The Salt-Box

Back when I was a Brittain fellow at Georgia Tech, I was struck by the fact that students had full access to a faculty member’s grading history.  As I recall, you could look at the overall distribution of grades, but you could also break it down by course number, fall/spring/summer, maybe one or two other variables, and you could see the distribution over time.  That was a little disconcerting at first: I thought it laid an unseemly stress on the least important part of a class, without any contextualizing information.

I got over it pretty quickly.  And since the information was aggregated automatically, I seldom gave it another thought.  But I’ve been reflecting on this recently, in part because of my work on assessment and for our upcoming NEASC visit, and in part because of a general conversation about grade inflation.  Everyone knows that RateMyProfessor.com infamously asks students to rate professors’ “easiness.”

So I’m thinking about making my grading patterns publicly available on my campus homepage.  (Which I should update soon.)  Some questions:

• Is there any reason not to do this?
• Is there a reason not to do this, if you’re the only one doing it?
• If the grades were available, what kinds of variables would one like to be able to plot?  (No promises: I’ll probably have to do this by hand.  But I’d like to know what people would find interesting.)
• Do students look at faculty homepages?  I know that many students register for classes with the university portal open in one window, and RMP.com in the other–would providing this information make a dent?

I have no particular motive here.  I’d like students to be able to make informed decisions about their courses, and it seems to me that if I have information, there’s no reason to hide it.  (I’m considering putting the full text of my evaluations online, too.  [My dept.’s evaluation form doesn’t have a numerical portion.]  But since that would entail typing up the comments from the 35-40 sections I’ve taught over the past 4 years, it’s Not. Going. to Happen. this summer. )

First in an occasional series.

In this week’s New Yorker, David Denby has a feature-length article on the “slacker-striver romance,” or movies that feature a male slacker and an ambitious woman who’s out of his league. While leaving the film criticism to Chuck, I did want to pick out one comment Denby makes about psychoanalysis. He notes that Woody Allen’s romances, such as Annie Hall, tend to drive couples apart, and “the cult of psychoanalysis” is partly to blame:

Psychoanalysis yields “relationships” and “living together,” not marriage, as the central ritual, and living together, especially in the time of the Pill and the easy real-estate market of the seventies, is always provisional.

Yes, I think we’re all familiar with Freud’s famous essay, “The Vicissitudes of Staying Single: On Shacking Up with Your Woman.” Lacan famously re-interpreted this essay in the sixties to mean, “how to have booty calls *and* a significant other.” (From the as-yet untranslated Le seminaire, livre 69.)

Psychoanalysis certainly doesn’t “yield relationships” as a replacement for marriage. For strict Freudians, for instance, the centrality of the family romance means that marriage–if not your own, then your parents’, or your fantasy about what marriage must be like–plays a central role in psychic life. Further, classical and Lacanian schools of analysis, at least in theory, both abstain from recommending any particular arrangement of one’s life.

Now: It is probably fair to say that psychoanalysis works with the cultural ideals found in a particular milieu. If, in New York in the seventies traditional marriage was being eroded by a variety of forces, then it is true that psychoanalysis is profoundly unlikely to insist on marriage no matter what. And it may well be that Woody Allen thinks psychoanalysis converts marriages into relationships–but that’s hardly, like, part of the secret handshake you learn at the training institutes.

But far from claiming that psychoanalysis dissolves marriages into relationships, I would have been much more inclined to argue that psychoanalysis strengthens secular marriages (though it is not the only force that does so): By helping one recognize fantasies for what they are, and orientating one to the struggles for which the fantasy compensates, psychoanalysis could very well help a spouse maintain his or her commitment to the marriage. (By contrast, therapies that focus on self-affirmation, or that assume that unconscious fantasies are “the truth” about a person,” would directly threaten the long-term stability of a marriage.)

Over at PopMatters’s Re:Print, I’ve begun what I hope will be a series of reviews and interviews highlighting work from university presses that might interest general readers.

The first such post, about Angus McLaren’s splendid new book, Impotence: A Cultural History (U of Chicago P, 2007), went up last night. McLaren shows how even the most basic questions of the male body–am I hard? can I get it up?–have been construed very differently in Western history.

From the interview:

To say that “impotence has a history” means that every age has had its own ideas about what caused and cured male sexual dysfunctions. Fiascos in the bedroom have been attributed at one time or another to witchcraft, masturbation, homosexual desires, shell-shock, sexual excesses, feminism, and the Oedipal complex. In recovering this history we not only learn about other cultures, more importantly we find that what it meant to be a man differed in each epoch. Countless studies have tracked the ways in which women’s sexuality was “constructed” or repressed or policed but next to nothing has as yet been said about how normative standards of male performance were established.

And, from the review:

Despite the presence of a blurb from Dr. Ruth on the back cover, McLaren is a refreshingly low-key guide to the vicissitudes of impotence. The book is almost unmissable for its extensive cataloging of tests (”fifteenth-century English courts sometimes employed ‘honest women’ to examine the man”) and treatments (ranging from the implantation of monkey and goat glands, to the construction of mechanical scaffolding, to various forms of pastes, salves, and unguents, applied topically, orally, or anally).

Read the whole piece!

(Update: Andrew Sullivan’s link to the interview; Cliopatria’s link; and the one from the U of Chicago Press.)

I know typo-blogging is a bit unfair, but this one’s pretty funny.  From today’s New Britain Herald:

The story, of course, is deeply unfunny.  While I’m prepared in theory to agree that throwing money at problems isn’t always a good solution, it does strike me as unreasonable to take a state “Educational Cost Sharing” grant and apply it to . . . tax relief, at a time when the city’s high school risks losing accreditation.

The thing that nearly prevented us from moving to New Britain wasn’t the tax burden, though I recognize it’s relatively high; rather, it was the reputation of the schools, particularly the high school.

Thursday’s e-mail brought the AAUP’s monthly e-newsletter promoting the contents of Academe.  Here’s a screen shot of one of the news items:

I don’t want to defend either ACTA or Anne Neal, but I do think it’s weird to conflate “anti-faculty” (headline) with “right-wing” (in the slug).  I’ll grant that  AAUP and ACTA are probably not going to share a lot of policy goals, but still.

The actual article is headlined more neutrally, “Critic Appointed to Accreditation Review Panel,” and the article also omits the (apparent) epithet, “right-wing.”

Yesterday’s post at Blog of a Bookslut was later than usual, but did make it up.

I’m excited about a mini-interview with Angus McLaren (author of Impotence: A Cultural History) that I’ll be posting Monday to Re:Print.

Also, yesterday I stopped by the department to retrieve something for A. Since my own office is across campus from my department, it was the first time I’d been by since getting the iPhone. One of the department’s administrative assistants had just gotten a digital camera, and she snapped this picture (t-shirt by 30boxes, the excellent calendar web app):

Then, my chair came bursting out of his office to compare the iPhone with his disposable phone:

Good times. Back to prepping the living room for painting . . .

This morning PopMatters posted my review of Aurelia C. Scott’s Otherwise Normal People:

This book delivers almost exactly what the title offers: A sympathetic, perhaps even sentimental, look at the slightly crazy people who organize their lives around rose competitions. If you imagine a non-satirical Best in Show, except with flowers, then you will have an almost perfect mental image of this book. The book is breezily charming, and, unless you are already an avid competitive rose enthusiast—and if you read PopMatters regularly I’m betting you’re not—it also might teach you something about roses.

It turns out, for instance, that when Gertude Stein said, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” she was lying.

Read the whole thing!

As I noted just now on PopMatters, Sterling E. Lanier died two weeks ago.

If you’ve not read his Hiero novels, and you are, or have been, a fan of sf+fantasy, then doing so would make a lovely tribute to his memory.

. . . if only it had been around when I was an undergrad:

Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Harvard UP, 1999)

If, at 19, I’d known the classics were so awesome . . . I’d probably be annoying my students with Aristophanes rather than with Dickens.

At the Academic Commons today, I have a post introducing Collex, a search- and tagging- tool that allows researchers to move seamlessly among most of the major 19th-century digital collections.  Collex is one of the coolest early fruits of Jerome McGann’s NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) group.