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.

Nalo Hopkinson to Make Toronto-to-Fredonia Commute

[cross-posted from sf@SF]

It's official! Award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer Nalo Hopkinson will be giving a reading/lecture at SUNY Fredonia on Monday, April 21st. And she'll be making a special appearance in our Science Fiction class the following day, which we're moving to a new room to accommodate Saundra Liggins's African American literature class and any other Fredonians who want to attend.

Many thanks to the Dean of Arts and Humanities John Kijinski, the Pride Alliance, the Science Fiction Fantasy Gamers Guild, and the Mary Louise White Fund--not to mention the amazing Ms. Hopkinson herself--for making this visit possible. And to Jeffrey McMinn, Textbook Manager at SUNY Fredonia, who will have about 25 copies of her newest novel, The New Moon's Arms (which, by the way, was recently shortlisted for the Nebula and Aurora awards) and her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (which won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1997 and recently was one of the 5 finalists among the books selected for the Canada Reads program).

Here are the details:

Monday, April 21, 4:30 pm, Thompson W101: Reading/Lecture on race in science fiction; free and open to the public

Tuesday, April 22, 2 pm, McEwen G26: Class Visit; free and open to SUNY Fredonia students, faculty, and staff

And a bit of a bio:

Born in Jamaica, and raised in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the U.S., Nalo Hopkinson has lived in Canada since her family moved there in 1977 when she was 16 years old. The author of four novels and two short story collections, she has branched out into essays, editing, and art in recent years.

Spread the word!

Beyond Just Talking

OK, so we just had our own little in-house symposium on world literature/s that I've been blogging on a bit lately (and on which more to come) that we're thinking of expanding for next fall, but if there's one place I could be this weekend besides home grading, it would be the Rethinking the University conference that Marc Bousquet has been blogging about lately at How the University Works. I'm particularly interested in the calls there to "teach the university," as I've been doing something along those lines the past few years and will have a chance to do it again next fall, once for undergrads entering the major and again for Master's students entering the graduate program. If anyone in Blogoramaville has any suggestions on how to revise my approaches to raising these issues with students, chime in!

On Teaching World Literature/s, Part I: The Value of Just Talking

I'm still processing the 3-hour-long discussion on world literature/s that members of my department had this past Sunday (the last hour of which I missed due to a nasty sinus infection that's hit the Full Metal Archivist just as she enters the home stretch of her MLS program's semester--ugh!), and with grading and advising taking up the rest of this week, I won't be able to do more than a few quick hits on it this week here.

Our original plan was to focus in the first hour on concepts and theories of world/global literature, use the next hour for breakout sessions on how and what and why we teach what we do in the world literature courses that we teach, and then turn to issues of goals, mission, requirements, and curriculum in the final hour. The point wasn't to come up with any proposals or voting items, but to take some time to hear each other out, learn about the history of the department, consider how the issues and debates in the scholarly literature play out in our teaching experiences, and so on. What was great was that we had one emeritus professor (and former dean) and one full professor who could fill the rest of us in on the discussions and planning that went into the shift in the early '90s from a British/American-survey-based core to a world genre-based core; a handful of recently-tenured people who could speak to our intellectual journeys in our time here, partially as a result of teaching in that core; and a good number of new and relatively new hires who could bring fresh eyes to our majors (English and English-Adolescence Education). What was also great was that we could have the discussion without a sense of looming crisis: long before my cohort came here, we were one of the most influential departments in campus governance and we've done a lot of serious work to continue that tradition in the past decade; we have a very high percentage of majors per graduating class relative to the national average in English; and we just had an amazing Open House for admitted students the day before, the largest in the university's history, in which every student I talked to said that we were already their first choice. (That didn't stop those of us at my table during lunch from venting over assessment, accreditation, the SUNY system's misguided approach to general education, and NY State economics/politics, of course.) What wasn't so great was that due to travel, health, birth, leaves, and other matters, some key people had to miss the symposium. On the bright side, that meant those of us who were there could be a bit more informal and flexible than we had originally planned. In fact, we actually had an intense two-hour-straight discussion on our first two topics as a full group, without having to break out into smaller groups--or even break for a snack!

I won't use this post to get into the actual issues we discussed; what I want to focus on instead was the value of the discussion itself. When I arrived here in 1998, the new faculty had plenty of time to talk in the hallway, drop in on each other's offices, hang out downtown together, have each other over for meals, and generally get to know each other and the established faculty quite well, both in personal and professional terms. Over the course of the ensuing decade, I've found that my time is much less my own. This is not simply due to a shift from being single the first half to starting a family the second half, although the fact that so many people in my department and our wider circles of friends have been making the same shift has obviously had a huge effect. But in my experience, what's had an even bigger effect is a marked increase in workload, particularly in service. Increasingly, my time on campus has been eaten up by meetings and preparations for meetings. Even though I've eliminated union service this year (thanks to ballots for the 2007 elections taking forever to reach me in Japan) and cut back sharply on university service (I'm back on the University Senate this semester and was just nominated and voted in to be its Vice Chair next academic year, though, so that's coming to an end), the intensity and stakes of department service have taken me by surprise. What this has meant is that besides the mentoring I've been doing this year (and can I add how pleased I am that 2 of the 3 I worked with as associate chair want to continue working with me?), I've barely had time to sit down and talk with anyone in my department, including my best friends, for more than a few minutes at a time.

So just taking the time to have an intellectual/professional discussion with my friends and colleagues was--how shall I say it?--great fun. Even more fun than listening to my colleagues whom I invited to speak with my students in my introduction to the major half-semester seminar or participating in the Theory Live series one of my new colleagues organized this semester (on which more later). It's funny what a pleasure it can be to simply hear what we think and why, what we've done and how it's worked, what issues we have with the world literature core and what we ought to do about them/it. And to realize how much I missed this kind of exchange. Next in this series: what kind of exchange it was.

On World Literature/s

Since the early 1990s, my department has placed world literature at the core of the English major--students here have to take 3 of 4 courses in an introductory genre-based world lit sequence--but since I've been teaching here we've never really sat down and systematically examined what we mean by "global literature," how we approach teaching it, and how we might improve on the goals and requirements of our major. That's going to change later today. We'll be building on an earlier Global Studies conference we co-organized and responding in particular to a few pieces from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's World Literature/s Research Workshop, 2007-2008:

• the introductory distinction proposed by the workshop organizers between World Literature and World Literatures:
  
  

  World Literature - in the singular - seems reserved for the repository of the timeless wisdom of the world, the best representation of the multitude of narrative forms and traditions around the world from the antiquity to the present. World Literatures - in the plural - however, is unreflectively used for contemporary literature written in and/or translated into English and other languages of European descent. Marketed as exemplars of the contemporariness of the world, such literary works make their way into the classroom through courses and series on “World Literatures.” The seemingly democratic plurality ascribed to the noun, however, does not guarantee this body of works the singularity reserved for the repertoire of “World Literature.” The contemporariness of “World Literatures” creates the impression of their being ephemeral; their multifaceted and purportedly chaotic ambition is often measured against the timeless and eternal value inscribed to representative works of a national or a linguistic canon assembled under the rubric “World Literature.”

  
  
  
• Franco Moretti's "Conjectures on World Literature" (2000) proposes a method for studying world literature: "Distant reading: where distance...is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes--or genres and systems" (57). He takes as one example the "rise of the novel" around the world, and draws the following conclusion from it:
  
  

  if after 1750 the novel arises just about everywhere as a compromise between West European patterns and local reality--well, local reality was different in various places, just as western influence was also very uneven: much stronger in Southern Europe in 1800...than in West Africa around 1940. The forces in play kept changing, and so did the compromises that resulted from their interaction. (64)

  
  
  He suggests that this compromise is not just a matter of form and content alone, but something that expresses itself in the narrative voice itself, as well. And he concludes that tracing out national phylogenetic trees and global diffusionist waves are two competing approaches to analyzing world literature.
  
  
• David Damrosch's definition from What Is World Literature? (2003): "all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language" (4); "a mode of circulation and of reading" (5) that casts a work as both literary and worldly (6). By literary, he suggests inclusiveness in response to the debate over whether world literature consists of "an established body of classics, an evolving canon of masterpieces, or multiple windows on the world" (15), but points out problems with each, as well. By worldly, he argues that "works of world literature take on a new life as they move into the world at large, and to understand this new life we need to look closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and new cultural contexts" (24). Along the way, he offers advice on avoiding cultural and critical imperialism, presentism, literary ecotourism and cultural Disneyification, total immersion or airy vapidity, and other dangers of reception and production attendant upon translating, editing, and reading world literature. And he suggests that Moretti's choice between a tree or a wave viewpoint on world literature and between close and distant reading techniques is too stark.
  

More on this after our symposium. The Valve's Moretti book event and the online journal Words Without Borders make for interesting reading in the meantime.

Sisyphus for President!

Things are tough all over public higher ed, it appears. But Sisyphus over at Academic Cog has the answer. Who better to run the UC system than someone with on-the-ground experience in how it really works?

Come on, Blogoramaville--are you with her?

On Funding Public Higher Education, Part VII: New York State Budget Webquest

Rather than continue hijacking the comments thread at my IHE column, I'll simply point out here that the crisis in the New York State higher education budget, which pits SUNY vs. CUNY and public colleges and universities vs. privates, is coming to a boiling point.

Here's some testimony from late January that's worth recalling today:

CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, Co-Chair, Commission on Higher Education

Alan Lubin, Executive Vice President, New York State United Teachers

Barbara Bowen, President, Professional Staff Caucus-CUNY (with related materials)

Fred Floss, then-Acting President, United University Professions

And for context, see the report of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities on the Top Ten State Policy Issues for Higher Education.

I wasn't planning to blog on this so soon, but I guess I won't have the luxury of perspective or reflection. More when I get back from a campus event!

April Fool's Day Came Early This Year

I was pretty familiar with the quality of Inside Higher Ed's commentariat before agreeing to write a column for them, but it appears I've been spared the worst of the usual dreck. I was hoping to pick up a few trolls here out of the whole deal, but no dice.

Thankfully, though, the few comments that did appear from L.L. and Buzz provided much-needed comic relief for the start of the post-spring break rush. It's hard to tell whether

a) they read the title and the blurb only and rushed to comment without reading my piece itself;
b) they misread my piece almost completely;
c) they really expect to influence any colleges or universities in the Billion Dollar Endowment Club that read my piece, see the light, and set up a committee to give out a few million dollars before the end of the semester; or
d) they're cleverly trying to illustrate the lack of value of their own public university degrees by demonstrating what little they got out of them.

Any other options I missed?

Dear New Readers via Inside Higher Ed

Yes, this blog is "chiefly about Hawthorne matters." Just not lately.

But I can say that Hawthorne would have appreciated the writing in the latest J-Drama that the Full Metal Archivist and I have been watching together on Veoh. So much of Bara no nai Hanaya reminds me of The Scarlet Letter--in particular, its plot compression and dramatic economy, its probing of the ethical tensions within and between different forms of love, its bending of the conventions of the romance to address the social tensions of its day--but it puts a dead mother in the place of the vacated seat of the patriarch. Come to think of it, if The Wire is tv's best modernist novel, then Bara no nai Hanaya may well make a case for the superiority of Hawthornean romance for television today. (How's that for a provocative thesis about the relative value of one show I haven't seen at all and another whose final episode I literally can't wait to be fansubbed? Who says evaluative criticism is dead?)

Once the semester is over, I promise to return to research blogging, which mostly means Hawthorne blogging. Looking over my posts from the first few months of CitizenSE's existence, I'm surprised--and delighted--at how many threads I left hanging. But until then, this will remain the academic/family life blog it has morphed into since our return from Japan last August. Feel free to look around the place and leave a comment, and thanks for dropping by.

On Viewing Japan from Afar and Up Close

Check out the most excellent analysis of "the Harajuku myth" by W. David Marx when you get a chance, along with Bardiac's blogging from Japan.

New readers here may be interested in my own unpacking of U.S. images of Japan from last summer, as well as my attempts at blogging our year in Japan and its aftermath. (Sorry for all the scrolling that clicking on most of these links involves.)

I'm struck at how apropos Melville's "Benito Cereno" is to all this, particularly its reversal of expectations that the closer view is the better view, its focus on the structure and consequences of Captain Delano's fantasies, and its subtle take-down of its particularly untrustworthy narrator. The fact is, there's no best perspective on Japan, whether near or far, from inside or outside. What matters is what comes from juxtaposing views and contextualizing acts of viewing. Including Japanese ones of outsiders. What happens after that is up to us.

Kid Lit Bleg: YouTube/Veoh Suggestions?

That language explosion I predicted a long time ago for imoto is now blowing up and onechan has been loving to "draw letters" in both English and Japanese for a couple of months now, so my usual practice of entertaining the girls with anime theme songs/AMVs and Japan-inflected music videos from YouTube is going to go on the back burner this summer. What I'm looking for now are kids' shows that delight in wordplay and storytelling, particularly ones we can watch for free on YouTube or Veoh.

So far the Full Metal Archivist has discovered a few episodes of an old favorite of hers when she first came to the States, Wishbone:



And I've noticed that there's a good amount of Between the Lions on teh U2bes:



Any other suggestions?

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.]

Congratulations, 10,000th Visitor!

Let the frivolity continue: it appears CitizenSE's 10,000th visit was from a computer at the University of California, Irvine!

Even if this visitor turns out not to be SEK himself, I'll still mail you an onechan original drawing. But wait--that's not all! Imoto has started drawing, too. I'll ask them each to draw an SEK. Yup, two priceless originals for the price of one. No need to thank me. Just email me your snail mail address.

"A minimum of 300,000 SEK in prize money at each event"

Wow, I knew Scott Eric Kaufman was big in Blogoramaville. But apparently he's even bigger in Sweden. How big? How about big enough to have a currency named after his initials? Must be all the fish blogging he's been doing lately.

On Funding Public Higher Education, Part VI: Two Paths Toward Improving Access and Affordability

As we enter a season in which reauthorizing the Higher Education Act is a top legislative priority, the discourse of opportunity and affordability sets the terms and terrain of debate and struggle. As I argued here a few months ago, there are serious consequences to the limitations such an authoritative discourse places on our imaginations. Rather than seek to contextualize and displace this discourse here today, I will attempt to rearticulate it. For there are at least two paths toward improving access to and affordability of higher education in the U.S. that I haven't seen discussed much this year.

The first involves combining the gap year with the idea of national service. Taken separately, both ideas have their serious critics, who have marshalled formidable arguments against each. Combining them, however, should answer both the objections from the left that the gap year reduces access and affordability and from the right that national service offers little by way of compensation to those doing it. What higher education needs now is a new G.I. Bill, that is, but one that broadens the notion of national service beyond military service, offering a range of options to those who choose to serve in order to finance their post-secondary education (say, modelled after the National Guard, the Peace Corps, Teach for America, and so on). The basic mechanism is simple: for every year of service, the federal government issues a voucher worth the average total of tuition and fees in U.S. higher education for that year. (Obviously this creates an incentive for cost-conscious students to spread it out over more than a year at colleges and universities whose costs are below that average.)

The second involves rethinking the timing of payments for higher education. I call it the "Let's Make a Deal" model for financing higher education. Right now, students and their parents need to beg, borrow, steal, and work to pay tuition and fees upfront. (Thanks to the generosity of the State of NY [not!], that's exactly what my family is doing to finance the Full Metal Archivist's graduate studies in Library Science.) No $$, no classes. Even though there are many opportunities for scholarships, grants, and loans to help discount tuition/fees and extend credit toward paying the rest, sticker shock alone is too often enough to drive many worthy students and their families away from even thinking of paying for their post-secondary education. What if colleges and universities offered other options to prospective students? Take the back-end option, for instance: in lieu of paying tuition or fees, entering students sign contracts to pay .1% of any pretax income they earn while they are pursuing a post-secondary degree, .25% in their first decade after graduation, .5% in their second, .75% in their third, and 1% in their fourth decade and after until retirement, when their obligation to their alma mater expires. (Of course, a system would have to be put into place that included mandatory payroll deductions and enforceable penalties for attempts to evade it, but implementation issues can wait for now.)

So, Blogoramaville, what say you? Can you all come up with other paths?

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!]

Who Is This Guy? Revisited

Dropping a link in a comment over at Tim Burke's place is roughly the equivalent to getting "Around the Web"ed by Inside Higher Ed, apparently. So in the interest of keeping this blog going while pre-spring break work calls, I'll add for his readers in particular that another sign of how low The Nation has sunk is to compare your reaction to what's-his-face's recent piece there with a couple of Arts & Letters Daily selections from the Times Literary Supplement that you might think you'd find similarly irritating for their "English departments r teh suxxx!" set-ups: Sophie Ratcliffe on James Wood and John Mullan on Rónán McDonald. If you're anything like me, you may have found plenty to disagree with in them, but also plenty of appreciation for their being, well, interesting and thoughtful review essays. But now I'm falling prey to the oldest trend of all in English: Anglophilia.

Book Bleg: Gretchen Murphy's Hemispheric Imaginings

Eric at The Edge of the American West got me thinking yesterday about the contemporary relevance of the Monroe Doctrine (in a slick move, his MD trumping my manifest destiny comment, I might add), which in turn got me thinking about Gretchen Murphy's Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire, which in turn got me review-hunting (a quick and easy way to learn about a new field, I always tell my students, if done right), which in turn made me realize how relevant this book really is to my manuscript (she writes in part on Hawthorne!), which in turn made me remember the last time I mentioned something to this effect on this here blog, magical editorial assistant fairies have offered me review copies, which in turn made me guilty that I haven't gotten around to posting my review of Copperheads, which in turn made me realize I should probably just order Murphy's book through interlibrary loan or look for it at UB and be done with it, which made me wonder what I'd blog about here if I erased all this, which made me decide I should at least post some of the review essays that made me want to get this book, so my dear reader(s) can get something of value from it, besides the important information that I need this Murphy character's book!

Ricardo Salvatore
John Belohlavek

And yeah, I know of others, but they're behind various silly academic firewalls (I'm talking to you, JSTOR/Project Muse, in particular)....

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.]

Who Is This Guy?

Just came across (via BookForum) an almost interesting attempt to assess the state of the profession through the MLA job list rather than the MLA Convention, but since when does The Nation publish badly-thought-out Chronicle First Person pieces or lame Inside Higher Ed op eds? (Links to that which does not suck.)

Losing majors? Trend-obsessed? Maybe the problem is with his department. Is that really a profession-wide phenomenon? If it is, then perhaps there are more structural explanations to be pursued? Reading tea leaves doesn't cut it...nor does waiting for Godot the Next Big Theory.

[Update 3/29/08: Check out Amardeep Singh's take over at The Valve.]

[Update 4/10/08: And Tim Burke's and Joseph Kugelmass's.]

[Update 4/15/08: It's fitting that on tax day I finally found The Little Professor's statistical rejoinder to WD!]

Who's In?

You know how it goes...someone invents something cool and it takes a while for it to be accepted, much less taught in academia. You want examples? Well, we all know the stories of how long it took for English literature to be taught in England and American literature in America, but we could go back further to the emergence of literature itself as something to be studied, or forward to the origins of film studies last century. Well, what happened then has been happening lately for tv, new media, comic books, and video games. This will come as no surprise to those familiar with my super-secret group pop culture blog, but I've been following developments in these newer fields of academic study, over the shoulder of friends who are in the middle of them but too busy to blog there. This little brainstorm is for them, and anyone else who wants to get in. I've been batting around this idea for years, so be gentle with it, ok?

I've always liked the cultural studies model of an academic conference focused on a particular movement or subgenre, where creators, critics, fans, and others can get together and almost anything can happen from there. It's a good model, but not hands-on enough for video games studies. What I'm envisioning is crossing this model with the model of a basketball camp or golf clinic: getting kids from grades 7-12 together for a week on a campus one summer where they can play the latest equipment and games (donated of course by the companies who want a chance to send their developers out and get quality focus group experiences), work on skills in a variety of genres and compete in their favorites ones, and learn how to be more critical consumers and gamers through workshops taught by leading figures in video games studies, question-and-answer sessions with game designers, and discussions of, reflections on, and writing about their gaming experiences. The number of genres and issues to be considered is dauntingly large, but we could always start small and scale up.

I need to check with my friends in coaching to understand sports camp logistics and economics better--it's been more than two decades now since I was a participant in one--but as my girls get older, I get more and more serious about actually putting the idea into action. So who's in?