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.

Common-reading grumpage

So, it's time again for the annual round of freshman common-reading grumpage over at InsideHigherEd. Depending on which of the comments you read, the common-reading selections at the vast majority of universities are too new! too liberal! too nonfictional! too lightweight! too depressing!

John Warner's comments in the thread at IHE nail a lot of the difficulties, complications, and uneasy compromises of choosing a common-reading book. (Actually, John Warner pretty much nails everything all of the time, and can we please just make him Secretary of Education already?) Since I seem to have become, much to my own dismay, chair of the subcommittee that is in charge of selecting our university's common reading, I'd like to underline his point that the book has to be acceptable to faculty from across the disciplines. This, by the way, includes faculty who aren't necessarily on board with the whole liberal arts enterprise in the first place. I'm talking about faculty who want to jettison the whole program so they can spend the entire freshman experience course going over the requirements for their particular pre-professional discipline. And faculty who complain that the last few years' offerings have been insufficiently uplifting, and can't we just do an inspirational self-help book instead? And faculty who are Very Very Concerned that the book should not depict white people in our state in a bad light. (N.B., if you're going to have a common reading book about the civil rights era -- and there were several good reasons why our selection this year really needed to be about the civil rights era -- it is going to depict white people in our state in a bad light. If you don't want posterity to judge you harshly, don't behave badly.) And faculty who think it is really too much to expect students to read a whole entire book. (Call me old-fashioned, but I think somebody really needs to tell the students who are unwilling to read books that their choices are a) to become willing to read books; or b) to choose a life-path that doesn't involve college.)

Sigh. If they would just make me dictator of everything, I'd totally pick a classic. Like Lysistrata. Or The Importance of Being Earnest. Or maybe Candide. All of which have the advantage of being fun and short. But if I did that, certain people from the Pre-Professional Discipline That Shall Not Be Named would totally flip out.

Did I mention, we've been asked to start thinking about next year's reading selection more or less immediately after school reconvenes this year? I can hardly wait.

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.

a paradox

1) Students whose ACT scores are low enough place into Basic Writing, Basic Math, and / or Basic Reading. Students who are in two or more of the above also take a three-credit Learning Skills course. If they're in all three, that's full-time status right there.

2) None of these classes are considered "college level," so they do not count for credit toward graduation. For this reason, grades in these classes do not factor into the student's GPA.

3) Therefore, it is pretty much impossible for a student who never actually manages to PASS any of these classes to flunk out of college, or even to end up on academic probation.

Something is wrong with this picture, yes?

Taking the pledge

No, not that pledge. I am not sure there is ever a good time for temperance and sobriety, but the eve of a new semester isn't it. I refer to the Academic Honesty Pledge, which (as of this semester) all students taking a course in my department are supposed to sign.

I dunno. I do believe in academic honor codes, and I think students should experience rituals that reinforce them every so often. It's how I came up: both the Beloved Alma Mater and the University of Basketball were old-school Southern gentlemen's universities, and as problematic as that heritage is in some respects, they did know how to impress upon students that the honor code was a Big Deal. But I kind of think that a culture of academic integrity has to come from the students, not imposed on them from above; and I doubt that one department, without institutional backing, can do much to create that culture.

I also suspect that to make an honor code really stick, you have to trust your students enough to let them be the enforcers -- and I'm not sure anyone at my institution does. (Misnomer U. began as an old-school Southern ladies' university, you see, a heritage that comes with a strong tradition of in loco parentis. While both of my alma maters have had a student-administered honor court since time out of mind, I can't really imagine the young ladies of prior generations at Misnomer being allowed to run anything of the sort, given everything else I've heard about the Old Days. And the paternalistic attitude still persists, even after coeducation; I was rather shocked, in my first year, to learn that dorms here have curfews.)

And I wonder, too, if we can sustain a culture of anything, considering how many students transfer in or drop out and are only on campus for a year or two. And how many of them live off campus and show up only for classes. So many of our students inhabit a different world from the one where I went to college, and where I taught as a grad student, and I don't know yet what that world looks like.

But it's a start, I guess, and it means that the students in our classes this semester will at least be aware that the university has an honor code. And maybe that's something.