Maybe uni faculty have missed this point because we actually think that education should be about, you know, educating people, not rooting for them to drop out.

I’m sure this is not an original thought, but it occurred to me yesterday as I talked to a fellow student at my yoga studio who was a full-time adjunct at our local CC.  She explained that the CC is all in on online ed–the educrats running the place think that it’s the future.  As usual, I’m skeptical:  it seems to me that the value of our CCs is that they offer college classes that are smaller than the big intro sections that our first-year students and sophomores take at Baa Ram U., and give students who don’t feel prepared yet to navigate a large university some confidence and training in college-level math, reading, and writing.  These are the kinds of students who need more help and coaching to figure out how to do college–and therefore, they’re the kind who are likely to throw money away on online courses unless and until they figure this out.

I’ve been thinking about why some students drop courses or (worse yet) remain enrolled after ceasing to attend class or to submit any work, forcing me to deliver an F at the end of the term.  If I have at least a few of these students every semester at a four-year university, then how much worse is the problem at a CC, which attracts students who are almost by definition either academically unprepared or otherwise unready for a four-year uni?  How much worse would it be when CC students are left to their own devices in an online course? 

The number of students I have every year who pay for courses but who don’t earn any credit also makes me wonder about complaints about the “high cost of higher ed.”  Really?  Do you think I ever just walked away from my classes at an expensive SLAC?  Maybe the problem is that it’s too affordable for many of our students to waste their time and money at Baa Ram U.

Most of what I know about online courses comes from Jonathan Rees at More or Less Bunk.  He might have something to say about this.

It’s been a bad past few years here [at my university].  Since we’re not going to get recognition or support from our institutions for our work, I’ve decided to e-mail or call everyone whose book my students and I really like to thank them and let them know.

Isn’t that a great idea?  Let’s all do this!  I think the historian above is exactly right:  we need to share the love and support each other.  He said that he’s had some surprising reactions–overwhelmingly positive, of course, but he’s even had a fulsome and grateful response from someone who’s not a historian but rather is a pretty famous non-fiction writer, someone from whom he never expected a reply.

So, think:  did you read an especially interesting, well-researched, well-written, or otherwise thought-provoking book in the past year?  Let the author know, and be sure to let them know what your students’ reactions were to the book if you assigned it in a class.  (I always enjoy hearing what students liked or disliked about my book–sometimes they pick up on things that my peers don’t see.)

Earlier in my career, I made a lot of new friends by complimenting them on their books, but I’ve fallen off the wagon lately.   In part, this is because my field is so small that I *already know* pretty much everyone whose books I assign.  (Also, I’ve been called on pretty frequently in the past few years as a manuscript reader for presses and journals, so although I always sign my reviews, my relationship to those authors is different.)  Maybe this is a sign that I need to read a little more broadly. . . or that I just need to be more generous with the love.

So tell me about the book you liked and the author you’re going to write to in the comments below.

*They appreciated the fact that I read and used more than just English-language sources, and thought that “this woman is doing something new!”  I couldn’t be happier to hear that my book survived the graduate seminar shred-O-matic!

This could be your chance to meet Tenured Radical, who’s chairing the first panel on Friday morning the 28th! Alas, I will not be able to be there myself, much as I had hoped.

One last comment: did we really need to include “liberty’s sons” in the conference title? I know Norton has had some distinguished men students, but couldn’t we for one weekend have assumed that the female was the universal default? Few traditional historians of the American Revolution pause to reflect on the exclusivity of the “Sons of Liberty,” so why do should feminists be so scrupulous?

You can have the coaches, the royal balls, the glass slippers, and personality-free Handsome Princes. For a library like that, I’d happily live with a beast. Maybe Lumiere and Mrs. Potts can help with marking exams?

Hey, it’s my princess fantasy, alright? Step off!

1. Nasty, lazy blogger with an axe to grind insults the ongoing dissertations of a few graduate students on a Chronicle-sponsored blog. 
2. The mostly academic audience for the Chronicle blogs takes offense not only at the a) racist invective of the original post, but b) at the fact that the writer came to her opinions on the basis of reading just the titles and brief abstracts of the dissertation.
3. The Chronicle dismisses the nasty, lazy blogger, after foolishly trying to portray the blogger’s post as an “invitation to debate.”  (Since when do we debate the existence of academic fields?  Do we debate the existence of the Philosophy or History departments?  Does the Chronicle publish blog posts arguing that all biology departments are driven by their political agenda of evolution, instead of producing research based on creationism and intelligent design too?)
4. The nasty, lazy blogger writes a screed complaining of her unfair victimization by typical left-wing closed-minded academics.

Here’s something from the nasty, lazy blogger that’s unintentionally funny.  She complains that Black or African American Studies hasn’t advanced:  “[My post] could have been written 30 years ago. And perhaps that’s the most depressing part of all this.”  On that we agree!  Lance called his shot last week:

The ironic takeaway is that Schaefer Riley is likely to be better paid for not reading these dissertations. This dustup now becomes a part of her professional paratext. It ensures that when certain people are looking for someone who can speak “the truth” about black studies – and black people – they will turn to her, offering her a bigger speaker’s fee or a book contract. She will get applause for this. All because she didn’t – and would never – read the as-yet-unfinished work of a trio of young scholars who believed, at least up until three days ago, that what they wrote might make a difference.

Shame, again, on the Chronicle. First, you allow a blogger to opine about dissertations she hasn’t read; now, you give her to space to defiantly proclaim that she is proud of her ignorance. What is next?

I’ll tell you what, Lance:  as the nasty, lazy blogger points out today, she was a paid blogger, unlike the majority of bloggers at the Chronicle who have academic positions.  Now, don’t that beat all?  Is there any better argument for remaining in free blogistan after that choice morsel dropped?  I think the remaining Chronicle bloggers had better ask for paychecks now, if they aren’t getting them already.

Is it just me, or do some of you have similar stories and memories?  What do you think is behind the compulsion of students to experience a college campus in Eve’s Livery?

My memories of the liberty I felt to walk around naked or nearly nude really underscores just how safe and how much a part of that world I felt at the time.  What a privilege, especially for adult women, to be publicly naked on our terms & not have our bodies or our images used in someone else’s spectacle!  It was certainly also an exercise of class privilege, too–somehow, SLACy campuses grant dispensation from the usual sanctions against public nudity, at least if you’re still a student.  (Faculty nudity?  Eeewww:  criminal charges territory, for sure.)  At least, I sure wouldn’t have felt safe walking around naked at a big public university or even a large, co-ed university.

Although, I must confess:  at my fifteenth reunion I engaged in some very cold skinny dipping, and at my twentieth, some children in our party jumped in a fountain, and when scolded not to get their clothing wet, they stripped and went about their swim.  (I was touched by how natural and sensible their response was.)  Why?

• Tony Grafton reviewsAndrew Delbanco’s College:  What it Was, Is, and Should Be.  Of all of the recent books on what’s wrong with higher education, this one seemed to me to be among the most worthy.  I’ve had Delbanco’s scholarship on my shelves since undergraduate days, and as he is a Columbia University faculty member he’s doesn’t blame the faculty for all of our current woes.  Grafton finds Delbanco’s contribution stronger on the Was and Is parts than the Should Bes–in other words, a better history of higher ed and diagnosis of its current ills and perhaps weaker on prescriptive solutions, but it seems like getting the Was and Is parts right is a good enough reason to read it. 
• Echidne reflects on the end of the Cold War, and concludes that without the atheistic communist foe, capitalism “has gone wild:”  “It is ironic that communism was what kept the American type capitalism decent. Without that public enemy the nazguls are free to rob and ravage.”  That’s the thing about the ultra-rich and their lapdog politician-servants:  they’re not just greedy, they’re sore winners.
• Finally, the Big Dog takes on the Dog-Eared:  President Bill Clinton reviews Robert Caro’s latest volume on Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power:  “Southern Democrats were masters at bottling up legislation they hated, particularly bills expanding civil rights for black Americans. Their skills at obstruction were so admired that the newly sworn-in Johnson was firmly counseled by an ally against using the political capital he’d inherited as a result of the assassination on such a hopeless cause.  According to Caro, Johnson responded, ‘Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?’ This is the question every president must ask and answer. For Lyndon Johnson in the final weeks of 1963, the presidency was for two things: passing a civil rights bill with teeth, to replace the much weaker 1957 law he’d helped to pass as Senate majority leader, and launching the War on Poverty. That neither of these causes was in fact hopeless was clear possibly only to him, as few Americans in our history have matched Johnson’s knowledge of how to move legislation, and legislators.”

That’s all folks!  Bon fin-de-semaine.  I’ll ring the dinner bell when the steaks are ready.  Come on over, and bring something to wet your whistle.

Black Robes

It’s a very strange position to be in, as a non-Catholic Marxist feminist scholar. I’m hardly uncritical, but I find myself (perhaps inappropriately) sympathizing with the Jesuit point of view. Then it occured to me just this spring: I don’t just sympathize with the Black Robes, I identify with them. After all, like the Jesuit fathers, I see myself as bringing Truth to the ignorant. I believe in the power of reading, writing, and knowledge to set people free, if not bring them to Paradise. And part of my job is evangelical–selling the notion of college as an intellectual experience as well as offering myself as a guide to that experience. Like the Black Robes, scholars today have to believe in the transcendent importance of our work, because there is little external recognition or material reward for what we do. And like the Jesuits, we usually overlook the complexities and the contexts of our students lives in order to hold onto these beliefs. We need to believe that education can work for everyone in order for us to get out of bed and face our neophytes and catechumens every new semester.

I fully embrace the good as well as the fundamentally clueless and obnoxious realities of being a Black Robe.

Fortunately, my job doesn’t require the kind of physical risks and bodily discomfort that the Jesuits embraced in their world-wide outreach in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When it does, I’m outta here. Sorry, friends: I may play a Jesuit father at my day job, but I’m no martyr, that’s for sure!

Busy day–we’re still teaching classes here, with our dogforsaken 16-week semesters. But then, as Dr. Crazy noted yesterday, they end. (Finally!) And then, we begin all over again.

Don’t miss Dr. Crazy’s thoughts about teaching, and the myth that college professing is all about b!tching about teaching and cutting corners:

People act like professors are a bunch of slackers who don’t want to teach. Look: I teach four courses a semester. And I don’t hate teaching, and I don’t actually want to teach less. I want the time to teach the way that I’m capable of teaching – I want time to really reflect on the work that I do as a teacher, to design new assignments, to think about the texts that I teach and to connect those ideas to the ways in which I present those texts to my students. I want time to do my best by my students. And that is the thing that is lost in the current structure of higher education, for tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty alike. For those of us on the tenure-track, we’re so burdened with the work of running the university that teaching gets short shrift, regardless of how many courses per semester we teach. For those off the tenure-track, they are so burdened with their contingent status (lack of office space, lack of job security, lack of resources to do their jobs well – like computers, photocopying privileges, etc. – and while these issues are tougher for part-timers, they affect full-time non-t-t faculty as well).

Discuss. Or just make fun of Gaston, a prime example of an anti-intellectual, abusive creep.