the for-profit hustle
Music: iamamiwhoami: Kin (2012)
Yesterday the University of Virginia's equivalent to a board of regents issued the first of what I suspect will be a number of statements regarding the abrupt and unforeseen firing of its president, Terry Sullivan. Sullivan was Vice President and Dean of Graduate Studies here at the University of Texas at one time, and roundly recognized by a number of folks I know as one of the most ethical and professional colleagues they have worked with. Because she is so widely liked and respected, I'm assured, she'll be able to leave Virginia and relocate easily if she wishes.
That she is so widely respected and liked is why her ouster is all the more puzzling: why would a university's governing board fire a popular president without warning? Numerous leaders and department chairs have signed a letter to the board requesting transparency. The statement released yesterday underscores Sullivan was in "extended" talks about the future health of the university and that the firing came as a consequence of deep "philosophical" differences.
While the details here are rather murky, I don't think it's very difficult to fill in the blanks. Here's what we do know: like the University of Texas's Board of Regents, the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors is comprised of political appointees, most of whom are not educators but businesspeople. The Rector who many are murmuring is responsible for orchestrating the push is Helen Dragas, a real estate mogul who has differences of opinion with Sullivan. Obviously one of those key differences concerns the relationship between public and private. We see it in just about every notable public university: political appointees, almost always "conservative," see the privatization of the university as inevitable. The problem with this "philosophy," of course, is that it is internally contradictory: on the one hand, those who would force the university to be more "accountable" want to micromanage it, which is counterintuitive; on the other hand, states keep draining the public university budgets and then passing laws that prevent tuition hikes. No doubt Sullivan had to battle the same contradictory philosophy UT's President Powers is battling (and as I blogged earlier, apparently risking his own job).
So, what's happened in Virginia is happening in Texas. And as a colleague observed yesterday, it's happening everywhere: Richard Lariviere was fired by Oregon's Board of Higher Education abruptly, citing philosophical differences too (Lariviere dared to give faculty raises and fight for his university's independence from the state system). I've already blogged about LSU's firing, and then there's the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arizona. In each case we have a fight over the public university as a resource for private industry, in some sense entirely in keeping with the land grant mission of the public university, but also in a sense decidedly not (in the sense that actually educating people is on the decline).
A trusted colleague who keeps better tabs on higher education politics is suggesting the real rationale for Sullivan's firing is her resistance to transform the University of Virginia into another for-profit university. The for-profit movement has only gathered momentum; its business model concerns massive "classes" of folks taking online courses, which obviates the need for bricks and mortar or actual bodies in space. She notes that study after study has shown that to be educationally beneficial and effective, online courses require as much (if not more) resources than an actual, "traditional" classroom experience. This means, at least empirically, the real business model concerns sub-par and inferior instruction in favor of increasing enrollments.
What's really going on with Sullivan's firing, then, is the Final Culture War. Now that primary and secondary education has been gutted and thoroughly politicized, the last frontier is higher education. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a so-called conservative policy think-tank, is frank about their agenda to politicize higher education, and they have been quite effective here in Texas (even getting their inside guy on the UT board as a hired consultant, until he was fired for being, more or less, unprofessional and using bad data to support policy recommendations). What's happening in Louisiana and Oregon and Virginia is part of this larger movement to politicize higher education.
What this means for the university is not good. And we have two viable responses. First and foremost, since "accountability" is the rally-cry for this recent politicization of higher education (by which I mean, neo-conservative-ization), we have to have a hand in assessment metrics. My colleague Rick Cherwitz has been saying this for years, and I do think he's correct: if we don't figure out our own modes of assessing accountability, then they will be imposed from without. By real estate overlords.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, we have a PR problem. Talk to anyone outside of a university community---including the left leaning---and there is a widespread perception that the professoriate are lazy, don't really work, have summers off, and so forth. It's a tiresome and relentless stereotype, but it persists and influences policy. We need to figure out a better way to represent the academic and do the work of the public intellectual.
As a small step, I've been thinking about developing a thirty to forty minute lecture on "the life of the academic," and then giving it randomly to my large lecture classes. In this lecture, I would describe the history of the university and my field, and then how the role of the professor has changed from the formation of the land grant public institution to today. I would detail a typical "day in the life," discussing meetings, the shear amount of letters of recommendation I write---an exhaustive account, really, of all the hidden labor of the academic. It's likely a student has never really been introduced to all of this stuff. While I don't think such a lecture would make a huge difference in the larger, cultural stereotype of the professor, it would at least give hundreds of students a year a better representation.
it's synth-pop friday!
it's body-pop friday!
pressing our vanities (seeking coauthors)
Music: The Auteurs: After Murder Park (1996)
About every other week or so I get an email invitation to publish with an online, "open access" journal. "Dear Dr. Gunn," reads the come-on, "This is a Call for Papers to invite you to submit original articles to . . . Bogus Vanity Quarterly." Random Capitalization is reason Enough to Doubt the legitimacy of such an Outfit. Dubbed by Jeffrey Beall as "predatory publishing," these pretend-not-pretend journals charge anywhere from $400 to $1000 to publish your article (you can even assist them by suggesting whom to review your essay). After getting two of these "invitations" in as many days, I joked on Facebook I cannot wait to send off my essay, "NSFW: Anxiety and Repetition Compulsion in Response to Gilbert Gottfried's Dramatic Interpretation of Fifty Shades of Grey"---or something ridiculous like that. I forget the exact title that I made-up.
Well, lo, a friend who wishes to remain anonymous took it upon himself to start an honest to goodness essay of complete nin-com-poopity. I have added my own taste of hogwash, and now, we present it to you for your co-authorial assistance.
Can you add anything to this prose to get it to the five or seven page mark? Help us. I know you can. Write a paragraph or three in the comments. Make it insane, but then somehow plausible. If your addition is ridiculous enough, we'll add you as a co-author, and then send this off to one of these vanity presses. Also, feel free to rewrite anything to make it more ridiculously plausible. Frankly, the more the merrier: nothing could be more delightful than twenty co-authors! Take that, social scientists!
If accepted for publication, we'll figure out how to pay for it later. A grant? Yes, we need a grant for this. I doubt the National Endowment for the Humanities will go for it, but . . . somewhere and somehow this tomfoolery will be made possible. Here goes:
NSFW: Experiencing Immanentism or Transcendence Upon Hearing Gilbert Gottfried's Rendition of Fifty Shades of Grey in the Postmodern Workplace
Frank Baummett, Sephas Brustkrebs Streut, [insert your pseudonym here]
Immanence has been theorized as a hegemonic totality eliding the possibility of structural transcendence. Not so clear in these efforts to relocate the ideological in the fundamental is the notion of abrogation. Moments of subcultural refusal alternate with moments of the complete abandonment of subject positions contrary to the hermeneutical arc of Dionysian Scapegoating (DS), when this occurs (presumably DS only afflicted lesser developed countries, however, the epidemic of bullying, especially as is discernable in U.S. preschool settings, has belied what was once an obvious truth with rampant exceptionalism). Leftist intellectuals have been as much at fault as any in their failure to capture the subaltern nature of this interrogation, to elide the penultimate mirror stage which must inevitably, if ineluctably, give rise to this refusal ("accept the cut!" intones the Lawgiving Paternalist). Nor can Jung help us out here, as the mandala is, under the discursive formation of this problematic, only a fictive reality. How, then, to recapture that moment of utter intransigence that is necessary for real interventionist politics? Whither now, within?
We argue that moments illustrating this possibility may be found in what seem like the most unlikely texts, and one is the neofeminist, indeed some have argued Fourth Wave work, Fifty Shades of Grey (hereafter Fifty Shades). By turning in upon itself in a voice of subrogation, difference gives way to differance, and the perceptive reader will note the deliberate lack of diacritical marks in our formulation of the contrast. Gilbert Gottfried’s commentary upon this text illuminates exactly the sort of rhetorical turn toward which we genuflect, away from the all-too-easy modernism of DS. And what better context to mark this turn than the postmodern workplace?
Sliding under the surface of postcapitalism, this workplace is both virtual and sententious. Aside from its pretense to high-mindedness and the metaphysics of presence, it is primarily identified by three material attributes: (1) a ubiquity of workers using earbuds; (2) a surfeit of cubed workspaces, often separated by push-pin dividers or mauve-colored walls; and (3) a predominance of communicative or emotional laboring, as opposed to manual laboring or "real work." In this context, how can a sado-masochistic "novel" like Fifty Shades be read in different nodes of the rhizomatic structure of this workplace? That is what our work attempts to get at.
While mostly self-reportative in skein, the narratives displayed here speak most clearly in their erasure under a sign of abstinence. Hangings of the virtual abound in rituals of self-denial and con-(s)traint. The panopticon of the workplace enfolds in upon its ulterior plane of emergence, truncating that internal eye which, like Helmglot’s apocryphal porpoise, seeks only to rise and rise again. These narratives which are yet not narratives but archives, reference their own inversion as specious artifacts, even if true. How can that which is Gottfried’s work and yet not Gottfried’s work be entrained with the refusal of the phallus? In asking that, we likewise refuse the contexts and restraints of any discipline of the academy, but instead propose a theatre of ritual in which the proscenium can be nothing less than a realization of the sexual subjectivity of the authors, if not the forceful penetration of the readerly reader or lookerly spectator (the eyes are not windows to the soul, but britches of the soul and necessarily subject to an intellectual spanking, or exploratory but possibly metaphorical thumb). Given this presumption, we turn in our widening gyre to the only theoretical stance from which one can begin: Gilles Deleuze's.
Deleuzian Worlding: From Be-Bop to Shock Jock
[We need help making up stuff for this section; someone with enough background in Deleuze to know how to make fun of Deleuzians. Three paragraphs or so.]
Arousing Self-Reporters: Workplace Filthy and the Liberation of the Dongle
One person's transcendence is another person's immanence, which can depend on anything from their perceived locus of control to conceptual--or even actual--constipation. Ascending up the metaphorical spiral staircase we find up there a paradoxical attic-catacomb of cubicles, each arranged like so many teeth cavities in the neoliberal mouths of the postcapitalist multitude; in each socket we find a festering employee whiling away the hours by listening to the radio or perhaps even an audiobook (a recording of an actor reading a novel or nonfiction book of some sort, often abridged but sometimes the whole thing). Someone in need of narcotization because of the pain of redundancy and the repetition compulsion of nothingness. E.L. James's racy, best-selling novel of sado-masochistic frenzy, Fifty Shades, may be the novel an employee is listening to for this effect, particularly if he or she is not listening to the radio and instead an audio book. Audio books are not free, like the radio, however they are now relatively inexpensive compared to Internet pornography, which is expensive and which, in many parts of the world. employers do not allow employees to enjoy workplace (one might respond to Foucault: "To Hell with the Greeks; we are a lot more Victorian than we think."). So, chances are that most workers working with earbuds in their ears are listening to Fifty Shades because to date James' book has sold 10 million copies, and at the time of this essay's writing, it was the number one New York Times bestseller.
Readers unfamiliar with Fifty Shades may wish to skip this paragraph, as our purpose here is to describe the line of plot flighted by the escapist and sexy novel. It concerns [insert ridiculous plot summary here.]
Perhaps more importantly of noteworthy is that Audible.com has produced a stunning audiobook of Fifty Shades narrated by the (in)famous character actor Gilbert Gottfried. Mostly known for his roles in films such as ____________ and ______________, Gottfried has established himself as having one of the most distinctive and expressive voices in the industry. In a timbre that rivals the baritone of _________, Gottfried can coax tears and---apparently---much more than that from the body of the ears lubricated by his golden pipes. It was fitting and certainly proper, then, that Audible hired Gottfried to render his interpretation of James's obviously sensuous prose. His voice is roundly recognized as the objective, standard bearer of dramatic purpose and effectivity.
For our experiment, we asked five people who self-identified themselves as listeners to Gottfried's rendition of Fifty Shades to provide self-reports of their experiences. While these reports were at variance, a content analysis of key terms revealed three dimensions common to their listening experiences, which we in turn thematize as: (1) enjoyable revulsion; (2) dexterity envy; and (3) vicarious ecstasy.
Here are some reactions organized around each theme.
ENJOYABLE REVULSION
[Insert stuff here]
DEXTERITY ENVY
[Insert stuff here]
VICARIOUS ECSTASY
[Insert stuff here]
Concluding Remarks: Immanitism FTW! Of the Redemptive Value of Workplace Ecstasy/Revulsion
[Make-up conclusion]
_________________________________
Ok, that's all we have so far. I had to stop writing this because I'm on an airplane and kept cracking up laughing. The lady trying to sleep on my left does not find whatever I'm laughing at funny. Hopefully you will, and won't mind contributing to this beautiful monstrosity. Hot mess labors. Yes.
it's synth-pop friday!
it's synth-pop friday!
to facebook or not to facebook?
Music: The Dandy Warhols: Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (2000)
A few days ago I "unfriended" approximately three hundred people from my "old" Facebook account and invited them to join my newer profile. This process took a long time, but I feel relieved having made the "transition." On the new profile page, I'm much more circumspect about what I "post" as a link, status-update, and so on, and I have set the privacy settings to give me the most control (as much as possible) over who can "tag" me in photographs, posts, and so on.
Before I did this, I posted as a status a long rationale for why I am making the change. I'll share that here, and then add some comments too.
Dear Facebook Friends,
Over the next few of weeks I will be "un-friending" or "de-friending" most of you on this account, and inviting you to "add" me on a different Facebook account under my actual name (search "Joshua Gunn"). This note endeavors to explain why.
A couple of years ago John Sloop asked me to think with him about the character of social networking using Foucaulidan software. John wrote most of the code. The parameters he set inspired me to think hard about Facebook's function, and we were able to think-through this new social reality we occupy here together. The result was a couple of publications in which we advance a number of critical observations about the increasingly +compulsory+ character of Facebook and how that creates some interesting new "power" dynamics. The general argument cannot be summarized here, but the gist is that social networking has imploded what we once knew as "public" and "private," and potentially gives access to private parts (broadly construed) we'd rather not be "public," or at least should not be "equal access" (You can download a PDF of one of pieces here.
When I joined Facebook, my friends consisted of folks I had dinner with, shared embarrassing personal moments with---not to mention victims of my poorly memorized dirty jokes. Facebook used to be the new "MySpace," which was the new "Friendster," which was the new "Livebook" and "Nervenet." Those older networking sites were very different---and had a stronger illusion of privacy simply because they were much, much smaller in scope. When I think about the world I inhabited in 1999 with my Livebook "friends" and compare it to what Facebook is today, it's truly jaw-dropping---in size, in scope, in what this so-called social networking thing has become. And very few of us can +really+ claim to make sense of it.
As Facebook has evolved, it has horizontalized, fanning across a mediascape that is no longer possible to envision. Much more narrowly: I've picked up friends who were former classmates from 15 (sometimes 20) years ago. Family members. Friends with whom I have never dined with---even the parents of friends. I have almost five hundred "friends." Who are you all? Well, if I go down the list one-by-one I know you. But this exercize stretches the concept of "friend" pretty broadly, from acquaintance to buddy to "oh, I liked that guy in the elevator." Declining a friend request is fraught with anxiety now; and having a request denied or ignored can make a person feel bad. Facebook is compulsory in ways we're only starting to understand, and the consequences in the larger socio-cultural-economic matrix are no less murky.
It seems like within a wink (ok, a four years-long wink) the social landscape has changed, revolutionized, morphed. Like, whoa!
But here's the thing: Facebook has altered its interface so much that the "privacy settings" and so forth are so complicated I cannot figure them out. It used to be I could post a status and select "groups" of folks who could see it, but then the network of friend's friends and so forth could see it, and then I'd click a subdirectory to say "no" to that, and so on. It just got so complex I gave up. As a consequence I've offended some of you. I've inadvertently insulted others whom I don't really know. And gosh knows one of my buddy's parents has seen me "tagged" in a photo posted by someone else, in which I'm suckling milk from a ceremonial goat hoisted above the heads . . . oh, wait a minute. I think they deleted that photograph. Nevermind.
Anyhoo---my point is that I'm giving up on the complexity of privacy settings. I've given up on posting and then deleting "heat of the moment" status updates. And I'm caused to think that that this account is so +old+ that it bears the traces of a history I'd rather keep among those who were party to that history. It bears the history of a very dated way of thinking about social networking that is no longer true of today.
Because Facebook has transformed from a---however illusory---interface of private, friendly interaction to one of public personae and self-publicity, I am slowly shifting folks over to my newer "Joshua Gunn" account. It'll take some time. Weeks, if not months.
I learned some years ago that shutting down this account suddenly, or "de-friending" folks without explanation, is upsetting to many. Some of you are thinking this all sounds like self-important blather. I'd agree with you. But there are others who will be offended by discovering I "de-friended" them, and I know that for a fact. Hence this long-winded note.
For those who take the social network more seriously, understand I NOW believe that one's posts on Facebook can have serious, material consequences. It's thick with power, discipline, and surveillance. For example, it is commonplace for potential employers to survey one's Facebook profile for hiring decisions. There are countless stories of folks getting fired for status updates (and incriminating photos). The list of implications infused with power is a long one, so I won't belabor the point except to say: if you and I have a relation of power---if you're my former student, for example, or if you're my employer or represent my employer---then THIS account is most likely not the best place for us to interact.
Facebook used to be akin to my home office and pub; it is now the work office and reception hall. The "King Rhombosis" account reflects the former mentality and not the new reality---most especially with the title. It used to be the case one rarely if ever used one's actual name in online networking interfaces! "King Rhombosis" reflects that older reality (oh, how many times I have had to explain why I don't use my real name on this account . . . "it's old skool computer geek" never seems to explain it quickly anymore).
So, I'm trying to make the transition; I'm trying to accept the change and comport my online interactions similarly.
One might respond: "But Josh, do you have something to hide?"
"Yes," I reply. "Yes I do. That's why I wear clothes."
If you're already friends with me on my "Joshua Gunn" account, you'll notice little change. If you're not, you may save me some time by "adding" me there.
A suspect more than a few hundred of you will not be reading this note, which I reckon only underscores my reasoning.
Anyhoo, them's my quick-and-dirty answers for "why'd you de-friend me, bro?"
See you on the other side/site.
Although I did not want to, I even defriended good friends who are colleagues and students. The rationale here is that in addition to friendship, I have a working relationship with them too---there are multiple roles we each play. And insofar as some of those roles concern institutional power (e.g., I sit on his or her Ph.D. committee), it seems to me that it's a good rule that keeping it more-or-less professional online saves face all around. I may "throw down" and party with students, for example, but that doesn't need to be documented to a friend list that spans from acquaintances to my boss.
In response to this move, a friend messaged me and asked what I thought about Facebook snooping by potential employers for a graduate student going on the job market. I responded that it is definitely something to think about. At the very least, I suggested a thorough scrubbing of what's on the Facebook page, or perhaps (as I have) a second account. She thought that would be too much work to maintain. It is, I agree, work.
Two years ago I probably would not have given the same advice. But since that time I've observed a number of things. A local acquaintance got fired from teaching because she had some racy photos of herself on Facebook. A recent story on NPR was broadcast last week about employers actively vetting the Facebook pages of potential hires, and there have been a few instances of employers asking for an applicant's password. I've overheard colleagues discussing the status updates of students in meetings at the office. I'm sure you could supply your own stories about the increasingly permeable boundaries between what is presumed to be "private" and what is ostensibly "public."
Think about it this way, from a more personal angle: you meet a person that strikes your romantic fancy. Do you see if they have a Facebook page? If they do, do you try to look at their posted photographs and status messages? I bet you do. It's very tempting. And if so, how different is that from an employer wanting to know more about whom she is about to hire?
So, if you're a grad on the job market, yes, censor yourself. You may think you have nothing to hide, however, even that attitude can raise some eyebrows. The CIA would probably not want to hire you, for instance.
In short: be careful.
textbook sneak peek: presentation aids
Music: Beach House: Devotion (2008). Writing energies have been focused to roving in other pastures, both academic. One of them is writing about presentation aids in the public speaking situation. Here's a small snippet of what I've been working on the past week . . . but you don't get much. Tease? Yes.
Sensation Station: Aiding the Eyes and Ears
In keeping with the norms of radio broadcasts, many early television shows in the United States featured the sound of live audiences reacting to the actors on a stage or in a studio. Live audiences, however, were unpredictable and often laughed inconsistently at a joke or gag—or, worse, not at all. In the 1950s, CBS sound engineer Charles "Charley" Douglas decided to remedy the problem with the invention of the "Laff Box," a machine that housed looped recordings (audio tapes) of audiences laughing. During a television filming, if the audience did not laugh at the right moment Douglas would augment or "sweeten" the show by punching keys on his "Laff Box," much like one would an organ (which happened to look like a large, mutated typewriter). By the 1960s, Douglas had helped to transform television comedies almost completely with his "canned laughter," enhancing the television experience for audiences watching from their living rooms to this day.
For those who can hear, the interesting thing about canned laughter is that most of us don't notice it. Once you are used to hearing it, canned laughter on a television show is relatively unobtrusive, and yet, the laughs add information to what you're watching. In the public speaking situation, "presentation aids" are designed to work similarly. Typically, a speaker uses presentational aids to help "sweeten" the experience of audiences during a speech, but hopefully in a manner that is not too conspicuous or detracts from the speaker and her speech. By showing your audience objects, images, texts, and graphs, as well as playing sounds or music, you can make your speech lively and help to encourage understanding and comprehension. In this chapter we discuss all the elements you can draw upon to aid and enhance a speech, including the now ubiquitous use of "slideware" or presentation software programs, such as Apple's Keynote, Microsoft's PowerPoint, and that Internet-based Prezi. Along the way, we'll also discuss the general rules preparing and presenting visual and audio aids, taking care to note how aids can "go wrong." The key to using presentational aids is to remember that they are aids and are used to assist your speaking.
it's synth-pop friday!
politics at the public university
Music: Quicksilver Messenger Service: Castles in the Sand (1970)
In my previous post I complimented UT President Bill Powers for publically disagreeing with the Board of Regents, most recently in regard to their not honoring his request for a tuition hike. Although the details of the plan that Powers (and various committees) proposed are important, his expression of disappointment was symbolically encouraging because of its advocacy for the welfare of the university and, by extension, its staff and faculty. The rumor broke last night that this advocacy may have put Powers' job in jeopardy.
According to that ubiquitous "undisclosed source," the so-called "dean of political reporting" in Texas, Paul Burka, has suggested that the Regents have approached the Chancellor to fire Powers. There's very little in this story to go on and nothing has been substantiated, but the story is being discussed and reported as truth, of course. The reason is that the fantasy is quite plausible---the reason is that the fantasy is true.
This is to say, the idea that a governor would indirectly fire the president of a university for disagreeing in public has been made real, and repeatedly, and remains an viable "option" for political movers-and-shakers in higher education circles. First, just last month the LSU Board of Supervisors (the equivalent of our Board of Regents) fired system president John Lombardi for vocally disagreeing with the governor's vision for the university system (basically, to free the flagship campus from the entire system as an autonomous enterprise). Second, closer to home, UT President Homer Rainey was fired by the regents in the 1940s for opposing the Regents demands to fire suspected "communists" in the Department of Economics. Since that time, the University of Texas has had a fairly colorful history of uneasy tensions between the administration and the Regents (and by extension, the governor's office).
Politically, the character of power illustrated by firing a university system head or president is the familiar "rank and file" or "chain of command," which of course is inherently at odds with the vision of education as a domain of "academic freedom." As least some of the reason why the gesture troubles folks is that it represents a challenge to the assumed autonomy of the academic enterprise---an autonomy that has never really existed but which we nevertheless hold up as a guiding ideal.
For me, what is most troubling are the comments and observations from my colleagues who have been here at the university for decades. Owing to the fact that the Regents are appointed by the governor, the University of Texas has been a political football for most of its history. Even so, one trusted colleague observes the firing of Powers is the least of our worries. What should trouble us, she says, are the looming appointments to the board: two seats are up soon, and those seats are currently occupied by "moderates." Because Perry has been governor for such a long time, the board is already stacked with his less-than-moderate political compatriots. What if Perry appoints two more neo-conservative, anti-intellectuals? (Many would say the question is not "what?" but "how soon?"---technically, the governor can appoint new regents at the beginning of the new year before the customary term of service is up on the academic calendar). Whether or not the rumors about ousting Powers are true, a more devastating reality is possible: an ideologically "pure" regency, a complete lock on less cognitively complex, bottom-line modes of management.
My colleague says that in her many decades at the university, owing to the nationalization of the tuition issue as well as Perry's political stature, she has "never seen it so bad." I've only been in higher education for sixteen years, and certainly as a graduate student I was shielded from the political realities of the public university, but even so I have also never experienced an educational system more politicized than that I do today. It's not that I believe in a non-political educational system; all organizations concern resources, the use of force, and thus "power." But it is often astonishing to me---despite my cynicism---that the politics is so naked, that the "do as I say, or else" has so much force, beyond the tempering of reasoned argument and consideration and perspective-taking/switching. Owing to a decidedly concerted effort to make education---previously an idealized, "safe space" of actualization and self-empowerment---the latest frontier of the Culture War, one wonders if there's any space left for free thought in the national, political imaginary. Your bedroom is regulated, whom you are allowed to love is regulated, and now we're engaging the possibilities and punishments of thought control.
Or as my teacher and friend Ron Greene would say: "Speech is Money."
Double-plus-good?
on post-tenure review
Music: Ramona Falls: Prophet (2012)
As I tweeted some weeks ago, the University of Texas Board of Regents approved stricter guidelines and rule on on post-tenure review at my employer. I noted then that these rules only formalized what has already been in practice for some years (presumably before I arrived here): tenured professors should be reviewed annually regarding their performance. Although the process differs from one college to the next, all professors undergo annual review in their departments. We file reports every year on our service, teaching, and publications. These reports form the basis of annual evaluations, written by a department committee, which then go into one's file. What the Regents passed makes sure this process is mandatory for tenured professors (it is already mandatory for tenure-track junior faculty), however, it has always been so in my college.
What is different about the new rules is that they appear to wrest power from departments, putting it in the hands of colleges (and under the purview of the university administration). The rules do this by adopting a universal ranking system (from "exceeds expectations" to "unsatisfactory"). I believe my department also already used such a ranking system. Nevertheless, the new policy only raised a few eyebrows because it would appear to threaten department self-governance, and I've overheard many a long-time employee doubt that many administrators would actually change current practice. The university has been governed so long "from a distance," with departments having relative autonomy. Just from what I know as a seven-year employee, I don't see the new rules changing much of how we govern ourselves (the system in place is already a tight ship, is working, and there doesn't seem any incentive to change that except by making it "formal").
The only other difference, and I suppose this is really the "big deal" from an outside perspective, is that the rules do make it easier to fire someone more quickly. As I understand it, if you were routinely performing unsatisfactorily as a faculty member, it would take---more or less---about six years to show you the door. Now it only takes two years of "unsatisfactory" ratings to start the "evaluation" process that can lead to dismissal. But there is no specified time table for the "evaluation" process. I am not an optimist about trends in higher education, don't get me wrong, but I am not personally threatened---and I do not think my colleagues are threatened---by the formalization of the process. In an even-handed column on Inside Higher Ed, Kaustuv Basu interviews a number of thoughtful commentators here at the university who do not seem especially alarmed by the rules per se which, again, seem only to make formal what has been occurring here for quite some time. The "big deal" is from the outside; one professor remarked that the move will be "read" as an attack on tenure freedoms and may hamper retention and recruitment. It's the perception that things have changed, or are changing, that is key here.
If there's anything to worry about as someone who is here in a flagship school that just announced a formalized policy on post-tenure review, it's the outside. Although I do think my university administration does things that are not nice to faculty and employees (and while I find the "star system" model of reward odious and counterproductive for community---most of the people I know would give up a little raise to make sure everyone gets something, as opposed to rewarding a few at the expense of many), my experience is that the people running the various processes of evaluation mean well and intend good. That danger is not---are not---us, but rather, politicians.
The gesture of formalizing these post-tenure rules---despite the fact we already observed them---is political. This political dimension is what is dangerous and troublesome, and it is also at the level of the political that people are really arguing over the policy. What does it mean to announce to the "outside" that you are adopting "stricter" policies on reviewing faculty, if those policies are not, in the final analysis, all that more strict? What it means is that the regents wanted to respond to those "critics" in the wider community who believe the professoriate is lazy, is not accountable, and so on. In this respect the announcement is of a piece with the controversy over teacher evaluations and "net worth" (students taught versus salary), the house bill that required all course syllabae be posted to the Internet (which we already did), and so forth. The alarmed reactions are not to actual changes that are occurring, but to the framing of public relations.
The danger, then, is the possibility that the university comes to resemble its PR, a slow drift toward incremental change over time. I am uncertain if the risks taken here---to announce radical change to deflate political pressure---is the best rhetorical strategy. Moreover, as someone in the IHE piece points out, the symbolism of playing visibility politics with policy can affect other institutions with a less willful (or more disempowered) faculty. A flagship university is a symbolic machine at its PR does have rhetorical effects that affect material changes at peer and aspiring institutions.
With these worries in mind, I have been pleased with our president's often critical, public responses to the political subtext of the regent's decisions (for example, the most recent one). I suppose he cannot be more forceful and must strike a balance. Still, a careful reading of his recent addresses reveals someone with rhetorical skill is helping him respond to the cultural battles that are besieging the university. I think if he was not critical and did not "strike" back at all, then I would be more worried.
it's syth-dustrial friday!----warning, NSFW or happy, go lucky conscience
bullied
Music: Sennen: Lost Harmony (2012)
The freckled-faced new kid in eighth grade had tussled hair that seemed like a hospitable bed for lice. I didn't wear hand-me downs like he appeared to wear, but only because I was an "only child," I guess, and we didn't have a Goodwill. Yesterday's Walmart---a chain called Richway---had the cheaper generic brands anyway ("why advertise for a clothing company? Be an individual," my dad used to say to justify my wearing the social markers of "uncool"). Two years prior, when I was in sixth grade, I convinced my mom to buy me some red, Converse high-tops. The fad came and went, and for a few months I felt like I "fit in," that going to Middle School was akin to hitting the reset button on the Nintendo, that I could "blend" and be "cool." By seventh grade my fear was back to normal (a kid named Dustin started bullying me), and by eighth grade I was starting to find my people (skaters) and adopting my own style.
The gradual embrace of my difference in eighth grade entailed a certain risk; although there would be no question about who I was---it's not like I could blend in anyway---my conspicuousness marked me as a target for new social tests. The new boy, the freckled one, probably didn't want to beat me up. But he knew he had to go through with it when the teachers mysteriously disappeared, somehow, on the long march from the field back to the school building.
"Kick that faggots ass! Do you want to be a pussy like him?" rang out from the cowards who didn't want to do it themselves. "Fuck that faggot up!" was a familiar, commanding chant from the bullies who never really ever got physical and the fat kid who, surprisingly, would when provoked. Like the new kid. I can still hear their high-pitched boy voices, and girls screaming, pretending to be frightened by the spectacle of the new kid trying to bash my head into a large, barely unearthed rock near the ball field. I remember seeing the rock approaching my face, the rush of adrenaline that helped me move my head to an impact on the grass. And I remember losing badly, or so it seemed. The "fight" (or better, "attack") was broken up by a teacher I didn't know who came out to investigate. I remember the initial, accusatory tone of the assistant principal (I had caused a ruckus just a year prior by circulating a petition by the "Student Liberation Army" to allow chewing gum in school). I remember the next day, too, when the kid who assaulted me got in trouble and I was "absolved" of the initial charge of provocation; I had a few bruises, but the freckle-faced kid looked like a wreck the next day, with big black eyes. The eighth grade consensus was that I "lost the fight," but the proof of flesh suggested otherwise. Either that, or the kid got beat up by his dad when he got home.
This was not the last time I was "in a fight." I had only once started one: in seventh grade, with a best friend, and we figured out mid-tussle it was a bad idea. I had never provoked a fight prior or since. Apparently I have erased from my memory the numerous times I arrived home roughed- or beaten up. I know I was pulled out of preschool because a girl had it out for me; my mother says she bit me every day and drew blood and, when posed with the choice to stay with my grandmother at the age of five or so, I chose grandmother (and a years-long, bordom-dripping tutoring in soap operas, General Hospital and Days of Our Lives especially.) My father said he once paid a visit to the home of a child who routinely beat me up on the bus (by his account, my father showed up with a firearm and threatened the kid's dad). I dimly remember this, and was glad to know my dad didn't tell me his "solution" at the time because, you know, the "lesson" is not a good one. And I definitely remember getting picked on in church---a lot---and the "Sunday school teacher" turning a blind eye.
I do remember that my childhood---my existence all the way through high school---was synonymous with bullying, even if I have repressed all of the instances. I got out of Georgia and away from my "home" for a reason, and its crown is "trauma." I don't want to overly dramatize my experience, but I do see in retrospect how formative being picked-on and beaten up has been for me; it's in my teaching, it's in my scholarship, it's in the food I like to give away to friends.
The eighth grade attack was the last time I remember having to fight alone, the last time I remember feeling hopeless or like no one was looking out for me. In high school I found my friends, my "group," my clique: alternative kids and mods and goths and skaters and the one queer kid a grade ahead. The 1980 film My Bodyguard also inspired, I suspect, my befriending of a couple of guys who scared the shit out of most people (in all grades); one of them is still a friend to this day. Even though I figured out ways to surround myself with the comfort and, sometimes protection, of friendship, the bullying never stopped. At 39 years of age, I still experience it. Rarely. But I do smell it occasionally.
At home, I am still a "faggot," that weird kid who got out and did ok, but who is still "not of us." At my ten year high school anniversary in 2002, I was to give a speech because I was class president of my graduating class. My speech was about how we had now become adults and have the advantage of seeing beyond the group divisions that once structured our teenage world. I said the reunion was the time for us to take advantage of adulthood and to actually take the time to talk to and meet others from our class whom we were too afraid, or simply not allowed, to talk to. I was booed to silence and decided not to finish my speech. The hired DJ had to interrupt the booing, like a parent, telling these 20-somethings to "show some respect" (that is, to "behave"). This summer is our twentieth reunion and a few folks have asked me to come. I pleaded Bartleby, the Scrivener.
In college, I discovered that I really "fit-in" for the first time in my young life. I suspect this is one of the reasons I've never really left. Today I'm no longer called a "faggot" or a "pussy" (after all, an overwhelming number of us identify as queer; we "have the hegemony," as it were). Now the terms usually---though rarely---used are "weird" or "eccentric" or (I think with some affection) "crazy." But there's bullying here too, and when it goes down I can always sense it, hearing an echo of those kids nudging on freckle-face to bash heads open on rocks.
In higher education, bullying sometimes happens in scholarship---usually at the keyboard of a junior scholar---when s/he attempts to "take 'em down" in scathing barbs and accusations of "misreading." I don't mean to implicate the critical agon (think Adorno), but rather, the ad hominem. This kind of bullying rarely goes to print, although I can point to some notable exceptions in which I have personally (and I mean to the person) taken a beating.
Other types of bullying seem to take place in that deep space between faculty, staff and "the administration," a sort of Westworld of mass mediated threats in which Reavers---in the form of well-meaning "think tank" do-gooders, often self-described as "conservatives"----attempt to intimidate with threats of publicity ("Can you believe Prof. Jones teaches a class on Elvis? Where's the accountability!"). There's also the bullying and intimidation that can occur in employment negotiations (unions play both offense and defense here).
The point of these memories, where they converge, is the second great disappointment of adulthood. The first great disappointment is that "love is not enough," of course. The second is that adults are simply kids with experience. Some childhood bullies "grow out" of their sadism, learning to deal with the insecurities we all experience in better, non-violent ways (having children of their own seems to help). Some do not. I fantasize these become high school football coaches and policemen in rural areas, although I realize that's a gross generalization based on my limited experience. And, perhaps the worst adult children are those who were bullied and then "grow up" to continue the cycle of abuse, either by inviting routine victimization or becoming bullies themselves (how many mean academics do you know who were beaten up on the playground?).
The second disappointment of adulthood is on painful display in the documentary Bully, which I screened yesterday. The film was well-done, and its message definitely needs to be heard, but I thought the film too frequently pulled its punches. It made me weep and quickly brought back the memories I've shared here. And those memories lead me to think that the brutality the film was attempting to "expose" was mistakenly eclipsed in scenes of mourning and outraged parents. I thought the film missed an opportunity to examine the lives of the bully: why does a bully bully? Isn't this really the source of the problem? Isn't preventing someone from becoming a bully the real issue here, not so much a call for more policing? Schools are already run like prisons, they certainly look like them. And we know what the prison system does to "criminals," right? (Not to mention the execution of the innocent.) I think the film wrongly focuses attention on the failures of "adults" to punish bullies instead of zooming in on the likely locus of the problem: family life, poverty, entitlement, the lack of basic resources and health care, the "feed him a pill for his behavior" approach to acting-out, and so on.
To be sure, our teachers and school administrators are increasingly asked to do more with less, and I have a number of friends who are or were teachers with unbelievable stories of hardship and politics. The rabid politicization of education is not only a cause of problems, but also reflects a deteriorization of familial authority (ask any teacher, and you'll hear stories of abusive, non-involved, irresponsible parents). Why are schools becoming a political battleground? Because we're asking them to parent our children. Let me be very clear here: I have more sympathy for the hardworking, caring teachers and administrators of secondary and primary education than the film allows me to feel. Teachers and school administrators have it bad. Period.
That said, the film does a very good job of showing precisely how not to "deal" with the problem of bullying in the figure of Kim Lockwood, an assistant principal in Sioux City. Lockwood has a number of memorable scenes, two of which inspired me to yell out "you idiot!" in the theatre (one person clapped, in solidarity with me). In one of these scenes, Lockwood pulls aside two boys from the playground; one was picking on the other. Mrs. Lockwood demanded that they shake hands and "get along." After the bully does so and leaves, she takes to chastising (!!!) the bullied boy, who reveals his parents called the police and on the bully and that the bully was told to avoid him. As Lockwood interacts with the boy trying desperately not to cry, clearly feeling accused and without advocate, she says a series of callous and dismissive things to him. It's truly horrible. In another scene the parents of an adorable and sweet kid come to see Lockwood; the filmmakers catch the boy being physically beaten on the school bus and the spectator is led to understand they broke with verite protocol and showed the film to the boy's parents and administrators. Lockwood appears false and the subtext at her failed attempts to soothe the parent's concerns is that "kids will be kids." To prove her sincerity, she shows the parents a photograph of her grandbaby in what comes off as the most ignorant and narcissistic gesture in response to the parents' concerns and pain. I left the theatre wondering if this woman was fired, as apparently numerous others have also wondered.
Kim Lockwood is a human being, and no doubt editing can create impressions that are false. Even so, it's clear the filmmakers believed she was soulless. She's precisely the kind of "authority" I remembered hating growing up.
The implication of this film is that somehow, in our time, bullying is getting worse. I don't think that's true; I suffered the same---sometimes worse---bullying depicted in the film. It is all painfully familiar. The ways in which teachers and administrators help to facilitate bullying have also not changed (I remember a series of Mrs. Lockwood's and also the insinuation my difference provoked this or that "all American kid." You know, "your skirt was too short." I dealt with that by actually wearing a skirt to the club as an underage partier, but that's another story for another time).
I'm saying that there was as much need for training and awareness by teachers and administrators thirty years ago as there is today. I think as a culture we are becoming less tolerant of hatred.
Still, the responses to bullying---suicide, taking weapons to class, and as Columbine brought to our attention so vividly, killing perceived bullies or acting-out fantasies of mass slaughter---the responses to bullying are what appear to be different in our time. Those responses are indeed gestures of desperation, and of course the ubiquity of weapons in the United States doesn't help. Educational authorities do not necessarily need to police better (although the film does document a need here). Educational authorities need the training to stop bullying before it starts, by knowing how to read the structural and cultural causes that inspire violence. The answer is not "you're too sensitive," "you need to suck it up," or "you need to fight back." The answer is asking the right questions: why is sadism an answer for the bully, and why is that answer appealing?
Well, I've written much more than I had intended. I guess this topic hits too close to home. If you're reading this, I suspect it hits somewhere in the vicinity of home for you too. If it doesn't, consider yourself lucky. If it doesn't, at some level, I guess envy you.
I wish for a hippy's conception of the way the world could be for all young people.
on information design
Music: The Dandy Warhols: This Machine (2012)
For the past couple of days I have been reading, with great interest, the controversy surrounding Edward R. Tufte's scathing critique of Microsoft's PowerPoint software program, first advanced in his self-published pamphlet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint in 2003. Since that time Tufte's arguments have been widely supported and critiqued. His critique advances largely around two claims: (1) good visual design demands graphics that correspond in some way to the cognitive tasks requested of audiences; and (2) PowerPoint, Keynote, and other "slideware" programs, reflect a "cognitive style" of the "software house," which means the slide templates reflect marketing logics. Regarding the latter, for example, he observes that "bullet outlines can make us stupid," which implicates a commercialized logic of narcotization---authority conferred by seeming order. Or as we might say as rhetoricians, form running roughshod over content.
Tufte's arguments are fun to read. His pamphlet is a brilliant example of visual aids done correctly (his graphics are often hilarious), and his prose a lesson in memory. He reduces his critique in the introduction thus:
PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thing information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.
There are, of course, a number of objections. The most common I've come across are voiced by folks like Jean-Luc Doumont in essays like, "Slides are Not Evil," which all-but-dismiss Tufte's critique as "dogmatic, judgmental, [and] often sarcastic in tone." I think Jean-Luc misses Tufte's point (which is, you know, to make a memorable point with that pointed prose). Another voiced objection comes from my colleague Dale Cyphert, who has been writing about and studying the "basic course" in my field (public speaking) for a long time: "Even though a liberal education offers far more than technical skill with the culture's communication methods, competent citizens must effectively use the common tools of the discourse community. The fluent use of presentation software is now expected by audiences raised in a media era." Moreover, she adds, college recruiters often voice the expectation that graduates have some familiarity with PowerPoint.
Of course, Tufte's critique and cultural demand converge on commercialism: business interests want future employers to have some facility with slideware. Tufte's critique is hard to deny: the whole point of slide presentations is to reduce complexity for memory. Tufted argues that slideware should be used to assist cognitive tasks and deliver content, which may be good for academics but does, of course, sidestep the fact that many slide presentations by public speakers are sales pitches.
Again, I'm coming around to my colleague Barry Brummet's argument that style has now become inextricably wed to identity, such that form and surface have become "content." Tufte is right about the cognitive style encouraged by PowerPoint. But can we avoid it?
I don't think so. As I write a textbook on public performance (that is, public speaking is no longer just about or even centered upon speaking) I'm caused to contemplate the challenge: how to write about slideware in a way that preserves the discursive function of public address while, nevertheless, also emphasizing the importance of form and style---that is, public rhythm? A discussion---perhaps even an extensive one---is necessary for "visual rhetoric" in a public speaking textbook, and insofar as some studies show as much as 90% of professional speaker use slide software, discussion is unavoidable.
Influenced by Tufte's critique, I'll definitely have some guidelines for creating slides (and more than a number of scare stories, including the famed NASA disaster's relationship to PowerPoint and the more recent condemnation of the software by U.S. military officials). But, there is one thing my schooling in the "information design" literature has taught me: Presi and it's motion-sickness inspiring "zooms" is pretty much the worst thing one can use for assisting in the delivery of information. If you want to use Presi as "art," well then, knock yourself out.
it's synth-pop friday!
parental inspections
Music: The National: The Virginia EP (2008)
In about an hour my parents arrive in Aus-Vegas direct from Hotlanta, courtesy of Southwest Airlines. Surprisingly, this is the first time both parents have visited me together since they came to Washington, DC when I graduated from GWU in 1996. Sixteen years. Since that time my mother visited me once in Minnesota, once in Baton Rouge, and once here in Austin three years ago. The visits are infrequent because of the expense, and perhaps because of small town Georgia values.
Anyhoo, there are certain things you will do when entertaining your parents, like clean baseboards with toothbrushes. I'm excited about their visit because I'll get to show them all the fun things Austin has to do---and it's an excuse to do those fun things. I'll make them a deal: I'll cook, you buy my ticket to the live show!
Which is to say, the blog will go dark until next week.
Meanwhile, a lovely ditty from a band I've always adored:
um, excuse me waiter: ah, there's a fetish in my textbook!
Music: Pet Shop Boys: Format (2012)
I've been writing relentlessly, almost every day, this past semester, alternating between a scholarly book and a textbook. Moving from one to the other is akin to whiplash as the audiences for each kind of writing (one, colleagues; the other, young adults and returning students) demands different kinds of prose. Today I finished the second of two chapters for the public speaking textbook on style.
As I was writing today I thought about how much of my thinking is made explicit in the scholarly book, and how much I have to bury my rationale for writing decisions in the textbook. What appears on a page in the textbook may seem relatively straightforward and (hopefully) clear, but it represents an awful lot of decision-making behind the scenes, scrapped outlines, deleted paragraphs, and so forth. Every sentence is, more or less, the outcome of a tortured process (not that it's not enjoyable, it's simply not easy). Every sentence is also, more or less, co-authored, first with my editor and second with untold numbers of reviewers who demand a closer policing. Writing a textbook is, in some sense, to succumb to the logic of the committee, which means you abort almost as much as you produce. I penned one example of "scrap" today, scrap that I like very much but which, I predict, the editor will want to go Santorum on. It's about shoes.
In my discussion of style and public speaking, I spend some pages discussing "what to wear." For those of you who know me, you'll recognize this topic is truly an instance of parental hypocrisy ("do what I say, not what I do!)." It was a fun stretch to write because, well, it's a very important topic for public speaking but one which, from what I've seen, gets glossed over in one or two paragraphs.
When writing about one's appearance in a public speaking situation, I had to deal with how perverse the art is: I mean, it's an invitation to voyeurism, and consequently, public speaking is a minefield of fetishization. Small things you don't notice about yourself are amplified, and the smallest of fashion choices, such as a broach or unusual cufflinks, can generate all kinds of unintended meanings and uninvited projections. So, how do I broach the topic of projection and fetishism in a way most 18-24 year olds will "get," without offending their, um, their instructors? How do I write about the visual erotics of pubic speaking without, you know, calling it a "visual erotics?"
For all sorts of contractual reasons I cannot share the entirety of this section or chapter on my blog; you'll just have to guess about how I handled it. What I can do is offer periodic teases. Here's a small section of that chapter---a section, I suspect, the press will want to cut. Still, it was fun to write. Here ya go:
. . . And a Good Pair of Shoes: On Fashion
When audiences are preparing to listen to a public speaker they do what most of us do when we meeting someone for the first time: check out their looks. Before you open your mouth to speak, like it or lump it, your audience will be assessing your appearance. Inasmuch as tonework concerns syncing your body and voice with the content of your speech, you should strive to similarly match your grooming and clothing with the context of your speech and the setting in which you are giving it. The general rule for appearance that seasoned public speakers generally follow for speaking engagements may surprise you: avoid having your grooming and clothing choices noticed!
Such a rule seems counterintuitive, but the reason speakers adopt this rule is because . . . [SNIP].
[IMAGE: a foot with a stiletto heel crossed over a foot wearing jeans and a beat-up tennis shoe, like crossbones]
Finally, a word about shoes. Yes, I said shoes. Although there is little research on the topic, many of those who have spoke publically for a long time—and especially those who teach public speaking—will testify that for some reason, some audience members are keenly interested in footwear as an index of personality. Whether or not there is any correlation between what you put on your feet an who you are, the fact remains that at least some audience members, especially those who are concerned with fashion, will make judgments about you as a speaker based on your footwear. Think about it this way: when a person is "flirting" with someone or "checking them out," despite some variations in gender and orientation, he or she will examine the head and face first, then the body (including dress), and then finally, the feet (including shoes). The shoes, consequently, are the "final statement," as it were, of your nonverbal cues to others about who you are and what you are like. If you are wearing tennis shoes, these might communicate you are athletic, or enjoy comfort. If you are wearing a six-inch stiletto heel, what this communicates varies from one community to the next, but in general it would be received as a statement of femininity, perhaps strength (at the very least, a skilled sense of balance).
In general, when observing the rule of avoiding notice the shoes that you wear to a speaking engagement should mirror the footwear of your audience. Observing the rule to dress "one step" up also implies your shoes should be a little nicer, perhaps a little newer, than the audience's feet that you imagine will be arrayed in front of you. Yet it is also with footwear that you can add a little signature of individuality if you wish because the feet are the last thing that gets noticed about appearance. As a speaker, some folks may not notice your feet at all, however, for those who do you can break the general rules just a bit here to express your individuality, giving the fashonista in your audience a subtle, surprise treat of the feet!
__________
Yeah, this is going to get edited out of the textbook. Still, a hat tip to you, Professor Wright.
it's synth-pop friday!
on academic temporality
Music: Happy Particles: Under Sleeping Waves (2011)
Last year I was at a meeting with colleagues to discuss our graduate admissions process. We were---and still are---having trouble balancing the way the graduate program has admitted in the past (admit more than we can fund) and the new realities of graduate education (the primary being, of course, the availability of jobs). I cannot recall the exact context, but when discussing advising loads a senior faculty member with whom I'm fairly close asked, quite earnestly, "you're not full professor yet?"
I remembered the question, but have forgotten just about everything from this meeting. Why? Because, first, the question is somewhat novel. I'll come back to this.
Closely related to the novelty of the question is that it's especially demonstrative of the perception of temporality in the academic environment. To me, it seemed like I was "in rank" as an assistant professor forever, a sense no doubt amplified because I had been functioning (in terms of service) as an associate for some years before I was promoted. I'm also prepared for experiencing an eternity until the next promotion. For me, there's no need to rush; it seems like full professorship is something like knighthood: soon afterward, you get a horse and then are asked to be an administrator of something [insert painting from Edvard Munch here]. Or slay some dragon (we used to call my chair at LSU, the incomparable Andy King, "the Dragonslayer"). Yet my colleague, fully promoted, administering, and carrying more responsibility than I can imagine, perceived things as moving much more rapidly than I did.
When my own self-interest is not involved, however, I'm noticing I have similar feelings about the academic temporality of others. When I arrived here in 2005, I befriended many of the incoming grads and we "grew up" together; the time seemed to have been much longer than the pace of recent years. In many ways, because the slowed experience of arriving in Aus-Vegas, I think my friendships with the folks I met in 2005 are stronger than those who came after. Anyhoo, case in point: when two of my advisees said they were done with coursework last fall, I had a mental jaw drop: what? You're already done? But you just got here!
What I'm describing, of course, is not unique to the academy, but just about any profession---and not reducible to that. As we age, it seems that "time flies." In a NPR story I heard last year---no, wait, it was two years ago---a number of scholars were asked about this common experience. Why does our sense of time seem to speed up? There is not consensus in answering. Some suggest it has to do with the aging brain. Others, the reality of death. The most satisfying explanation, seems to me, is the experience of novelty. When we are thrown into a novel context---or when, rather, we seize on the present in its uniqueness and panopoly of detail---are are more self-aware and conscious the swirl of "now." When experiences are routine or familiar, they feel more rapid or speedy. Routine, then, is the mind-killer: you don't notice routine. You notice the odd.
This feeling of time's speed is related, I think, to the experience of psychic or paranormal phenomena. Those who have studied this stuff refer to probability and the way in which we tend to remember the odd at the expense of the familiar: every time the phone rings a possible person calling may come to mind. I look at my phone, and lo, it is the person I imagined. I remember this match. But the fact remains the phone rings all the time, and the person I imagine calling is not the person calling; I forget the un-match, the missed guess. In retrospect, however, I can lead myself to feel that I have magical abilities. The same, uncanny experience happens in accidents: I can remember, quite vividly, the first car accident that I was in. The car spun around, it seemed like forever, and I literally had time to put on my seatbelt as the driver screamed to me, "Oh my god Josh! What is happening?" The accident took no more than ten seconds to total the car---and we both survived without so much as a scrape. But as we sat on the hood of the car, antifreeze spilling onto the pavement, me holding up a make-shift sign for passers-by that read, "Car for Sale," my friend and I talked about how interminably long the wrecking seemed to take.
All of these explanations rely, of course, on what Heidegger termed "vulgar temporality"---the impression time as a string of nows flowing into some eternal future. And there's lots to critique here, and Heidegger's analysis of an authenticity before death and the past-in-the-future (the experience of guilt, the posture of anticipation, etc.) still has a lot to recommend, at least ethically. Even so, that we nevertheless experience temporality in terms of speed is a reality, and it's an experience that bears upon our sense of life's many enjoyments and disappointments.
In the academy the experience of time is especially noteworthy because of the (seemingly never-ending) series of hoops that mark novel moments: an essay for publication gets published; one finally writes the dissertation; the degree is awarded; one gets a job; one gets a tenure-track job; one is promoted to tenure; and so on. Each of these goalposts mark incredibly rich, detailed moments that we remember. Older colleagues, who have long since past these goal posts, experience time as moving much more quickly and, perhaps, too readily assume a certain future when younger colleagues may feel like passing the next goalpost is taking forever.
I suppose the lesson here---if there is one to be learned---is that the temporality of our undergraduate and graduate students is experienced as moving much slower than it is for the faculty. What assumptions do I make, as an educator, based on my experience of "routine?" As a scholar?
Perhaps we might say that a vita is not simply a resume, but a map of how a given academic feels-out, or feels-up, time?