The Salt-Box

One of my favorite writers, Russell Jacoby (whose The Repression of Psychoanalysis, an account of how the American medical establishment tamed & betrayed Freud’s key insights, has held up very well) has an article in this week’s Chronicle (permalink for subscribers | temporary free link) unpacking the academic penchant for “complicating” matters.  The whole thing is worth reading, but the payoff is a story about academic integrity:

Underneath the signature, the credo continues, but the tone shifts: “There are alternatives to academic dishonesty,” it offers. “Please see your TA, professor, tutor, the Ombuds, or the Dean of Students to discuss other options.”

“Alternatives to academic dishonesty?” How many are there besides honesty? “Other options” to discuss? “Hi, Prof! I’m stressed about the exam. Honesty doesn’t work for me. What are my other options?” The mind-set is familiar. Complicate things. For the partisan of complexity, honesty/dishonesty presumably exemplifies antiquated binary thinking.

Mark Bauerlein had already gone down this path 11 years ago, in Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, which includes this entry on “problematize”:

This complication of accepted ideas and values certifies the critic’s heightened awareness.  As a problematizer, the critic is sensitive to institutional contexts and dubious of interpretative habits.  What others handles with thoughtless facility, the problematizer queries with wary deliberation.  He is a conceptual devil’s advocate, an anti-positive gadfly who keeps inquiry honest, preventing other inquirers from relying uncritically upon problematic norms and methods.

We are a faddish lot!

By coincidence, today’s “Tomorrow’s Professor” e-mail was about reducing complexity in academic prose.  It will probably show up on their blog in a week or two.  At the risk of seeming uncomplicated, however, I’m going to go check on this week’s installation!

If you bracket the 2 years or so right after 9/11, when he lost his mind and started ranting about treasonous America-haters, then Andrew Sullivan has been, for more than a decade now, one of my favorite writers.  I’ve taught Virtually Normal in composition classes.

But if he is going to start going after Coke Zero, as this post implies, he might have to come out of my Bloglines subscription.   (I think Sullivan’s partial to Tab.)  The drink is probably the biggest factor in this transformation.  Well, that and walking to work.  And reducing carbs.  And vastly reducing takeout after the kid was born.  But I’m pretty sure it’s the Coke Zero.*

Hate Zero, and you hate America!

–

*True story: My mother recently played for my family a recording of me at 2, in which, among other things, I fondly remember the Coke from the previous night’s trip to the Hut.  And I have a relative by marriage with an insomniac 18-month-old, who drinks Coke.

Apparently ACU has decided to give free iPhones to all incoming students.  Before scoffing too much, check out their comprehensive page of resources.  They’ve clearly been thinking about ways to embed new communications tools deeply into the campus culture, which I think is a sound approach.

This is different from Duke giving everyone an iPod: When every single student in a class has a handheld internet communicator, you really can start thinking about the use of class time in a different way.  Actually, you *have* to start thinking about it differently–no more standing at the front and reading your PowerPoint slides!

This week the senate elections committee issued its annual call for nominations for the myriad university committees that are either elected by the faculty as a whole or by the senate.

Immediately afterward, that sound you heard was the cry of the untenured, asking “hey, how can I get me some university service that will 1) round out my promotion-and-tenure file, and 2) not be too burdensome?”

Unfortunately, I have bad news: the category of “service that will look good in my file & yet not involve actual work” is, sadly, a null set.  The people who review promotion and tenure applications generally have a good sense of what kind of work is meaningful, and what isn’t.  (Now, they’re also not monstrous on this issue, and are in general aware that it’s not reasonable to expect heavy university service from assistant professors.)

I also don’t think you should expect your cause to be helped much by any committee that you did nothing but attend.  It’s helpful if you can make a case for your service as a well-integrated part of your academic career.  What have you contributed to the work of the university?  How has the broader perspective afforded by working with colleagues from other schools shaped your own practice, whether in advising or in the classroom?

In general, the best plan is to target committees that address topics you find important, rather than committees you think will be light.  The problem with the latter plan is that they don’t help you enough, and, because you don’t care about the work, you’ll be frustrated by *any* demands on your time.  (A more cynical piece of advice would say, “target committees that address topics your chair, dean, or provost will find important,” but that can be hard to do, and self-defeating when the dean leaves for a new job the year you go up for promotion.  Better to have a file that shows some common ground among your teaching, service, and research.)

I have noticed in recent years an uptick in messages from various people that say something like, “Thank you for participating in this important work.”  That phrase, “important work,” accidentally reveals what it’s meant to conceal: That there’s really no, or little, immediately tangible gain to one’s career by participating fully in self-governance.  (Which is what service work is!)  Committee work can be frustrating and slow.  But that work is also what makes academic life distinctive, and allows, or ought to allow, professors the autonomy to make decisions that affect their work.  Withdrawing from committee work invites campus administration to intervene in areas that ought to be the province of faculty expertise.

The Hartford Courant’s article from the weekend about how excessive CCSU-related partying is mildly annoying destroying the Belvedere neighborhood in New Britain does not–I repeat, does not!–refer to our house.

The confusion’s understandable:

. . . a surge in party-related activity in the neighborhood . . . complaints of wild parties and bottles on lawns  . . .

. . . but I swear it’s not us.

(Although all bets are off this weekend: We’re having one of these installed on Friday, and so will finally be able to take hot showers in the winter.)

Be sure to check out the article on Twitter in the Chronicle this week (permalink | free short-term link) , which features a cameo appearance by your humble blogger.  (Personal interest aside, Jeff does a good job explaining Twitter for people who aren’t already drowning in the Web 2.0 koolaid.)

A few points:

1.  Associate professor of English!  Not assistant!  Though I’m to blame for this: I superstitiously didn’t update my departmental webpage last spring when I was promoted, because I wasn’t tenured (for reasons that can best be described as pointlessly cruel in keeping with long-time local practice).
2.  Since the article mentions how I use my iPhone for class-related twittering, surely that means the iPhone & contract are wholly tax-deductible, right?

3.  Almost no students actually follow my Twitter feed.  The reason I get feedback from students about Twitter is that Twitter talks to Facebook, updating my status whenever I post.  Since the students are on Facebook . . .

4.  There are a variety of ways to post to Twitter from your phone; my solution-of-choice is Hahlo, which is pretty fast, even over Edge.

4.  One last point: What I like about Twitter is that it’s lightweight enough, and–thanks to the iPhone connection, fun enough–to make it easy and fun to do something (reflect on my teaching in a regular way) that I ought to do anyway.  I’ve never had much luck at keeping a teaching journal, but this is pretty easy.  Also, my instinctive response is to embrace anything that opens up the teaching process to students or other interested outsiders, and this does so in a format I’m comfortable with.  (Obviously, one has to be somewhat mindful about what one posts!  But this isn’t a very serious problem.)

You *may* not be done with your paper on King Solomon’s Mines if the first sentence includes this parenthetical:

(INSERT NAMES OF WHITE MEN)

Apparently using all caps isn’t always a sufficient reminder-to-self . . .

A is on the board of directors of the preschool our son attends, which has been . . . interesting.  Apparently, the last time the inspectors (I think attached to this program, which gave the preschool a nice grant this year) visited, they dinged the teachers for having a birthday party for the kids born in January. The inspectors complained that the party occupied time better spent learning.

Now, on the one hand, I loathe forced camaraderie and “community” as much as the next crazed misanthrope, I really do, and so usually would be quite happy to find any excuse not to have a fake party.

But, on the other, what kind of power-deluded, self-important nutjob decides that a curriculum for FOUR YEAR OLDS is more important than sharing a damn cupcake?

Attention, pre-school inspector:

We’re not looking for our kid to learn *anything* in preschool from his teachers. If he does, great.  But we’re pretty sure he’s off to a fine start now, what with his ability to read, and to write more legibly than his father, and his ability to count past 100, and work an abacus, and all the rest.

He’s in preschool because he’s an only child, and, except for sports, doesn’t spend lots of time in groups of kids.  So we’d like him to figure out things like “it’s ok if you’re the 5th person to get a cupcake.” And he’s the only child of 2 academics, who arranged their whole schedule (including their sleep schedule!) for almost 5 years now to keep him out of daycare/preschool as much as possible (never for his first 3 years, then 6 hours/week for 1.5 years, and now 9 hours a week for the past month), which means he probably overrates his ability to fascinate adults.  While we’re glad he’s confident, it’s still good that he recognize every once in a while that other people’s needs are important, too.

That’s the sum total of what we’d like his pre-K year to teach him.  It’s fine if he learns some of that through birthday parties.   Taking an hour out of his schedule isn’t going to set him back.  Because you know what?  Next year, he’s not even going to full-day kindergarten!  He’ll be “wasting” half a day still outside of school, outside the clutches of people who think a cupcake is worth a demerit.

(And look: I know that the rules aren’t written for just my kid, that they have to take into account lots of different kinds of families, including the various families who can’t, or won’t, or don’t know how to help their child have a rich intellectual life.  But what do you think would help those FOUR YEAR OLDS feel better about school?  An occasional cupcake break?  Or making sure every minute is related to some bureaucrat-approved lesson plan? )

We’re not going to homeschool our kid–mostly, he said in jest, because we need the sleep–but hearing stuff like this always makes me think again.  And I had thought the tiresome official parties would be the thing that pushed me over the edge . . .

(And if you’re a school inspector looking for something to check up on instead of cupcakes, I could regale you for hours with stories of students who assert, on the one hand, that they’d like to teach English, and, on the other hand, that they don’t like to read.  How about inspecting them?)

A very long time ago, I wrote a column for InsideHigherEd.com arguing that assessment isn’t just makework; done right, it can provide useful information to departments and other interested parties about what students actually learn.  By coincidence, Horace wrote a long post about his frustration with assessing the humanities the next day, which I promised to respond to, but never have done.  I’m trying to rectify that here, spurred in part by this article in Academe, which I think is a wrong-headed form of preaching to the choir.

I’ll concede James Berger’s point that writing collective mission statements doesn’t do anyone any good, but the banality of mission statements doesn’t actually tell us anything about assessment.  More than this, it sounds arrogant when those of us in the humanities assert that–uniquely in the university!–our content and methods are so special that it is impossible to evaluate them honestly.  (Remember Peter Mac Grawler!  At this point, it also would be fair to ask how on earth one ever grades . . . )  It’s–at least as a matter of persuasion–a grave error to argue that, unlike the humanities, the rest of the university is administered and staffed by knaves in the pocket of global late capitalism.  Even if that were true–and certainly there’s much that’s craven about higher education–to make that argument in those terms is to alienate the very people with whom we should be making common cause.  (For a more sympathetic take on Berger’s essay, see this post at Short-Circuit Signs.  Shawn Huston’s post is reasonable, but I would just say that the moment when faculty could simply say, “hey, we’re not teachers, we’re primarily researchers” and expect state legislatures and tuition-payers to tug a forelock are long gone–if it ever existed.)

Some object to assessment in the humanities because it seems like an add-on: After all, we already grade student work.  But course grades tell us both too much and too little.  First, they measure too much!  Some professors grade on effort, some on revision, some on a curve, others on an absolute scale, some penalize for absenteeism, some if you wear a hat to class–a lot goes into a course grade.  Also, in contexts where faculty are free to devise their own grading schemes–a situation which isn’t universal!–different faculty teaching the same course, or in the same area, might well emphasize different things in their classes, and grade students accordingly.  Considered as an educational experience, this is a feature, not a bug; however, it *also* means that aggregate final grades don’t tell us much about  what it is students are learning in a particular department.

What’s needed, then, is a system that aggregates comparable data across a department.  Such data has many uses: It can spur curricular reform (Crikey! Our students need a [theory course / research course / year-long composition sequence / senior capstone]!).  It can disabuse faculty of their assumptions about what students learn where (”Oh, I thought students were getting concept X in their first year.”  “Probably the problem with composition is that it’s taught by part-timers.”).  It can demonstrate to interested parties–deans, provosts, accreditors, donors, legislators, parents, prospective majors, or job candidates–that the department is, in fact, good at what it does (or it could be GREAT if that additional faculty line became available).  It could be used by a union in making arguments about the comparable status of tenure-line and contingent faculty.  The possible uses of such information are almost infinite.  It’s incredibly frustrating to hear smart people willingly give up useful information about what goes on in their department!

To keep this post above the level of a rant, I thought I might mention a pilot program that’s going on in our department.  I’m not on the department’s assessment committee, though I am on a university-wide assessment committee.  The process I describe below was not my idea; if I recall correctly, it was presented to us by our university’s ingenious new assessment guru.   (And a quondam Miltonist!!  How awesome is that?)  Obviously I’m speaking only for myself–but you knew that, right?  This is a blog . . . .

Say that your department can identify three or four learning outcomes initially, even in the humanities.  Students should be able to craft an analytic thesis; read a text’s language carefully, using quotations or other forms of textual evidence; make an argument about form; make an argument about the relationship, however vexed, between a text and its various contexts; and maybe some others.

Imagine then crafting a rubric that described–on a 3 or 5 point scale–what it would mean to achieve each outcome in ways that meet, exceed, or fail to meet expectations.  The trick is that the rubric would need to be department-sanctioned.

The process then asks faculty to take 20 seconds, after they’ve grade a particular assignment (perhaps the last major paper in a semester), to also complete the rubric for each paper.  The rubric might not match the assigned grade exactly, because each faculty member might have perfectly good reasons for emphasizing other factors more heavily.  That’s fine.

For the price of seconds per paper, and some computing and administrative costs (which will probably be borne by the assessment office), you actually get some very interesting information.  And what’s helpful about it is that the information comes in a format that’s comparable and relatively neutral.  Assuming your assessment office has a decent stats package, they will be able to aggregate and disaggregate the data according to almost any factor you can imagine.  (”Does student performance on crafting a thesis improve if they take the 200-level comp elective?  By how much?”  “Do students improve their ability to read literarily after they’ve had the intro to the major course?”)  The questions you can put to the data are limited only by your imagination.

Note what this doesn’t require: It doesn’t require yielding any ground on the complexity and subtlety of literary analysis.  It doesn’t mean substituting a paper for a multiple-choice test.  It probably does require some work on a department’s part to achieve inter-rater reliability on the rubric.  (We practiced this at a department meeting a week or two ago . . . let’s just say that right now our reliability is very low.  [Though I’m delighted to say that A and I had quite similar scores, which is good for domestic tranquility!])

This isn’t a perfect system, to be sure, and obviously it’s just a pilot (though I think the assessment guru has used this model elsewhere), but it does suggest that, with some creative thinking, it ought to be possible to figure out a way to avoid the Scylla of Peter Mac Grawler and the Charybdis of sheer statistical fetishism.  I think it would be nice if people just took our word for it about teaching, or decided that because we publish research for an audience of other scholars that our teaching must be ok, but I don’t think that we live in such a world.  More than this, one of the things that’s frustrating about teaching (as opposed to research, or even blogging) is that so much of it is hidden–from other students (who turn to ratemyprofessor.com in desperation), from our departmental or university-wide colleagues, and from interested outside parties.  Done reasonably, assessment can help give this work the attention it merits.

This probably only funny because I saw it after walking to campus through 11 degree weather on a particularly gusty morning, but I did enjoy this typo:

A screening of this video is what was meant, though it is amusing to contemplate the various kinds of linguistic overdoses that attach themselves to a marriage.