Oh so radical me

Long story short, I have been picking up the pieces that I dropped during the final push of finishing the revisions on my book MS (which is back to the editors now - woo hoo).

Unfortunately, in picking up those pieces, I dropped still others, like my blog. Sigh.

I am musing while I wait for the printer to spit out copies of two chapters from my book MS (how I love that phrase... like, did I mention I have completed a book MS?) and my CV b/c I putting together a packet to mail to a mentor / adviser who has agreed to write a letter on my behalf as I will be applying for tenure in January. Difficult as it is for me to believe.

I am musing about a recent post by anthropologist / blogger Kate Clancy, "The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar."

I will not dwell on how eerily much the recapped conversations between Clancy and her husband sound like the ones that StraightMan and I regularly have ("About how we can’t compete against people with kids but a stay at home spouse, about how we can’t compete against our peers without kids at all.")

Instead, I will write a bit more hopefully and optimistically about the three points that Clancy makes:

1. Bring your whole self to your job.
2. Have a plan.
3. Be a radical.

Bringing your whole self means not hiding parts of who you are to fit into the role of an academic whose interests fall in line with what (you might think) you ought to do.

Having a plan, Clancy describes, is the difference between the Plan A academic who "says yes to most things because she is directionless and is trying to meet expectations" and the Plan B academic who "uses her personal values and interests to define and express her scholarly worth."

Being a radical means: "Be the scholar you think you should be, bringing your whole self to the table, finding your passion and making it your scholarship, and having a plan that will help you become a leader in your field."

To which I say amen, sister - and add: Where you might want to be, radical scholar, is at a college committed to undergraduate education.

It is true that you will hear StraightMan and I grousing about how little time we have to commit to our research and writing, and how little understanding even some of our co-workers on campus exhibit about what it is, exactly, that professors do: We have summers "off" from teaching, not from the rest of the enterprise of practicing anthropology. Not to mention how resources like time and money (and respect) beget still more resources: Research universities produce research faculty. Too often, StraightMan and I feel that we continue our scholarship despite our positions as college professors.

Yet, in other ways, working as anthropologists at so-called teaching colleges enriches our scholarship. Look, it is true that the research expectations at our respective institutions are not nearly as demanding as they are for our friends and colleagues at research universities. That does not mean we are any less capable of conducting research of the same caliber. (In fact, StraightMan and I both have the privilege of working with colleagues who turn heads in their fields of study.) I am not even convinced that everyone I know at R1 is even that much more productive, when you compare the "input" of time and resources and at R1 versus teaching colleges.

Working at teaching colleges has freed us from the pressure that can drive pre-tenure faculty to undertake research that is calculated to earn them tenure. We pursue the projects that we truly consider meaningful. I believe this is true also of our colleagues. More important, I think our experiences - StraightMan at a small, private liberal arts college and mine at a mid-sized, public comprehensive college - belie the assumption that there is such an important divide between teaching and scholarship - and the rest of our lives.

I teach courses in cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of reproduction. My research has had to do with making and raising babies. I want my students to know that I consider the questions that I ask to be important and necessary not only as a teacher and scholar, but also as a woman and a mother.

If that makes me a radical, then that is OK with me :)

Why texts, not textbooks

From today's Science Times profile of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins:

“I didn’t have a very starry school career,” he says. “I was medium to above average, nothing special.”

He lighted his own intellectual fire at a university peculiarly suited to his temperament. Oxford relies on the tutorial system, in which students burrow into original texts rather than textbooks.

“I loved it; I become easily temporarily obsessed,” Professor Dawkins says. “I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.”

(From that experience he drew a dislike of the current establishment insistence — bordering on mania — for standardized tests and curriculums. He views this as antithetical to true learning.)

Keeping up with the Times

Apparently, when women start to succeed, this is a problem. Or so MIT has found, as the Times reports:

Among other concerns, many female professors say that M.I.T.’s aggressive push to hire more women has created the sense that they are given an unfair advantage. Those who once bemoaned M.I.T.’s lag in recruiting women now worry about what one called “too much effort to recruit women.”

WTF?!

But with the emphasis on eliminating bias, women now say the assumption when they win important prizes or positions is that they did so because of their gender. Professors say that female undergraduates ask them how to answer male classmates who tell them they got into M.I.T. only because of affirmative action.

Cue anger. Cue frustration:

Because it has now become all but the rule that every committee must include a woman, and there are still relatively few women on the faculty, female professors say they are losing up to half of their research time, as well as the outside consultancies that earn their male colleagues a lot of money.

Even the intelligent people at MIT cannot be expected to devise the solution on their own:

Yet now women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one.

As Professor Sive said, “Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast.”

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity.

The problem is not that women have begun to succeed, but that women can only begin to succeed. Still, I find it bold, brave, and even encouraging that an institution like MIT has undertaken this kind of scrutiny of its own policies and practices and their effects. How else can we work for change?

Educational credentialism

While grading exams and papers, I have been taking little "breaks" and reading anthropologist Peter Demerath's Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School.

The book is based on longitudinal ethnographic research - that is, Demerath conducted fieldwork over four years, engaging in participant-observation and interviews in order to follow a focal group of students from 9th to 12th grade - at Wilton Burham High School, a "good" public high school in the Midwest.

Much of the public discourse on schooling today is focused (rightly, I think) on disadvantages, so that we might talk about the effects of poverty.

As an anthropologist, however, Demerath also argues that advantages ought not be taken simply for granted - that they, too, should be examined carefully as socially created. He describes "the tight - almost seamless - linkages between class ideology, parenting practices, ideal notions of personhood, and accepted school policies and practices" that result in "1) positioning individuals to successfully compete in school and 2) leveraging community resources to support the schools, build up the confidence of individual students, and frame their efforts as successes" (2).

Exhibits A and B: At WBHS, building up the confidence of individual students and framing their efforts as successes can be seen in the school allowing up to 47 students to graduate as valedictorians, and distributing a special cord and "Medal of Excellence" to every graduate to wear with his or her cap and gown (in response to a parents complaining that their graduates might "feel bad" about not being designated members of the National Honor Society).

What especially concerns me as an anthropologist and a college professor who bears witness to this every day in my work is this passage that Demerath quotes from another book that I might place on my kindle wish-list, How to Succeed in School without Really Learning (1997):

David Labaree pointed out several years ago that market pressures and social exertions give rise to educational credentialism, at the heart of which is a tension between a view of education as a private good that facilitates individual advancement, and as a public good that provides society with collectively shared benefits. Furthermore, he showed how under credentialism, "teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses (1997,2). Labaree concluded that social mobility goals have promoted the commodification of education in the U.S., which threatens to "transform the public educational system into a mechanism for personal advancement" (p.12).

I think Labaree might have been a bit optimistic: Commodification is no threat, it is what already has been happening. Now, I worry that higher ed / academia has sold itself too cheaply as a self-help program. Yet, I also hear how lamely platitudinous it sounds: To claim education as a public good. What does that even mean? I wonder whether or not there is a convincing way to talk about public good that does not on some level speak to the "pecuniary considerations" that sociologists claimed in 1929 (in the classic study of "Middletown") were changing the fabric of American life.

I wish it mattered not only to talk about a public good, but also to talk about the play and excitement that actually accompanies learning - which as a parent is what I wish for my kids to know.

More truth from The Nation's Finest News Source

I have always known this to be true.

In fact, Bubbie knows it to be true, too: I mean, we are talking about the voice of Chick Hicks in "Cars" and Ken in "Toy Story 3."

Speaking of which, this commentary describes exactly how StraightMan and I feel about our boy's Pixar fixation.

***

We have been on "break" this week. Which just means that I gave exams and assigned papers last week, with the notion that I might grade them this week. Ha.

A friend and I have managed to be rather productive in terms of circulating e-mails, i.e., organizing a panel for our discipline's annual meetings in the fall: A task in academic life that richly deserves lampooning.

Still here

This is how I feel about the book manuscript that I currently am not revising.

***

However, I managed finally to write a book review that was due about two months ago to a journal that solicited it last summer. I ought to feel good. Instead I feel: Blurgh.

StraightMan tells me not to fret, as he recently submitted a book review that was overdue about a year.

What was it that Mark Twain said about being dead?

Sigh. I found this article, "Anthropology without Science," a bit overheated and under-informing, for the reasons that Hugh Gusterson (a cultural anthropologist on the AAA's executive board) writes in a comment to this posting:

I notice that the article does not tell the readers what the new wording is and how it differs from the old wording. (What sort of journalism is that?) Maybe we could dial down the temperature a little if people saw the two sets of wording. The old wording said "The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects, through archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research; and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists; including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems." The new wording says, "The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. This includes, but is not limited to, archaeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research."

I grow weary of that old chestnut about science being thrown under the bus of post-modernism. Reading the old versus the new wording, I think the change in orientation seems to be from promoting anthropology-as-a-science (i.e., discipline building, professionalizing, and claiming authoritative knowledge) to promoting the science itself - that is, the research and knowledge itself. It is about anthropologists as a group needing to communicate better what we do and how we think in terms that can be apprehended more easily as relevant to broader publics.

Which I think ought to start with the publics within the discipline. Frankly, I think the subfields are not only not particularly good at communicating with the oft-cited man / woman on the street, but they are pretty bad at communicating with each other. Obviously, there are individuals who are exceptions - primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's work on allomothering is read not only widely across anthropology, but also in other disciplines.

In general, however, archaeologists seem really to write and talk only to each other, and cultural anthropologists the same.

Frankly, I am a little tired of that other old chestnut that the four fields are drifting further apart and the discipline has no direction and so on. I mean, there is disarray also in economics, which as a science really ought to be feeling dismal right now...

Also, I think we ought to give more attention to where we can see communication and collaboration across the four fields - for example, on themes like water, climate change, extinction, and species. In fact, I went to an esp. interesting "experimental" panel (or "innovent") on multispecies called "Swarm." It featured anthros from the four fields, plus coordinated exhibits at art galleries, which engage yet another public. I missed them, but read more at Savage Minds.

'Nuff said :)

Curtains for anthropology?

Colleagues in my department circulated two articles reporting on the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). In particular, the reports focused on the bleakness of the present and future state of anthropology – which made me wonder whether or not StraightMan and I had attended the AAA in an alternative reality. Tis true that the job market has reached the depths of suckitude. Yet, the amount of engagement seems as high as ever. At the same time, anthropologists seem to be taking to heart the notion that they ought to demonstrating and communicating the relevance of what we do.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported primarily on that old chestnut in American anthropology: The four fields of anthropology (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology) are so divided that it is threatening the discipline. Presented as Exhibit A of the embattled and embittering state of anthropology: A session featuring graduate students (which no doubt contributes to the sense of embattlement and embitterment…) commenting on the intensity of specialization within the subfields, i.e., how and why archaeologists and linguistic anthropologists cannot understand each other’s jargon.

Inside Higher Ed reported:

It is no secret that these are hard times for anthropology. The discipline claims little more than one-half of 1 percent of undergraduate degrees conferred, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Anthropology departments across the country have been rebranded or threatened with being merged or scrapped; jobs have been targeted.

Hard times for anthropology? As far as I know, the number of undergraduate degrees in anthropology is itself not in decline. Combined departments of anthropology and sociology have been more the rule than the exception at colleges and universities. Unfortunately, it is not only anthropology programs and positions being scrapped or targeted, but to cite the particular example of the University at Albany, classics, foreign languages, and theater. It is not only hard times for anthropology, but in fact, hard times for the liberal arts and for anything that smacks of any intellectual life.

Back from outer space

Or more precisely from the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association.

Beanie and Bubbie spent the last few days with my parents! So, it was just StraightMan and me in New Orleans. With thousands of other anthropologists. Not to mention Saints fans. Who are even dat much more annoying than anthropologists.

***

Is it not a truth in life that the time when you are busiest at work is right before a break or a vacation?

It is also a truth that in the higher education-industrial complex in which I work, a break is never a break: Thanksgiving week and summer included.

Blurgh.

***

Finally, here is more evidence that "sucks" might be the new normal. Or is it just evidence of the kind of company I keep?

Friends on Facebook have been sharing the following two links that appear to be making the rounds among faculty: "So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities" and "One professor's fantasy".

I take the popularity of the links as a sign that morale among the professoriate is rather low at this time. When I started teaching, just five years ago, I actually talked about graduate school as an option that motivated majors ought to consider! Not any more.

I am conscious of the fact that I directly have benefited from the expansion of academia / higher education in terms of both my education (having had the privilege of attending an elite liberal arts college and a premier public research university), and my employment (as a tenure-track professor at a four-year public college).

However, I also think it is important and necessary to examine the effects of that expansion critically. We need to ask both whether or not colleges and universities really are prepared for the students that they are admitting, and whether or not the students really are prepared for college or university.

Simply expanding higher education is not the same as democratizing it.

Team players need not apply

For both the subjects and writers of recommendation letters in academia / higher ed, this piece (and the comments) in today's Inside Higher Ed is worth a gander:

You are reading a letter of recommendation that praises a candidate for a faculty job as being "caring," "sensitive," "compassionate," or a "supportive colleague." Whom do you picture?

New research suggests that to faculty search committees, such words probably conjure up a woman -- and probably a candidate who doesn't get the job. The scholars who conducted the research believe they may have pinpointed one reason for the "leaky pipeline" that frustrates so many academics, who see that the percentage of women in senior faculty jobs continues to lag the percentage of those in junior positions and that the share in junior positions continues to lag those earning doctorates.

The research is based on a content analysis of 624 letters of recommendation submitted on behalf of 194 applicants for eight junior faculty positions at an unidentified research university. The study found patterns in which different kinds of words were more likely to be used to describe women, while other words were more often used to describe men.

Sadly, while the results are not surprising - the caring, sensitive, compassionate, and supportive candidate is the one who does not become your colleague - the study has me thinking about how I characterize my colleagues and my students, particularly as I find myself writing recommendation letters for jobs and graduate schools.

I suppose that I might rephrase "collegiality" and "consensus building" as "professionalism" and "leadership." However. I hate that the advice is to "stay away from communal words, whether writing on behalf of men or women."

Cue Elvis Costello: "What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?"

A comment on the comments on Inside Higher Ed:

Predictably, there are comments that this is not really "about" gender, as in women and men, because men now have as equally hard a time being hired.

To which I must retort: How about entertaining the idea that "gender" is not really only about women and men? That it might be about arrangements of social relationships - significantly, inequalities - that both reflect and inflect ideas and practices of "women" and "men" in the first place?

One of the comments called attention to the fact that the so-called communal words refer to ideas that academia has celebrated as its values - and the so-called agentive words refer to ideas that "private enterprise" celebrates.

Unfortunately, I think there is a relationship between the devaluing of academic values and the privileging of corporate values in academia / higher ed - and the gendering of academia as communal / female and private enterprise as agentive / male.

***

On the bright side: Tina Fey was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor - only the third woman to receive it, and at 40, the youngest ever recipient. Hooray for funny, smart, female, and 40! That is for all my gal pals :)

On why I have not worked on my book revision in about a month

StraightMan and I share the responsibilities of Beanie's and Bubbie's drop-off's and pick-up's at their respective schools. I think it is important to talk with their teachers and the other kiddos and their parents. Also, I just like holding their little hands and walking with them, hearing their little thoughts. Beanie asks questions like why "tissue" can be something you blow your nose with or what your body is made of - I have no answer. Bubbie seems to notice every crack, twig, and drop of water on the pavement.

This morning, I dropped off Bubbie at nursery school, where he seems to be thriving.

When I say "dropped off," I mean that I walked him there, leaving the house about 20 minutes before 9am, after feeding him a "second" breakfast as he hardly ate his first, which StraightMan served around 6:45am, then bundling his reluctant little body in boots, sweatshirt, winter jacket, mittens, and hat after locating his favorite Matchbox car and packing it into his backpack. At nursery school, unbundling Bubbie, accompanying him into the classroom where we have a routine where I bumble at locating his name tag, then sit down and read a story book before I walk him to the table where a teacher is helping other children use scissors and glue sticks to create a craft that fits with the day's lesson, which was, most fittingly, adaptation. (Good luck with that, I think.)

When I arrived home after a micro-run - my almost-daily exercise, which I fit into my day because it requires dropping off a child at school, then returning home to eat breakfast and ready myself for the rest of the day - it was about 9:20am.

In other words, "dropping off" Bubbie is a multi-step process from door-to-door-to-door that requires at least 40 minutes.

I mention this because when I arrived at home, about eight hours later, I found on my desk, a photocopy of the first page of the Acknowledgements to Kay Anderson's 2008 book, Race and the Crisis of Humanism.

No, I have not read the book. StraightMan, aka LuckyHank, is on sabbatical: He has read it. He left me the page, noting that it reminded him of me: This is what counts as romance between two anthropologists married almost 14 years.

I doubt I am alone in sensing over the past 10 years the loss of a profession that once moved to a rhythm that fostered creative surges and pauses. This was a profession that felt alive to its own distinctive disposition - that winged immersion in ideas reigned in by the labour of composition. The challenges in producing this book have had less to do with the pressure of multiple relocations..., plus the arrival at an advanced age of a much-wanted but unexpected child. Mostly the experience has been an interior wrestle with an intensifying regime of academic production that seems increasingly hostile to sustained projects of the kind this one, in intellectual terms, has necessarily been. To be sure, the privileges of a writing profession remain (tenuously) intact. I am thinking of those riveting moments in the creative process when the parts appear to converge in a plot that drives and exceeds them. But, still, there is cause to highlight wherever possible the blindspots in an academic culture that increasingly measures 'output' as if it actually hails, machine-like, from the buried chambers of a mind divorced from all its embodied and circumstantial conditionings.

I might add that what can be said of scholarly writing can be said also of scholarly teaching.

College-for-all?

When last I blogged, I had been reflecting upon the observation that clearly not all students seem entirely prepared for college - and that both the kind and range of the challenges that students face (and a result, the challenges that students themselves then pose to faculty, staff, and administrators in academia and higher ed) leave me, as an anthropology professor, feeling rather unprepared to manage.

Exactly how am I supposed to "teach" students who are in no psychological, social, and / or even academic condition to "learn"?

Also, I confess, it is not only that I feel unprepared: I admit also that I feel somewhat unwilling to break what I understand as the "rules" of college b/c to do so then empties it all of meaning. Not just the class the student is taking, but also the student's purpose in college, his or her degree, and not insignificantly, the career to which I have committed myself as an anthropologist, who teaches... I mean if I had wished to be a psychiatrist / social worker / life coach / guru - not to mention a high school teacher - then that is what I would have become.

(BTW, there is a larger discussion that could be had here about rules making meaning, but that is too lofty for me... At least right at this moment, when I am procrastinating from grading exams while StraightMan and Beanie and Bubbie nap upstairs.)

As a cultural anthropologist, I think attending to meaning matters a lot - and should matter more to a lot more people - in the current discourse on college, esp. in this era of encouraging college-for-all. This is a point made in an article that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of American Educator (which the American Federation of Teachers publishes): "Beyond One-Size-Fits-All College Dreams: Alternative Pathways to Desirable Careers."

The issue had lain forgotten in a stack of to-be-read magazines that I reached for in a fit of despair last night - a Friday night spent reading exams - and I think the cover story is well worth reading. It opens with the observation that while the majority of high school seniors today plan to go to college, the truth is that less than half will graduate from college - a rate that drops to less than 20 percent for low-achieving students, who often must start their college careers with remedial courses for which they receive no college credit. "Meanwhile, they have wasted precious time and money that could have been spent on career-focused certificates or associate's degrees that have better outcomes than are generally recognized," note the article's authors, James Rosenbaum, Jennifer Stephan, and Janet Rosenbaum.

The outcomes include AAs in radiography earning salaries in the $80K range. Which I might add seems unfathomably high: It is considerably higher than what I earn with a PhD from an institution that the National Research Council recently ranked as one of the top programs in anthropology.

Here is where the question of meaning become critical in academia / higher education:

In everyday language and in formal policy discussions, the word "college" is used as a synonym for "bachelor's degree." Colleges have much more to offer than just four-year degrees - and recognizing that fact would go a long way toward rescuing the college-for-all-movement.

A friend commented to me on Facebook that "college will never be for everyone": I think what we both mean is that the pursuit of the four-year / bachelor's degree is not for everyone. Not to mention an education in the liberal arts, which I think traditionally has defined the four-year / bachelor's degree.

Another point about meaning: "Students are understandably surprised to learn that 'high school competency" does not indicate 'college readiness.'" Huh. In my experience, I have learned that this is true in fact, but I am surprised to learn that this is true in intent, too.

An especially interesting observation in the article is their comment that too many students in high school tend not to be especially well informed "about" college: They know they "ought" to go, but they do not know that fewer than half will graduate. The authors suggest that students enter college with unrealistic expectations - which themselves make it even less likely that they will succeed - because adults are withholding information and as result misleading them. In part, this might be because some adults, like parents, might or might not have attended college and have the experience to share with their children. Or at a time when the ratio of high school guidance counselors to students is 1 to 284+, the advice is fairly general, with not much detail shared, let alone individual counseling.

Even more significant, I think, is that the rah-rah routine to cheer students into college appears to be part of a larger cultural or social value placed on, well, rah rah routines in general - especially when as they concern adults promoting and / or protecting children's well being.

We are mystified by what we are increasingly seeing as idealism that prevent optimal outcomes across youth-related fields. We think our society's tendency to advocate BAs for all is a good example of this problem. Somehow, across fields, we must find a way of being honest with our youth without crushing their dreams. Short term, the truth about college might be disheartening. Long term, knowing the truth is the only way to accomplish one's goals.

For another time: How to talk to talented undergraduate students about (sigh) graduate school.

Dammit, Jim...

I'm an anthropology professor, not a psychiatrist / social worker / life coach / guru - and definitely not your mother.

Sigh.

Interim (midterm) grades are due this Monday. I have exams from my two sections of ANTH 100 to grade, and will be collecting essay exams from another class next week. So, there is plenty to do. However. What has me feeling especially anxious and overworked at the moment is having to respond to students "in crisis."

I have been thinking about the blog discussion at The New York Times on "Have College Students Changed?" In particular, I think about this response from Linda Bips, a psychology professor at Muhlenberg College (and the author of "Parenting College Freshmen: Consulting for Adulthood"):

In my experience, freshmen today are different from those I knew when I started as a counselor and professor 25 years ago. College has always been demanding both academically and socially. But students now are less mature and often not ready for the responsibility of being in college.

Many of today’s students lack resilience and at the first sign of difficulty are unable to summon strategies to cope. The hardship can be a failing grade on a test, a cut from the team, or a romantic breakup. At the first sign of trouble many become unable to function and persevere. Often they even anticipate difficulties and their anxiety alone paralyzes them.

Whatever the causes might be, the effects that I observe are students apparently unprepared to meet the demands of higher education - and I am utterly unprepared to respond to them. I sometimes feel rather tested and I see this as not necessarily the student's fault. (Though it is true also that sometimes particular individuals push against the limits of my patience...)

There seems to be a serious gap between the expectation that a college education ought to be accessible to everyone, and what this actually requires. If college students are changing, then is college changing? Should it not?

Is the work of college professors, too, changing?

No answers this evening. Just questions.

Tenure tracts

It probably says more about the cast of characters that I call friends, but I read two posts on Facebook concerning tenure:

One is this link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Parents: Your Children Need Professors with Tenure."

The other is this link to an article on Insider Higher Ed about the faculty at Brown voting no on changes to tenure that a Provost-appointed committee had developed.

The Chronicle piece offers a spirited defense of the virtues of tenure, culminating with a flourish on academic freedom... "A college professor must be able to voice controversial views and challenge his or her students to question their assumptions and, at the very least, learn to define and defend them more effectively," writes the author, Cary Nelson, an English professor at University of Illinois. "Too many faculty members without tenure do not want to take that risk."

On the one hand, if Fox News is opposed to it, then I feel like I should be in favor... On the other hand, I have to disagree with Nelson: I think the scholar-teachers who are most willing to take chances in their scholarship and teaching are other untenured professors. (In part b/c we are in the process of "proving" ourselves: To our peers, to ourselves for tenure, for posterity...) Being untenured has not stopped me from pursuing research or teaching on topics that can be "uncomfortable" to discuss: Race and racism. Class and social stratification. Birth control and abortion.

I think talk about tenure ought to be more precise: The fact of being "tenured," in and of itself, does not embolden faculty to toss caution to the wind and chase truths that the timid would rather not know! Rather, I imagine that the long term commitment of an institution and its resources - and time - enables individuals to develop: Teachers and scholars do not spring fully formed from graduate school.

I think tenure, if / when it works, might be more like an apprenticeship. Or in today's parlance, an investment that colleges and universities make to further their own interests. Or in still other terms: You grow your own.

Which brings me to the post from Inside Higher Ed on changes proposed in the tenure process at Brown University. In particular, this nugget caught my eye:

The backdrop for the discussion -- and part of the reason many faculty have been dubious of the recommendations -- is that Brown was faulted in a recent accreditation report for having too high a tenure rate (70 percent), because many top research universities have significantly lower rates. Brown faculty members insist that they do a good job of advising those who will not receive tenure to leave before the final vote.

Am I just naive? I was startled to learn that having too high a tenure rate could pose a problem for a college or university. What is the point of hiring "the best and the brightest" if / when the point, apparently, is just to let them go after six years?

What about all the resources and time - and experience and expertise and so on, gained during the years of service - that a faculty member represents? Even in corporations, it is understood that training new workers and grooming them for positions of responsibility is costly, so you protect your investment.

We need to remember that not only do colleges and universities produce students (with and without degrees...), they also produce professors.

***

The Chronicle piece is written as an appeal to parents: It advises them to look to institutions with tenured faculty.

From where I perch, as a parent and professor, I would be more interested not necessarily in how many faculty have tenure, but how many are tenure-track - and teach undergraduate students, including introductory courses.

This is not to discredit the talents of graduate students or of adjuncts. In fact, having been a graduate student at a major public research university, I would have to question the priorities of an institution that is apparently unwilling to invest in tenure-track faculty.

Scholarly sources say...

For those of us interested in "public anthropology", yesterdays's column from the NYT's Public Editor might be worth a gander: Scholarly Work, Without All the Footnotes.

Public Editor Arthur Brisbane comments on the reactions to linguist Guy Deutscher's article, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" which was published in the August 29th issue of the Sunday Magazine.

In fact, I had clipped the article as a possible reading to assign in Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, which I will teach again next semester, because I thought it provided a fine overview to the issues surrounding language, culture, and thought, including a discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis / linguistic relativity.

Brisbane notes a stream of reactions from scholars who felt that the piece exhibited "an unacceptable scale of borrowing" (i.e., plagiarism) from other linguists, including the use of specific examples.

Interestingly, Brisbane consulted with anthropologists, including Michael Silverstein, who told the NYT that “one could not avoid writing about these particular substantive phenomena and these particular lines of research, since that is what has fired folks up."

So, Brisbane concludes:

The problem here, I conclude, is not one of intellectual theft. It’s really a problem of journalism itself.

The rules of attribution and credit in the domain of scholarship are established, strict and well-understood. Journalism, by contrast, lacks a formal code for citing scholarly work. When scholarly subject matter traverses the border into popular journalism, it simply isn’t clear how much attribution is enough.

As someone who is teaching an introductory course in linguistic anthropology, I agree with Silverstein - I mean, had Guy Deutscher not used the examples that he used, he might have been criticized for showing inadequate understanding of the field itself.

As someone who previously worked in journalism and esp. enjoyed writing so-called think pieces (for which I not infrequently read scholarly works, and interviewed and quoted scholars themselves), I agree also with Brisbane, who also quotes Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars (and an anthropologist), observing that "scholars are filling a rising appetite for science writing in the popular press and that the protocols for giving credit there remain murky."

It might be time for journalists to develop such criteria - and for those of us interested in "popularizing" scholarly work to become involved in developing them.

For-profit education

No punditry or wisdom in store for today: Just prepping for today's classes :)

In the course of doing so, however, I started watching this Frontline documentary on for-profit education in the United States today: College, Inc..

Clearly the journalists approach this topic with a story to tell: They adopt the skepticism that they assume their audience will share.

Now, I pride myself on being in touch with the industry news, but I had no idea that so many students were taking courses through for-profit colleges and universities. So, I might re-evaluate the stance that Frontline takes.

The interview with the executive at the University of Phoenix raised my hackles. I think a lot of us feel that academia / higher ed is where good ideas come to die: Like, serve on any committees lately? The cynicism of faculty concerning service is not that we do not like to do it, but that we do not like to do it when it comes to naught. Which even in my four-going-on-five years, I perceive is what happens more often than not. For example, the standing committees on which I serve, representing my department, hold "advisory" status. Which means that the time and concern that we commit to this service will not and cannot effect change. So, the Phoenix model of Getting Things Done can seem appealing.

Faculty at "real" colleges and universities, like where I work, talk with disdain about for-profit education, but I think we need to pay attention to what they do. The faculty at for-profit colleges and universities are not unlike us. They even might be us. I bet a lot of the professors there do their work quite capably.

Of course, the students and the faculty are not the "targets": For-profit education treats them as opportunities and costs. I really think this is not the approach that academia / higher ed ought to adopt.

So much for keeping my promise about no punditry. Back to prepping today's classes...

Academic economics

How did I miss this Times opinion piece on tenure?

Author Christopher Shea describes the tempest in academia / higher ed's teapot over the economics of universities and colleges. In particular, whether or not tenure ought to be abolished, and the mission of academia / higher ed be rethought. This is in response to recent publications such as Mark C Taylor's new book, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, and his opinion pieces in the Times. Shea concludes his piece:

Here we have the frightening subtext of all the recent hand-wringing about higher education: the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality. And that — not whether some professors can afford to wear Marc Jacobs — is the real scandal.

From where I perch in higher education - a PhD who in fact is immersed in undergraduate education, teaching 4 / 3 (with no TAs) at a public college that is not a research center (and whose research career depends upon the amount of time I manage to steal, essentially, from myself...) and who cannot afford to wear Marc Jacobs - I do not think that private versus public is the only important division, and I do not see the division of haves and have-nots as news. Frankly, is it not for this reason that so many Americans today do pursue post-secondary education? B/c having a college degree might mean the difference having or not having a job. Not to mention why the competition for admission to institutions like Williams and Columbia (or faculty positions there, for that matter) is as stiff as it is?

What is broken needs to be fixed. I just worry that the fixes proposed for academia / higher education will make institutions like the one where I teach as broken as everything else seems to be? Is the new normal "broken"?

I am not tied to the tenure system - I can imagine reasons to abolish it - but in the current stream of rants, I seem to see a lot of suggestions to decrease the autonomy and security with work in academia / higher education.

When it comes to work, is the new normal "sucks"?

Having everyone participate equally in unfair conditions is not the same as banishing inequalities. It seems to me that we all need to feel that we put our energies and efforts to meaningful use in our work, and that we are as necessary to the work being accomplished as the work is for our ability to meet our own needs and wants.

That this is not true for too many people is what sucks and what is broken.

Keeping up with The Times

Just interrupting my stream of thought on horses to wonder whether or not Mark C Taylor is a tenured tool of corporate academia / higher ed?

Here is his August 14 op / ed piece proposing that universities and colleges ought to look at their bottom lines and act toward economic sustainability - through such measures as merging departments of philosophy at institutions like Columbia and NYU. I take it that the point here is largely rhetorical, as Taylor, a professor of religion, uses his own current affiliation (at Columbia) as an example.

In today's Room for Debate blog, Taylor, who is currently professor at Columbia and a professor emeritus at Williams College, calls for mandatory retirement of faculty.

Not that I do not see informed debate as vital - and the rethinking of academia / higher education as critical - but I do not see what Taylor says as especially imaginative. Yet because his is Mark C Taylor, his ideas find a forum in The New York Times and become part of the discourse.

Reason #641 for skipping the PhD

This is StraightMan "relaxing" on the beach at Cape Cod this afternoon.

The book is one he was assigned to review, about a year and half ago.

21 percent

This call for papers posted on a blog that I recently started browsing, Feminist Philosophers, notes that "a mere 21% of professional philosophers" (I assume in academia / higher ed in the United States) are women. Not sure whether or not I should be surprised. I guess I am. While it is true that gender equity certainly has not been achieved in anthropology, I think about my department, my teachers and friends in graduate school, and the scholars whose work I most admire - a strong representation of women.

That said, the number of women represented on my "Traditions" syllabi were scarce - Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Nancy Munn. I had to read Audrey Richards, Emily Martin, and Marilyn Strathern on my own time. Also, I find problematic the discourse on the so-called feminization of anthropology - the number of undergraduate majors, the number of graduate students - as it suggests something inherently wrong with there being so many women studying and practicing in the discipline. Not to mention that feminization seems to fade higher in the ranks of the professoriate.

This leads me to throw in my two cents on other posts that I read on the FP blog - see here and here - responding to this column by New York Times columnist John Tierney, which I had missed.

StraightMan, attending a 3-week seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, notes the marginal number both of women at all and of men with young children participating. (The participants include philosophers, economists, historians, and a pair of anthropologists. So, interdisciplinary crosstalk no doubt prevails...)

In fact, there was a kind of scandal with another NEH seminar that had required a female participant, a single mother, to provide evidence that she had arranged full-time child-care, lest she be dropped from the seminar. (Inside Higher Ed reported on it, here, following up on posts on Feminist Philosophers. Way to go, FP!)

Given the demands of the seminars, I cannot see any way that one could participate to one's own satisfaction without full-time child-care: It is a reason that I am here with Beanie and Bubbie, and StraightMan is there.

However. I think it highlights the ways in which opportunities for women become limited. If we "choose" to opt out, then it is because our choices already have been constrained. (I am not a philosopher, but I am certain that cannot really be called a choice then.) For example, I also had considered applying to an NEH seminar, then decided against it. I am the mother of two young children and the wife of a talented scholar about to start his sabbatical. I cannot imagine either being away from them for 3 weeks or alternatively, having them all with me at the seminar.

It also highlights the ways in which men's roles and responsibilities outside the family become emphasized. Why give up the satisfaction, the respect, and the privileges of work in favor of sharing the obligations to young children?

So, if the NEH and other institutions, including colleges and universities, truly are interested in supporting and promoting women in academia / higher ed, then they ought to make available to everyone affordable (I say free) high-quality child-care.

Universal child-care along the lines of universal health-care! Although we see in the United States how much Americans continues to abhor what might benefit them.