People sure are prone to weather-induced hysteria. This kind of hype used to be confined to the local teevee news channels, but I guess the Weather Channel has made it mainstream.

(More substantial blogging will resume in the near future.)

Please enjoy this crackling fire while you warm up after your local MLK Jr. Day Parade. Touré is here in Potterville! That’s pretty big news.

Thanks for the memories!

Book weight, that is, not body weight.  Our recent discussion of clutter, inspired by the super-detailed and super-creepy installation “Barbie Trashes her Dream House“, has inspired me to donate the shelves full of books I no longer read or use.  I’ve just removed four boxes and large bags of books off of my shelves, and I’m just getting started.  Whichever organization calls me first to ask if I have any good, re-useable household goods, books, or clothing, and offers to pick my donation up from my front door, will be the beneficiary.

I’ve lived in this house for ten years–by far, the longest place I’ve ever lived in my adult life.  And I’ve bought or been given a lot of books over the past thirty years.  I was wondering, aside from the household clutter angle, why now?  Why get rid of the excess books now, instead of sometime during the 1990s, when I moved ten times in as many years and was always packing and moving and unpacking those damn boxes of books.  It’s perverse, no? 

But my theory is that it’s precisely because I have a stable home now and I’m no longer moving once or twice a year, I don’t need the old books any more. It’s like I carted around those books as though I were building walls with them, Three Little Pigs-style, in the hopes that they’d make me feel secure and keep the wolf from the door.  But after ten years of not regularly culling the heard, some shelves in my living room and office were starting to look like the shelves of a crazy hoarder–you know, shelves with double-rows of books, and shelves with books files horizonally as well as vertically.

(And please–no lectures on e-readers.  For most of my life as a biliophile, e-books were entirely unavailable, so I’d still be stuck with 95% of this pile of unwanted dead-tree codex even if I had a Kindle or an i-Pad now.)

Fifteen year-old travel books?  Who needs ‘em!  Trendy books purchased on impulse in an airport two or five or ten years ago?  Buh-bye.  That whole shelf of anti-George W. Bush books I bought ca. 2001-2008?  You’re outta here, too.  Cultural studies books that mystified me 20 years ago?  Gone.  Fiction I bought but never read because it bored me?  Guiltlessly gone!  I’m keeping only books that relate to my work, and great literary fiction.  If I give away something and find I need it again (unlikely), I can get it at a library.  After all, I can get nearly any book in the world delivered to my university library, after all, and then return it when I’m done.  (And even non-academics can do this too–most local library systems participate in interlibrary loan services.)

A shande! Sin verguenza!

So the big clean-out is part I of my resolution.  Part II is a promise not to buy a single book for myself in 2012.  (And it’s a leap year! )  Instead, so as to support the work of my fellow historians and other useful authors, I will agressively pepper my subject-area librarian with requests for the Baa Ram U. library shelves.  Amazon and brick-and-mortar bookstores with new books aren’t my weakness.  It’s the used bookstores that always yield the greatest treasures, as I’ve written here before, and will be the most difficult test of my resolve.  (Maybe I’ll make exceptions for rare finds, if they’re directly germane to my work.)

Now, if only I could shovel off my desk, I might get some real work done this semester. . .any advice for me on this?  In the past, my experience is that if I wait long enough for the documents and papers on the desk to become irrelevant or useless, it’s a pretty easy cleanup.  (But it’s hardly efficient.)

This video only confirms my already very low opinion of college and university campus “police.”  My personal experience on two different campuses is that they are thugs who hassle only people who are sure to pose no threat to them whatsoever, and that they leave the real miscreants alone.  I was working alone in my campus office one late Sunday afternoon at a former university when an amped up campus police officer with a billy club burst into my office without knocking and threatened me.  (He assumed that only a thief would have the light on on a Sunday night.  I assured him it was my own office and that I was working there legally, showing him my keys.)  At another former university, I was pulled over and ordered out of my car for mistakenly driving the wrong way an exit-only parking lot egress.  (There was no danger to anyone else–there were no other cars trolling around that parking lot anyway.)

But these are far from the worst stories I’ve heard.  A former student of mine–a truly gentle and inquiring spirit of small- to medium build who spent several years after graduation riding his bike through Mexico, Central, and South America–told me a truly horrifying story about being stopped and arrested for drunk walking across the Baa Ram U. campus.  He had gone to the bars with some friends, and being responsible young men, they walked downtown.  On their way back to campus, his friends went one direction and as he continued walking quietly by himself he was stopped by campus police who accused him (rightly) of being drunk.  He explained that he was 21 and just walking home, as he understood he should do when inebriated, and showed them his I.D.  These campus “police” officers illegally detained him and transported him to an off-campus drunk tank. 

Meanwhile, of course, I’m assuming that there were rowdy parties and all kinds of underage drinking going on, large parties where people were probably being sexually assaulted, but busting up those parties would be difficult and potentially dangerous.  It was much easier to harass and detain the solo drunk guy who wasn’t doing anything illegal or any threat to anyone.  I encouraged him to lawyer up and sue, but being a gentle soul I don’t think he did anything.

I saw a former colleague last night who left Baa Ram U. for the University of Chicago.  He informs me reliably that the UC campus police now patrol much of Hyde Park, not just the campus within its own boundaries.  This is what the modern police state looks like:  private police forces, accountable to no one, not looking for trouble but rather just looking for low-risk opportunities to remind the non-criminal majority who’s really in charge.

As regular readers will recall, I commented on Tony Grafton’s recent essay in the New York Review of Books, in which he reviews the current jeremiads about what’s wrong with American colleges and universities these days and called for “curious writers . . . [to] describe some universities and colleges, in detail, with all their defects.”  I solicited your views, dear readers, and am blown away by the number and diversity of viewpoints you have contributed.  So today I offer you a very briefly annotated bibliography of the responses.  Please click and read them for yourselves!

1. Roxie at Roxie’s World must be reading the New York Review of Books up in heaven, because she wrote a post fully 24 hours before I solicited her opinion on what’s wrong with modern American universities.  Her answer?  The unconscionable reliance on adjunct labor, which is after all at the heart of most Excellence Without Money strategies.  (Just go to her blog and search Excellence Without Money to read her catalog of crimes against education over the past three years.)
2. Roxie also kindly reminded me that Tenured Radical got in on the game even earlier with this post calling for faculty “to get off the Education Carousel and get to work Occupying Education.  Faculty, in particular, are becoming more like each other than not, regardless of where they work.  While some of us will age out under the old system of tenure and stratified privilege, increasingly we too must come to terms with the effects of the neoliberal education agenda (shrinking salaries, reduced and more expensive medical benefits, the destruction of entire fields of study to eliminate tenured positions, political attacks on unionized faculty and staff, higher workloads) in the here and now.”  (Just to name a few of the problems facing us in higher ed!)
3. Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar says from her perch at Crisis State University (after Walt Kelly’s Pogo) that the enemy of higher education “is us,” that is, the American voters who have consented to withdraw their support from higher education at both the state and federal levels.
4. Lance Manyon writes from Flagship Public U. that Americans in general approach university education in a way that’s too career-oriented rather than thought-oriented, and urges other faculty not to fall into the trap of buying into this vision of education.
5. Dr. Crazy, in a brilliant riff on Foucault and the repressive hypothesis, asks who’s failing and on what terms?  From her position at a comprehensive directional university where she teaches a 4-4 load (plus usually some summer courses), she thinks that her university does just fine in offering first-generation college students a fine education at a bargain price. 
6. Expat U.S. American Janice Liedl writes about her Canadian comprehensive and bilingual regional uni, and like Dr. Crazy, says that she thinks it’s doing really well for their students even given budgetary pressures.
7. Feminist Avatar, a Scotswoman now teaching in Australia, reviews the issues in higher ed in both the UK and in Oz and argues that the corporate university is not just an American thing.  She writes, “Instead of taking the lead on what the relationship between research and the economy/ society should be, [universities] are buying into the narrative that ‘growth’, ‘money’ and ‘the economy’ should be our social drivers. But, what is the point of the universities, if not to question these things?”
8. Professor Zero offers the basic math of the demands on her time and labor in teaching and advising in a Foreign Language department, noting that her teaching alone should in theory occupy 60 hours per week!  (She’s effectively picking up on Roxie’s point in #1 above, which is the burdens that fall on the “privileged” regular faculty when universities staff programs or even entire departments with adjunct faculty labor.)
9. Spanish Prof writes from a prestigious midwestern sectarian uni that she’s got it pretty good for now.  However, she notes that the fates of even private universities are tied quite closely in all respects to the local K-12 schools, which is not encouraging for American higher ed at large.
10. Flavia at Ferule & Fescue offers twin posts on this subject:  Part I is “somewhat bizarrely cheerful,” (her words, not mine) about the job her comprehensive public uni has done in promoting the liberal arts and higher academic standards, although in Part II she confides that the absence of meaningful support for foreign language teaching and scholarship at her uni bodes ill for the truly “global” university it aspires to be.  
11. Speaking of the relationship between K-12 and American post-secondary ed, Clio Bluestocking writes about her former life teaching “grade 13″ at a community college in an area in which the K-12 schools have done a poor job preparing their students for any post-secondary education.  She argues that the assumptions behind the “assessment” regime and concern about “completion rates” are more appropriate to 4-year institutions, and don’t really apply to the CC model.
12. J.Otto Pohl writes from the University of Ghana about the “reverse brain drain” from the U.S. to other nations. 
13. Leslie M-B at the Clutter Museum writes from Boisie State U. about her predominantly working-class students and their complicated lives.  Accordingly, she resents the administration’s “desire to scale up the number of students we teach, and the speed with which they graduate.”  (She also resents the low status and pay scale among the humanities departments.)
14. Jonathan Rees at More or Less Bunk also complains about evidence-free (and unpaid!) work speed-up initiatives and online classes at Baa Ram U.-Pueblo.
15. Although Undine claims that she has nothing to contribute at Not of General Interest, she writes that the amount of student loan debt that Americans carry is deeply troubling.
16. And finally, I offered just one of the things I think is wrong with American universities, or rather, with the discourses on the “crisis” in higher education:  we never talk about student achievement, and treat all bachelor’s degrees like they’re equal when I suspect that grades and real achievement matter a great deal to employers and admission to graduate and professional schools.  I teach at a State Uni (not a Flagship U.) that’s officially R-1, although my department functions more like a History department in a comprehensive university (we have only the M.A., not a Ph.D. program.  My teaching load is 2-2, although the caps on our courses are rather high:  100-120 for survey courses; 42 for upper-division courses; 15 for graduate and undergraduate seminars.)

Keep ‘em coming, friends!  Be sure to send me an e-mail and/or leave a comment here if your post doesn’t track back to this thread or to the original post soliciting your ideas.  And please let me know if I’ve missed anyone here inadvertently–after all, although I know it’s difficult for most of you to believe, I’m only human, and I own and manage the ranch by my lonesome. 

(Speaking of all by her lonesome:  so long as you’re over at the New York Review of Books current issue for the Grafton article, take a look at Cathleen Schine’s review of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, a memoir of her only daughter’s life and tragically early death.  Keep a box of tissues at the ready, if you dare.  I’ve ordered a copy of Blue Nights from the library, although I’ll have to be careful about when and where I read it given the fact that I’m crying already as I type this!  I know that many people thought that Didion’s previous memoir about her husband John Gregory Dunne’s sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking, was too much grief Pr0n.  However, I thought it was a moving and insightful look at the unwanted journey from wife to widow.)

A self-portrait, minus cowboy hat.

I was wondering the other day why I’ve managed to get so little scholarship or blogging done since classes started in August.  Why, why, why?  Is my middle-aged brain incapable of nimble, complete synaptical connections?  Am I lazy?  Am I distracted?  Too much wine at dinner?  Then I remembered:  I’m teaching 2 new classes this semester, a team-taught undergraduate class on the History of Sexuality in America, and the graduate historiography class (or as I call it to make it seem less intimidating:  Introduction to Historical Practice.)  So, lots of lecture writing and new-book-reading is what’s keeping me busy.  No doy.

Apparently, my tiny brain only has so much room for innovation at this stage of midlife.  I think that age and/or complacency has a lot to do with this.  I used to teach a 3-3 load, write articles, make progress on a book manuscript, and win nationally competitive grants!  (Maybe I peaked at 33?  Maybe this is just what it is to be an Associate Professor at a beleaguered Aggie that’s down 6 or 7 tenure lines in the past 10 years?)

I’ll have a post up this weekend about all of your wonderful (and speedy) responses to Tony Grafton’s challenge for more specifically grounded descriptions of the “crisis” in American universities.  If you just can’t wait, please see this thread for lots of smart, detailed, and contrarian views!

Baa Ram U! Sheep be true!

Dear Friends,

Although the blogosphere can usually be fairly characterized as a bunch of malcontents b!tching about one thing or another, I’m pleased to report a tiny sliver of sunlight piercing the clouds of darkness and despair:  my department is running a search for the first time in four years!  We are looking for a specialist in public history to contribute to our public history M.A. curriculum as well as to teach undergraduate courses in hir area of specialization.  The big news here is that we are open to any subfield, globally and temporally.  This search is neither limited to American historians, nor to any particular emphasis in public history.  From the h-net posting:

The Department of History seeks to fill a position in Public History open to any subfield.  Entry-level Assistant Professor, tenure-track, nine-month  position beginning August 15, 2012.  The Ph.D. in History or related field must be completed by the time of employment.  The preferred candidate will contribute to the department’s undergraduate and graduate curriculum and programs.  Applications are invited from candidates who offer promise of significant research and publication and who can work effectively with faculty, students, and the public.  Send letter of interest, vita, graduate transcripts, evidence of teaching effectiveness, three letters of recommendation, and a writing sample (article or chapter length) to Dr. Janet Ore, Chair, Public History Search Committee, Department of History, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO  80523-1776.  Applications will be considered until the position is filled; however, to ensure full consideration applications should be submitted by January 15, 2012. 

If you are trained in public history and/or have experience in the field, please take a look at our current faculty and our graduate public history curriculum as it exists, and make the best case you can for what you can do for us.  Our current faculty in public history include the search chair, Janet Ore, who is an architectural historian and a historic preservationist, and Jennifer Fish-Kashay, who is a museums and material culture specialist.  (The Museum Studies Option is especially popular with our students, so we are open to applications from other museums and material culture experts.)  Although we have an adjunct lecturer who offers two undergraduate public history courses per year, they are not currently taught by regular faculty.

We offer a 2-2 load to our regular faculty, and the person who gets this job will have a central role in training our graduate students.  Furthermore, the 320 days of sunshine, the aridity, and the proximity to big water, resort and backcountry skiing, and the Rocky Mountains are part of the package.  Because we have T.A.-ships for all of our grad students now (which includes tuition remission as well as a stipend), we attract excellent students because we’re offering them the opportunity to earn a master’s degree for free.  So it’s a good deal both for the students and for the faculty who work with them.

I can answer some broad questions in the comments here, but I would prefer that any of you who might be interested in the position direct your specific queries to the search chair, Janet Ore.

In the meantime, tell me Wha’Happen? with the rest of you!

Toldyaso! I SO told you so.

Guess what?  Online “academies” for K-12 students?  Not such an awesome idea!  Grace Hood has an alarming report on KUNC radio on the money paid to the for-profit company K12 Inc. to administer “COVA,” the Colorado Virtual Academy (click here to read or listen to it):

At a time when public schools are seeing deep cuts in funding, there’s a growing market for companies running online elementary, middle and high schools. The largest for-profit company overseeing these programs in Colorado is Virginia-based company K12 Inc. While public schools are struggling to survive, K12 Inc.—with the support of state tax dollars—is reporting double digit profits. Meantime, it’s not measuring up to state academic standards.

To be fair, the kinds of students who end up seeking an education online are not those who are having success in traditional schools.  But instead of spending the money on human teachers to teach classes in bricks-and-mortar schools, let’s instead send $22 million a year to Virginia for an “online academy:”

Student enrollment at COVA has grown to about 5,000 thanks in part to marketing by K12. But despite the allure of flexibility and education from home, COVA is finding a relatively high number of students are dropping out. Last year the school reported a 12 percent graduation rate. That’s compared to a 72 percent average for all public high schools statewide.

Let’s try a thought experiment that I saw on Corrente recently in a post by Lambert (sorry–can’t find the exact post):  substitute the words But despite with Because of.  So:  Because of the allure of flexibility and education from home, COVA is finding a relatively high number of students are dropping out.  This I’m sure is obvious to any teacher or professor in the known universe.  Students who do not have the drive, skills, reading ability, or whatever to succeed in traditional mass education classes will not be well served by COVA or any online school.  I’m not saying that those students were all well-served by their schools–far from it, I’m sure.  I’m saying that the answer is clearly not a magical online fairy godteacher.  (What would most of you have done with all of that “flexibility” of “education from home?”  And now the kids these days have the world-wide timewasting pR0n-shilling internets at their disposal, when all we had was Space Invaders, Philip Roth novels, and clove cigarettes! And by the way:  88% is not a relatively high percentage of dropouts–that’s a shockingly high percentage compared to pretty much any dropout rate you can imagine.)  The story continues:

“I’m not going to lie to you about that. We’ve had some downward trends,” says Katherine Knox, director of school improvement for Colorado Virtual Academy. “But we’ve also had individual and small group successes.”

Overall, the state rated COVA academically as a “turnaround” school—the lowest of four academic rankings after it mis-administered statewide assessment tests last year. But after an appeal, COVA is one ranking better, listed as “priority improvement.” However, academically COVA is not alone. More than half of the state’s online multi-district schools are getting poor marks.

So with the state spending $5900 per pupil what are students, parents and taxpayers getting? Is anyone holding online management organizations accountable?

Short answer:  no.  And yet, we have faith that “throwing money at” computers and technology at a for-profit company in Virginia will solve problems that mere human teachers can’t.  In fact, we are rather busy beating up on teachers and underfunding their pensions and health care plans while we in Colorado are sending $22 million dollars a year to Virginia for a graduation rate of twelve percent.  This scandal is a bonus twofer: it’s the old online scama-lama-ding-dong plus the handover of public money for the privatization of public services.

Sing it with me so that they can hear you in Virginia, friends: AWESOME!!!  (And thanks to Grace Hood and KUNC for the excellent report.)