join in the
fun. Just look at how many Korean golfers have come to the LPGA following in Se
Ri Pak's history-making footsteps and you can see that playing golf well has
real effects. By the same token, the readings of academostars as well as the
less celebrated among literature's touring pros--the entire scholarly apparatus
that Fish attacks for being too specialized, too insular, too detached, too
exclusive, too arcane, too impenetrable--provide examples for analysis,
assessment, emulation, modification, rejection and more by beginning,
intermediate, serious, and competitive readers everywhere, not to mention other
teaching and touring pros.

This leads me to another turn of the mock(able)-epic simile screw, one which
returns me to teaching. Even in my introductory and general education courses, I
want my students to understand that there's more to reading literature than
developing and sharing readings of texts. Often I start with something as
seemingly simple but actually complex as authorial intent, ouevre, and
influence: what can we glean from the way a course is laid out about the options
for play that the architect had in mind when designing the course? what do
his/her designs imply about the state of the game at that time? what
characterizes his/her body of work and how does it develop over time? what
aspects of his/her predecessors' and contemporaries' designs were most
influential on his/her own work? This is where issues of canonization arise: who
are the most influential architects in history? which are the best courses? the
best holes? the best tournaments? what courses should serious golfers play
before they die? and why? And this, in turn, turns us to issues in and around
the golf industry, from those who commission courses to those who maintain them
to those who manufacture and sell and market and review the equipment necessary
to make, maintain, and play them. In the same way that a golf course is part of
a much larger set of institutions, so, too, is any work of literature.

Sure, you don't need to be concerned with all these issues to become a serious
or competitive golfer, much less a teaching or touring pro. But you don't need
to enter an M.F.A. program to experience their relevance personally; anyone who
wants to get published today (or knows someone who has tried) runs smack into
them (at least vicariously). Even people who are stuggling just to get the ball
off the ground should know a little bit about where the ball and club they are
using came from, the history of the development of these technologies, what
swing options they have and the history of debates over and analysis of them,
where what is in front of them came from and the history of the development of
various hazards (rough, trees, sand, water), and what the experiences of those
who have gone through similar and other struggles have been like. Of course it's
still up to them to get that ball in the air. But they can better appreciate the
difficulty, why so many people have exposed themselves to it, and what they can
learn from it if what they are doing gets contextualized and if they learn how
to contextualize what they are doing. So while I strive to teach my students how
to play golf in my intro and gen ed courses, I also want them to begin paying
attention to the history, sociology, psychology, economics, ecology, and
technology of the sport. This is why teaching literature for me is a wildly
interdisciplinary activity, not just limited to the traditional humanities.

Of course, the institution of literature will persist whether or not there
remain any professors in the humanities left to research it or teach it. But
that doesn't mean that the teaching of literature in college and graduate school
by trained professionals is valueless or that nothing would be lost by its
disappearance. Given the ubiquity of advice on playing golf, teaching pros will
always have to strive to figure out what they can bring to their students that
they couldn't otherwise or easily get themselves, how to design their courses to
make the best use of the time spent together in the classroom, and modify their
plans and strategies in light of what they are discovering about the actual
students in the course. Research matters because it means that courses get
played (books stay in print) or restored (through textual editing) or
rediscovered (through the production of new scholarly editions of forgotten
texts). When scholars find something of value in such courses for players today
and teachers want their students to learn from the experience of playing them,
on their own and together, touring and teaching pros can help shape the future
of golf/literature.

To me, the question of why I teach is inseparable from what I teach and how.
When I return to this series, I'll use my teaching from last semester and the
upcoming one to show how my answers vary by course and how my courses fit
together.

[Update: Reading around others who have responded to Craig's call, I eventually
made my way back to One Flew East and discovered a gem of a book review on video
games, literacy, and learning. Read the whole thing, as someone is reputed to
have once said. My first response was, "damn, why didn't my colleague and I
follow through on that crazy Video Game Studies Summer Camp idea we had back in
1999?" My second was, "why didn't Sloucho and I get our act together back in the
early '00s and actually write that Video Game Studies book together?" It took
until the third response to realize that the author of the book Aaron reviews is
actually fleshing out the ideas I'm gesturing toward here about teaching and
learning, but with respect to video games rather than golf.]

[Update 2 1/27/08: Here's a line from the rookie who was playing with Tiger
Woods on Saturday at the Buick and, like the rest of the field, got smoked:



> "That was one of the coolest things ever, no doubt," he said. "He was fun to
> watch but just kind of fun to compare myself against him, as well. It's
> inspiring and very educational. I recommend everyone try it at least one
> time."



The title of Doug Ferguson's AP article from which this observation comes says
it all: "Tiger Puts on a Clinic at Torrey Pines."]

By The Constructivist - January 22, 2008 2 comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE Manifestos, CitizenSE Meme-o-Rama, Why Do I Teach?



FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2008


ON FUNDING PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION, PART III: FREE EDUCATION!


Marc Bousquet has posted the first part of his interview with Adolph Reed at How
the University Works. If you want a quick introduction to why higher education
should be free, check it out. [Update 1/21/08: here's part 2!]

Meanwhile, for a concise and cogent critique of the current system and what to
do about it, check out Craig Smith's recent post at FACE Talk.

For more on these issues, check out Part I of this series.

By The Constructivist - January 18, 2008 No comments:
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MONDAY, JANUARY 14, 2008


TAGGED!


Craig Smith at Free Exchange on Campus just tagged me. I'm it--yay! Uh oh--now I
have to live up to Dr. Crazy's inspiring example. With two girls still on
antibiotics and an office move happening tomorrow, it's going to be a little
while before my CitizenSE Teaching Manifesto is ready for action. Let's see if I
can finish it before my taggees do:

A White Bear [Update 1/16/08: damn!]
Rob MacDougall
Marc Bousquet
Jennifer [Update 1/25/08: sweet!]
The Hobgoblin

[Update 1/22/08: Did it! Or at least started it.]

[Update 1/30/08: My tags have no power on men! Maybe a look at the list of
contributors will inspire you all!]

By The Constructivist - January 14, 2008 6 comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE Manifestos, CitizenSE Meme-o-Rama, Dramatis Personae



SUNDAY, JANUARY 13, 2008


ON THE ROAD AGAIN: CONSTRUCTIVIST FAMILY POETRY


The Full Metal Archivist started a neat little game that can eat up a half an
hour on a car ride if it goes well: family poetry. Each person in the car
contributes a line of poetry based on what they see outside until the poem is
done. Here are two examples. Try to guess which lines are mine, the FMA's, and
onechan's!

I-90 to Erie, 1/4/08

Bald trees
No leaves left
Grass-stubbled snow
Yellow with pee
Clouds with water
Weight my tears
Twinkle twinkle little star
I am the yellow one
18-wheeled dinosaurs
And 4-wheeled rabbits
Pass the sign
Of Westfield-Mayville
A V-shaped patch of blue sky
And Phantom Fireworks
Overlook empty vineyards
And old Christmas lights

I-90 to Buffalo, 1/12/08

Zombie grass lurks
The cars are golden
Two red eyes
In the Lion's Den
Skeleton towers
The trees are red
Imoto is crying

By The Constructivist - January 13, 2008 2 comments:
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Labels: CitizenSE Games, Dramatis Personae



THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2008


HAWTHORNE SOCIETY CFP AND ANNOUNCEMENTS


Got this over the transom from Leland Person and thought I'd do my part to
spread the word.

***

1) The 2008 Hawthorne Society summer meeting at Bowdoin College is scheduled for
June 12-15, 2008.

2) We have extended the deadline for submitting paper and other proposals for
the Bowdoin conference until January 30th. Here’s the “Call”:

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Starting Over

The Hawthorne Conference organizers offer this wide-ranging rubric to include
such topics as: Hawthorne's new start at Bowdoin, his beginnings as a tale
writer; his "new" career as a novelist; his new (and constantly renewed)
reputation; his interest in the beginnings of things (biblical, historical,
personal); his new friends; his sense of the "new" vs. the "old" world; his
definition of the "new" woman--and new man ("New Adam and Eve"); Hawthorne and
the New Romanticism; Hawthorne and the New Classroom; Hawthorne and the (new)
State of Maine; Hawthorne and the (new) structure of allegory; and Hawthorne in
the new (21st) Century.

Please send paper topics by January 30, 2008,to Sam Coale, 39 Pratt Street,
Providence, RI 02906 or samcoale@cox.net

3) We announce topics for ALA 2008 and MLA 2008:

ALA
Teaching Hawthorne
Hawthorne and the Performing Arts

MLA
Hawthorne as Story-Teller
Hawthorne and Emerson

***

Pass it on!

By The Constructivist - January 10, 2008 No comments:
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MONDAY, JANUARY 07, 2008


ON FUNDING PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION, PART II: HARVARD'S ENDOWMENT


A belated Happy New Year to Blogoramaville! Time for Part II in this CitizenSE
series.

Check out this Dec. 31st op-ed by Steven Roy Goodman in The Boston Globe on
Harvard's endowment. Taken together with Herbert Allen's Dec. 21st op-ed in The
New York Times, which also makes Harvard the poster child for endowment
disparities in the U.S., Goodman's piece helps turn up the heat on the
wealthiest colleges and universities in the country. In it, he asks why
universities are exempt from the federal law that non-profit organizations must
spend 5% of their endowments each year or lose their tax-exempt status. And he
raises other tough questions:



> Why does an institution of higher learning have $35 billion in its back pocket
> anyway? Why has it become customary for universities to spend only a small
> fraction of their interest income--and not even the endowment funds
> themselves--for daily operations? Why do American taxpayers continue to
> subsidize schools that increasingly operate like for-profit companies--and
> less like tax-exempt educational foundations that are charged with educating
> the next generation?



Although Goodman and Allen disagree on how much Harvard's endowment grew in the
past year (by $5.7B or $7B?!), they agree that there's a problem when so much
capital is tied up in so few institutions of higher learning--a perspective
obviously not shared by the Harvard, Princeton, and Yale administrations, as
reported by their universities' student newspapers back in October '07. Yet even
people at relatively well-off institutions--like Bard College President Leon
Botstein--think the problem is real.

Is there a problem when the 62 colleges and universities in the Billion Dollar
Endowment Club (according to NACUBO's most recent study; figures for 2007 should
be out in a couple of weeks) are on average a thousand times greater than the
endowment at my home university, which recently rose to $17.41M? It's a question
I'll come back to in a couple of weeks, so let's say for the sake of argument
that there is. How should it be solved?

Allen and Goodman help steer discussion of solutions away from reducing tuition
and increasing financial aid at those institutions in the Billion Dollar
Endowment Club and toward the funding of higher education more generally.
Allen's proposed revenue-sharing solution--to tax the capital gains of
institutions with endowments greater than $500K/student and distribute the
proceeds pro rata to the institutions with the lowest per-student endowments--is
more carefully thought-out than Goodman's rather vague closing line: "it might
be time for our elected officials to rein in financial benefits for those
institutions that can't manage to spend 5 percent of their tax-exempt wealth." I
have a few ideas that Harvard and other private institutions in the BDEC could
do with their endowments right now that don't require any Congressional action.

1) Support your graduate students better--at least give them a real
apprenticeship experience if you won't recognize their unions.

2) Hire more full-time, tenure-track faculty members, not enough just to do most
of the teaching the graduate students are now doing, but enough to reduce class
sizes significantly.

3) Put aside 1% of your capital gains each year to be gifted to the endowments
of universities your institution thinks deserve the funding. That's right:
invest in U.S. higher education.

So what do you think, Blogoramaville? Any other suggestions?

[Update 1/8/08: College affordability is, of course, an important issue, but the
point of my #3 is that targeted investments by the BDEC in capital-starved U.S.
higher ed institutions can have an immediate effect on the quality and cost of
education for more students, rather than simply a symbolic or trend-setting
one.]

By The Constructivist - January 07, 2008 No comments:
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ABOUT CITIZENSE

CitizenSE started out as a place to clear my throat and free associate my way
through parts of several apparently neverending research projects while on a
teaching Fulbright in Japan and became an academic/family life blog upon my
return to the States, until it morphed into an academic governance blog during
the year I chaired Fredonia's University Senate, then went more or less dormant
for over a decade (alternating between union, governance, teaching, and
Hawthorne matters during the "more" parts), until being revived during the last
six months of my third term as Senate chair. Someday soon it may once again
become "chiefly about Hawthorne matters"--or something else entirely. Feel free
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