Non-Western Literature Student Learning Analyses: The Untouchables on Marquez

I'm experimenting this year with adding blogging into the mix of things students do in my courses. So this semester I'll be posting post-group research/teaching-project learning analyses from students in my Non-Western Literature course. The students' task in this assignment, one dimension of many they're being assessed on in this project, is simply to identify the one or two most interesting things they learned about the text and or writer on which they presented as a result of the planning, research, teaching, and reflection/assessment process they went through in doing the project. These are not meant to be full-blown analytical/interpretive/argumentative critical essays, but instead little personal, subjective pieces on what the text they taught meant to them.

Here's the first batch, from a team who named themselves The Untouchables and lead a great discussion on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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Anonymous #1 leads off:

I learned a great deal about 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I came across many themes in the novel such as solitude, magical realism, and politics. However, the two things that I found to be most interesting was how real life experiences influenced him and how the novel is circular. Overall I enjoyed this novel.

Some of the things that influenced Marquez to write 100 Years of Solitude were the banana republic, his grandfather shooting and killing a man and his grandmother going blind; these were just some of the things that occurred in the novel. He was raised by his grandparents for eight years. His grandfather was a father to sixteen children. Colonel Aureliano represents his grandfather in the novel. There was a character in the novel that went blind just as his grandmother did.

Another thing I found interesting was how the novel is circular which is represented by the characters who travel to different locations but they always end up coming back to the main location which was Macondo. Jose Arcadio leaves with the Gypsies, his ship gets wrecked so he returns back to Macondo. Colonel Aureliano Buendia constantly returns to the town after his fight against the conservatives. The seventeen sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendia always return to the town and end up dying there.

I learned so much about the author Marquez and how his life played a big part when it came to writing his novels. I like how he was very descriptive in his novel; it made me want to keep reading. Through those descriptions I was able to formulate a picture in my mind which helped me to understand what was really going on in the novel.

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Katie continues:

While reading the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez I found myself thinking about life itself. The novel made me stop and I thought about life, and the things in it. The novel also made me think about what it means to be lonely and what happens to those who find themselves alone. Solitude is one of the themes in this novel and I think that the readers should think more about this theme when reading it.

Solitude is a real subject in life, and it can mean different things to everyone. In the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, all of the members of the Buendía family experience solitude in one way or another. Each of the members in this family is a part of something bigger that was started by two of the older members. Úrsula founded a new town with some of the other women in the family when the town they were living at kept looking at the family as weird people. The family was involved with incest, and so they were cursed to have a baby with a pig tail. The town was called Macondo and it wasn’t surrounded by other towns, so it was in solitude that way as well as the family members of the Buendías.

While reading the novel more, I found that the Buendías over time were not really with each other mentally. They are with each other in the town but they have their own lives and they do their own thing. Also, many of the Buendías leave Macondo, but then they come back to the town. For example, with Amaranta and how she returned to the town after a while being away. She came back along with everyone in the family who did leave Macondo. It seemed to me like no matter what each member of this family did, they just couldn’t stay away. With many families people do leave and then come together for special occasions, but this family didn’t really do that.

I found that doing research on the book while reading it, that Márquez was in solitude for a long period of time while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. I thought that that was interesting to know, because his characters had this connection with him. Overall this was a good book to read, because it has several lessons and what it means to be a family. Families interact with each other, and it’s good to have that connection. Also, that solitude is different from one person to the next and it’s not just one person alone with no one else. It can also mean that a person is in the midst of a crowd, yet that person can feel alone. This novel speaks differently to each reader, and the reader has to find out for him or herself what the novel is trying to convey.

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Preston adds:

First off, I would like to say that I really enjoyed reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It really made me think, and look at non-western literature in a whole new light. What I mean by this is the book opened my eyes to what could be considered non-western literature and what could be considered western literature. Not only this, but it makes you think about third world countries in a whole new light. This book gives us a view of people that were not from Colombia. They were brought over by Francis Drake’s voyage. So when we see this book we look at it in a western light because they are Spanish from Spain. However, they are living in a third world country that has been cast down and is in turmoil. So the book could clearly be seen in a western and non-western light; this makes it arguable for either side.

I would like to now direct your attention to the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He talks about how the winners write the history. So should we look at the Buendia family as winners or the losers? Well by the time we get to the end of the book we can see that they clearly are the losers since all but two have died. The clear winners would be the people like Marquez who escaped out of the town’s solitude. Yet, really the Buendias are a second generation of victims. The first being all the displaced people (Indians) who were in Colombia before Drake came.

I think Marquez is a truly unique author who was able to use the events within his life to make a story. This I find interesting because being a future teacher, I plan to have students write about their own lives. Thus I could use Marquez as an example of how one’s own life can be the ground work in a novel of their own. However, I would personally not use this with any class under 11th grade and would make sure that the students as well as the parents were aware of the themes within the book (incest, violence, etc.).

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So there you have it. Next up: Team Ghosh! on In an Antique Land.

[Update 4/3/08: This Wikipedia article on Marquez got "featured article" status and it was done by students of this guy!]

This is for D at LGM

Let's compare CBAs! UUP's new contract got an A+ from the membership (close to 98% approval rate). What grade does it deserve?

You Won't Find This on The Edge of the American West

Unless Ari and Eric get seriously into Tim Burke or Rob MacDougall territory. What am I talking about? Click here! Hey, just doing my part to help my favorite blogging historians broaden their horizons. And trying to make CitizenSE just a little bit fun again.

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.]

Go Read This Now!

No, not because a friend of mine from grad school got published in The New Yorker. And not because his argument confirms my long-held view that the Mexican War and Spanish-American War are the most useful historical analogues to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. No, read it for the questions this finely-nuanced historical account of American responses to water torture by the U.S. military in the occupied Philippines raises about the state of the nation as it entered the 20th and 21st centuries.

English is Rotten Here

Well, at least at Politics and Culture, according to Amitava Kumar. Here, too, though, I would hope. And perhaps also in the state of globalizing U.S. higher ed, as Andrew Ross suggests in a long excerpt from his co-edited collection, The University Against Itself.

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.]

An Open Invitation to "Anti-hypocrisy advocate"

Whoever you are--whether tenured faculty, long-time adjunct activist, or someone else entirely--I was entirely serious when I invited you to guest blog here at CitizenSE over on that comment thread at How the University Works. So I'll restate the offer: I'll publish your review of Marc's book here--in the exact state you send it to me. I'll even post a response. You can call it a refereed and peer-reviewed electronic publication on your c.v., if you wish, but you don't have to out yourself to me or anyone who happens to drop by the obscurest blog on teh intertubes. Heck, if you want to join in on the polemical fun at the debate blog I founded and sometimes contribute to still, I'm open to that--that AAUP-NY silencing thing sounds like it deserves wider play.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I called you names, tossed off unfounded accusations and disparaging remarks, and concern trolled you. But if you can't take what you were dishing out, you may as well go back to commenting at Inside Higher Ed under different pseudonyms.

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CitizenSE regulars, please lend me your critical distance! Was AHA trolling Marc? Was I too mean to AHA? Have Marc and I become the new good old boys as AHA accuses? Special bonus question: why do you think AHA rubbed me so precisely the wrong way? Oh, and congratulate Marc on his good news!

On Funding Public Higher Education, Part V: Service; or, Seizing the Levers

Take a look around your campus: do you have a union? an AAUP chapter? a college or university senate? Now ask yourself: who's in charge of them? what is their agenda? do I like it or not? could I do better?

The reason I ask these questions is a comment thread I've been participating on at Marc Bousquet's How the University Works. In the course of dropping an f-bomb, constructively of course, I tried to make the point that hypocrisy cuts both ways and organizing is the answer.

But the point that I want to make here is that tenure-track faculty need to stop treating service as the third wheel of the research-teaching-service triad. Sure, three's a crowd, but the sooner we think of service as the terrain for institutional activism, the better off we'll be, personally and as a profession. So do me a favor: read Marc's book, consider his arguments, and reflect on what you can do, individually and with colleagues in your department, division, university, and system (if you're part of one) to solve some of the problems he identifies in the places you can make the biggest impact.

And the point I want to make to the nontenurable majority is similar: if your university is like mine, there's a real generation gap in campus leadership among the faculty. Rather than turn it into another excuse to slag baby boomers, why not join in and take over the institutions at your campus from which you can best make change? If the leadership on your campus is anything like mine, they're eager to mentor newbies and give them serious responsibilities. And if not, well, that's why they have elections.

Unlike the wealthiest private institutions, most public higher education institutions really are constrained--by legislators afraid to raise taxes or authorize tuition hikes, by a history of failure to prioritize endowment growth, and much more--to exploit their part-timers and overwork their full-timers. Taking on more work--in an area least likely to improve your salary or status in the short run--may sound rather counterintuitive, to say the least. But unless administrators, legislators, parents, and prospective students are made aware of the quality of the work the faculty is doing and how much better we could do with more funding, their only demand is going to be for colleges and universities to cut costs.

More on that demand later.

We Interrupt This CitizenSE Hiatus to Bring You This sf@SF Public Announcement

For those of you who have been itching to see Samuel Delany's "significant distortion of the present" idea applied to George Stewart's Earth Abides, you've come to the wrong place. Go here, young geek! Or old geezer. Or whomever you may be. Westward, ho!

No Time

It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done in my life to kick off a semester in which, over the course of its first few weeks, 6 candidates are coming to campus and 4 colleagues are coming up for reappointment/tenure--and in which I trade associate chair for university senator and co-chair of an active committee--by teaching two novels that I've never even read before. It's not that I'm not loving them--they were the exact right choices to start both classes--but my choice certainly doesn't make a week in which I'm also trying to get funding to bring a hopefully-soon-to-be-named writer to one class, finalizing colleagues' guest spots in another, setting up student teams for research/teaching projects in two, and nailing down the logistics of a campus talk by a former mentor of mine at Seinan Gakuin University any easier or less stressful. Which is why things have been quiet in these here parts for the past week. And threaten to be for the next two. Unless the urge to complain becomes too pressing again. Don't even get me started on the mystery ailments afflicting the Full Metal Archivist and me that are baffling doctors all over town, and, probably soon, out of town!

For the First Time in Ten Years

I'm teaching what used to be called Third World Literature, got renamed Non-Western Literature, and shall be renamed...what? Literature of the Global South? World Bank Literature? Postcolonial Literature?

Amazing Colleagues, Part II

With CitizenSE in danger of losing its status as the obscurest blog on teh internets, thanks to Inside Higher Ed, now is as good a time as any to pick up my series on the incredible people I work with where I left off last October--with our creative writers. James Thomas Stevens, author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations, A Bridge Dead in the Water, Bulle/Chimére, and The Mutual Life, is one of the most impressive people I've ever met. It's not just that he's a fantastic poet, essayist, teacher, historian, and theorist--often simultaneously. Or that he has a gift for languages, a knack for research, a zest for connections, and a healthy disrespect for arbitrary borders. It's that you can always count on him to call it as he sees it--after seeing it from angles few others could imagine. His only flaw is an intolerance for science fiction--and a stubborn refusal to admit that Almanac of the Dead is a science fiction novel--but nobody's perfect, eh?

Announcing sf@SF: Science Fiction at SUNY Fredonia

My science fiction course begins in less than an hour, so I'm officially launching the course web site and course blog right...about...now!

On Funding Public Higher Education, Part IV: The Billion Dollar Endowment Club

Late last week, NACUBO released their 2007 report, which discloses that there are now 76 colleges and universities in the Billion Dollar Endowment Club. That same week, Inside Higher Education covered new developments in the world of higher education endowments and their political repercussions. And the always-thoughtful Timothy Burke, riffing on an Andrew Delbanco/Roger Lehecka op-ed in The New York Times, considered alternatives to a renewed financial aid arms race between the Harvards (#1; $34.63B) and Yales (#2; $22.53B) and the Williamses (#1 small liberal arts college; #33 overall; $1.89B) and Pomonas (#2 SLAC; #38 overall; $1.76B) of the U.S. My goal in this post is to use Burke's analysis and proposals as a lever to shift the discussion from relations between the top and bottom of the Billion Dollar Endowment Club to relations between the BDEC and the overwhelming majority of the 4000+ higher education institutions in the U.S.--those with endowments less than $50M.

Let's start with Burke's insight that, particularly among peer institutions, endowments matter:

Each institution uses marketing literature to highlight its major sources of distinctiveness, like Swarthmore’s Honors program or Reed’s focus on individualized senior research projects. But these are like shiny decorations on top of a basically similar cake. The big difference, in the end, is the relative wealth of a given institution: that’s what determines how big and lustrous and tasty the cake really is. Swarthmore can support the range of subjects and favorable student-faculty ratio that it has because in the end, that’s what it spends its considerable money doing: having a curriculum that’s unusually wide for the small size of the institution without using large lecture courses or adjunct instructors as the primary vehicle for delivering that curriculum.

You don't have to get to the final analysis to conclude that Swarthmore is wealthy. Its $1.44B endowment (#6 SLAC and #50 overall), is over twice the size of Hamilton College's (#16 SLAC; #101 overall, $.7B)--the college I graduated from--which, by the way, has an endowment around 40 times the size of the institution's at which I work, even though we enroll more undergraduates than it and Swarthmore put together (don't even ask what percentage of Princeton's endowment ours is!). With its wealth, Swarthmore can offer about the same range of majors and courses to about the same range of students as the much larger institutions at the top of the BDEC, but distinguishes itself from them through its choice to do so in small classes taught mostly by tenured and tenure-track professors. Part of this is by necessity--they have no graduate students to apprentice exploit. But a lot of it is seeking comparative advantage--they believe that severely limiting the number of courses taught by non-tenurable faculty on their campus will better prepare the students they choose and who choose them to excel in their careers and donate enough over the course of them so that they can continue to afford to try luring future students from the larger highly selective private colleges and universities at the top of the BDEC.

Burke would like to see the SLACs that can afford to make this gamble

do a lot more to shoulder the responsibility of social mobility, to work harder to bring in first-generation college students. To a significant extent, I’d like to see Swarthmore and all of its peers shift some of the efforts we presently put into pursuing diversity across a very wide range into the dedicated pursuit of qualified applicants who would be first-generation college students, to look at economic diversity as Job #1.

Although Swarthmore could afford to add resources to this effort rather than shifting them away from other kinds of diversity initiatives, Burke's proposal is admirable for many reasons, particularly in light of Delbanco and Lehecka's "scandalous fact" that

between 2004 and 2006--an era of enormous private wealth accumulation--27 of the 30 top-ranked American universities and 26 of the top 30 liberal arts colleges saw a decline in the percentage of low-income (Pell-grant-eligible) students.

And it is clever, as well. Those schools that follow Burke's lead would be gaining, at least for the short term, another comparative advantage on their peer institutions, as there presumably are the same or perhaps greater advantages from the experience of economic diversity as of other forms. Still, implementing it would affect only the relatively few such students who could be admitted into such highly selective small colleges. This is one of the key problems with the social mobility model that Burke invokes here. Even if every single private institution in the BDEC were to act on his proposal, we'd continue to have a higher education system in which the most educational resources were devoted to the students who, in a sense, least need them.

To be sure, there are several public systems in the BDEC, but take one guess where most of the endowment resources typically flow in them. Yup, to the "flagships," the Ph.D.-granting institutions--those that value research over teaching, that substitute non-tenurable teachers for tenurable ones as often as they can, just like the Harvards and Yales of the BDEC. The portion of the endowment that escapes this gravitational field and makes its way to the "satellites," the public regional universities, guarantees that no matter how much individual administators and faculty in them value teaching, the percentage of courses taught by the non-tenurable remains shockingly high.

Let's face it: probably about a dozen of the schools in the BDEC can afford to do just about anything they want with respect to student target markets, curriculum, staffing, tuition, fees, and aid, and institutional growth. The rest are looking nervously over their shoulders at what those institutions decide to do. But if they all were to ask themselves how they could have the greatest effect on class in America, they would stop obsessing over intra-BDEC relations, stop acting as if the relations between the wealthy and less wealthy were all that mattered, and start paying attention to relations between elite and non-elite colleges and universities.

The BDEC could, for instance, turn the table on the states and the federal government. There's an easy way to shift public discussion from why the BDEC is spending so little while their endowments are growing so much to why public higher education is so underfunded. If most in the BDEC were to follow my advice and get creative about donating 1% of their capital gains each year to deserving colleges and universities that value teaching, they would not only be putting their endowments to better use but also showing up the state. If they were to act on the principle that quality education ought not to be a class privilege, they might be able to shame the state into changing how, in Marc Bousquet's nice phrase, the university works. But of course they'd have to get their own houses in order, at the same time, and stop relying so much on non-tenurable teachers.

I hope that Burke would support such a strategy, even though in the long run it could jeopardize the very comparative advantage that distinguishes the Swarthmores of the world from the Harvards. The best SLACs, after all, benefit from the exploitation of graduate employees and other casualized academic workers that is the norm in the rest of the American academic world. Were that exploitation to become the exception rather than the rule in U.S. higher education, what would become of the formerly exceptional SLACs? This is where Burke's emphasis on mission differentiation takes on added significance.

Less wealthy institutions could make a different choice than throwing poorer students overboard in order to discount tuition to less academically qualified but financially attractive upper-middle class students. They could aim to live in the “long tail” of the education marketplace. Right now, there are relatively few selective colleges and universities that try to deliver a strongly distinctive kind of education....

I think the answer for less wealthy institutions isn’t to either keep up with the Joneses or complain bitterly about the inequity of Harvard’s tuition initiatives. It’s to get out of the game of trying to be all things to all possible students, to drop services and curriculum not because of a need to indiscriminately economize but because of a strategic, deliberate decision to specialize or seek distinction in some highly specific area or philosophical approach. Frankly, I think the wealthier institutions could use a shot of this kind of thinking, too.

To return to Burke's earlier "cake" metaphor that is recalled by his closing "shot" metaphor, his advice is open to multiple readings. Perhaps Burke is playing with the metaphor that in the American educational system primary education is the appetizer, secondary education the main course, and post-secondary the dessert. Diversifying dessert offerings makes sense within this frame. Rather than trying to decorate the cake differently or use an innovative icing--or even develop a new recipe--he is calling on those outside the BDEC to stop assuming that cakes are the only dessert that need be served. Or perhaps Burke is juxtaposing the meat and potatoes education available at most colleges and universities with the luxuries of the BDEC and suggesting that less wealthy institutions get out of the dessert business entirely.

In either case, while avoiding a certain "Let them eat cake" cluelessness about class in America, Burke's metaphors obscure as much as they reveal. U.S. higher education does need a shot in the arm. But no matter what an institution specializes in or how it differentiates its mission from its peers, its students still need well-balanced meals produced and served primarily by tenured and tenure-track professionals. Unfortunately, as Bousquet shows in How the University Works, what most get instead is a system modelled after the fast food industry:

Ask any thirty-seven-year-old graduate employee, with her ten or more years of service and just beginning to peak in her pedagogical and scholarly powers, yet soon to be replaced by a twenty-two-year-old master's degree candidate: Is this a system that teaches well? And she will answer: Heck, no, it is just a system that teaches cheaply.... [T]he system of disposable faculty continuously replaces its most experienced and accomplished teachers with persons who are less accomplished and less experienced. (42)

This is why Delbanco and Lehecka's proposals for federal action, while representing a valuable first step toward solving the accessibility crisis in private higher education, don't go nearly far enough toward addressing the disease raging through the entire system.

For every college to become accessible to talented students regardless of income, the federal government must create enhanced grant programs, progressive tax incentives and programs that reduce the debt of graduates who spend time in public service.

Making higher education affordable for all matters little if the way it is done provides perverse incentives for the few colleges and universities that don't follow the sickening labor and staffing practices of the Harvards and Yales of the world into following their lead. If the best-endowed private institutions in the BDEC were instead to follow the lead of the Swarthmores and the Hamiltons of the world, their example might help restore the health of higher education in America.

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.