Brother, Can You Spare 15 Minutes?

To help out some NYU researchers by filling out their survey? And post the link (with comments closed) on your blog? Please don't do anything to bias the survey results...thanks!

Guess Who's Got His Grading Done?

Not me. MacDougall. And he's got a fantastic series on concept courses going. I'll join in sometime this month, with luck! For now, you can check out my place-based Introduction to African American Literature and Culture, a model I cribbed from Kenny Mostern.

[Update (5/19/08, 3:39 pm): Nope, I'm still not done, but MacDougall has installed his third course widget thingie--this one will actually be (co-)taught.]

E for...?

Lumpenprofessoriat has bestowed upon CitizenSE its first-ever bloggy award thingy. If I had time to figure out how to display it, I would; same for supplying relevant quotations from The Scarlet Letter and The Holder of the World on alphabetization. But what this really reminds me of is when I first arrived here as a shiny assistant professor and E was then used in place of F, which is how I'd grade my blogging here lately. But thanks for the vote of confidence, LP, as well as for the links! And even though I consider everyone on my blogroll "excellent," I agree that recommendations carry more weight when there are fewer of them, so here are my "best of the best" right now:

Is there no sin in it?: for general awesomeness and also for this
Mixed-Race America: for bridging academia and Blogoramaville and for engaging her commentariat so patiently and thoughtfully and kindly
verbal privilege: just because
How the University Works: for bringing to Blogoramaville what he brought to the world of electronic journals when he co-founded Workplace

Thanks to everyone who participates in this meme for helping spread the word about exceptional blogs that everyone ought to be reading (except this one, which deserves to remain the obscurest in Blogoramaville!). Ah, now I got it: E is for "exception"!

On Generalizations (and Grad School, Tenure, and Taylorism)

Can't do with them, can't do without them--that's the problem with generalizations, I say. As an antidote to the off-target generalizations flying around about tenure these days--"it exists only to protect lazy bullies!" "it's to blame for the corporatization and casualization of the university!" "it restricts the academic freedom of the untenured and nontenurable!"--may I humbly recommend that you go and check out A White Bear's post on the way faculty and graduate students (are expected to) interact (and so much more) over at Is there no sin in it?? Go ahead, I can wait.

Read it? Yeah, yeah, I know it's not about tenure even tangentially, but I'll get to that. One of the things I love about her post (and AWB's blogging more generally) is the way she sets up and qualifies the generalizations she makes--they inevitably come from carefully-observed and -thought over details of her life. Even better, almost every post reads like an insight has just hit her or a pattern has just fallen into place in the world or her head. She's not putting it out there as her settled view--she wants to see what her readers make of it. And because she has built up such a great readership and commentariat over the years, the comments on many of her posts are as illuminating and moving as her writing that got each of those asynchronous conversations started. Which is to say that she gets blogging--she really is committed to exploring the possibilities of this medium and of playing with its emerging conventions and traditions.

Tenure? Oh yeah! Here's the connection, in slow motion. AWB offers three interesting generalizations about what being a graduate student means.

1) "PhD students, even more so than undergrads, are, on the East Coast, anyhow, expected to be slime-dwelling sycophants. We are supposed to keep in mind at all times that, although we are responsible for teaching big courseloads of difficult classes, sitting on committees, helping to run programs (often out of our own pockets), advising students, writing recommendation letters, developing curriculum, and on and on, we are in probation. Our classes are observed and evaluated every semester, our behavior is analyzed to the finest degree, our work scrutinized for purity of thought, and, on top of all that, we make about a quarter of what a tenure-track prof makes, and usually without health insurance."

2) "And when I meet students from other, more formal and stately PhD programs, I am rather shocked by the god-like awe that separates the faculty from the graduate students. At MLA one year, I remember sneaking off to a casual Thai restaurant and watching a whole program dine together, everyone in thousand-dollar suits, with the graduate students speaking only to say things like, 'Ah, I believe Professor X is correct there!' and 'Ha, ha, Professor Y!'”

3) "If there’s one kind of mentoring that really gets lost somewhere in graduate programs, it’s something about how to be brave."

She's not putting these generalizations out there as The Truth. For those who read her post and check out her blog regularly, it's clear that these are reflections based on comparing her (relatively collegial) experiences with others'. But because she's so observant, so smart, and such a good writer, it feels to me that she's earned the questions she poses at the end of her post, in which she puts forward even broader generalizations:

Partly, I suppose the grinding-down is there because most of the people who seriously consider grad school in the first place are egotistical assholes, but what about those who are so easily convinced by the grinding-down that they are scum? What benefit does it offer them to further scummify them? We receive all kinds of professional training, but as far as interpersonal social training goes, all grad students seem to be learning is how to couch every statement with an apology and a self-negation. Who is there to lift us up so that, when we go on the job market, we look like young professors, and not like self-loathing vermin? Is the feeling that one is a vermin somehow productive in a way that I am blind to?

Tenure? I'm getting there. First, I want to throw a question or 5 of my own out there. How widespread are the problems AWB identifies? Do they get worse the higher up the academic status (and endowments) ladder you go? To what extent does tenure exacerbate them? To what extent does it cause them? Is it possible that tenure has nothing to do with them at all?

Sure, AWB's comment thread on this post is mostly about gender, generations, and mentoring, but I don't think I'm out of line to connect this to the tenure issue. When you're in your graduate program, you tend to assume it's a microcosm of the entire profession--that The Field is Your Department writ large. If you hit the jackpot on your job search and start your first tenure-track job at a place that's roughly equivalent to where you did your graduate studies, you're too concerned about figuring out the local politics and culture of Your New Department to make much of the difference in perspective on The Field you're getting. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people starting their tenure-track careers find themselves in the world of Academic Taylorism, too busy to do more than rue how badly their graduate programs prepared them for life outside the Billion Dollar Endowment Club. And the rest--the majority of candidates--do academic piece-work. The generalizations you tend to make about The Field start from the kinds of institutions you've been at and positions you've held in your academic career.

What Craig Smith and I have been trying to do is connect the dots--explore the relations between the training/credentialing system, the job search system, the academic staffing system, and the institution of tenure. A post like AWB's can help us do this--from our various institutional locations and academic histories--together.

A Cease-Fire Proposal in the Tenure Wars

Gabriela Montell at the Chronicle's On Hiring blog was kind enough to link to my tenure post in her recent summation of the latest battle in the tenure wars. She asks, "Can tenure be saved or is it time to chuck the system?" Maybe this is the wrong question. Maybe what we need is a synthesis of the various positions out there that can lead to a cease-fire. That's what I'm shooting for in this post. (Aim high, I say!)

Building on a favorite metaphor of mine, and picking up where my last call for making tenure more flexible left off, here's my big idea: give institutions, departments, and individuals the opportunity to opt out of the tenure system. Of course there's a catch: institutions that opt out must accept unionization of their faculty; departments that opt out must make only full-time hires; and individuals who opt out must agree to the terms of a scholarly performance-ranking system created and maintained by their professional association.

Here's the bare bones of an explanation and justification. On the institutional level, the only way to avoid universalization of the contingency nightmare we've been slouching our way towards for a generation is to recognize that there's no way anyone without tenure can be in any sense of the word "managerial"--which is to say that even by the flawed logic of the Yeshiva decision, the employees of such a college or university would have every right to organize. Only institutions whose administrations make legally-binding pledges to not oppose any organizing drives should be allowed to take this step. [Update: And employees at such institutions should all be represented by the same union, even if they are in right-to-work states.] On the departmental level, everyone needs the same teaching and service load so they're competing on a level playing field. In fact, professional associations should identify [Update: the union members of such departments must join would negotiate] a required teaching/service load for tenure-less departments, so everyone in the country employed at such places is on a level playing field when it comes to research. On the individual level, highly productive reseachers at departments with tenure may want to enter the competition [Update: and join the nation-wide union]. In exchange for the loss of job security, they're basically announcing they're ready to be recruited by the departments and institutions that have opted out of the tenure system. Probably those who had chosen the research-service or research-teaching tenure or post-tenure options in my proposed expansion of the tenure system would be the ones most likely to take the next step. As for ranking the scholarly productivity of individuals without tenure, I'll leave it to the professional associations to come up with a quantifiable set of criteria and develop a formula that has broad consensus. I'm thinking a point-based system like the Rolex Rankings in women's golf may be the way to go. But we would probably need to develop a series of conferences for the tenure-less, along the lines of what I half-jokingly proposed in my first-ever "Around the Web"ed piece here, so we can truly compare performance.

I guess what I'm thinking here is that tenure is a joke at many R1 places: full-time, tenure-track faculty may as well be contingent labor for all the odds they have of actually getting tenure at such institutions. While I was in grad school, the unspoken rule was that "junior faculty should be seen and not heard" and they were explicitly referred to as "temporary faculty," by the tenured and administrative alike. The main function tenure plays at such places is as an incentive for the outside hires they've made at the senior level to actually stay at the institution for a time and as an incentive for their junior faculty to attempt the impossible. In my system, the institution would need to come up with other incentives to keep their top faculty and everyone, not just the junior faculty, would be under pressure to maintain or improve their individual rankings [Update: , while the union they all joined would protect their basic rights and negotiate terms and conditions].

There's more to be said, but not by me. What say ye, Blogoramaville?

[Update 4/1/08: Check out Professor Zero's and Lumpenprofessoriat's proposals.]

CitizenSE Teaching Manifesto, Part II: Looking Forward to Teaching Obama's Speech in the Fall

Thanks to Jennifer at Mixed Race America for posting the video (and text) of Barack Obama's speech in its entirety.

Thanks to all the awesome history bloggers Ralph Luker linked to at Cliopatria, who convinced me to watch it in the middle of the night this week (and put off reading for my classes for another 40 minutes).

Thanks to Jennifer again for her follow-up questions, and to Annalee Newitz at io9 for her observations.

Thanks to Chris Clarke at Creek Running North for articulating some of the (to my mind, calculated, on which more in a second) blind spots of Obama's speech. And to N Pepperell at Rough Theory for his reflection on Obama's theorizing of affect and politics.

But thanks most of all to my chair and associate chair for giving me yet another chance to teach Introduction to African American Literature and Culture next semester. Because Obama's speech is going right in the middle of the course's "Nation" unit in the fall, not long after Election Day. (And thanks to Kenny Mostern, one of my favorite former academics, from whom I borrowed the country/city/nation/world structure of my course!)

Why am I going to teach Obama's speech? Because of its supple invocation of and subtle response to the classic debates over American and black nationalism that go back centuries in African-American political discourse. Because it'll help my students understand race and nationalism in more complex and interesting ways. Because it'll enable me to contrast Obama's rhetoric with Wright's jeremiad and draw my students into a consideration of the nationalistic uses of the jeremiad (as analyzed most famously by Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Emory Elliott on the Puritans and David Howard-Pitney in the African-American grain, but also more recently by Edward Blum, Ralph Luker, and Kim Pearson). Because it'll help my students understand the full force of Obama's invocation of Faulkner's line from Intruder in the Dust Requiem for a Nun (thanks to former student Charlie Wesley for the correction!) that "The past is not never dead. It's not even past" (and maybe even wonder why he added "and buried" to the first sentence, or why the punctuation linking the two thoughts vacillates between a period, semi-colon, and comma even when it's scholars doing the quoting--for more on this line and Obama, see Scott Horton). And see why that invocation was no accident, that for Obama to invoke the founders and slavery in the ways he did is to invoke Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Twain as much as Walker, Douglass, Du Bois, and King.

Among the things the speech itself and the responses to it have made me wonder about are the limits on political speech in this country--what traditions, conventions, and myths you have to invoke (and hopefully rework) and avoid (or avoid questioning) if you wish to be considered "presidential" today. Take Obama's starting with the Constitutional Convention--the literal founding of the U.S.--rather than, say, the Declaration or the founding of Jamestown or the first landing of Columbus in the Caribbean. I've already blogged a bit on the complexities of Hawthorne's relation to the founders in "The Custom-House," so forgive the self-quoting here (and the long parenthetical statement within the self-quotation):

it's not exactly right to put "The Custom-House" unproblematically in the tradition of Jeffersonian democracy (with its "tree of liberty nourished by blood of tyrants" strains), unless you see that tradition as itself problematized and strained. (After all, Jefferson blamed King George for blocking efforts by the colonists to end the slave trade yet also signalled his intent to defend American slavery by condemning the king's version of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; Jefferson affirmed the "self-evident" truth that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence yet called in Notes on the State of Virginia for scientific investigations to confirm his suspicions of the racial inequality of African Americans; Jefferson condemned slavery in part for its corrupting tendencies on masters yet continued to hold slaves and do more than hold Sally Hemings; Jefferson denounced "merciless Indian savages" who fought with England in the Declaration of Independence, praised American Indians in Notes on the State of Virginia, and saw them as an obstacle to the expansion of the American "empire of liberty" that he helped engineer with the Louisiana Purchase.)

Sure, Obama invoked some of this complexity and these contradictions in his speech, but his central axis for riffing on race was black and white. Although he began to problematize whiteness by reaching out to the white working-class descendants of immigrants, his references to other racially/ethnically marked groups always felt like an addendum to his core "America in black and white" focus. This seems to me to distort American history and American society, almost as much the "nation of immigrants" discourse it competes with, which, as Werner Sollors rightly pointed out, is itself a rearticulation of the "Puritan origins of the American self" thesis. "Manifest destiny" is not an add-on to these other dominant narratives of what makes the U.S. America, as I tried to make clear to my students in Japan last academic year, and as I've been trying to do with my American students, before and since. (I've blogged on some of this here and there [and there and there and there and there and there and there--and, damn, did I leave a lot of loose threads hanging on this blog toward the end of that Fulbright year!].)

The history of American Studies and American historiography bears me out. After proponents of one or another account of the origins of American exceptionalism (whether based on the Puritans, the frontier, or liberty--that is, the North[east], the [South]West, or the South) competed for much of the first half of the 20th C, attention to the blindspots in all three accounts--or, to use a metaphor I worked to death in Japan, an exploration of the shadowy areas that their jostling over the narrow-focus spotlight cast into darkness or only fitfully illuminated (namely, Indian removals, expansionist wars, and slavery)--continued for much of its second half. But rather than repeat their predecessors' competition, these scholars increasingly came to question American exceptionalism, to look for ways of broadening the spotlight's focus, to attempt to remap America and put it in a global frame.

What I'd like to see from the politician who eventually comes to replace George W. Bush as the most recognizable and representative American to the rest of the world is an overt acknowledgment of the full range of American complexities and contradictions. I'll give Obama credit for going as far as he did and for responding to the most personal and prevalent and perhaps pressing of them so brilliantly in his speech. And I'll trust that were he to become President he'd go further, that the exigencies of his speech delineated its scope in advance.

What I'd like my students to recognize and analyze, then, is the rhetoric, intertextuality, context, framing, and reception of Obama's speech. I'd like them to be able to assess its strengths and weaknesses, to respond to its call for a sustained and critical conversation on the meaning of race and ethnicity in American public and private life, and hence to participate in the (re)making of America.

[Update 1 4/3/08: Plus I get to teach Toni Morrison and Alice Walker on Obama!]

[Update 2 11/6/08: Not to mention Rob MacDougall!]

Jumping the Gun: On Tenured Radical and Lumpenprofessoriat on Tenure

Tenured Radical has posted another great broadside against tenure over at her place, so I figure I'll use it and a now-golden oldie from Lumpenprofessoriat to pick up the conversation on the wisdom of rethinking and expanding the tenure system where Craig Smith of FACE Talk and I last left it.

So if you've read TR's and LP's posts, you'll see the good old revolution vs. reform debate underlying the differences in their perspectives on tenure. TR emphasizes the toxicity of the system while LP points to one school that's trying to detoxify it.

Or maybe a better metaphor for the difference in their approaches would be the abolition vs. colonization debate--is it better to abolish tenure or for academics dissatisfied with the system to migrate to places with reasonable approaches to it? To take the plantation metaphor a step further, ought faculty to burn down the Big House or escape the plantation?

If these latter metaphors make you a bit uncomfortable, then they've done their job. It is thoroughly ridiculous to suggest, as I've done, that tenure-track professors working at schools in or aspiring to join the Billion Dollar Endowment Club are in any sense of the word enslaved. (The nontenurable-as-migrant-labor metaphor at least has some merit to it.)

Maybe I'm putting words in TR's mouth by mapping this metaphor onto her post, but it's only at private institutions and in right-to-work states that her opening assumption that tenure and unionization are mutually exclusive makes any sense. Rather than putting their efforts toward abolishing a system that works at the vast majority of higher education institutions in the U.S., as several of her commenters have suggested, why don't the tenured radicals at private institutions and in right-to-work states go ahead and try to organize? The Yeshiva case was a bad decision; I'm sure either President Clinton or President Obama would appoint a Supreme Court justice or justices who could help to overturn it.

In the meantime, taking over faculty senates and other sites of governance and pushing for the nature of scholarly work to be reimagined and revalued--and not just by administrators, but by faculty as well, for I encountered a lot of resistance to the Boyer Commission's recommendations from some of my most productive colleagues (in garnering grants and publishing research), even at a teaching institution like mine--is one way to go at privates and right-to-works. Forming an AAUP chapter or revitalizing an existing one at the same time is even better.

There's much more to be said on this, but I have a long day of student conferences, broken up only by a department meeting, waiting for me on campus. Be back later....

[Update: Sequel percolating. In the meantime, check out chasing the red balloon's tracking of this anti-tenure meme-in-the-making!]

[Update 3/20/08: Craig Smith joins in.]

[Update 3/25/08: One of Craig's blogging partners in crime, Phil Ray Jack, preaches it! Meanwhile, profacero has started an open thread on this emerging discussion.]

[Update 3/26/08: Lumpenprofessoriat has a great response, which includes the suggestion to label Tenured Radical's position "surrender." While it's true my slavery metaphors were more obviously tongue-in-cheek, even my revolution vs. reform dichotomy was not all that serious, particularly given Craig and my ongoing conversation on tenure in which we were questioning such binaries.]

[Update 3/28/08: Here's my latest salvo in the tenure wars--actually, it's a cease-fire proposal. There are a bunch of belated responses to the TR/Oso Raro exchanges, from Chad Orzel, Timothy Burke, Dean Dad, and Dr. Crazy.]

[Update 4/3/08: Whoops, I missed undine's brilliant pieces at Not of General Interest! And the new one from profacero.]

[Update 4/8/08: Belated link to Dr. Crazy's latest at Reassigned Time. And to Eric Rauchway's at The Edge of the American West.]

[Update 4/11/08: Laurie Fendrich at Brainstorm jumps in.]

[Update 4/13/08: Undine tries it once more, with feeling.]

[Update 4/16/08: How did I miss the soon-to-be-tenured Dr. Virago's post from last week?]

[Update 4/19/08: Laurie Fendrich offers two models for replacing tenure with multiple-year contracts over at Brainstorm.]

The Long and Winding Road II: A Response to Craig Smith; or, Elaborating the Model

It strikes me that Craig and I have been unpacking everything about the "two out of three ain't bad" tenure model except for the model itself. Sure, I've noted that it's really a 4-tiered and not a 2-tiered model, but that's just a correction to my original fragment of a post.

So let's elaborate what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Meatloaf model (because you can play it on your 4-track?):

Track 1: The traditional tenure-track job, in which you need varying degrees of excellence in varying weightings of the traditional triad to get tenure at a variety of institutional types among the 4000+ colleges and universities in the U.S.

Track 2: The research-teaching tenure-track job, in which, in exchange for a lower teaching load, higher research expectations (or vice versa), and no service responsibilities, you accept a lower salary than those on Track 1 (but equal to Tracks 3 and 4).

Track 3: The teaching-service tenure-track job, in which, in exchange for a lower teaching load, higher service expectations (or vice versa), and no research responsibilities (outside of course design and class prep), you accept a lower salary than those on Track 1 (but equal to Tracks 2 and 4).

Track 4: The research-service tenure-track job, in which, in exchange for a higher service load, higher research expectations, and no teaching responsibilities, you accept a lower salary than those on Track 1 (but equal to Tracks 2 and 3).

Of course these aren't the only ways of elaborating my Meatloaf model. But for now, let's leap into some possible applications of it....

Are we imagining it as something strictly limited to conversions of non-tenurable positions into tenure-track jobs? There are pros to this version of the model, as some of my colleagues on a UUP activists' listserv have noted: 1) it prevents administrators from converting already-existing pretty-darn-good jobs to worse ones; 2) it prevents administrators from doing the same thing over time by making all newly-created positions fit Tracks 2-4 and further reducing the number of Track 1 positions offered; 3) it provides a clear way for people already doing a great job at an institution to compete with outside candidates on the (nearly-)inevitable national search that's involved for (most) any tenure-track position, as it provides something of a disincentive for those who really want to aim for Track 1 to apply for any other kind of position; 4) it provides both greater flexibility and clarity to the people in the non-tenurable positions (as well as to departments) in terms of workload expectations than the current system, not to mention better salary and benefits, security, and advancement opportunities.

Are we imagining it as something imposed from above or proposed from below? This question is implicit in the reasons why it might be a good idea to "test-drive" it, as it were, on tenuring the non-tenurable. Or to rephrase the question, how and at what level are decisions made as to which kind of track a formerly contingent faculty member gets on? I can imagine several models: 1) the administration chooses the track, in consultation with the department, before the position is advertised; 2) the candidate chooses the track, in consultation with the department, after beating out everyone else who applied for the position; 3) the administration, department, and candidate work within ground rules negotiated with the faculty union or AAUP chapter, or, in their absense, the university senate or other faculty governance body, or, perhaps guided by principles set out by national professional associations like the MLA and AAUP and faculty unions like the AFT, NEA, CWA, and SEIU.

But why imagine it only for this limited purpose? Why not start with general principles at the national level and negotiations at the campus level, and then, within the rules hammered out, give administrators, departments, and individual faculty members the widest range of choices they can agree to? For instance, under what circumstances can you jump tracks--or be involuntarily transferred from one to another? Think of the institutions that can't afford to offer sabbaticals all that often--why not have the option of switching from Track 1 to Tracks 2 or 4 at teaching-intensive institutions for those faculty who wish to focus more on research for a set period of time? Why not use it to give teeth to post-tenure reviews? Tenured free rider who's been boycotting service for a decade? Boom--Track 2 for her! Tenured deadwood when it comes to developing new courses and doing any other kind of scholarly activity in living memory? Boom--Track 3 for him! The budding administrator who's been getting course reductions for chairing departments, senates, and chapters? Boom--Track 4 for her!

Hey, why would we need an administration if we had this system? Could the Meatloaf Model lead to the withering away of the administration-faculty divide that Marc Bousquet so vehemently denounces over at How the University Works--or "the administration" itself?

Hold on a second, isn't this moving way too fast? Hey, nobody here but us bloggers.

The Long and Winding Road: Another Non-Response to Craig Smith

Loved Craig's latest post in our highly asynchronous exchange. But as I'm hosting a visiting speaker the next three days and trying in some small way to repay him for the hospitality he showed me during my Fulbright year (he was my faculty mentor at Seinan Gakuin University), I'll have to resort to apologetically nodding Craig's way, recommending Berube's takedown of Bauerlein on faculty work(load) as strangely relevant to our discussion, reporting that my department has voted with its feet, as it were, for a combination of his 3rd and 4th options, and noting that my university doesn't even have a unified policy for the hiring of nontenurable faculty (as in, even finding out what each department does is a major project, much less figuring out the rationale for their procedures).

[Update 3/8/08: Undine surveys the range of takedowns of Bauerlein over at Not of General Interest and adds her own 2 cents!]

Want/Need/Love II: A Response to Craig Smith

Reading over Craig's careful unpacking of some of the assumptions underlying my "two out of three ain't bad" question to Blogoramaville on tenure, I'm struck again by how productive his proposed starting point is. To those who tend to like my thought-experiment proposal for the way it expands tenure to protect the people who currently make up the majority of the professoriate and better value their work, Craig points out that "you would be arguing that the types of positions currently being employed were, to a certain extent, 'acceptable,' but the current treatment of the people in those positions is not." On the other hand,

if we were trying to push back against contingency and specialization (what I usually call disaggregation), we would not want to be arguing for creating permanent jobs out of lower paid positions or more positions with narrower responsibilities. Rather you would be focused on moving more people into stable full-time positions with a wider mix of responsibilities.

What I find so productive about this starting point is Craig's awareness of the multiple ways these options could be characterized--working within the status quo vs. heading back to the future, pragmatism vs. idealism, accepting vs. transforming current staffing patterns, the good vs. the perfect, settling vs. dreaming, and so on--and his attention to the limitations not only of either option, but also of the dichotomy itself.

Now, of course, I have just been talking about working within the status quo or moving back (forward?) to a model based on a corps of full-time faculty. And, as with most simple dichotomies, it is not this simple--the path forward surely involves doing some of both and the mix is the key. However, I do think it is important to keep some idea about what we are assuming when we have this discussion. Not in the sense that we have to decide which of these perspectives represents our position, but, in fact, because of just the opposite. How can we work on both simultaneously and not get overly committed to one of these perspectives which so often seems to lead to a downward spiraling argument?

In the spirit of Craig's post, then, let me try to identify a few other assumptions and dichotomies--in addition to the ones on his list like "people vs. positions, short-term strategy vs. long term goals, collective bargaining vs. legislation, and local realities vs. public policy"--we may well have to think through in the course of our discussion.

First, we are assuming tenure is something worth keeping in academia. Tenured Radical has made a few arguments against tenure that are worth considering in later posts.

Second, we are assuming that tenure as an institution is something that can be reformed, transformed, abolished, or replaced with something better. Given that institutions are in some sense designed to resist change (whether we think of that in the "good" sense of conserving valuable traditions or the "bad" sense of resisting needed improvements is another matter), we also need to think about strategies for making what we want to happen happen.

Third, we should avoid assuming that "we" are the only ones with a stake in the discussion--students, alumni, administrators, trustees, parents, taxpayers, legislators, corporations, unions, and the general public that's supposed to benefit from the institution of tenure--all care quite a bit about what happens with/to tenure and will seize the opportunity to wrest control away from "us" whenever possible. So in addition to thinking strategically about getting results, we also have to be sure we're thinking strategically about blocking others from getting the results they want that we don't want. And since "we" are only provisionally a "we," given how many kinds of faculty positions actually exist, we also need to think about strengthening and broadening coalitions, converting opponents into allies, and so on.

I'm running out of time here at onechan's yochien, so I'll keep thinking about assumptions and dichotomies. But I want to close by talking about the kind of people I used to work with who, in retrospect, helped inspire my original question. One used to teach composition, world literature, creative writing, and science fiction, among other things, at my university as well as at the community college to the south of us. Although he didn't have a Ph.D. and had no intention of getting one, he had done a dual MFA/MA which involved a significant amount of research in his areas of specialty. Morever, he was a gifted teacher who knew how to communicate with and inspire the students from the area who made up the vast majority of our students. When he didn't make it to the MLA interview stage in a creative writing search we were doing years ago, he decided to take on a full-time position at the community college rather than keep adjuncting with us. Another dropped out of her Ph.D. program but continued to research and publish in her area of specialty while teaching composition, world literature, and Native American literature. She, too, left after we hired a tenure-track Native Americanist in our department (although there were other, personal, factors that played a greater part in her decision). So part of my asking the "two out of three ain't bad question" is to ask whether these colleagues and friends might have decided to stay and continue contributing to the work of the department if they had had better options for pay, security, and advancement.

[Update 3/2/08: Whoops, in my rush to finish I forgot to mention Assumption #4, which is that we'll be able to leverage the funding needed to reform or transform higher ed's staffing structures. This gets to the question of who pays for higher ed and how it should be financed. And not just for higher ed in general, but for the many different kinds of institutions within it.]

Want/Need/Love: A Non-Response to Craig Smith

Craig Smith at FACE Talk graciously and thoughtfully unpacked the issues raised by my fragment of a post on tenure, which was itself a sequel to my post raising the possibility of negotiating in addition to lobbying for more tenure-track lines. In neither post was I advancing an argument that I'm 100% behind, but instead floating possible solutions to longstanding issues that arise when a faculty union (or faculty/professionals one like mine) represents both the tenurable and the nontenurable--and seeking insights from Blogoramaville. So I really appreciate Craig's taking the time to take up these issues in an ongoing exchange with me and I encourage anyone interested to join in.

But since work is actually getting in the way until the very end of the week, what I can do here and now is thank him for making explicit my Queen allusion. Or whatever it is you call it when you've forgotten (repressed?) that you are, in fact, making an allusion. I can't quite say it was unintentional (is this a non-denial denial?)--I must have put it in quotes for a reason--but to the best of my memory it was for a technical rather than musical one (look and clarity, that is). But, yes, I am a Queen fan. Or maybe they're just one of the many bands from the '80s in particular that have burned their way into my memory bank, never to be rooted out. I'll blame Wayne's World rather than my ex, who was the real Queen fan in the family at the time! Who am I to put down her love of Queen when, pre-grad school, my musical tastes spanned Journey, Men at Work, Weird Al Yankovic, "Eye of the Tiger," and more that I really don't have time to confess to.

So, back to Queen, I suppose one of the biggest problems with the actually four-tiered tenure system (RTS, RT, RS, TS) I was proposing in a thought experiment kind of way is that it institutionalizes the dichotomies of want, need, and love posed in my not-quite allusion. And not only from the perspective of the institution but also from that of the faculty member. I'll really have to finish unpacking this later. Lots to do before I drop the girls off at day care!

[Update: Reading over Craig's post again just as quickly as the first time, it strikes me that I may have been working my way toward a quibble--and maybe more than a caveat--with his proposed starting point. And with that perhaps-suggestive fragment, back to work!]

[Update 2/28/08: I am SO tempted to erase all evidence of my humiliating Queen/Meat Loaf switcharoo here, which Craig was ever so kind to point out in comments, especially since Inside Higher Ed decided to feature the first two posts in our exchange. But no, let the historical record show that I am an idiot! I'm just glad they didn't link here.]

On Tenure: The "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" Route

I'm on a mailing list for activists within UUP and we've been discussing the complexities of contingent labor issues and the comcomitant difficulty of crafting legislative or activist solutions to problems. I may have had a brainstorm, however, and I need Blogoramaville's feedback. What do you all think of

a two-tiered system for tenure--those who want to go for the whole package (research/teaching/service) would get paid more than anyone who wanted to go the "two out of three ain't bad" route....

The Million Dollar Question

Another plea to the collective wisdom of Blogoramaville, this one having to do with a faculty-professionals union's priorities. I want my half dozen regular readers to help me start a meme.

Like the California Faculty Association and the Professional Staff Caucus at CUNY, United University Professions is a union that represents all teaching faculty, from Lecturers and Visiting Assistant Professors all the way up to Full Professors, in our case in the SUNY system (where we're a bit different is that we also represent academic professionals). In that infamous comment thread at How the University Works, I criticized UUP's leadership for, in essence, failing to live up to PSC-CUNY's and the CFA's example.

Mayra Besosa, a full-time lecturer and former member of the CFA's bargaining team, recently explained why issues of contingent academic labor are at the front and center of the CFA's agenda and why faculty solidarity across ranks is so crucial. She doesn't get into that many specifics, but in Marc Bousquet's How the University Works, there's an aside that caught my attention and inspired the thought experiment I'm about to put out there.

One recent California State University contract--through which the California Faculty Association compelled the administration to raise tenure-track hiring by 20 percent annually over the life of the contract in exchange for concessions in their cost of living adjustment--is an eye-opening, and heartening, exception.... (57)

With that set-up, here's my scenario for Blogoramaville to ponder:

Pretend, for the moment, that you are represented by a faculty union (let's call it UUP). Negotiations for a new contract are around the corner. UUP leadership is divided between those who want to emphasize traditional bread-and-butter issues (salary and benefits the top priority in negotiations) and those who want to try a different approach (prioritizing the expansion of the tenurable faculty as a negotiating strategy rather than only as a lobbying campaign). So they work together to develop a survey and put the question to a referendum. The survey is designed to help them figure out the complexity of the members' views; the referendum to gain clarity on the level of support for the new approach.

With me so far? OK, I'm not actually going to develop that survey myself, but think of your rationale for your decision on the referendum as what it is designed to elicit. So what I'm looking for from you is your decision and reasoning behind it on the following question:

UUP is considering a new strategy for the next round of negotiations. We are willing to offer some concessions on our demands for improvements in salary and benefits if New York State will agree to incorporate key provisions of the AFT's FACE Campaign into the next contract. So, for instance, if the state commits to reaching a 75/25 tenured/tenurable faculty to non-tenurable faculty ratio, having 2/3 of students in SUNY classes at each campus taught by tenured/tenurable faculty, and acting on our long-standing demands for improving the compensation, security, working conditions, academic freedom, and professional development opportunities of the nontenurable, we'll be open to finding ways to help them pay for all this. Do you support this approach to the next round of negotiations? Why or why not?

This is what I'm calling the million dollar question. Here's hoping it goes far and wide and gets some interesting responses.

And yes, there is a backstory to my asking this. But no, I'm not going into it now. Oh, and since I am not even a member of my chapter's Executive Board any more--thanks to the slowness of mail to and from Japan--this post has nothing to do with the current tentative agreement that UUP members will be voting on soon. And very little to do with the recent election of a new UUP President.

[Update 2/19/08: For a cogent clarification of AFT's FACE Campaign goals in Washington state, check out the latest from Craig Smith.]

Two Ways to Improve the Job Search Process in English

OK, this is only a half-serious post but there's no time even for a two-thirds serious one. How to improve the job market for literature people?

1) The Reality TV Option. For the best job on the market in a given year, produce a reality tv show. That is, use an American Idol format to narrow the field down to the dozen most viable candidates, then Survivor to get down to the three finalists, and then the Presidential race (a series of debates at peer universities and votes by profs and grad students) to decide the winner. The search committee could be involved in the first two stages in creative ways, but after that it's out of their hands.

This would publicize just how amazing the talent pool is in literary studies. The long time for it to develop would allow all kinds of looks at backgrounds of the various candidates, spark interest in the humanities more generally, and be much better for all involved than the usual process.

2) The Q-School Option. Author- and period-based professional organizations (among others) could put on late-summer conferences in which applicants (only those without and in search of a tenure-track job) can choose which of, say, 5 pressing questions in the field they want to address in their talk, narrow the participants down to the top 5 on each, spend a day discussing the answers proposed by the panelists on each question, rank the panelists at the end of the conference, and, eventually, publish a book of the winners' expanded and revised essays. The questions for the next summer's conference would be agreed-upon by the officers of the society after the conference and posted by early fall, so that everyone going on the market the following fall could have the academic year to prepare their papers and submit them in early summer. As an incentive to those who don't make the top 5, all papers from the top 30 applicants could be posted on a conference blog, opening them up to comments and feedback from the profession at large. [These numbers are customizable to the size of the organization, of course.]

This would help get attention to what the leaders of the organization see as the crucial issues in the field and help them indicate who among the not-yet-tenurable they feel most deserve jobs. With the late-summer timing of the conference and blog, candidates (in the top 5 or top 30) can include the results on their c.v.s and those who are invited to present at the conference would also benefit from the day devoted to their question and answers and the chance to interact with more established people in their field.

***

I'm sure others can come up with better ideas. Let's get creative, people!

[Update 1/30/08: Craig Smith at FACE Talk answers my call! And I got Around the Webbed by Inside Higher Ed for the first time evah. Just for the record, I wrote this on a computer in the day care center playroom imoto and I were hanging out in while onechan was in her yochien and revised it slightly when we got home. There's a lesson there somewhere.]

A Thing That Makes Me Say "Yay"--No, Four!

The Atlantic Monthly has opened its digital archives--which go back to 1857.

That is all.

No, wait! Marc Bousquet passes along the fantastic news about Adjunct Whore....

Oops--one more thing! Elizabeth at verbal privilege has posted her poetry commonplace book. Now there's a meme I'd like to see propagate!

Oh yeah, this is my 200th post here, too.

CitizenSE Teaching Manifesto, Part I: The Literature/Golf Mock(able)-Epic Simile

I have to admit to having been a bit intimidated by Craig Smith's recent decision to tag the humble proprietor of the obscurest blog on teh internets alongside such bloggy luminaries as Michael Berube, New Kid on the Hallway, Tenured Radical, and Sherman Dorn. When you consider how amazing Dr. Crazy's post that inspired Craig was--not to mention those in response to it by A White Bear, Aaron Barlow, Philosleft, and Craig himself, to name just a few--you have to wonder what you can add to the conversation. At least you do if you are me. So if you know where I'm coming from, you might be able to imagine how pleased I was to discover that the idea I came up with enables me to build upon one of my favorite CitizenSE posts in recent months.

Imagine, if you will, that a work of literature is like a golf course. Think of the process of designing and constructing a golf course as similar to imagining and composing a piece of writing. And think of how whether to play, which course to play, and how to play it can be compared to the kinds of decisions that go into whether to read, what to read, and how to read. What I am trying to get at through this opening analogy (writer as golf course architect, reader as golfer) is the notion that it is the experience (of reading, of golfing) that matters. What I like about the analogy is that golf's image as an elite and elitist sport corresponds rather well to the image of literature as an elite and elitist form of writing. (And if you believe Caleb Crain, reading may become about as prevalent as golfing this century.) For that matter, the humanities as a whole, like golf, still have a rather clubby image in popular culture--both are often represented as a luxury pasttime for the wealthy to dabble in, certainly nothing useful or productive or innovative to contribute to society. But that's a matter for another CitizenSE series....

Let's get back to teaching. Golf, like any sport, is neither a natural nor an instinctual activity. You have to learn how to do it, from many people, over time. You get better at it by doing it, again and again, though improvement is hard to come by and even harder to sustain. At some point, you may decide to become a serious golfer--you start playing more regularly, watching professional tournaments on television or in person, reading golf publications for tips and examples, researching equipment options, playing golf video games obsessively, betting with your playing partners, and so on. Eventually you may decide to become a competitive golfer--you start seeking perspective on your swing from a book, pro, and/or machine, getting your clubs fitted,joining a team and learning from a coach and your fellow players, playing in tournaments and learning from your fellow competitors, and so on. To extend my analogy further, serious golfers are like literature majors, competitive golfers are like literature graduate students, professors at teaching institutions are like teaching pros, and professors at research institutions are like touring pros.

Now, how does this mock(able)-epic simile help me answer the question of why I teach and why it matters? Sure, I love pushing the serious golfers and mentoring the competitive ones as much as the next teaching pro and am overjoyed when former students make a splash in academia. And I love teaching the occasional graduate seminar and sharing my limited experiences as a touring pro when appropriate with my master's students here. But what I love the most is the challenge of figuring out how to draw new golfers into the sport, helping beginners master the fundamentals and enjoy the game, and encouraging intermediate golfers to become serious golfers. That's why I teach so many introductory and general education courses here. I want all the students I teach to come away from my courses willing to consider acting on the idea that reading literature, like playing golf, can be a worthwhile and rewarding lifelong activity.

All well and good so far, but the reading literature/playing golf analogy has much farther-reaching implications, which require me to unpack some of the key terms I just used. What are some of the fundamentals of golf? Beyond obvious things like learning the rules and etiquette of the game, developing a consistent pre-shot routine, honing your grip, stance, alignment, and swing, and building your repertoire of shots, pitches, chips, scrambles, and putts, I have in mind analyzing and assessing the hole in front of you, imagining what shot you want to hit next in light of the course and weather conditions, figuring out what kind of swing you need to make to execute the shot, and learning how to focus enough to do it increasingly consistently, under various degrees of pressure and distraction, every time you address the ball. I won't try to give the literacy/literary equivalent of every one of these golf fundamentals, but I will point out that they all involve becoming more self-aware as a reader and more attentive to the text in front of you--its form, the genres and conventions it participates in, the allusions it makes to other texts and intertextual dialogues it enters into, and so on. Just as you get more enjoyment out of golf as you become better able to make solid contact with the ball and hit it closer to where you are aiming, so, too, do you enjoy reading literature more and appreciate what writers are doing better the more familiar you become with various examples of effective uses of rhythm, imagery, metaphor, symbolism, tone, point-of-view, irony, ambiguity, and so forth. The way I try to draw new golfers into the game, then, is to teach an integrated combination of reader-response, formalist, and structuralist techniques of reading and responding to literary texts in introductory and general education courses. I try to take students--many of whom, to the extent that they have been trained to read literature, have been trained to cherry-pick a poem for a metaphor or locate a story among four core themes (Man vs....) and write about it in a cookie-cutter 5-paragraph essay--and show them that there's a bigger and better rationale for understanding and acting upon the interrelation between techniques, strategies, and experiences of reading literature.

Here's where my teaching--and, I believe, the teaching of the vast majority of my colleagues in my department and across the country--departs most dramatically from the paranoid vision of the David Horowitzes of the world. I'm not trying to indoctrinate my students into what I consider to be the one best way of swinging a club, playing a hole, and thinking your way around a course. Sure, I'll demonstrate a few shots, show them clips of how various golfers have played a given hole, and give them advice on playing a particular course. But I can't play the game for them. What I can do is to try to give all my students the tools and the opportunities to practice making their own decisions on how, when, and why to play the game. Because I know from experience that each round of golf is different, even when played on the same course by the same person, I take for granted that every person is going to have their own experience on each reading of a literary text. That doesn't mean they designed the course; it just means they're following a fairly unique path around it. And it's worth their time and effort to keep track of their path, compare it to others', and reflect on the similarities and differences, not just to modify their techniques and strategies for the next round, but to get a better sense of the range of experiences and emotions golf offers, as well.

This is where the ambiguity in the term reading in my mock(able)-epic simile matters most. Reading is not just the personal and individual and private process of experiencing a text, it is also the social and collective and public process of sharing one's experiences with others. Sure, there's a difference between playing alone and playing with partners, random or regular, but both are forms of golf. Very few people, that is, are satisfied with stopping after having arrived as their own construals and interpretations of a text for themselves alone--they want to share their responses with others, out of confusion, curiosity, competition, and more. The dialogue and debate that emerges from this process of intersubjective responding can have multiple effects--appreciation of the nuances of the course/text and of the various ways to play/read it, a desire to seek out other courses/texts by the same architect/author, development of strategic and/or critical thinking skills, self-knowledge of various kinds, understanding of and empathy with others, values-clarification, community-formation, and more. But there's no guarantee that any of these things will actually happen for every single golfer/reader in every one of my classes. Making people write and read each other's responses can help, as can responsible and responsive comments from their peers and professor, but writing is no panacea, either. Unless my students discover they like playing golf and want to get better at it, all the best teaching in the world won't motivate them to benefit from the byproducts of entering into the discipline that learning to be a better golfer/reader requires. (In this sense, learning to play golf is like learning fencing or chess or dance or a martial art.)

If I were to stop here, no doubt you'd be justified in responding with some version of "So long and thanks for all the [Stanley] Fish." Sure, I think Fish is seriously mistaken when he concludes his recent New York Times piece on the uses of the humanities with:

So two cheers for critical thinking, but the fact that you can learn how to do it in any number of contexts means that it cannot be claimed for the humanities as a special benefit only they can supply. Justification requires more than evidence that a consumer can get a desirable commodity in your shop, too; it requires a demonstration that you have the exclusive franchise.

And I have problems with the way he answers his own questions here:

The pertinent question is, Do humanities courses change lives and start movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized?

If the answers to these questions are (as I contend) "no"--one teaches the subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is contingent and cannot be aimed at--then the route of external justification of the humanities, of a justification that depends on the calculation of measurable results, is closed down.

But I think he's onto something about the implications of his answers there and when he claims here that

the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external to the obsessions that lead some (like me) to devote their working lives to them--measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perceptions, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination. If these or some other instrumental benchmarks--instrumental in the sense that they are tied to a secondary effect rather than to an internal economy--are what the humanities must meet, they will always fall short. But the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value.

This is something I'll take up later in a series on assessment, but my response is actually implicit in my playing golf/reading literature mock(able)-epic simile. Is there any good reason Tiger Woods made $100M last year just for playing golf superlatively well? Should we begrudge Lorena Ochoa her record-smashing $4.36M in winnings during the 2007 LPGA season? Although we might question the motives of the corporations that invest in tournament (and televised) golf and sponsor players, or critically analyze the systems that make up the golf industry and connect it to others, we can't ignore that people around the world are inspired by Tiger's and Lorena's play, want to watch them compete against the best in the world at what they do, and want to join in the fun. Just look at how many Korean golfers have come to the LPGA following in Se Ri Pak's history-making footsteps and you can see that playing golf well has real effects. By the same token, the readings of academostars as well as the less celebrated among literature's touring pros--the entire scholarly apparatus that Fish attacks for being too specialized, too insular, too detached, too exclusive, too arcane, too impenetrable--provide examples for analysis, assessment, emulation, modification, rejection and more by beginning, intermediate, serious, and competitive readers everywhere, not to mention other teaching and touring pros.

This leads me to another turn of the mock(able)-epic simile screw, one which returns me to teaching. Even in my introductory and general education courses, I want my students to understand that there's more to reading literature than developing and sharing readings of texts. Often I start with something as seemingly simple but actually complex as authorial intent, ouevre, and influence: what can we glean from the way a course is laid out about the options for play that the architect had in mind when designing the course? what do his/her designs imply about the state of the game at that time? what characterizes his/her body of work and how does it develop over time? what aspects of his/her predecessors' and contemporaries' designs were most influential on his/her own work? This is where issues of canonization arise: who are the most influential architects in history? which are the best courses? the best holes? the best tournaments? what courses should serious golfers play before they die? and why? And this, in turn, turns us to issues in and around the golf industry, from those who commission courses to those who maintain them to those who manufacture and sell and market and review the equipment necessary to make, maintain, and play them. In the same way that a golf course is part of a much larger set of institutions, so, too, is any work of literature.

Sure, you don't need to be concerned with all these issues to become a serious or competitive golfer, much less a teaching or touring pro. But you don't need to enter an M.F.A. program to experience their relevance personally; anyone who wants to get published today (or knows someone who has tried) runs smack into them (at least vicariously). Even people who are stuggling just to get the ball off the ground should know a little bit about where the ball and club they are using came from, the history of the development of these technologies, what swing options they have and the history of debates over and analysis of them, where what is in front of them came from and the history of the development of various hazards (rough, trees, sand, water), and what the experiences of those who have gone through similar and other struggles have been like. Of course it's still up to them to get that ball in the air. But they can better appreciate the difficulty, why so many people have exposed themselves to it, and what they can learn from it if what they are doing gets contextualized and if they learn how to contextualize what they are doing. So while I strive to teach my students how to play golf in my intro and gen ed courses, I also want them to begin paying attention to the history, sociology, psychology, economics, ecology, and technology of the sport. This is why teaching literature for me is a wildly interdisciplinary activity, not just limited to the traditional humanities.

Of course, the institution of literature will persist whether or not there remain any professors in the humanities left to research it or teach it. But that doesn't mean that the teaching of literature in college and graduate school by trained professionals is valueless or that nothing would be lost by its disappearance. Given the ubiquity of advice on playing golf, teaching pros will always have to strive to figure out what they can bring to their students that they couldn't otherwise or easily get themselves, how to design their courses to make the best use of the time spent together in the classroom, and modify their plans and strategies in light of what they are discovering about the actual students in the course. Research matters because it means that courses get played (books stay in print) or restored (through textual editing) or rediscovered (through the production of new scholarly editions of forgotten texts). When scholars find something of value in such courses for players today and teachers want their students to learn from the experience of playing them, on their own and together, touring and teaching pros can help shape the future of golf/literature.

To me, the question of why I teach is inseparable from what I teach and how. When I return to this series, I'll use my teaching from last semester and the upcoming one to show how my answers vary by course and how my courses fit together.

[Update: Reading around others who have responded to Craig's call, I eventually made my way back to One Flew East and discovered a gem of a book review on video games, literacy, and learning. Read the whole thing, as someone is reputed to have once said. My first response was, "damn, why didn't my colleague and I follow through on that crazy Video Game Studies Summer Camp idea we had back in 1999?" My second was, "why didn't Sloucho and I get our act together back in the early '00s and actually write that Video Game Studies book together?" It took until the third response to realize that the author of the book Aaron reviews is actually fleshing out the ideas I'm gesturing toward here about teaching and learning, but with respect to video games rather than golf.]

[Update 2 1/27/08: Here's a line from the rookie who was playing with Tiger Woods on Saturday at the Buick and, like the rest of the field, got smoked:

"That was one of the coolest things ever, no doubt," he said. "He was fun to watch but just kind of fun to compare myself against him, as well. It's inspiring and very educational. I recommend everyone try it at least one time."

The title of Doug Ferguson's AP article from which this observation comes says it all: "Tiger Puts on a Clinic at Torrey Pines."]

Tagged!

Craig Smith at Free Exchange on Campus just tagged me. I'm it--yay! Uh oh--now I have to live up to Dr. Crazy's inspiring example. With two girls still on antibiotics and an office move happening tomorrow, it's going to be a little while before my CitizenSE Teaching Manifesto is ready for action. Let's see if I can finish it before my taggees do:

A White Bear [Update 1/16/08: damn!]
Rob MacDougall
Marc Bousquet
Jennifer [Update 1/25/08: sweet!]
The Hobgoblin

[Update 1/22/08: Did it! Or at least started it.]

[Update 1/30/08: My tags have no power on men! Maybe a look at the list of contributors will inspire you all!]