Service to the Profession

When I was in grad school, I did a lot of what academics call "service" and in general found it fairly satisfying. Most prominently, I was a senator in our Graduate Student Senate, then parliamentarian, then vice president; later I did a little bit of work for the Graduate Employee Union as the "guide" for the local. I also spent five semesters at one of two assistant directors for the Freshman English Program. Beyond those things, I served on a lot of committees, and so on. (I've previously talked about these experiences here and here.)

* * *

I was reminded of the former last week because it's actually the tenth anniversary of when the UConn GEU was certified. I wasn't terribly involved in this process, but I was present throughout it. I was incoming vice president of the GSS when our health insurance was unilaterally changed by UConn HR; basically, they had ended up in an untenable financial situation, but their solution was to take it all out on us. When it was presented to the Senate, they span it so it looked like an upgrade, and it was really only once the new plan went into effect that summer that we began to realize just how awful it was. I actually had a dentist call me wanting to know why we had made such a terrible switch!

The GSS worked on solutions through its official avenues, but we were pretty limited in our power; meanwhile, outraged graduate students were kicking off the process of setting up a union. As long as I had been at UConn and involved in the GSS, people would come to meetings wondering if we were going to unionize... but it had never gone anywhere because to be honest, we had it pretty good. UConn paid above average for stipend and had great health insurance. The only people who wanted to unionize were the "true believers," those committed socialists who just love forming unions, and they had no ability to win over your average graduate assistant. The health insurance switcheroo showed everyone, though, that no matter how good you had it, the boss could always make it terrible at their discretion.

My big memory of this all was a meeting where the Dean of the Graduate School (who I did really like, and I think was pushed into an awful position by a bunch of other people's decisions) came to the GSS to tell us that the GA health plan was still losing money, and thus needed to be made even worse—and he was going to let us advise him on how to make it worse. We saw this as an attempt to gain our "approval" for whatever change was imposed; a group of people involved with the union introduced a motion rejecting the false binary and demanding UConn recognize our right to collectively bargain.

A year later, we had the fastest union card drive in higher ed history (something like that anyway) and whatever UConn saved by pushing us onto crappy health insurance was more than cancelled out by the kind of gains the GEU was able to make in collective bargaining.

So in honor of the tenth anniversary of that, the GEU invited a number of us from the early days to come and speak (mostly via Zoom) at a membership meeting. It was fun to see some people I had not thought about in a long time, and hear about some of those successes we had had. It was a reminder to me that with committed people on your side, you can really accomplish something.

* * *

I was also reminded of the latter, working in the Freshman English office. Here at UT, our Director of Academic Writing recently left the university, so the department and the Dean have ended up restructuring the position somewhat; it's been split into a Director and an Assistant Director, which are voted on by the department. (The old Director had the position as part of his contract; it never changed.) A number of people asked me if I was going to run, so I did; I thought other people might run, but in the end, I was unopposed. The Academic Writing Committee recommended me to the department, and at our last department meeting of the academic year, I was elected to the position.

I posted about it on facebook, and a friend sent me a congratulatory text, asking if it came with "with more money and security," I think envisioning it as a sort of promotion. The answer is, of course, no; I get a course release, so I'm down to a 3/3 load. Other than that, I am doing the exact same job I was doing!

But I am excited about it. The split of the old position into two works in a way that I think benefits both the assistant director and the program. The director deals with all the administrative bullshit, while I get to work on mentoring faculty and developing program pedagogy. I think (we'll see what I think in a year) that this means I get to do the fun stuff, while also it ensures this kind of important work isn't neglected by the director because of his focus on scheduling and putting out administrative fires.

* * *

At the GEU Zoom meeting, someone talked about how as a graduate student, you get thrust into leadership positions quickly because there's such churn among grad students. This is true but I hadn't really thought about it before; I was Assistant Director of Freshman English in my fourth year (second year of Ph.D.) and I was GSS vice president in my sixth (fourth of my Ph.D.). Here at UT, I am in my seventh year as faculty, but just now reaching the point where you start to get tapped to do significant leadership in service.

For me this is a real boon; it has allowed me to stretch myself and find more pleasure in a job that can sometimes feel thankless. I enjoyed doing service in grad school, and think I am finally getting to do so again here.

In the Market: Being on an Academic Hiring Committee

Every year since I landed in my current position, my department has hired at least one new assistant teaching professor of academic writing; every year we take in more students, so every year we need more faculty to deliver those course. The year I was hired, the committee was entirely tenure-track faculty but over the years, the role of ATPs has grown, from a token one to being the entirety of the committee. Things seemed to work their way down the department in terms of seniority. Last year my friend Cari asked me if I was going to do it, as I was the most senior ATP who hadn't, but she would do it for a second time if I wouldn't. I dithered, and so she not only ended up on the search, but chairing it! So I was definitely on the hook this year, and I was even made search committee chair.

giving a job talk is stressful

If you want to buy me a beer, I am happy to tell you all kinds of things about the hiring process, but for here I want to restrict myself to three things that I learned.

A Strong Cover Letter Is Important. Obviously I knew this intellectually, but going through the pile of applications made me incredibly grateful for the strong mentoring I got in graduate school. For me personally, what I was looking for was a clear specific articulation of how the candidate approached the teaching of writing. I wanted two things: a sense of an overall approach or philosophy, and a sense of a concrete applications of this, like an assignment or a classroom activity. This is a teaching-focused job, so though knowing about your scholarship/service is good, it's not the main thing we care about... but anyone can say they love teaching, and lots of people have lots of experience, so seeing your approach to it in a meaningful way is hugely important.

You Really Want the Finalists to Succeed. Obviously candidates are emotionally invested in their own success, but I didn't realize how much I would be rooting for every candidate. In previous searches, I have seen candidates bomb a talk, and intellectually, I knew that they must have done well up until that point, but this time, I felt how much I wanted these people to succeed. You had a hundred applicants, you brought in two or three or four—you brought in these people because they were the best, because they impressed you the most, and you want the rest of your department to see how good they are, what a good job you and your committee did on the search. Though in some ways it would make your life easier if one candidate came in and said something racist (now the choice is obvious!), you really do want to be in the bind of having multiple really good candidates. (If any of my candidates are reading this: none of you bombed the job talk. I mean it.)

It Feels Very Satisfying to Be on a Search. You can do a lot of "service" in higher ed that ultimately feels pointless, committees that accomplish nothing by incompetence, apathy, or design. So a search committee is a very satisfying undertaking! By the end of the process, there is someone in your department who was not going to be there without you, and that person is very good at what they do and will make a noticeable difference. Your department is demonstrably better than it was before you did what you did! How often does that happen? And if nothing else, there's a person who without you wouldn't have gotten a job.

A lot of people complain about searches, and I can definitely imagine ways in which they might be terrible (bad politics, bad colleagues, bad candidates), but none of them applied to us. I very much enjoyed the process, and though I don't know that I would do it again next year, and nor would I be in a rush to chair again, I would happily do it again in the future, knowing there's a positive addition I could make.

A "Service" Department?

When I came to my first-ever department meeting as a professor back in 2017, we had a three-hour conversation about our department's mission. What was it that united us in our disparate branches of "English"? How should we be selling ourselves? It was tense at times, an awkward way of being introduced to new colleagues.

This year our department has a "mission statement task force." What is it that unites us in our disparate branches of "English"? How should we be selling ourselves? So yeah, we've made a lot of progress in the last six years.

At a recent department meeting, we were contemplating what kind of position we should hire for in a possible tenure-track literature line. People were getting excited about one idea, pointing this person could teach classes in our new gen ed program and that otherwise had an appeal across majors. A member of the department objected: where we just becoming a "service" department then? What kind of upper-level majors-focused classes would this person be offering?

A service department is a university department that instead of existing to serve a set of people majoring in it, serves majors in other departments. Say you work in a languages department, but your school offers no language degrees and yet every undergraduate has to take two French classes. You are a service department. Many people like to fret about becoming one; when we recently revised our gen ed, for example, some other departments actually objected to more courses in their department being built into the new requirements because then they would become service departments.

I teach seven classes per year. Every single one of them is a gen end.

At this department meeting, I went around the room and counted. There were about twenty-six professors present. Sixteen of them are, like me, full-time NTT faculty. Most of us teach seven sections of AWR; a couple do fifty-fifty mixes of AWR and creative writing. The remaining ten tenure-track faculty teach three AWR and three non-AWR courses per year.

By what metric are we not already a service department? A majority of the faculty teach gen eds a majority of the time.

Is this a problem? Well, maybe. As someone who teaches all gen eds it hard for me to get worked up about it. So what if someone else in the department isn't teaching classes on George Eliot to majors? I'll never get to do it anyway. As long as the university needs AWR courses, the university will need me regardless of how many majors we have.

And yet... though I knew what the job entailed when I took it, I don't think anyone goes into a literature Ph.D. because their dream is to teach gen ed composition forever. Which is to say, I think we might be a service department already by any meaningful metric, but can't I teach an occasional non-AWR course? So far I've gotten to do this once out of forty-two courses taught. I occasionally think that getting to teach majors even just once every few years would significantly improve my job satisfaction.

So I guess what I'm saying is that though I really like my colleagues and think we are very well supported as far as NTT AWR faculty go, it's hard for me to invest in an aspect of the department where it feels like the department is not investing in me. If the department doesn't want to be a service department, maybe it shouldn't be made up of people who entirely teach service courses.

How I Accidentally Became Associate Editor of an Academic Journal

When I interviewed at UT way back in January 2017, one of the things I talked with our then-department head, David Reamer, about was possibly becoming involved with Studies in the Fantastic, the University of Tampa Press's academic journal devoted to the fantastic. It was originally founded back in 2008 by renowned Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi as a venue for articles on Weird fiction, and two issues came out; in 2016, Reamer and another professor in our department, Dan Dooghan, revived it with a focus on the fantastic more broadly.

Once hired, I actually didn't have much to do with it. Quite honestly, if you are teaching a 3/4 and having a kid, you don't seek out extra work! I did do a blind peer review for Reamer, but that was it.

In 2019, though, another professor in our department, Sarah Juliet Lauro, took over as editor, and one of the first things she did was expand the editorial board, recruiting anyone in our department (as well as some other within the college) that had an interest in the fantastic. This meant me, of course, though being on an editorial board is not a lot of work-- typically I attended meetings where SJL told us what she wanted to do, and we all said that sounded good, and I was now on the hook to do first reads of things.

Late last year, as SJL was finalizing the Winter 2020/Spring 2021 issue, I volunteered to take a look at the citations. If you know me, you will know that citation in general, and MLA particular, is something I am enthusiastic about; I think it's the engineer in me. Unlike many other aspects of writing, citations have correct answers, and I get some pleasure when I put together a particularly complicated citation. I ended up editing the citations on all the articles in the issue, as well as doing some other editorial work where needed.

SJL asked me how I wanted to be credited, but I really had no idea. Was a "citations editor" a thing? (It is in law journals, apparently.) To my surprise, I was credit as assistant editor when the issue came out. (You can see the page for the issue on the UT Press site here, and if you have access to Project MUSE via your library, the page for the issue is here.) Well, that was cool.

It turned out to be a trap.

A good trap, but a trap nonetheless, because now that I had a job title, SJL could ask me to do all kinds of work and I couldn't refuse! She of course handles the majority of the editorial work (going through submissions, organizing peer review, and so on), but I have been doing multiple editorial passes, as well as organizing things like book reviews. At some point, she started calling me "associate editor" in her e-mails... I am not sure how I got promoted!

I do enjoy it, though, and I think it's a good opportunity. I think it will be an even better opportunity when academic conferences come back; one thing I had promised to do as a member of the Editorial Board was shill for the journal at conferences, but I never got to do this because all of the conferences I usually go to were cancelled in 2020 and 2021!

The citations editing is fun. What is surprising to me-- but maybe should not have been-- is how bad at MLA style some academics with decades experience are. It gives me some sympathy for my students' own struggles (if someone with a Ph.D. can't figure out what kinds of titles get italicized, why should my students?) and understanding of why they are so bad (if the other professors grading their citations don't know what they should look like, of course the students aren't going to learn)... not that I am going any easier on my students as a result!

But if the citations were perfect, I wouldn't have as much to do.

---

Anyway, if you are an academic who works on the fantastic in any form (the Weird, science fiction, fantasy, and so on), we welcome submissions! Currently we're putting together a special issue on Lovecraft Country (and submissions for that are closed), but we take submissions on a rolling basis for our general-topic issues. The submission guidelines are here.

COVID Positivity Rates at My University

Every Friday, my university updates its COVID case tracker. They list how many students had a positive test in the past week; this can come from either testing positive in the campus health center, or from a student obtaining a positive test result off campus. Of course, this means the total number of infected students is probably higher. Unlike some other schools (my grad school alma mater, UConn, for example), UT does not do random testing, and some students test positive at off-campus venues and don't report it to UT. On top of that, students have told me that if you go to the health center and ask for a test, they try to discourage you from getting one if you're not symptomatic.

The chart is somewhat striking:

We had an initial steep rise, things backed off somewhat, and in the past couple weeks have bounced back up.

Now, I should say I am not terribly worried about my personal safety. While 550 students have reported positive cases since the semester began, only 5 faculty and staff have-- and the Dean informed us at this week's college meeting that contact tracing indicates all those faculty and staff were infected off campus, not in pursuit of their college duties. So it seems the things we're doing in the classroom to mitigate transmission (limited class sizes, masks, and so on) are working. Students are getting infected in their social interactions, in the dorms, and at parties and clubs and so on.

(That said, we were told to make seating charts for contact tracing... and never given anywhere to submit those seating charts, and no one has ever contacted me to do contact tracing when any of my students have become infected.)

I know from talking to my students, that some students take it very seriously, and some students absolutely do not take it seriously at all. An old student I chatted to this week who is playing it totally safe-- they and their suitemates do no go out, and do not interact-- told me they thought it was probably around 45/55 don't take it seriously / do take it seriously.

The Tampa Bay Times has a weekly feature where they round up all the COVID statistics from local schools: K-12 and higher education. If you read this column, what will strike you is that the number of students infected at the University of South Florida is usually about the same as the number infected at UT:

Until the past couple weeks, at least, when USF's kept level but UT's swung back up. (The Times first reported the total number of infected USF students in its 5 Sept. column.)

But of course USF is a big state school, and UT is a mid-sized private one. So yesterday I sat down and worked out the positive tests as a percentage of total population. UT has 9,605 students enrolled this fall, though that includes students taking classes remotely and (I think) on-line. USF's three campuses had 50,927 students enrolled as of the 2019-20 school year (I couldn't find this year's numbers), though that includes things like the graduate program and the medical school (but I think the positive case numbers do too). The numbers might not be exactly comparable, but the ballpark idea that there are five times as many USF students than UT ones ought to be valid. If you graph as a percentage of total population, the differences are stark:

USF has never even broken 0.2% of students testing positive in a single week. I also looked at the cumulative cases thus far. (This is not quite accurate, because I think if you report multiple positive tests you would get counted again each week that happens, but it gives a sense of how many students overall have been infected at some point.)

At this point, over 5% of UT's population has had a positive COVID test at some point, while not even 1% of USF's has!

Quite why this should be, I don't know. Does USF have fewer in-person students? (UT made it difficult for students to go fully remote.) Do they actually enforce their penalties for partying? Are they just even worse at testing than UT? Is it about the location? (UT is downtown, USF is out in Temple Terrace.) Do UT students just like to party more than USF students?

I don't know what the cause is but it seems to speak poorly of either the behavior of students or administration (or both) at UT.

The Most I Could Do

When I was in grad school, I was heavily involved in graduate student government. I spent a year as senator for the English graduate students, two years on the Graduate Student Senate Executive Committee as Parliamentarian, one year as a senator again, and then one final year as Vice President. The responsibilities of the VP were running meetings and chairing the Student Life Committee, which had a very vague remit of essentially dealing with all the stuff that the other standing committees did not.

I came in as Vice President at a pretty fraught time. The year prior, the administration had unilaterally changed the health insurance for graduate assistants. We had been on a great plan, basically identical to the state employees plan, but administrative factors caused the administration to get rid of our plan and put us on the student plan (mostly for undergraduates who didn't have insurance from their parents), but offered subsidies. This plan offered fewer benefits than the old plan, was more expensive for GAs, and was administered by an utterly incompetent corporation, Bailey Agencies. But when the new plan was presented to the outgoing Executive Committee, the presentation highlighted all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks, which only slowly emerged as GAs dug into the plan details and began using it.*

So this is what I came into, and what I spent most of my time as VP dealing with-- meeting with administrators, surveying GAs. Parallel to my efforts in the GSS, this is when the UConn graduate employee unionization effort exploded. It wasn't just this (we had seen a number of fee hikes over the past few years, including a substantive one to build a new gym that something like 98% of surveyed graduate students were against, but flat stipends), but it was one of the major contributing factors.

Things got worse as the school year rolled along. When the spring semester came, and GAs began filing taxes, it was discovered that the university subsidy counted as income, and therefore had to be reported on your taxes. This meant that if you were on the family plan, which the university subsidized at $10,000, you had to pay taxes on your $20,000 of actual income as if you made $30,000 of income.

To me what was particularly irritating was that UConn's administration seemed entirely uninterested in the actual effects that this policy change was having on the lives of actual people. Members of HR continued to smile and insist it was a better plan even when presented with evidence that this was demonstrably untrue; one particularly loathsome HR employee, Lori Vivian, kept rattling on about "total compensation packages," insisting GAs were just blinkered because they didn't appreciate how much money they got in the form of tuition wavers even as they struggled to make ends meet.

The new plan wasn't even achieving its goal of being cheaper for the university, so in January, the Dean of the Graduate School came to us to tell us it was getting even worse, and asking us to pick the way in which was getting even worse. To his credit, he had about as much power as we did in all this, and this visit was because he wanted to do us the courtesy of keeping us in the loop, unlike other administrators. The GSS rejected the choices as a false binary, a tactic of making it look like we consented to what was happening; the resolution ended with a statement that "that the Graduate Student Senate finds the recognition by the University administration of the right of graduate assistants to collectively bargain with the University as the only viable recourse for negotiating the terms of graduate assistants’ employment and for ensuring the well-being of graduate assistants, the Graduate School, and the University of Connecticut."

Nothing else was working, nor would it work. The thing that continually stymied me in my every effort to do something was that no one was obligated to do anything. No one had to listen to graduate students, because graduate students had no power.

The point where things really got bad was when the tax thing became apparent. Because UConn reported its subsidy of our health insurance as a scholarship, refunds were going down by about $650. But no one could tell me why. Eventually we managed to figure out it was because the new plan did not count as "employer-provided" even though it was provided by our employer... but no one could tell me what that meant. UConn's tax and compliance accountant didn't answer my e-mails, but thankfully the Dean of the Graduate School eventually got me into a meeting with him and a number of other relevant administrators.

That meeting was horrifying in how abstractly it treated the lives of real human beings. The guy from the Comptroller's office provided his explanation of why GAs were losing this money... and clearly considered it all good, and the meeting over.

I was like... "Wait... but what are we actually doing? Now that we know why this is happening, how are we using this information?" And the answer was basically that we were not. Lori Vivian from HR just apologized and said, "We didn't know." Which just infuriated me even more. It was her job to know! (It still baffles me that she has a job. Thanks to her poorly implemented health insurance change, GAs unionized, and UConn surely lost much more money due to that than it ever even could gained from downgrading our benefits.)

After that meeting, I went and spoke at the next Board of Trustees meeting, during the open comment session. This is how my speech ended:

I recently attended a meeting on this topic with the Dean of Graduate School, the Director of Student Health Services, the Controller, and representatives from Human Resources. The purpose of this meeting was not to fix the problem, but simply to explain it. It was explained to me that UConn was legally in the right, and everyone said they were very sorry and expressed surprise that this had happened. Legally, I am sure UConn is sound—ethically, I am not so sure. When a GA loses $600 or $1,500 or more for the privilege of having worse health insurance, UConn has done something wrong. When no one informs GAs in advance that they will lose this money, either because they didn’t know or because they forgot, UConn has done something wrong. When a roomful of administrators throw up their hands and says there’s nothing to be done about this, UConn has done something wrong.

I don't think this did any good but at that point it felt like all I could do.

I turned out to be a frustrating and unenjoyable year to be Vice President; I had just wanted to make jokes while chairing meetings.

#619: When have you spoken out about something you felt had to change?

* The new plan was so bad that the some GAs opted instead to go on the state-subsidized Medicaid plan for low-income families. The owner of Bailey Agencies, John Scott, was a state senator and corrupt as hell, so he introduced a bill in the state legislature to make it illegal for people to go on Medicaid if they were students!

The Perils of Professionalization: The Tone-Deafness of NAVSA

As this post goes up, I'm driving to the second day of NAVSA 2018 in St. Petersburg, the annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association. It's my first time attending NAVSA, and my first year as a member of the organization in several years.

I was a member of NAVSA for a few years in graduate school, though eventually I stopped applying because I was rejected pretty consistently; I think three times in a row. I'd like to think I am pretty good at writing conference abstracts, and never have I been rejected so consistently by a conference. I remember attending my first meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association in graduate school, and during the banquet the president came over to where all the grad students were sitting and asked us what SFRA could do for graduate students. I told him that just by accepting graduate students (most of my friends were consistently rejected, too), SFRA was doing more for me than, say, NAVSA. Eventually I stopped re-upping my membership.

The thing that really irritated me, though, was NAVSA 2013. A pretty common thing for academic organizations to do these days is to "professionalize" graduate students, which is a fancy way of saying that they try to give them tips on how to successfully navigate an increasingly terrible job market for humanities Ph.D.s, and so NAVSA 2013 was preceded by a professionalization workshop.

For some reason, that year's meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association was held in Venice. The conference was June 3rd through 6th; the professionalization workshop was May 27th through 31st, plus June 7th.

It cost $800!

On top of whatever it costs to fly from North America to Venice (humanities Ph.D. students get very little travel funding), NAVSA was expecting them to pay almost a thousand dollars in order to hear tips on jobs they probably weren't going to get. I found that completely flabbergasting and completely unconscionable. It would have been a whole month's rent for me at the time.

The cynic in me suspected the whole thing was to allow the workshop organizers and lecturers the luxury of extending their Venetian vacation. Nice work if you can get it.

Fast forward to 2018; NAVSA is still doing "professionalization workshops," though this year they do not involve a five-day beach vacation, at least. This year's conference is preceded by a two-thirds-day session and followed by a half-day one, covering the material of the Venice workshop in about one-fifth of the time. As a result, it costs not $800, but $60.

The workshop, however, is staffed by volunteers, so what does that $60 go to?

Apparently, one boxed lunch and a coffee break! I get that conference venues charge ridiculous amounts of money for their food, but $60 for a shitty cashew chicken wrap served with (I assume) a bag of chips and a can of soda? Really? That's the best you could do for a bunch of graduate students who are probably paying for all of this out of pocket? The conference is in downtown St. Petersburg; any one of those students could walk out the doors of the Hilton and just buy a lunch and a coffee literally anywhere and pay less than $60.

It's ridiculous that it should cost this much in general (at some conferences, $60 will get you a goddamn banquet), but it's completely tone-deaf to charge this to underfunded, underpaid, and underemployed graduate students. Like, give this to them for free and let them walk to McDonald's at lunchtime. Or pack some granola bars. These people will not get jobs. You do not need to charge them $60 for that privilege.

I complained about this to a colleague, and she pointed out that the whole idea of "professionalization" was essentially bogus anyway. Because the real problem is not insufficiently "professional" Ph.D.s (though I have seen some pretty poor cover letters), but the dwindling number of full-time Ph.D.-level academic positions, and the persistence of Ph.D.-granting programs in producing graduates for whom jobs do not exist.

According to its web page, my own alma mater produced fifteen Ph.D.s last year. Also, according to its web site, eight of them landed full-time jobs. Two of those were tenure-track. My program is one that trumpets its placement rate, too. That they produce a 50% excess of Ph.D.s is the problem, not "professionalization," and NAVSA is exploiting those desperate students' economic precarity with its continued stream of workshops.

The Best Student Work and the Problem of Limited Resources

Right now, in the between-real-employments phase of my academic career, I'm working part-time (i.e., adjuncting) in the department where I received my Ph.D. In the fall, I taught two first-year writing courses; this spring I taught one writing course and one 3000-level literature class. (Undergraduate classes here go from 1000 to 4999, so this makes it junior-level in theory.)

That class is winding down now (only one more week of classes to go), which is causing me to think about the assessment I'm using. I do weekly-ish reading quizzes (there's a 50% chance of a quiz on any given day, so it averages out to one per week), a 3-page paper due during the semester, a 6-page paper due at the end, a midterm, and a final.

I'm not convinced these are very good or very appropriate levels of assessment. When it comes to encouraging reading on a regular basis, I think short responses are more appropriate to the kind of work I want my students to be doing than quizzes. When it comes to synthesizing their knowledge of the class, I think longer writing is better than multiple exams.

But I have forty students, and so pedagogy must compromise with efficiency. It is simply easier to grade 40 four-question quizzes per week than it is to read and respond to 40 1.5-page writings. It is simply easier to assign nine pages of writing than to assign more (8-12 is the range for a 3000-level ENGL class, so you can tell at least I'm doing more than the bare minimum). And exams are the best way I know to figure out if all forty of my students got something out of the class when usually there's not time or space for each one of them to say something substantive every day. I just don't have the time, space, and money to obtain the best student work.

Last fall, there was a minor brouhaha on the department listserv because out of 22 winners of our university's funded undergraduate research prize, only three were from non-STEM fields. Two of those three were indeed from English, however. Undergraduates apply for these awards as first-semester juniors, which means you have to be basically ready to have a research proposal by the end of sophomore year.

Well, how likely is that if even once you get to junior-level, you're one of forty students in your English class? I had some large English classes as an undergraduate... but I don't think I was ever in a class of forty in a 300-level course. As an instructor, I have absolutely no incentive to encourage research projects, as it just increases my workload in what is already a large course; my six-page paper requires no research beyond sources read in class.

Furthermore, as an adjunct I have even less incentive to mentor a student so that they can carry out research. I'm not going up for tenure here, ever; I have no possible motivation other than, well, collegiality. But collegiality is not rewarded when you're a part-timer.

So when all this was going back and forth on our department listserv, my thought was, If this department wants engaged undergraduates who carry out research projects, they need to not be  stuffing forty of them into junior-level classes taught by adjuncts. And I get that there are real financial exigencies that make this necessary, just as there are practical concerns for me that override my pedagogical ideals. But if this is what we put into our department, we should not be surprised at the students who come out of it. Our department is very reliant on adjunct teaching, moreso than other departments of similar sizes, so I have heard. Our tenure-track faculty do not teach 1000-level courses by and large.

Finally, a faculty member (former department head) pointed out something similar: "It seems to me that the faculty might have more impact on this process if we were more regularly willing to teach the sorts of courses that our sophomore majors are likely to take--for instance, the 2000-level and 3000-level literary surveys. It is my impression [...] that our beginning majors are hungry for serious mentoring from our tenured and tenure-track faculty. It is also my impression that faculty do not often volunteer for such courses"

The conversation continued, but no one ever addressed that component of it. If you want the best student work, you have to put in the best quality of teaching. Our current model, for a variety of reasons, doesn't make that happen.

Collegiality, Serendipity, and Altruism in Graduate School

Names removed to protect the innocent.
(amazing Photoshoppery by a grad in our program)

This past Monday, I participated in a roundtable on collegiality (or, as the organizer liked to say, "colleaguing") organized by the Professional Development Committee of my old graduate program. There were four of us: two current graduate students and two former graduate students (me still physically at the department, the other now junior tenure-track faculty and appearing via videolink).

I spoke on the necessity of developing your teaching, and specifically, developing your writing. My Ph.D. is in Victorian literature, but like many graduate students, much of my teaching was in writing. There's definitely a strain of literature graduate student who dismisses writing as not really counting, but now that I've spent three years on the academic job market, I see even more clearly how short-sighted that approach is. If you're a graduate student at an R1 university, all the faculty you see are only teaching literature courses, but that's not the reality at smaller teaching-focuses schools, which are the kinds of schools where graduates from mid-ranked public school programs like mine get jobs. Most of my friends with tenure-track literature jobs are still teaching at least one writing course per semester.

When you interview for that kind of job, they want you to speak thoughtfully and intelligently about the teaching of writing. They don't expect you (in my experience) to be all up on the latest composition scholarship, they just want you to have a real investment and commitment to the teaching of writing. You can get that, I think, by taking on administrative roles as a graduate student (I was Assistant Director of Freshman English for over two years as a graduate student), but you don't have to go that far: you can work for orientations or what have you.

Time to redeploy this old clip art again.

It's also good to broaden your teaching within writing. When I was on the market last year, I was up for a job that involved teaching a "basic writing" course (here at my school we call it "Introduction to Academic Writing," but it's basically a preparatory course for students with low SAT verbal or TOEFL scores, that's a prereq for the main academic writing requirement). They asked me how I would teach such a course, they evinced skepticism as to my approach, and because I had never actually taught the course, only talked to my program director about how to do it, I didn't have a convincing defense.

So when I didn't get that (or any) job and ended up adjuncting here, I asked to teach Introduction to Academic Writing so I could answer that question better. I'd avoided it, I guess honestly because it has a sort of stigma, but I actually liked it better than our usual academic writing course in some regards. And when I had a campus interview this year and the dean asked me about teaching that course, he pointed out how enthusiastic I sounded about teaching it.

This didn't come up in my remarks on Monday, but talking to a graduate student about some of these issues earlier that day, she complained that a lot of people's success in academia seemed to be based on "serendipity": happening to have worked at a part-time job with some connection to a skill valued by a proseminar, happening to have organized something a potential employer is seeking someone to organize, happening to have graduated from a program with a philosophy of writing that aligns with another university's.

And she's kind of right. The way many people get hired seems very lucky. To a degree, it even makes sense: most everyone who graduates with a Ph.D. is very qualified, so the things that set people apart are going to be random characteristics. But for me, the serendipity of these alignments only heightens the need to get involved in something when you're in graduate school. If you don't do anything other than the things everyone does, you don't have anything that can spark one of those serendipitous connections. So on the one hand, it's very often a fluke what makes you stand out from the pack, but on the other hand, you can increase the odds of a fluke.

Rude grad students go on to be rude professors.

Something else that I didn't say, but only occurred to me afterwards: as I have been seriously job-searching for two years now, my comments were kind of mercenary, focusing on the practical outcomes of the work for your future career prospects. But even though I really do believe it can help you out on the job market, that shouldn't be the whole of your reasoning. This kind of outside academic work is best approached with enthusiasm, caring, thoughtfulness, engagement, and genuine collegiality. I have served on committees (I have ran committees) where it became clear that people I thought were good colleagues were only out for number one, and only signed up because they thought it was an easy paycheck or a nice line on the good old c.v. And now I never want to work with those people ever again.

This stuff can help you professionally, but if you want to be collegial, it can never be your primary reason for doing something-- then you're just a selfish ass.

The Limits of Institutional Structures of Diversity in the University

At my university, graduate assistants recently unionized, forcing the university to recognize us as state employees. This has had the positive effects of providing us with access to state employee benefits such as state healthcare, but has also meant we now have to do a lot of the things other employees do, like attend mandatory trainings. This past Tuesday, I attended a sexual harassment prevention training. Parts of it were helpful-- the details of reporting requirements for instructors had never been indicated to me in eight years here-- but parts of it were also pretty stark, often due to the limitations of providing meaningful training to a group of one hundred people at a time.

What really hit me was this slide:

Why do we have to report? Legal liability. Not because you might help stop someone from being the victim of harassment or assault, but because you'll save the faceless institution that is the University from being sued. They're who really needs to be protected here.

Now, I am being realistic: I know that the reason things like our Office of Diversity and Equity exist is because of legal requirements. But I don't see why being legally obligated to exist can't stop these structures from thinking of themselves as protecting the individual, not protecting the institution. I have worked in a large bureaucracy, and though I suspect I occasionally (or even often) failed in this regard, I always tried to keep in mind that our requirements didn't exist to serve themselves, or even us, but the people.

The problem with this protect-the-institution mindset is amply illustrated by a different training session I went to earlier this semester, about diversity. We watched an eight-minute clip from an ABC show called What Would You Do? about two deaf women trying to fill out an application to work at a coffee shop that needs help in the kitchen:

If you don't feel like watching the actual video, the manager tells the women they can fill out the application if they really want, but he will never hire them on account of their disability. But the deaf women and the manager are all actors, and the experiment is repeated a few time across the course of the same day. The focus of the video is on the bystanders and their reactions, a few of whom confront the manager, and one who declares he's never buying coffee there again. Many others just sit there and look disgusted. (Most likely this would be what I did.)

But three people come up to the manager after the women leave and tell the manager that if he's going to discriminate against these women, he just needs to be smarter about it. He should politely accept their applications, and then reject them for reasons of "fit." All three of these people work in Human Resources.

To me, this seemed a weird video to show at a mandatory employee diversity training because it's not damning of ordinary employees or even the manager (after all, he's a plant). It damns the very people putting on the training we were attending, highlighting that these structures are fundamentally not about protecting people from discrimination, but protecting the institution from being accused of being discriminatory.

Which, really, was the whole problem of the trainings. Lecturing hundreds of people for 2-3 hours is not an effective way to "teach" them diversity, as anyone who works in higher education should full well know. But these trainings aren't actually about teaching anyone about diversity or harassment. They're about protecting the institution from liability, and they were about as perfunctory as that implies.

Seriously, look at this slide:

No way was this slide made by anyone who was actually giving any thought to people being able to understand or use the information. It was probably on the projector screen for around 30 seconds. This slide is the invention of someone who wants to get through something as quickly as possible so that they can claim that they did their duty when they get in trouble for something. Actually helping people understand issues of diversity and equity doesn't enter into it.