In which the Counseling Center is no real match for John Webster

So our Counseling Center is offering a new service, called "Don't Cancel Class!" Basically, one of the counseling staff is offering to go around to classes on days when the professor is absent and conduct a workshop for the class.

Which would be nice, since I do have to miss a class this semester -- except the class in question is, um, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. And the list of available workshops ("Stress Management," "Body Image and Eating Disorders," "Finding Your Place at [Our University]," and so forth) seems entirely too mundane.

Forthwith, a list of workshops I think the Counseling Center should totally consider offering:

-- Revenge Management
-- Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine, or Phlegmatic?: What Your Humours Say About You
-- What to Do if the Devil Speaks to You
-- How to Fake a Mental Illness Convincingly
-- So You Killed Your Twin Sister and Now You Think You're a Werewolf
-- Coping with Grief by Carrying Around Your Dead Girlfriend's Skull
-- How to Turn Your Gender Identity Crisis Into a Successful Stage Career

On the performativity of "What have you been reading lately?"

So, for some reason they seem to have made me a full professor since the last time I posted here, and the new president of Misnomer U. hosted a dinner for everyone who had just been hired, tenured, or promoted, which was nice of her. There was one bit where we were supposed to go around the room and introduce ourselves, and also say what we had been reading lately. Forthwith, some observations:

-- If you are a humanities professor, you say something that is clearly pleasure-reading, but at least vaguely cerebral. Witty mysteries about British academics are good, or the sort of science fiction that doesn't have aliens on the cover.

-- If you are a scientist or social scientist, you name a book related to your field of study.

-- If you are nursing faculty, you disclaim having any free time at all for reading, and pivot to talking about your children or grandchildren.

-- If you are in business, you also disclaim any time for leisure reading, but you make a joke about spreadsheets instead of talking about grandchildren.

-- If you are a university administrator, you say that you are reading the university Common Reading book, or something by one of the writers who will be visiting for the Writers' Symposium in October. Either way, it is very interesting and you are enjoying it very much.

-- If you work in tech support, you are allowed to read the kind of books with aliens on the cover.

Athletics comes to Misnomer U.

So we have an athletics program now. This is new; or rather, new-old, since the program has returned after a hiatus of fifteen years or so, but at any rate, this is the first time I've had to deal with student athletes since I was hired.

I was hoping it would be better than I remembered. It isn't: there are still lots of annoying bureaucratic forms to fill out tracking athletes' progress and grades, even though they're mostly online now, and all of these absences that we MUST accommodate, even though the student is inevitably missing important stuff. And there is still an astounding level of apathy among most of the student-athletes toward anything remotely academic, coupled with an insistence that they MUST MUST MUST get at least a B. (Back in the good old days, the apathetic students were as apathetic about grades as they were about everything else; adding athletics to the mix seems to amp up their extrinsic motivation without doing a bloody thing about the intrinsic part, which is the part that counts. So, for example, they will insist loudly that they don't want to do peer review in comp class because they want MY opinion, and then flake out on a round of required conferences which is their big opportunity to get my opinion because they can't be bothered to complete a draft on time.)

One of them stole a paper draft from his roommate, which is a type of academic dishonesty I haven't seen before. (He "rewrote" it, but not well enough to cover his tracks.) Somehow, this seems like a much, much more serious level of wrongdoing than ripping a paper off the Internet.

And it feels like there is a kind of, I dunno, cult of performative apathy in the one class I have that's majority-athlete? That happens sometimes -- students feed off each other, and a small critical mass of visibly participatory or non-participatory students can set the tone for a whole class -- but it's noticeably worse with this group. (Due to the demographics of Misnomer U., it's very rare to have a class that's majority-male; this one is, and I feel like there's a crucial difference between the way guys act when they're trying to impress girls and when they're trying to impress each other. At any rate, I occasionally read complaints from people at other schools about male students talking too much and dominating the classroom, and this phenomenon is so utterly foreign to my own experience that it feels like a dispatch from Bizarro World. Where are all of these guys who WANT to talk in class? Can we please, please get a few of them over here?)

Grump. These kids today!

Sigh...

So, thanks to a lot of hard work put in by some awesome people, we have a new Center For Teaching And Learning at Misnomer U., and there are some grants available for faculty. Last semester, I put in for a grant to buy theater tickets for the students in my various lit classes, because it turns out that there are some awesome educational benefits to live theater, and also because it's really kind of stupid to ask people to read a play when they have never actually BEEN to one.

So, totally free tickets available for students. And I'm doing the driving.

It turns out that it is hard as hell to actually get students to take a few hours off to see a play. Well, I kind of knew that because I'd done this before, but I was hoping things would change when they weren't responsible for buying their own tickets. Nope. They are not interested. Or they are interested, but they're too busy for there to be a time that will actually work for them. Or they bail at the last minute, after I've already bought them a ticket. It isn't the students' fault, most of the time. It's because they have complicated lives: they had kids way too young and their child-care arrangements fell though, or they're working full time while also taking a full load of classes and their boss keeps changing the schedule on them. I totally get it. But I wish things were otherwise. And the ones who DO show up often seem not to be the ones who would benefit the most; they tend to be the ones who actually HAVE seen a play before, and are maybe even theater majors, and the ones who are visibly engaged in class and basically getting it.

So I'm off to see some Tom Stoppard today, with two students out of the twenty enrolled in Brit Lit II. I hope neither of them bails. (At least this grant thing has made me a lot more Zen about people bailing, because I don't have the choice between getting stuck with the price of the ticket myself or trying to chase down the student and get them to pay for a show they didn't actually get to see.)

I was right around their age when I first saw this particular play. I might still have the program somewhere. My parents took me -- because it was the first US run and of course they were excited about seeing it, and of course they waited until I was home on spring break. It wasn't my first play by a long shot. It wasn't even my first Tom Stoppard. I want things to be that uncomplicated for my students. It turns out that it takes more than a bit of money to uncomplicate them -- and yet, money is surely at the core of why this is so hard.

bridge over troubled water

Breaking the silence (and, possibly, becoming ever less anonymous) to note that our university president has just been named commissioner of the state board of higher ed.

Very mixed feelings about this. I had only the vaguest notion of what college presidents actually did when I was first hired at Misnomer U.; they were just there, people who spoke briefly at public functions and made innocuous jokes. And then, in my first two years here, I discovered what it was like to work at a school with a spectacularly bad president. The good ones, I think, do so much work that is invisible. You notice it when it isn't there, or when it's done badly.

We had an interim president after that, who did a great deal to pour oil on troubled waters. And then Dr. B. came to us, and he was a bridge over troubled water. I remember that I was skeptical when he first came, since he was a higher ed board insider and we'd had a vexed relationship with them in the past. I should not have been.

It is not an easy job, I'm thinking. You have to be a salesman for your university, and you have to schmooze with people; but you have to have wisdom and intellect and strength of character in ways that don't typically go with the personality types that can do salesmanship and schmoozing. (It is possible that I am a prejudiced introvert.) At any rate, it was our good luck to land a president who united all of those qualities, and who was a wonky, data-driven political scientist to boot.

Good luck in your new position, Dr. B. The state higher ed board's gain is our loss.

Ugh...

So my department chair wishes to create this mostly-online graduate program, let's say that it's in Advanced Mopery. I don't actually teach Mopery, and there are only two people on campus who do, but the graduate program is intended to be sort of cross-disciplinary, so there are a bunch of literature classes attached to it. (All theoretical classes at this point, taught by theoretical faculty.) The senior Mopery professor wants to list me as one of these potential theoretical faculty on the proposal, so this is where I come in.

I am not wholly opposed to the concept, especially if it means I get to teach less freshman comp, but it seems to me that 1) teaching an online graduate class would be a hell of a lot of work, particularly since the topics for these classes are sort of ... far-ranging. (This is not the sort of program where you can teach a seminar on whatever your dissertation topic was and call it a day.) And 2) we teach a 4-4 load, we don't have a whole lot of support for research or travel or intensive study of new works of literature, and the institution really, really does not have the resources to change this. Nor, as far as I can tell, will there be a pay bump for teaching a grad class. And, in fact, Department Chair and Senior Mopery Professor seem to be working with the cavalier assumption that if you start the program first, the resources will eventually come, and then they will be able to hire new faculty, and compensate the existing faculty, and so forth. Whereas I am of the opinion that if you start giving away milk for free, nobody will offer to take the damn cow off your hands.

Oh, and the junior Mopery professor (who is no longer very junior, being tenured, and who is also well on his way to becoming somewhat famous) ALSO really does not want to teach in this program without some reasonable level of additional compensation, which the Powers That Be have positively refused to give him. At which point he basically washed his hands clean of the whole thing and left them to figure out how to put this program together without him. I am not sure that Chair and Senior Mopery Professor have realized that he is, in fact, the one with the leverage in this situation, and that he has very, very good odds of getting a better job elsewhere. (Let it suffice to say that if you Google his name, the first twelve or so hits are not us, and they include quite a few articles in national media.)

Chair knows how to work systems like nobody's business, so I'm reluctant to say that she and Senior Mopery Professor are being delusional; she is also a seriously awesome and ridiculously hard-working person who basically bleeds in the school colors, but I think that in this case this is part of the problem, because she has a hard time remembering that for the rest of us, this is in fact a job that we are paid to do, rather than the great calling of our life. (And yeah, everybody in academia has a hard time remembering that sometimes, but with Chair it's on a whole other level and most of the time it's great, until she starts expecting it of other people.)

Fuck, I really like and respect all of these people, and I don't want this to turn into a massive departmental feud, but I see almost no way that it doesn't. Meanwhile, I want to be a good citizen, but I really feel like I can't get behind this program and don't particularly want to teach in it, especially if there's no prospect of getting so much as a course release. Because in the end, it is extra work, and work deserves compensation (and grad students deserve faculty who aren't all stretched out like taffy). I said so, pretty much, in the department meeting today, and I feel like I've suddenly flipped the switch from being the Mousy Assistant Professor whom everyone liked, to being a Mouthy Associate Professor who is about to have enemies, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that, either. But tenure means not only that you can speak up about things, but that you sort of have to, right?

Bianca and Kate: a Misnomer U story

I've been in two minds about whether to post about this, but about a month and a half ago, one of our study abroad students -- I'll call her Bianca -- started making noises about possibly having to withdraw from the trip. This alarmed us considerably, since we were already at minimum numbers. Bianca offered no further explanation, but her friend, Kate, eventually turned up in my co-leader's office to explain that Bianca's family was in grave financial difficulty, and that while she had been able to scrape together (just) enough to make the payments, she wasn't sure she'd be able to buy textbooks, food, or anything else while we were away. To compound matters, some of her family were opposed to her spending money on what they saw as a luxury.

Bianca is a good student, but very quiet. Kate is the opposite, loud and brash and confident. It appeared that Kate had actually lent Bianca some of the money that she had been using to make the payments. Bianca, she explained, never got to do fun things like this, and Kate didn't really need the money right now. I don't know Kate's exact background, but I went out for tapas with her and her uncle once (because that is the sort of thing that happens sometimes at small colleges), and they struck me as probably very comfortably upper-middle-class. Kate, I think, had an upbringing that lent her a much more expansive sense of what is possible, and surmised that the faculty might be able to do something about Bianca's situation if they knew about it. And -- again because this is the sort of thing that happens at small colleges -- she was absolutely correct. We went to the Dean, who is AWESOME and immediately offered to buy the books himself, and to the chair of my department (because Bianca is one of our majors, but also because my chair knows everybody and can pull a lot of strings). They swung into action, and the upshot is that Bianca should have a fair chunk of emergency-scholarship money coming to cover her living expenses. Happy ending. (The sum of money, I should note, is in the three-digit range -- the sort of amount that seems big when you're a college student but laughably small later in life.)

So, a couple of things about this story: First, of course, it wouldn't happen at a state flagship university. You need to be at a place with a short enough chain of command, and a dean who knows individual students, and is willing to go to bat for them. You also need a few people who see travel, and all those other little enriching experiences, as an integral part of educating students. So, not the kind of thing that happens at a totally no-frills institution either, although I think no-frills colleges serve a useful purpose.

But more than all that, this story doesn't have a happy ending without Kate. And that, I think, is the real virtue of an institution like ours -- a public liberal arts college, not super-exclusive but academically solid. We're accessible to the Biancas, but we're also attractive to the Kates, and we're small enough that they'll meet up and befriend each other instead of stratifying into their own little cliques by the end of freshman orientation. And when students from different backgrounds come together, some pretty awesome things can happen. But it seems to me that they happened more often a generation ago, and are likely to happen less in the future -- because there are such big, class-based differences in colleges people aspire to attend in the first place, and as tuition goes up and up, the message from the media is increasingly becoming elites to the fancy R1s, plebes to the community colleges and for-profits, nothing in the middle.

But for now? We have a little space where the Biancas and Kates can and do meet, and where there are several people committed to making sure Bianca gets the chance to travel outside of the country for the first time in her life. And I'm proud to work in that little space. That is something.

Fleeing the country (with students)

So, I have not been blogging about this because I didn't want to jinx it, and it has been touch and go whether we could get and keep enough students for the trip to make, but I think it is time to make it official: In less than two months, a colleague and I will be leading our first study abroad trip. We'll be flying out of Nearest Large City to our destination -- let's call it Green Country* -- spending a few days in the capital city hitting the tourist sites pretty heavily, going to Quieter City and staying there for three weeks, and then heading back to the capital for another week before going home. Somewhere in there, we both teach accelerated summer-term classes. Mine, I must confess, is cobbled together from a single graduate course on Greenish literature that I took fifteen years ago and a few texts that I've taught in survey classes, and I am feeling massively underqualified to teach it -- but there has to be a first time for everything, and at least I do know a lot about figuring out the logistics of travel-on-the-cheap, which is certainly a relevant skill if not an academic one. Somehow I ended up in charge of all the budgeting and finances. (Yes, that is the sort of thing one might normally expect the study abroad office to handle. No, they don't. Long story.)

We originally planned this as an Honors trip, which would have come with a built-in audience with travel scholarships, but for various reasons that ended up not happening. So after recruiting like crazy, we're taking five non-Honors students from Misnomer U., and one retiree from the community who's coming along as an auditor, and one student from a neighboring university. That was exactly the number we needed for the trip to make, so we've been keeping our fingers crossed nobody would drop out. There isn't much of a culture of study abroad here outside of the Honors program, and most of the students don't have the money (nor are there scholarships available for non-Honors folk). But we made it. That feels like a triumph. And in the end, I'm glad that we're doing this outside of Honors. Because I love the Honors students, but they have so many opportunities handed to them that really should be available to all of our students, and this group has worked so hard to come up with the money themselves and find ways to make it all happen.

We just held an orientation session, in which we threw way too much information at our students and fielded questions ranging from the predictable ("Will I be old enough to drink in Green Country?"**) to the moderately wacky ("Can I bring an acoustic guitar in a gig bag?"***), and it's finally starting to feel real.

It's going to be interesting. Ever since grad school, I have been used to using travel as a way to get away from my everyday academic life, or even, secretly in my heart of hearts, regarding my academic life as a way to finance travel. And it has become a way to turn into a different person for a while, one who doesn't give a damn about student evaluations or readers reports, one who feels younger and less tied-down, takes bigger risks, strikes up quick friendships with strangers and then says goodbye as quickly. One thing I haven't ever tried to do is combine these two lives. (I'm wondering, now, what sort of teacher I will become in Green Country, where our classes will be taught here-there-and-everywhere -- in our lodgings, maybe outdoors sometimes, maybe in the pub -- and whether I will bring that teaching persona back with me.)

* No, not Greenland. We're nowhere near that exotic.
** Yes, you will. Hopefully you won't do anything stupid.
*** Well, you COULD, but we really aren't sure you want to.

of travel and education

So, as I hinted in my last post, a friend and I are hoping to put together a summer study-abroad course for the Honors program next year, although I won't know until fall whether it's going to be approved or not. Summer programs are the only kind of study abroad we have at Misnomer U.; anything during the regular semester is too long, too much time away from regular coursework, maybe also too scary for our students. So the Spanish program used to do one-month immersion programs in Mexico, until Mexico also became too scary; now they go to Spain instead. And the residential Honors program -- one of the few programs here that isn't run on a shoestring, thanks to a generous legacy from an alumna -- spends a month in various, though most often English-speaking, destinations in western Europe. This is a required component of residential Honors, and it's also totally free for many of the students apart from food and incidental expenses, and heavily subsidized for the others (it depends on exactly which scholarship they hold).

In four years of interviewing applicants for the Honors scholarships, I've learned that this is a huge draw for some of them and a huge source of anxiety for some of the others -- there is usually at least one student in every group who says that they are not interested in residential Honors because the study abroad component scares them. Sometimes my co-interviewers have tried to talk them out of it; I have never done so, since there are always plenty of other students who would love to go on the trip, and I'd just as soon save the scarce slots in this program for the ones who do want them, badly. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the ones who don't want to travel are the ones who most need to do so. God knows, a lot of the fear seems to be passed down from parent to child -- and it was my good luck that I was born to parents who talked me out of being afraid, who took me to Europe and the Dominican Republic when I was a teenager, and then gave me the push I needed to go on that Christmas break trip to the Bahamas with my high school marine biology class (because in Fairfax County, Virginia -- a place that now seems very far away -- even public schools do that sort of class trip).

So I went to the Bahamas, and had a wonderful time. And then, when I was a sophomore in college, I went to Spain for a semester, and hated it for the first six weeks, and loved it for the last eight. I did everything wrong in some ways, being too shy to speak as much Spanish as I should have done or to socialize with strangers, but it was still life-changing. Spain was where I learned how to handle myself -- how to tell if that guy cat-calling you is harmless or scary, how to drink in bars without turning yourself into an obviously-drunk target, how to deal with police and insurance companies after your purse gets snatched, how to be a stranger in a strange land. And it was reading Lorca on the all-night train to Granada, and feeling the hush that falls over people when they're in the presence of Guernica, and going to see El dia de la bestia without English subtitles and wondering what the hell that was all about. And it was orange trees, and lilacs, and little dishes of olives, and fireworks, and dirty city beaches, and a blizzard of pigeons in the square behind the cathedral.

We don't give our students all of that. We don't even give them a new language to dream in. We give them a lot of activities and excursions, and probably not even enough time to feel displaced. We give them, more or less, what my parents gave me on my first whistle-stop tour of Europe -- a glimpse, a taste, a safe space in which to see a little of the world. And maybe it's just as well; maybe that is what they need first, and bigger adventures can come later.

Why I love my university, in pictures

Because sometimes, art installments appear overnight.



Many spectators gathered on the stairs to watch the balloon.





But alas! Not all is well in balloon-land.

Campus-visit eve

We're hiring for a new colleague this year -- the first one in my department since I came along. The two finalists are coming next week, one right after the other. The first one arrives tomorrow, although he's requested to have a day on his own to explore (which sounds like a fine idea), so I don't get to meet him until Monday. (I wonder if he knows exactly how dead downtown Deep South Town tends to be on a Sunday; although I think one of our two coffee shops is open on Sundays, so at least he won't starve.)

I walked around the campus a little, trying to imagine it through the new-person's eyes. We have some lovely buildings: Victorian, rambling, asymmetrical, towered, balconied. We'll be putting the candidates up in one of them. And April is our best month, I think. My own campus visit was in April, though at the other end of the month: magnolia-time rather than azalea-time. I remember the ivory cups spilling their fragrance on the air. I remember deciding (a good decision) to ditch the interview suit and wear a nice summer dress. I remember noticing all the little details that spoke of bare-bones budgeting -- one and only one search committee member at each meal, an ancient TV cart instead of a smart classroom for the teaching demo, a suite in the Honors dorm instead of a hotel room -- and deciding I didn't care. (This may not have been the best decision, as Misnomer U. spent my first couple of years lurching from one crisis to another.)

I hope one of them falls in love with this place. I hope the rest of us fall in love with the same one who falls in love with this place. (Oh God, what if they both fall in love with this place? And what if we fall in love with both of them? I want there to be enough happy endings to go around, but I know that in humanities job searches there never are.)

On wealth

Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860 — Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored, I suppose, by the recital. And she told me — rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters were read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr —— won’t give a penny. The Saturday Review has been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall we hold a bazaar? Can’t we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill said on the subject. Can anyone persuade the editor of the —— to print a letter? Can we get Lady —— to sign it? Lady —— is out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was spent on it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together...

This is Misnomer U's story, pretty much. The long struggle continues; now and again we have to lobby the state legislature for our continued existence. Otherwise, barring a fresh round of budget cuts or a natural disaster, they ignore us. We are small and do not have any sports teams, and while we are no longer exclusively female, we are still stubbornly woman-serving in our demographics and outlook.

Over spring break I went to visit the University of Basketball, where I went to grad school. No particular reason, just missed the campus and the town. There is a small art museum at the edge of campus; I went there now and again when I was a student, though I don't remember thinking it was anything special at the time.

I went in, and followed the signs upstairs to the study gallery. Oh, my God. How did I not know about this when I was a grad student? Faculty members can request to have specific works put on display for their classes -- anything in the collection, any class. There was a corner set aside for a Brit Lit II survey, an ordinary sophomore-level gen ed class just like the one I'm teaching now. Only the students in this Brit Lit class get to go in and see works by Blake and Turner and Beardsley. I hadn't had any idea you could do that -- nor would I have thought to take advantage of it, not back then, when I was still struggling to get through one day of class at a time, trying not to expose my ignorance in front of a horde of unruly undergrads. You don't think about giving your students cool and enriching experiences until later, after you've got a handle on what you're doing. But God, what wouldn't I give to have a resource like that now!

The galleries at Misnomer U. are strictly for rotating exhibits, mostly of faculty and student art; we don't have a collection as such. Much of what we do have on display, at any given time, is for sale.

We don't have a performing arts series. This is why I ferry students "all over hell and creation" (I thank thee, Fie, for teaching me that phrase) to piggyback off of other schools' visiting artists. We don't even have a film series.

We try to pretend these things don't matter: with a little imagination, one can put together a fairly respectable-sounding schedule of "cultural events" for the freshmen in Intro to College Life, even if most of them are homegrown. But opportunities and experiences do matter, and they especially matter when most of your students come from places where the arts are not part of their everyday life, and frankly I am getting sick of pretending.

two years...

So, it's just about two years since I got the job offer from Misnomer U. The campus looks very much as it did when I interviewed; it is the season of magnolias and long slow spring evenings. The fountains drip gently, and the graduating seniors pose in front of fantastic Victorian buildings with their towers and balconies. I fell in love with this place at this time of year. I would have accepted a job offer from almost anywhere, of course, but it was nice to feel that it came from a school I could love.

Today was my first graduation, since I was at Kalamazoo last year. It was nice. Everyone gripes about graduation, but I like the solemnity and ceremony of it, and I'm secretly fond of wearing my robes and hood. It made me feel like I was looking at our campus with fresh eyes again, and finding that the gloss hadn't quite worn off after all, in spite of everything I know now about budget cuts and internal politics and assessment madness and crumbling admissions standards. There's a deeper truth and value underneath it all, and it will endure long after we've forgotten about these ephemera.

I believe in universities. I do. (It would be nice if American society in general, or at least the state higher education board, believed in them with the same fervor, but tonight I am just glad that I have a job I believe in.)

And we have a damned fine crop of graduating seniors in the English department this year -- three of the nine seniors who completed honors theses were ours (four, actually, if you count the double major who did his honors work in a different field), and we've got several others graduating with various flavors of cum laude, including the one student in the graduating class with a perfect 4.0. Good for them. Good for the humanities, in general.

Fee-grief

I hardly know how to write about this.

Four of our students died last weekend, in a particularly awful and terrifying way. They were freshmen, just beginning their second semester, still in their teens. I didn't know them. I'm sure many of my students did. It is a small college and a small community.

In some ways, it feels like this is not my tragedy to talk or write about. I didn't know what to say in class; I don't, of course, miss them in the way that so many of the students and professors on our campus miss them.

At least one of them would have been my student sooner or later, given her major. In a year or two or three -- I don't know and never will know exactly when -- I will teach a Shakespeare class that would have been slightly different in character, because the presence or absence of even one student changes the temperament of a class just a little.

There are so many would have beens; so much potential. I've just been thinking about how young eighteen or nineteen is, and how hard it is to guess who our freshmen will become. Their families and friends have lost the girls they knew; the rest of us, perhaps, have lost the women we will not know. And for that reason, no mind that's honest but in it shares some woe.

Politicking

I went to the state capital yesterday in Grande Dame Colleague's van, along with a couple of other colleagues and three students. There was also a huge bus of Misnomer U. folks, which filled up too quickly to get a ticket, and assorted alumni and friends from other parts of the state. All in all, we filled up both galleries of the state House of Representatives. A couple of the representatives introduced us, and Sorta-Famous Alumna sang a song. We were going to take the state Senate by storm as well, except they'd adjourned by the time we got there because a water main burst and most of the downtown area was without water, so that part was sort of anticlimactic. So we posed for a couple of photos for the press, and then went to a reception at one of the hotels, where there was also no water, but lots of Wine For Legislators, and fried catfish bits, and mini-cream puffs, and all that sort of thing. So I had some wine and catfish, and tried to talk to legislators (I wasn't very good at it -- politics is not a game for introverts), and then we drove back, getting home at around 10:00 or so. Which wouldn't have been bad, ordinarily, but on top of the first day of classes it was a bit exhausting.

The Capitol building was nice: lots of swoopy art-nouveauish railings and Tiffany glass. I don't think I'd actually been inside a state legislature building since my Girl Scout troop's trip to Richmond when I was ten, so it was interesting getting to see it.

I'm not sure I feel like I contributed all that much, but I'm told that we made a pretty impressive showing through sheer numbers, and the important thing is to show the legislators that they have lots and lots of constituents who care about the university's future.

It's frustrating, though: apparently all kinds of daft public-university-related bills have been introduced this session, some of which have no chance of passing and no apparent purpose except to vent hostility against higher education in general, but at least one of which has me seriously worried.

Anyway, back to business as usual, at least until the next crisis. The classes seem OK, so far; I have a fair number of repeat students in Brit Lit II and Shakespeare, and the general temperature in both classes seemed pretty good. I don't know yet what to expect from either section of comp (one Basic, one regular English 101 but filled mostly with people who started in Basic or else failed it last semester). I hope neither of them is too dire.

Nice to see public liberal arts colleges get a little love, at InsideHigherEd.

Both the Beloved Alma Mater and Misnomer University arguably fall into this category -- or at least they did for many decades -- and I think this type of school fills a vitally important niche. I'm not quite as sanguine as Spellman about the future, because I've seen both institutions suffering under the pressure to become bigger! And more research-oriented! And more cost-efficient! And more vocational! And more standardized! And bigger! They have reacted to these pressures in opposite ways, the Beloved Alma Mater by "trying to become Princeton" as the Laid-Back Medievalist put it when I went back for my college reunion, and Misnomer U. by tipping closer and closer to becoming Yet Another Regional Comprehensive.

I'm also not as enthusiastic about vocational programs as Spellman is; I think they can work as part of a quality integrated liberal-arts program, but it takes a particular institutional culture and a lot of careful advising to make sure that they do. Students like the nursing major who took my upper-level Shakespeare class last semester, who wasn't the best writer in the class but was really talkative and enthusiastic and obviously very much into Shakespeare, even though the course probably made it harder for him to fulfill his program's requirements? Yeah, I want more students like that. But more often, I'm seeing a huge gulf in attitude and intellectual curiosity between the education, nursing, and business students and the ones drawn to more traditional arts and sciences majors, and the advisors in the vocational programs do not seem to be doing much to bridge that gap; if anything, they seem to encourage students to think of the liberal arts core requirements as a series of stupid boxes that need to be checked off. (And, to be fair, the whole structure of the core curriculum reinforces this world-view; I would like to see fewer tick-boxes and a chance for students to pursue work in a few complementary disciplines at a higher level, rather than taking a dozen unrelated intro-level courses.)

But this is turning into a nitpicking-and-grumbling post, and I don't mean it to be, because I do believe my institution is providing something valuable. I believe it is a place where it's easier for students to know their professors than not to know them, and I also believe that the features Spellman identifies as the hallmarks of a quality liberal arts education -- "small class size, close faculty-student interaction, an innovative and interdisciplinary common core in the arts and sciences, undergraduate research experiences, senior capstone projects, service learning and community engagement, and a rich and diverse co-curricular life" -- are the norm for all of our students and not just a hundred lucky souls in the Honors College. And I believe, most of all, that this type of institution needs to be an option within the state system, because for many of our students, going out of state or going to a private college simply isn't thinkable. (And yes, I know some private SLACs hand out financial aid like candy, but you have to apply first, and nobody has ever told them they can apply.)

Yeah. I think I believe in what I do. And that's a good way to feel at the beginning of a new year.

floryshyth and burgenyth

Spring has come to Deep South Town. The Bradford pear tree outside my office window was white with blossoms a week ago; now the green, glossy leaves are unfolding, and the rest of the campus is coming out in many colors. Surprisingly, students here don't seem to spend much time outside, unless they are walking to and from classes. I would have expected to see suntan-oiled girls on blankets and games of Ultimate Frisbee by now, but the lawns are very decorous and very still.

Perhaps they're too exhausted to play. I'm feeling that way myself. The nine weeks between the beginning of the semester and spring break (which starts TOMORROW!) seem very, very long. Spring means a faster tempo for both professors and students, a flurry of deadlines, more urgency in everything. And most of our students have little enough leisure time as it is.

Still, I hope they find a little time to enjoy the sunshine and the daffodils before they're gone.

End of the semester!

Yup. Classes at Misnomer U. ended yesterday. Take that, those of you who were out on the beach in August while I was teaching my classes. Yay!

There's still a week of exams after the break, followed by an astonishingly early deadline for submitting grades, but in practice it's over.

Random observations about the first semester:

-- I shall miss my Awesome and Fabulous Shakespeare class. I really liked that group. It was a required class for many of them, but with only about three or four exceptions, they were also very much into the material for its own sake, and a few of them expressed an interest in taking the other Shakespeare course in the fall, even though they're not required to have more than one. I think I may make banana bread for the final exam. (Every now and again, I get a group that inspires me to bake.)

-- My morning freshman comp class reminded me a lot of the kids in the Summer Bridge program at the University of Basketball: very social, pretty chatty, better at talking than writing, eager and excited about being in college if sometimes clueless about what college-level work actually entails. This is mostly good, as I really liked working for Summer Bridge, but some of them do seem to need a level of discipline and general cluing-in about academic life that is difficult to provide during the regular semester. The afternoon comp class was pretty similar in terms of background, but without a core group of three or four excellent students to model good class participation and behavior, and I think the other students definitely needed that core group. But at least it is a very, very different dynamic than at New SLAC, where I felt like I was fighting an uphill battle every single day.

-- In general, this place has a very different vibe than New SLAC, despite being roughly the same size and having similar average ACT scores. I miss some things about the campus culture at New SLAC -- it was, I think, more engaged, more community-oriented, the sort of place where faculty showed up to the English Club poetry reading and everybody turned out for the choir concerts and theater department productions. On the other hand, I don't miss feeling like the unwritten requirements for tenure included being seen at these events (and, quite possibly, being an extravert). There has to be some sort of middle ground, right?

-- In lots of ways, though, the community vibe at New SLAC was illusory; it didn't necessarily encompass the commuter students from Desperately Poor City up the highway, for example. The same class divisions apply here, only more so: there are plenty of middle-class students who live in the dorms, work 10-12 hours a week if at all, participate in campus activities, and have a good-sized social support network among their fellow students. And then there are lots who commute from other counties, work such long hours that they fall asleep in class, and barely have a chance to talk to their fellow students, and they're visibly hurting from the lack of time and energy and, most of all, community. I don't know what to do about this -- maybe there is nothing we can do -- but I am very, very sure that the administration's current push toward distance education is going to make the problem worse, not better.

-- At any rate, there is good and useful work to be done here. And maybe that's the most important quality in any job, really.

Day One...

So, this was my first day as a tenure-track professor. Shakespeare at 9, Brit Lit I at 10. I've had that sort of schedule in grad school, and I'd forgotten how nice it was -- the whole day ahead of you. I do have office hours on Wednesday afternoon, but Mondays and Fridays are free. (In theory, this will be time to Pursue Scholarship. In practice, probably not so much.) I still don't have an actual office; that is, I have been assigned one, but it is a brand-new office and as yet it is full of workmen and sawdust.

The Shakespeare class seems nice: mostly English majors, a few people with acting or directing experience, pretty engaged. I'm still making my mind up about the survey. They are nearly all non-majors, and I'm starting to think that my Mentor may have been right; several of them seem like they'll struggle with the reading. Well, at least we hit Chaucer before the end of the drop period (and there are thirty people enrolled, so I really hope some of them do drop).

I can't stop thinking about the fact that my first Brit Lit survey, back in grad school, was an absolute disaster. The second one, at New SLAC, was great, but the student demographics were totally different and the class ended in 1600 instead of 1800. (Also, we had lots of shiny technology at New SLAC, so I could perk things up by showing images and film clips. Here, it is me and a piece of chalk and an overhead projector, maybe a portable TV on a cart if I remember to reserve one. Which isn't bad; most of my own favorite professors had themselves and a piece of chalk. I had myself and a piece of chalk for my first two or three years in the classroom. It's a little scary how quickly technology becomes a crutch, and maybe just as well that I'm going to have to do without.)

Tomorrow: Two sections of freshman comp. God, I hope they don't hate me as much as my first-semester freshmen did last year.

I'm back

Here I am in Deep South Town. In the past week, I have gone camping in the Great Smoky Mountains, moved into the new apartment, posted the course grades for the summer class, acquired some new plants and utterly failed to assemble a bookcase, attended New Faculty Orientation and a party at my chair's house, and, rather oddly, gone out drinking with the local Chief of Police. How was everyone else's week?

I have Internet access at home, as of yesterday, but for some reason I have utterly failed in my attempts to access any work-related sites. Only fun sites. I'm not as broken up about this as I probably should be, although I guess I should do something about it. I keep getting "Sorry, we could not find this page" messages about the majority of the web pages in the state university system, and my login for WebCT doesn't seem to work. (It is remotely -- REMOTELY -- possible that all of the state university sites are down, but I suspect something more sinister is at work.)

I have been assigned a Mentor. I am starting to think this may be a mixed blessing, as she is very nice, but our approaches to pedagogy seem to be ... somewhat at odds. She said Dire Things about the students' reading and writing skills, and then finished off by saying she no longer assigns papers in her 200-level lit classes because they were so awful. Well, dude. How are they supposed to learn to write papers if they don't WRITE any? (On looking at her syllabus, it appears that the students are reading about twice as much in my 200-level Brit Lit survey as they are in hers. Perhaps this is overambitious. Then again, perhaps it will encourage the lazy students to drop, and since I have a total of ONE HUNDRED AND ONE students this semester, mass drops would be a good thing.) Anyway, I'm inclined to ignore most of the Dire Things she said about student literacy, because honesty, I had colleagues who said the same things at New SLAC, and they weren't true for the most part, and the average ACT scores here are pretty much identical to those at New SLAC.

We have had some meetings about Assessment, and Assessing the Assessment, and Assessing the Assessment of the Assessment. I felt sort of guilty for playing Buzzword Bingo in the first one, but then it turned out that everyone else was doing much the same, except for a few people who are really earnest about Assessment. Anyway, it appears that there will be a great many more meetings about this topic. I am tempted to come up with some Anti-Assessment buzzwords. ("When you assess, you make an ass out of essment"? All right, maybe not.)

Classes start on Wednesday. I'm not ready.