digital digs

academic community and academic labor

There's been some brief discussion in and around my department regarding the role of contingent faculty (i.e. non tenure-track/tenured faculty) in the department's governance. Our organizational plan allows these faculty a 1/2 vote on "non-personnel" issues. However, in my experience, this vote has rarely been exercised. Though we invite contingent faculty to attend department meetings, they are not required to do so. Now there has been some discussion of whether or not contingent faculty should have a vote in the election of department chair. It's been concluded that neither department nor SUNY policy would afford them this right.

I don't want to comment on that conclusion. But the whole matter did get me thinking about this in broader terms. I suppose one could say that it makes sense that contingent faculty have a vested, personal and professional interest in who gets elected chair, just like tenured and tenurable faculty.
Beyond this though I believe there is a strong desire among contingent faculty to be recognized as equal colleagues in the department. Participation in department governance is clearly a part of that.

Here's the difficult part. We don't ask contingent faculty to do service or advise students or otherwise participate in the department beyond their responsibilities as course instructors. The simple fact is that they aren't paid very well, and it would be impolitic, indeed unethical, to ask them to undertake this work. When viewed in terms of labor, department governance is just more work that needs to be done. However, when a department is viewed as a community, as an academic commons, then governance is the right and responsibility of its citizens. Like any community, in any department, some members will be more active than others. In this respect, community participation should not be required but rather encouraged and supported. The question is how or when to view a department activity as work, when to view it as community participation, and when perhaps to view it as a professional, career-building activity.

If we view all our activities strictly as labor, then we would say to contingent faculty (as we might often say to ourselves for that matter), don't do anything "extra." I have not forgotten the primary piece of advice I was given before entering my first tenure-track job: learn to say "no." However, you can't really become part of a community by saying "no" all the time. That wasn't the point of the advice. The point was to not become so buried in obligations that my teaching or scholarship suffered. Of course, we all do "extra" all the time, including contingent faculty, when they meet repeatedly with students working on their papers. There are contingent faculty teaching in Professional Writing who have managed to make it to more of our students' open mic readings than I have (though I swear I will be there on Friday!). Another instructor has made service learning connections with the community for his class. Others have voluteered to lead workshops with our student literary magazine association.

Who would tell these committed faculty not to do this work they freely enter into? Who would wish to take away the value they are adding to our community?

Some might consider such acts a poor political decisions (who will buy the cow etc, etc.). But perhaps not. Perhaps generosity is a savvy response to the miserly actions of higher education.

I believe one of the biggest challenges in this regard is professional development. Let me note right at the start that by this I do not mean that contingent faculty are unqualified to do their jobs! All faculty require professional development. For tenured/tenurable faculty, this development is part of our job, and its scope and nature are largely self-determined or come out of our participation in our discipline at large. For contingent faculty, professional development is not part of the job. In our discipline this problem can be reinforced by perception (among non-rhetoricians) that writing instruction (of the kind contingent faculty most often do) does not require professional, disciplinary knowledge, that there is no professional development associated with it!

From a department perspective, one cannot require professional development. However, my experience is that contingent faculty are intellectually curious and thoughtful humans (the way one might hope all academics to be) and might welcome an opportunity for professional development, if the content of that development were not predetermined for them (who would want that? I mean who would want to step into a room where someone else had predetermined the readings, the topics of conversation, and the work? right?). Again, if professional development is viewed as labor, as a means of improving the college product, then we must insist these faculty get paid for their time. On the other hand, reviewing research, discussing teaching experiences, and evaluating new practices, technologies, textbooks, etc. is an important part of being in an academic community. Furthermore, some of our contingent faculty may be looking to advance in their careers, either by landing better positions at Cortland or moving elsewhere. Professional development can be an important part of boosting one's career. I know that when I was contingent faculty at Georgia Tech, I took classes and volunteered for a pilot program and so on. Of course, I knew I was looking to find a tenure-track job somewhere else, so it really does depend on what one's objective is.

Composition for Professional Writing

One of the things my colleagues and I are discussing is developing sections of Composition specifically for our Professional Writing majors. Though we don't have enough majors to fill a section of CPN each year, we can at least get them all together. We can also use the courses for recruitment, so that's not bad either. Also, it really adds two more courses onto our major without effecting our students courseload at all. In turn we can remove some requirements and give them more electives.

The thing with building pilot programs, in my experience, is that they always sound good in theory, and one can almost always construct a heroic pedagogic narrative or two as a result for purposes of publishing after the fact. In constructing these classes, we're not talking about a solving the "problem" of composition for Cortland or anyone else. Our classs, admittedly, in fact intentionally, is for students who, as professsional writing majors, have an existing interest in writing. Certainly this sets them apart from many of their peers.

In truth, for me, the fundamental error in composition is its founding institutional raison d'etre: students cannot write (well). That is, composition is founded upon the identification of a "problem." The problem, however, is built into the institutional hailing of the college student; i.e., a college student can be defined, in part, as one who does not write well (or at least as well as professionals or college faculty). A related part of the definition is that a college student is one who does not know (much) (or as much as faculty).

Who can deny such definitions? Any individual exceptions only serve to prove the general rule, eh?

This lack (of discipline, ability, knowledge, experience) serves the Nietzschean mechanism of ressentiment and bad conscience that leads to the ascetic ideal upheld by the pedagogue: learn this habit of thought, develop this disciplinary practice, master this body of knowledge, and your lack may be mitigated.

So I would begin any approach to composition with setting aside this notion of lack. Instead of mitigating some absence, writing might be understood as the proliferation of thought. I think this is generally recognized, and instruction often seeks to limit the potential for proliferation by sequestering it within "brainstorming" or invention. Writing instruction quickly turns to controlling this proliferation and targeting writing toward a purpose: completion of an assignment, approximation of the simulacrum of "good" academic writing, and achievement of pre-established course goals.

Here are some activities that might comprise the course I am envisioning:

• Writing without direct grade evaluation: this would take various electronic formats. A personal blog that would be more journal like (a record of writing activities, responses to readings, whatever else). A course blog that would be focuses on course themes and issues. The grade would simply reflect that students contribute regularly (content is not specifically graded). However a different type of evaluation would take place through the way in which others respond to one's writing. I don't see this as anything particularly radical or even new. My point here though is that students need to write far more than a teacher can formally evaluate.
• Developing writing heuristics: the problem with examining the rhetorical features of completed texts and trying to imitate their features is that the product obscures the process. Instead one must develop compositional tactics. Rhetoric, as a philosophy, may provide ideas about writing or even strategies. Tactics are related to such matters but are far more mobile and mutative. In my view the development of tactics is heuristic/experimental.
• Intersecting experience with reading/theory: here I borrow from a cultural studies methodology. Experience is a powerful form of knowledge, particularly for students. It is clearly ideological, but it is also formed from material events and affective responses that are not simply ideological. The notion here is to use a reading to revisit an experience via a heuristic, proliferating writing practice.
• Identifying and responding to exigency: a grade is an exigency but a poor one. One must think about the fundamental, rhetorical objective of higher education: to persuade a professional audience that one is a member of their community. This is likely an exigency that students can recognize for themselves. In our major students often imagine themselves as published writers or professional editors or going on to graduate school. This may seem to take us back toward approximating expert writers, but I think there is an important difference. Imitating professional authors may have some use for developing as a writer, but one need to differentiate between imitating an author's end product and uncovering rhetorical tactics. In responding to this exigency, students need to develop tactics for acheiving there rhetorical goals. This is, in effect, what they already attempt to do when they try to guess what the professor wants them to say in a paper, or when they ask "what do I need to do to get an 'A'?" (Answer: don't ask that question!)

Anyway, clearly the rhetorical tactic I'm employing now is rambling, so I will stop and think more on this.

Cortland's Literary magazines

The students of the Cortland Writers Association will be releasing copies of our two literary magazines, Transition and She Said, She Said. It's always a fair amount of work to get done, and I'm always wondering if it will get done on time, but somehow it always works out. This year, like last year, the students asked some of the faculty to include some work. So there's a brief piece of mine in there.

We'll be having a reading on April 21st to celebrate the release of the magazine. Until then, here's a reading of my piece, titled "Three Roadside Cutshots," a kind of half prose poem/half flash fiction piece.

Download roadside.mp3

two summer courses

I'm slated to teach two summer courses this year. Originally I was going to teach just one, but a second fell in my lap when a colleague had to drop out.

The first is a special topic graduate course on Contemporary Poetics. My focus is on avant-garde/experimental poetics traditions, primarily in the US, though not exclusively so. I'm planning on using three texts plus some other materials.

1. Poems for the Millenium Vol.2 edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenburg. University of California Press. ISBN: 0520208641
2. Telling It Slant. edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. University of Alabama Press. ISBN: 0817310975
3. Rhythm Science by Paul D Miller. MIT Press. ISBN: 026263287X

A course on poetics begins with recognizing the disconnect between literary studies disciplinary approaches to poetry and the discourses on poetics developed within these experimental practices. Clearly we will be reading poetry, but we will also be reading statements on poetics in which poets articulate their vision of poetry as an experimental cultural and political force.

The second course, the one that has fallen to me, is Writing in Cyberspace, a course I regularly teach (and taught last semester). In this course we look to understand the effects of new media upon writing practice and to develop writing practices appropriate to electronic spaces. I'm not sure yet what books I'll order. Usually I have something to support practical instruction in web design and a second text that offers readings for discussion of technoculture.

David Kirp's Bottom Line

I've just read Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line. It came out a few years ago (2003), but it's new to me ;). Here's the "bottom line" to me. Kirp does not naively express nostalgia for a time when academia had a united sense of itself and its values (as if such a time ever really existed), but he does note that the absence of a strong sense of institutional identity and purpose makes opposing academic capitalism more difficult. That is, we can oppose the enterprise university, at least its more virulent and distasteful aspects, but what do we oppose it to? This is where we become quickly mired in ideology. Without access to the "universal" values of a traditional, humanistic education, any values we espouse necessarily reflect an ideology. Indeed even the opposition or support of academic capitalism is an ideological position.

He also points out that the marketing of higher education, academic entrepenurialism (whether it takes the form of industrial-research partnerships or online education), and the emergence of customer-type relations with students cannot simply be equated with the transformation of the academy into yet another industry. That is, academics has its own unique flavor and special relationship with its clients, different from that of other industries (though this begs the question for me of how different/similar agriculture industries are to pharmaceutical or auto or movie or software industries and so on).

One disappointment for me with the book is that Kirk doesn't deal with instutions like my own: middle-of-the-road comprehensive colleges, public or private. He deals primarily with elite research institutions (Univ. of Chicago, NYU, Univ of Michigan, Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Univ of Michigan) with one study of an elite private liberal arts college. He also talks about some online programs, including Oxbridge's OPEN university, and for-profit ventures like DeVry.

The fact is that much of the work of higher education is undertaken at institutions like Cortland. The case studies demonstrate how unique each institutional situation can be, so I'm not sure how much there is to be learned in local terms from Kirp's book.

open house

We had our college open house this weekend. My part was at the majors fair, where prospective students come by, and I get to tell them why Professional Writing might be good for them. As a still young and small program, we are trying to recruit students, but we are also trying to recruit the right students. No point in becoming a PWR major unless you have a real interest in writing. That's enough to scare off many students. Imagine a degree where you spend most of your time writing! Leading to a job where you succeed or fail based upon your writing!! Yes, scary stuff indeed.

Anyway, I was having a conversation with a colleague from another department. We were talking about some of the discomfort that surrounds the majors fair. Of course students and their parents want to know that getting a degree is a form of career insurance. They all like the idea of a major that seems to point straight toward a job (though as I've said elsewhere, at least in PWR, our students don't always show enthusiasm for the truly professionalizing courses once they are actually here). After all  Cortland's most popular degrees are in Education. That's job security++, right? Get certified as public school teacher and you'll find a job, get tenure, etc., etc.

I wonder sometimes though what the statistics are. How many students who enter with this goal actually get the degree and the certification? How many get a job right out of college? How many end up getting the Masters degree NYS says you need to get fully certified (the state gives  you five years to do it)? How many are still teaching in ten years?

I honestly don't know the answers to those questions. However, one does tend to hear that teaching is a career in which a lot of folks burn out fairly fast. The guy who sold me my car last week has a BA and an MA from Cortland and is certified to teach High School social studies. Obviously it's just one example, but it's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

In any case, this conversation I was having centered on the notion that a degree focused on specific job preparation was perhaps false advertising (we weren't actually talking about teaching, though I am suggesting here that might be an example). It's false inasmuch as it implies that graduates go on to careers in that particular field. It's probably more true in teaching than in some other specific job training areas. I would hate to imply that our graduates go on to jobs in technical writing. They don't, or at least they haven't to my knowledge, but then again they've never shown much interest in doing so either.

What can you really say? If you pick up the right training at the right time, a degree could lead you to a good job right out of college, but if the degree is too specialized you may find yourself back in school trying to retool. If you take a more liberal arts approach then you have to do something special to stand out. There are so many people out there now with college degrees--folks with narrow specializations and technical certifications, folks with liberal arts degrees from fashionable and competitive private colleges, folks with graduate degrees and so on. And a lot of them are doing customer service or retail management or sales or marketing...some generic post-college job. It didn't really matter what they majored in.

Who knows, maybe they come to love the job they fall into. Maybe not.

I guess my point is maybe we shouldn't ask "will this degree get me the job I want?" Maybe the question should be "will this curriculum give me the opportunity to shine? to stand out against a sea of other graduates?" In a way, that's what my colleague and I came to. We agreed that what students needed to figure out in college was that they had something to say. (And I would add now that they also need to learn how to say it.) And at least from my perspetive, having "something to say" doesn't simply mean having a point of view or a political position or set of principles, it means having the creative, critical, and rhetorical-compositional chops to get noticed.