Footnotes
We haven’t done “Footnotes” in awhile, but here we go again. To refresh our memories, “Footnotes” is supposed to be a semi-regular series that collects some stories and postings that are semi-relevant to the semi-academic focus of the blog.
"Kindle DX Front" by Jon "ShakataGaNai" Davis (Creative Commons license)
1. Books vs. e-Books Grudge Match: You know one of our big interests, especially of late, has been publishing. Here’s a handy, super stylish chart, courtesy of Digital Inspiration, that gives us the tale of the tape on the coming showdown between print and digital. Obviously, the cost of production seems to tip to e-Books, but other economic factors favor print: authors get more royalties from real books ($3.90 vs. $2.12 from a download) and sales are still almost ten times greater at this point ($249.2 Mill to $29.3 Mill). One interesting point of comparison is that the carbon emissions needed to produce one e-Reader is equivalent to those used in making 40-50 books, so I guess the environmental issues depend on how much you use your Kindle or whether it’s a novelty. Noting that only 15% of e-Book owners will stop buying print, the best point of the chart makes is that both media can and will co-exist, debunking the idea that they are mutually exclusive forms or that virtual books will make hardcovers obsolete.
2. Drake U’s “D+” Ad Campaign: A lot of folks — a surprising amount, actually — are getting their kicks out of a really bad ad campaign put out by Drake University. Courtesy The Awl,”The Drake Advantage” campaign uses a giant D+ as its logo, explaining that ,”When we talk about D+, that’s what we mean. Every moment at Drake is one that has the power to educate, to transform, to open minds and to unleash potential — to introduce who you are, to who you hope to become.” The obvious rejoinder is that “D+” idea earns a F grade, but, instead, I’d like to think that the “Drake Advantage” is just doing it’s part to combat grade inflation.
"OutKast 2001" by Joe Goldberg (Creative Commons license)
3.HuffPo College’s Rapper-College Analogies: HuffPo College’s inane photo slideshow polls, we just can’t quit you. Here’s one of the more absurd but somehow compelling one just in time for back-to-school, analogizing the hip-hop pantheon to higher ed. Some of the comparisons are pretty good, with gold-standard Jay Z equating to Harvard and the Eminem-Princeton connection tagged as “The whitest of the truly elite.” And with Tupac repping the west coast from Marin, the Stanford namecheck isn’t bad, though I’d probably go with Berkeley as a point of reference, then bump Lil’ Wayne from Cal to some counter-cultural school in the South, since even a rap know-nothing like me knows enough about the genre’s geographical specificity. And, in the end, all anyone needs to know about the agenda behind the concept is revealed when Wesleyan student Charlie Alderman matches OutKast to his home institution, with the explanation, “Doing its own thing. Well.” Seriously, because Wesleyan doesn’t ring any march-to-the-beat-of-its-own-drummer bells to me? If that’s the criteria, Andre 3000 and Big Boi would be better off representing Deep Springs or Evergreen or UC Santa Cruz or something.
Work Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
I rarely blog about my current work life because blogging about one’s current work life usually gets little hamsters in big trouble. But a coworker did me a huge favor the other day that’s worth blogging about. He told me that I apologize too much. (For the record: I had stumbled into a conversation among colleagues about where to go drink after work, and I mistook it as interrupting a work conversation with another work question.) He’s right. It’s a bad habit that I cultivated as a childhood/teenage survival instinct.
Apologizing too much is often an issue for women, like we have to apologize for having thoughts. Men don’t apologize before they talk, or at least I don’t hear it that often. I don’t have a problem with that, either. Even if a thought isn’t a good one, why apologize for having it? But I still feel like I need to add a caveat before I make a statement.
Apologizing too much is also an issue for academics, not just female ones. Someone, somewhere started assuming that academia was an easy life. There are many movies, novels and slacker tenured professors to thank for this, so now academics feel like they have to atone by working themselves to death just to prove they work as hard as everyone else. (For non-academic readers, let it be said: Academics work hard. If you don’t believe it, step into their shoes for a day. I was in their shoes, and it was so hard that I threw up and fled.)
Tips on avoiding the apology trap after the jump! Image of a “Sorry!” game board by myguitarrz on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
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The best-of list on which UC San Diego is #1
You probably know that our interest is always piqued by college rankings, like the U.S. News ratings and the Princeton Review’s best party schools list. There’s a bunch of these lists coming out with the start of school, and one of the more interesting surveys is Washington Monthly’s best service schools rankings. The top school in the country, by their measure? UC San Diego, which can celebrate not being in the shadow of Berkeley and UCLA for once. Here’s who rounds out the Top 10 on their list, as well as the best in Liberal Arts, Master’s, Baccalaureate schools, and community colleges.
"Geisel Library, UC San Diego" by Andrew Chen (Creative Commons license)
1. UC San Diego
2. Berkeley
3. UCLA
4. Stanford
5. UT Austin
6. UC Davis
7. Michigan
8. Syracuse
9. Harvard
10. William and Mary
Best Liberal Arts school: Morehouse College
Best Master’s university: St. Mary’s University (Texas)
Best Baccalaureate college: Bard College at Simon’s Rock
Best community college: St. Paul College (Minnesota)
The main categories that go into the mix are social mobility, service, and research. The social mobility ratings measure students receiving Pell Grants and the difference between projected and actual graduation rates, while service takes into account community service hours, work-study funds, and how many students go into the Peace Corps and ROTC. On these grounds, it does stand to reason that top-level research schools that are designed to serve more economically diverse populations would fare better. Hence, the strong performance of research-oriented state universities, though we in the UC know that the schools need to work on making themselves more and more diverse in terms of the racial and class make-ups.
The list seems to pride itself on offering a perspective that tries to separate out the factors of cultural capital and status from what a college offers, going great lengths to pick on the Yales and Princetons of the world as basically Wall Street farm teams. As the magazine describes its own rationale, “Instead of asking what a college could do for you, we asked, ‘What are colleges doing for the country?’” This methodology lends itself to a little Ivy bashing, as the editors question just what hedge-fund manager factories are doing for their country, a description that might not be entirely fair as much as we’d like to mock ‘em.
Whatever the rhetoric or agenda, at least the Washington Monthly list puts the spotlight on really good schools that sometimes get the short end of the stick in the national rankings that prop up legacy schools. And it seems to be a serious endeavor, which, as we know, isn’t always the case in these things.
The Alcoholic Horndog Tenured Professor Stereotype on Film: Smart People
At first glance, “Smart People” seems like a knockoff of “Wonder Boys.” A dowdy professor finds love and has to deal with a precocious young adult along the way. Only in this case, “Smart People” swaps Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand and Tobey McGuire for Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker and Ellen Page. Alas, despite Ellen Page’s dazzling array of winter sweaters, “Smart People” takes the film law that “professor” is shorthand for “self-absorbed” and pushes it to the limit.
Meet the Professor: Lawrence Wetherhold, English Professor at Carnegie Mellon. (Is it a law that all movies about sad professors have to be set in Pittsburgh?)
Hot Pepper Rating: Low. They manage to make Dennis Quaid look like a schlep.
Likelihood of Having an Undergrad Piece on the Side: Pretty high if he’s willing to see former students as promising sexual partners.
Boozing and Drugging Quotient: Although Wetherhold is seen chugging from a bottle of wine, his chief vice is narcissism.
Mental Condition: Since this is a dramedy, his mental condition is fairly serious, and it is implied that much of his behavior stems from grief over the death of his wife. At least it doesn’t have as much to do with despair over his status or lack thereof on the job.
Financial Fakery: Finances aren’t a huge issue in this movie, but it does stick to the film rule that any character who is a professor must a) have a problem with driving and b) have an old, crappy car. What’s really fake is the idea that a literature professor could sell a book to Penguin, even if it has a combative title like “You can’t read!”
Teaching Talent: This movie should be a lesson to anyone who does not make the effort to learn the names of his or her students, even if the students are annoying snowflakes. Wetherhold and his students are equally disgusted by each other, and he has trouble tracking down a single positive teaching evaluation.
Quotations: 1. One of Wetherhold’s colleagues on the value of student evaluations: “It’s mostly just speculation on my sexuality.”
2. “You never tire of Bleak House!”
3. An editor on Wetherhold’s book: ” I got to the third section where I noticed a certain marketable tone, the surly smarter-than-thou asshole tone. “
4. Wetherhold: “They’re publishing my book!”
Wetherhold’s poorer and infinitely more interesting brother: “Who the fuck’s gonna read that?”
Conclusion: This movie tries too hard to be quirky and true to the academic life, but the non-professor characters are infinitely more interesting than the professor ones. Nothing really happens. The characters say they’ve grown, but their change isn’t that convincing. Videogum sums up the movie best: “… it definitely helps to define what might be the Worst Genre of All Time, the Being an Upper Middle-Class White Is Hard genre.”
The Five Stages of the First Day of School
"First School Day" by ERWEH (Creative Commons license)
I’ve been taking note of all the back-to-school status updates from my Facebook friends, which don’t exactly make me envious, though maybe a little nostalgic. We’re still about 3 weeks from the start of school here on the quarter system (yay, summer!), though I’m entirely sure if anything changes that much for staff. Anyhow, I was recalling what that first day of school is like from one stage of my academic life to another, starting with college up to being an adjunct.
1. College: There was definitely a palpable excitement for the first day of classes, since I was definitely a little bit of a self-defined geek going from high school to college. It wasn’t just the thrill of living somewhere new with lots of interesting new people, but there was a sense of exhilaration in getting to choose what I wanted to learn for the first time ever. I loved leafing through the newsprint schedule of classes, then slowly whittling down all the candidates for the courses I wanted to take into my schedule that quarter, leaving a little wiggle room for the “shopping” period to make my final decisions. The first day of classes was just a fulfillment of all the planning, though maybe an anti-climactic one in the end.
2. Grad school: I experienced something of the same thing on my first day of classes in grad school, only it didn’t feel like such a watershed moment. Rather, I went about starting grad school with a more practical — and perhaps cynical — perspective: Things needed to get done, such as figuring out what the other folks within what was going to be a very insular grad school social circle were like and gauging the competition among my classmates. The latter wasn’t exactly front-and-center in my mind, but it was definitely something I was thinking about as I started to make my flawed and judgmental judgments way too early.
The first day of school gets less and less looked forward to, below the fold…
Speaking of Translating Jargon: The Postmodernism Generator App
We’ve all used a name generator. My favorites are the Wu-Tang name generator and the Jersey Shore name generator. But what about a postmodern author name generator? Oh, yes, there’s an app for that.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Postmodernism Generator, which has been creating pitch-perfect faux cultural criticism since 2000. (Frankly, much of what comes out of the generator is easier to read than certain authors we have mentioned before …)
The portable version of the Postmodernism Generator lets you get your cultural critique fix anywhere, anytime. You can quote from it and play “trick-a-professor.” But the niftiest part of the app pulls last names out of your address book so you can read fake articles by your friends, who get their own nicknames worthy of a cultural critic. For example, if “Richard Lopez” is in your address book, the Postmodernism Generator turns him into the esteemed “H. Jurgen Lopez, Department of Deconstruction.”
That’s H. Jurgen Method Man to you! Image of Method Man by Johnny Blaze from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
Unsuck That!
As education becomes more business-ified, the chances that you will encounter business-speak have increased. You may even receive unwelcome Hamster Advice in the workplace. Luckily, the Internets make it easy to translate Hamster-Speak.
The website Unsuck It helps you translate exactly what a top-level Hamster is saying to you. (The low-level Hamsters are usually out back either a) working or b) taking a baseball bat to the printer or c) stealing beer and taking a ride down the emergency chute, and yes there is truth in “Office Space” and the adventures of Steven Slater.)
For example, type in the phrase “monetize,” which is a biz biggie, and you’ll get “Turn into money or make profitable.” (As in: “How can we ‘monetize’ the humanities?”) Go for “deliverable,” and you’ll get “Piece of a project.” As a Hamster Bonus Translation, I find a “deliverable” to be the part of a project for which you or your team are directly responsible.
But the best feature of Unsuck It, by far, is the “I’m Feeling Douchey” button, which will reveal other pearls of wisdom from the Hamster World. My personal favorite is the term “content creation,” which really means “writing.”
Hat Tip: Lifehacker
Brainstorming the online peer review process
"Brainstorming" by Agripolare (Public Domain)
It’s not much of a surprise that I would be thinking more about the online peer review process we discussed last week, since that’s what I do many hours a week now. Again, whether or not it was wholly successful isn’t really the issue in my mind, but it’s that the folks at Shakespeare Quarterly and MediaCommons sought to innovate peer review and academic publishing. Like I mentioned last time, I’ve always been thinking about production and distribution when it came to imagining what digital media had to offer, and less about how scholarship and collegiality might also benefit. So the SQ experiment was definitely illuminating on that front.
What follows, then, are some things that could be brainstormed about the next time someone tries something like this, to build on what SQ and MediaCommons tried on this go-round:
Incorporating responses: One of the outcomes of the project was that there was so much feedback that authors found it took longer to process the comments, both in terms of time and page length. According to the journal’s editor David Schalkwyk in the piece that appeared in the Chronicle, editors and authors had to spend a good amount time keeping track of how the discussion of the articles went, which also led to more lengthy revisions. Think of it this way: Don’t you feel indebted to incorporate all the comments that people who’ve really taken the time to read your writing offer you? Well, multiply that by about 10 times, with the suggestions being public, so that there’s a record to check your changes against. Getting input is good, but there’s a limit to it, logistically for the editor and mentally for the writer.
More brainstorming below the fold…
Are Your Students Betting on You?
Did you think Rate My Professors was the only website you had to worry about when it comes to teaching college? Well, a new website is allowing college students to place bets on their own grades:
A website called Ultrinsic is taking wagers on grades from students at 36 colleges nationwide starting this month.
Just as Las Vegas sports books set odds on football games, Ultrinsic will pay you top dollar for A’s, a little less for the more likely outcome of a B average or better, and so on. You can also wager you’ll fail a class by buying what Ultrinsic calls “grade insurance.”
Since students can only bet on themselves and the site isn’t gambling in the sense that you’re betting on what others will do, Ultrinsic paints itself as a motivational tool. Ultrinsic’s home page text proclaims: “The right amount of cash should provide you with the needed motivation to pull all-nighters and stay awake during the lectures of your most boring professors.”
Via: huffingtonpost.com More after the jump! Image of the French gambling aristocracy from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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Great Employment Opportunity! #1: The ethnic lit catch-all
Now that we’re so close to the start of the academic job search season, I thought it would be good to begin a recurring series of posts highlighting the ridiculousness of job ads. Mind you, the new “Great Employment Opportunity!”–herein abbreviated as GEO!–is not meant to point out what are the plum positions, which, anyway, depend on the eye of the beholder. Rather, we’re gonna parse the rhetoric of job calls as best we can, though with the disclaimer that my track record on this front hasn’t been the greatest.
"Old Main, St. Olaf College" by Calebrw (Creative Commons license)
Our first example is a personal favorite of mine, the ethnic lit catch-all. Here’s the posting, courtesy of whoever posted the St. Olaf College position on the Academic Job Wiki:
“The Department of English seeks an individual with teaching and scholarly expertise in the area of twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, with emphasis on post WWII multicultural literatures such as Latina/o, Native American, African American, Indian American, and Asian American literatures. Desirable secondary interests include film; transnational literature; and generic, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary approaches.”
So basically, this ad *could* appeal to pretty much anyone who works in 20th c./contemporary American literature, which is, like, half the job market. Indeed, the best thing about the ethnic lit catch-all is also the worst thing about it: anyone can apply. It can boost your spirits when a specific specialty has a dearth of openings in a given year, but that also means that the pool becomes insanely large.
The problem is that you might read the position as appealing to anyone, when, in fact, it might have a more specific target, but won’t commit to anything in the job ad. Here, I’d read into things and suggest that Latina/o takes priority and so on down the line to Asian American, because there’s no particular rhyme or reason as to why the different racial groups are listed the way they are. Of course, the vagueness of the ad also leaves it open for a strong candidate in any of those other ethnic lit fields to apply, so you might as well give it a shot. If you can work in multiple ethnic fields, your chances would probably tick up, too.
But even if the dept does want someone in a specific field, though won’t reveal it for whatever reason, it’s likely that whoever holds the winning ticket will be teaching in many of the fields vaguely alluded to, since the school (especially a smaller one with fewer faculty) obviously needs someone to fill those gaps. So in the end, I guess the job posting is accurate in what your teaching responsibilities will be, but only after the fact!
