Academia

I’ve alphabetized and tabulated the survey results for words we like and don’t like in conference panel presentation titles. As I’d hoped, people had more than a little fun with the survey (thank you, Mr. Garcia, for risky, frisky, and Lebowski), but there are some interesting minor findings here, as well. (I’ll refer to respondents as “we,” but with such a small sample I’m not in any way suggesting that these findings are generalizable to a broader population of “we.”)

First: our likes are more diverse than our dislikes. The only repeated concept in the “yeah, I’d go see that panel” was punk, either as pseudo-punk or as punk rock. (Apparently, we’ll take punk any way we can get it.)

In terms of what we dislike in conference titles, there were a number of repeats: “post/process/ed” in its various forms (all from one respondent, who apparently really doesn’t like that construction), assessment, community, diversity, expressive or expressivism, literature or literary, praxis, Derridean parentheticalized prefixes, and — of course — Mark Bauerlein. I get the sense that some of these dislikes are tropes — as with the Derridean parentheticalized prefixes, modes of disciplinary talk that have reached the point of tiresome over-use — but with others, I’m not sure if it’s a sense that the terms or topics have been over-discussed to the point of redundancy, or if it’s a sense that use of the term in presentations has been consistently and problematically imprecise (as in the point Joe Harris uses Raymond Williams to make about the term “community” in what we call “discourse communities”).

Note, also, that the one term occurring in both columns is “queer.”

Results follow.

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In the interest of the advancement of knowledge and the quest for unalloyed truth, disciplinary status, and shameless self-aggrandizement, I’ve put together a research instrument that I have no doubt will lay to rest for all time the ugly questions surrounding improper areas of focus at academic conferences. To that end, reader, I’d be grateful for your input, if you’d be so generous with your time as to

I’ll post the results here.

Or maybe propose to present them at an academic conference, in the interest of confirming certain folks’ ongoing fears.

It’s only September, but I’m already deep into my second year as an assistant professor, and I’m feeling a bit at sea. My first year, I was protected; given the space to adapt to my institution and its habits and quirks, its possibilities and limits. Here, now, since mid-August, I’ve been plunged into committee and mentoring and extracurricular and planning work that sucks time away from my scholarship in far more concrete and visible and obligatory ways than the unfamiliarity of my first year did. Certainly, September is a particularly bad month, what with various mandatory government three-hour training session foolishnesses upon which I won’t elaborate, save to say that the alcohol and drug abuse prevention briefing began with a lecture on the dangers of absinthe, and went downhill from there. Would that I had the leisure for such dangers: I’m finding that I feel best when my weeks at the office run from about 7:15 to 5:30, and we’ll see how much that schedule lets me get done.

It looks to be a busy year, and while the book is gestating, I don’t think I’m going to be able to get an actual good solid start on it — for various professional reasons — until spring 2009.

So of my good rhet/comp readers, I’ll ask: is that too late, for somebody hired as an assistant prof in 2006?

Writing teachers often make use of a system whereby students write comments on one another’s papers, with those comments intended to help the student revise her writing. It’s a labor-saving pedagogical device, but when implemented carefully, it works well: students get a sense of how audiences read and respond to their writing, and revise accordingly. There is a name for this system.

Scholars who wish to share their insights make use of a system whereby their peers read and evaluate those insights and deem them worthy or unworthy for publication, and offer comments on those insights, with those comments intended to help the scholar revise her writing. It’s a labor-intensive academic practice, but our hope is that it keeps us honest: scholars revise, and only the best scholarship gets published.

While these two systems are similar, they are separate, and serve separate functions. However, there is a frequent tendency in our pedagogical and theoretical discourse to refer to both as “peer review.” I’d like to counter that tendency, because it too easily and conveniently elides the status differential between student writing and scholarly writing, and that status differential is something I’d like to see called into question. Mariolina Salvatori and Amy Robillard, among others, have already done substantial and significant work to make visible and problematize that status differential.

I think we need a more precise vocabulary that extends the work of Salvatori and Robillard and foregrounds the differences between those two systems in order to call into question that status differential. For that reason, I’d like to call our classroom work, wherein students read and respond to one anothers’ papers, “peer response,” and I’d like to call our scholarly work, wherein we review one anothers’ work for publication, “peer review.”

And I’d like to be a part of a conversation that discusses how we might productively blur those two terms.

Like Jeff, I recently received an invitation to my high school’s twenty-year reunion. I’m ambivalent about it: somewhat curious, but also not eager to spend a lot of money for a lame DJ and chatting with folks I mostly don’t remember. With my military service, I’ve taken a career path somewhat different from Jeff’s, but it’s interesting to think about what happens in twenty years.

Twenty years ago, I was a high school senior at Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Maryland, and then a college freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Twenty years ago, my first-year writing course was in Linda Flower’s composition curriculum, and my freshman psychology course — “Cognitive Processes: Theory and Practice” — was taught by John Hayes.

Twenty years ago, the American military was explicitly protecting economic interests in the Persian Gulf by escorting oil tankers when an Iraqi jet fired two missiles at the USS Stark and killed thirty-seven sailors.

Twenty years ago, Ira Shor described in Critical Pedagogy and Everyday Life the faceless, agentless agency of “a wildly growing and uncontrollable machine-economy [that] rushed across the land transforming everything it touched” and “created and peopled an educational frontier” in the form of the community college system (2); a system that some critics have suggested reinforces hierarchical structures of economic inequality.

Twenty years ago, Michael Joyce wrote the seminal hypertext fiction afternoon: a story. Bootleg copies circulated around the Carnegie Mellon dorms on 3.5-inch diskettes, where I encountered it. I thought it was something like a poetic interactive fiction, like Zork or Planetfall or Suspended. I also thought it was one of the most beautiful, puzzling, intricate, and compelling things I’d ever read in the way it went back and forth and traveled multiple times, multiple iterations, through various forking paths and nodes that changed in their meaning and nuance when I returned to them.

Twenty years ago, Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize in economics for his careful examinations of the ways technological development influences economic growth.

Twenty years ago, I was taking a freshman philosophy course from a professor I don’t remember. It was called “Philosophic Methods and Morals,” and it included a significant focus on logic and Turing Machines We analyzed and created various rule-bound (hypothetical) Turing Machines with read/write heads that moved back and forth on various tapes (paths?) depending on the symbol in each cell (node?). Working with these abstract computers was challenging, time-consuming, labor-intensive, but oddly fascinating in its crystalline intricacy.

Twenty years ago, C. Paul Olson wrote an essay called “Who Computes?” for the edited collection Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power wherein he pointed out that “the computer as a tool does fundamentally reorganize material relationships and organizations of production and our thoughts about what production is” (183, emphasis in original). Charles Moran points out that composition still has not adequately responded to the economic critique Olson sets forth in the essay, but the way Olson demonstrates that better machines reduce work by replacing labor-intensive processes with capital-intensive processes (184) was a starting point for my dissertation.

Of which one cannot speak, one must thereof be silent.

I don’t know what else I feel I can say. It’s the shocking global numb; the instant inadequacy of words.

On Friday afternoon, I served as chair and respondent for a panel on “The Evolution of the Classical Imagination” at the New York College English Association conference on “Evolution and Revolution” at SUNY New Paltz. Each of the presenters offered a perspective on an Augustan poet — Horace, Ovid, Virgil — and how that poet might help us understand the complexities of contemporary military service.

The panelists were undergraduates presenting at a graduate conference, and they were absolutely amazing: poised, confident, insightful, professional. As several auditors noted, had the presenters not been in Cadet grey, everyone would have assumed they were graduate students.

After the Friday presentations, we went to the keynote presentation by Ed Sanders, founder of The Fugs and biographer of Allen Ginsberg, wherein there was much hectoring of anyone who didn’t subscribe to the ideological certainties of the academic left, and wherein many of the clichés and platitudes of the academic left were cheered and applauded. It made me cringe a little: I know that I’m far more liberal than most of the Cadets in my classes, but in the keynote, Sanders came across almost as a comedic caricature of smug, self-indulgent would-be left radicalism, and the rest of the audience seemed all too happy to agree that every problem in the world — the environment, genocide, consumerism, war, intolerance, corruption, poverty — would be solved if more people just agreed with the left-good, Bush-bad bromides Sanders offered.

It didn’t faze the Cadets, and in fact, they went down after the keynote and waited in line to talk to him and shake his hand. That was a side of Cadet life I hadn’t yet seen, but it was in full evidence throughout the conference: these students are absolutely remarkable in their social facility, and with their forthrightness, curiosity, and directness, they charmed everyone they met.