Clearing My Throat

All right, I'm back.

Why am I back?

Long story short, I need a way to express myself as an individual in ways that are clearly distinguishable from my official role as Chairperson of the Fredonia University Senate, and particularly from the messages I send to the campus and post on the website as Senate Chairperson.

Bottom line:  I need a space to explore ideas, rather than issue carefully calibrated statements.

But there's more!

Executive Committee has agreed the stakes are too high the rest of the academic year for me to freelance my official messages, so I won't put anything out as Senate Chairperson that hasn't been approved by the team—every member of the team.  We each need veto power over my official messages, down to the "line item."  If you've been following what's been going down at SUNY Fredonia, you'll understand why.  And if you haven't, well, CitizenSE will be my outlet for explaining things as I see them and taking action on my own when I think it's important enough to take my Senate Chairperson hat off and speak for myself.

For now, check out one of Executive Committee's attempts to influence Governor Hochul's January 9 State of the State Address, and consider signing and sharing our petition.

OK, back to the why.

Given that my term as Senate Chairperson ends on June 30, 2024, the countdown is on to when I lose the keys to the @FredUnivSenate x-twitter account and go back to using only my personal @CitizenSE account (which started as an offshoot of this blog).  So I need to reestablish that connection between blogger and x-twitter.

Now, on July 1, 2024, my three-year term as SUNY Fredonia's Senator on the SUNY University Faculty Senate will begin.  So I'll still be on the Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee.  But somebody else will be in charge of speaking for Executive Committee and the Senate.  And I'll be back in the much more comfortable role for me of advising, supporting, deliberating and strategizing with whoever that turns out to be.  Yet another reason to try building back some kind of audience for this blog.

It's also highly likely I won't be on the SUNY UFS Executive Committee by the time Fall 2024 begins.  I mean, it's possible SUNY Potsdam's Jan Trybula decides to run for another term and is elected Vice President/Secretary; in that case, I would still be UFS's Immediate Past Vice President/Secretary.  And it's possible that Executive Committee would choose me to serve another term as chair of the UFS Governance committee for AY 2024-2025, and that I'd accept.  But as I'm going back to a full teaching load next academic year, I'll have to think through the pros and cons and let folks know my decision before they even start seriously considering who should lead that committee next academic year.

In the matter of a few short months, then, my relation to both my campus governance body and the UFS will be changing.  So I need to change with it.  And that means getting back to this blog.

I don't think I'll use it as much as I did during my Fulbright year in Fukuoka, Japan (2006-2007).  Nor do I think I'll use it as much as when I was last Fredonia Senate Chairperson (2009-2010).  But who knows?

Anything that's too personal or too political, too raw or too hot or too spicy, overlapping too much with my roles as a faculty member and a union member (UUP Fredonia; UUP; NYSUT; beyond), too exploratory, too questioning, too tentative—that's the kind of stuff you might see here.

For the really personal and more playful stuff, I'm bringing Mostly Harmless back, too.  That's my after-hours, off the clock, non-work, not-professional blog.  When I get personal here, it'll be to make some kind of point.

Let's just say I'm going back to my roots.  And that means coming back to this completely outmoded platform.  I'm not on Tumblr, insta, or TikTok.  I'm not on Substack or Bluesky or however you spell them.

I'm back, baby!

Let's see what happens next!!

Hello, Hello...Is This Thing On?

 Might need to fire up the old blog again! Let's see if this works....

We're on the Move!

I'm happy to join Sandra Lewis, Idalia Torres, Dan Smith, and Anne Fearman in running for leadership positions on the Fredonia UUP Chapter's Executive Board from 2017 to 2019.  For more on our slate, please see our letter to Fredonia UUP members and our web site, which includes links to our candidate statements.

Here's an excerpt from our letter:

Now more than ever, we must organize together, stand together, and fight together with allies on and off campus to uphold Fredonia’s and SUNY’s mission, to improve our working conditions, and to support our students’ learning, engagement, persistence, and professional, civic, and personal success. 

My candidate statement is not as quotable, so I'll let you read it for yourself.  And please feel free to share any questions, concerns, demands, statements of support, advice, or other feedback!

Is It Just Me, or is Google Weird When it Comes to Guccifer 2.0?

How is it possible that a few posts scattered here at CitzenSE and on some of my other blogs last night led to their being more easily findable on google than anything Studio Dongo has posted on Guccifer 2.0 over the last several weeks?  Anyone who understands google search algorithms better than me, please feel free to explain!

I get that my blogs are older and have many more posts and that my posts cumulatively have many more views than anything he's done on his blog, but I've basically been neglecting mine for years while he's been using his to actively pursue an ongoing story that's received international attention, and he's raised important and interesting questions and connected dots in the process that I, at least, think deserve a much wider audience than my little social media experiment.

What gives, intertubes?

This Is A (Guccifer 2.0) Test of the Google Search System

Quick questions to my remaining readers:

• are you aware of the Guccifer 2.0 story?
• have you been trying to follow it?
• have you been able to find any good sources on it through google searches?

Just to be clear, I had not been aware of or following the story until one of my best friends started blogging about it in mid-June.  As he's been writing about his experiences going down that particular rabbit hole, I've started looking for other sources.  Not very hard, to be sure.  And I know that I've been on leave from blogging for awhile, but what ever happened to google's blog search?  Back in the bad old days, I was at least able to find a wide range of voices on almost any topic, no matter how obscure.  But when I search "Guccifer 2.0" on google, I get nothing interesting or new.  If I didn't know about posts like this, I would never be able to find them.

There's got to be more out there, right?  Are you there, google?  It's me, The Constructivist.

This will have been a test of the google search system.  This will have been only a test.

Yet Another Reason to Read Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird

Given my interest in fairy tales and fairy tale re-visions, Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird was at the top of my summer reading list.  I'm so glad I read this slim, sly novel for so many reasons, but the one I'll put the spotlight on here and now has to do with the evocativeness of Oyeyemi's Hawthorne allusions.

At first glance, the scene where 13-year-old Bird and her 15-year-old friend Louis Chen team up to challenge the classmate who wrote "LOUIS CHEN IS A VIETCONG" in yellow chalk to fight them at "the corner of Pierce Road and Ivorydown" in Flax Hill includes what some might see as a fairly conventional Hawthorne invocation:

After ten minutes, we decided, with a mixture of disgust and relief, that Yellow Chalk Guy (or Girl) wasn't going to show, and we were ready to leave when three hefty boys from the eleventh grade showed up.  These three didn't take lunch money; they were less predictable than that.  They might stop you and give you a stash of comic books, or they might rip up your homework.  We knew their names, but never said them in case it made them appear.  One of them was directly descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter; that one's mother had mentioned it at one of Grammy Olivia's coffee hours.  Mom says everybody immediately began to feel oppressed by their humble backgrounds because they'd forgotten (or didn't know) that anyone who's descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne is also a descendant of John Hathorne, the Salem judge who put just about as many innocent people to death as he could, so was it any wonder that Hawthorne was so good at describing what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night. (182-183)

Bird's mom is Boy, and she and everyone in her family knows a lot about "what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night," but she doesn't know that Bird and Louis are soon "caught in a circle of sniggering kids, without a single one of our so-called friends in sight," or that "the eleventh grader with the witch-hunter's blood," as Bird describes him, becomes the group's literal ring-leader, counseling "Patience, my friends, patience," as he refuses to allow the two friends to leave (183).  Fortunately, before they try to fight their way free, Grammy Olivia breaks the circle, leading Bird to reflect:

It put me in awe of Grammy Olivia's Saturday morning coffee hour, because that was part of the reason we went in peace--everyone's mother, aunt, grandmother, or great-aunt goes to Grammy Olivia's coffee hour.  Also Gee-Pa Gerald regularly plays golf with the Worcester's chief of police, et cetera.  Also Grammy Olivia's tone of voice offers you ten seconds to do as she says or the rest of your life to be sincerely sorry that you didn't. (184)

I won't go any further into this scene right now, because unpeeling some of its layers would give away too much of the characters' back stories and entanglements to avoid spoilers, but trust me that Hawthornean themes of family, descent, inheritance, and guilt invoked by this scene are at the heart of Oyeyemi's novel--in quite surprising and revealing ways.

And these themes carry over into the relationship between Bird and her older half-sister Snow, whose correspondence starts not long after this scene and eventually moves into trading stories (literally twice-told tales) about a figure they call La Belle Capuchine.  I'll skip the one Bird writes to Snow, which has a distinctly Chesnutt feel to it, and jump straight to the Snow's story, which might be read as a rewriting of "Rappaccini's Daughter," with a twist of "Earth's Holocaust":

La Belle Capuchine has a wonderful garden filled with sweet-smelling flowers of every color.  She plants all the flowers herself, and she tends them herself, and every single one of those flowers is poisonous enough to kill anyone who comes close to them, let alone picks one.  La Belle Capuchine is beautiful like her flowers, but she's a poison damsel.  She eats and drinks poison all day long and she can rot a person's insides just by looking them in the eye.  I don't think Mother Nature likes us much.  If she did, she wouldn't make the things that are deadliest so beautiful.  For instance, why does fire dance so bright and so wild?  It isn't fair.

So far La Belle Capuchine has ended the world seventeen times.  She does it by making her poison garden bigger and bigger until it's the only thing in the world.  After that she takes a nap.  But the world starts again from the beginning.  And every time a few days after the new beginning somebody comes across a beautiful flower and picks it.  That wakes La Belle Capuchine up, and then there's hell to pay.  I think we'd better get used to La Belle Capuchine, since she'll never be defeated. 

The End. (230)

Again, to close-read either this story or Snow's reading of it or Snow's reading of Bird's La Belle Capuchine story would be to give too much away to readers who haven't yet had a chance to enjoy Boy, Snow, Bird and its revelations for themselves.  So of course it's even more premature to use that close-reading to explore how and to what ends Oyeyemi is re-envisioning Hawthorne texts as much as she is re-envisioning "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty."

Consider this post, then, a promise to continue that exploration later!

I'm Baaaaaaack!!

Hey folks, my apologies for the radio silence for most of the spring semester.  I decided to keep a low profile after helping organize Fredonia's answer to National Adjunct Walk-Out Day for a variety of reasons:

• I was teaching over 30 novels, graphic novels, short story collections, and other books this semester and meeting regularly with students on their writing and other projects, so keeping up that pace required me to sleep whenever I could (yep, I'm really in my mid-40s now!);
• negotiations over the appointment, reappointment, and promotion of contingent faculty at Fredonia went into an even higher gear and I didn't want to come close to skirting our ground rules of keeping negotiations confidential while they were ongoing;
• thanks to an extension, the first draft of a  group-authored article on university-level shared governance I was working on got submitted almost in time;
• the election/appointment process for Chairperson of my department ground away this academic year and I chose to devote my time to meeting individually with all my colleagues after my department held an election and recommended me to the Dean to prepare for the transition and assemble my leadership team;
• I got appointed to a Title IX and Sexual Violence Task Force and an Academic Affairs Review Committee, both of which were (and are) vitally important and added to my time commitment;
• my younger daughter broke her forearm in two places on the same day my Nissan Versa's engine melted on the Thruway;
• I tried keeping up with as many new graphic novels as I could (including Saga, The Unwritten, Black Science, Morning Glories...) along with classics I missed by Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, and Kurt Busiek....
• I tried keeping up some semblance of an exercise schedule and family life outside work....

No wonder I needed to sleep so much!  But it all came together.  My students kicked much butt this semester, particularly in my Major Writers course on Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.  Negotiations concluded successfully and our new Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion goes into effect 8/1/15 (on which much more later).  The President appointed me Chairperson and the department approved new minors and restructuring of the major.  Imoto's cast came off and she's working hard to get full range of motion back in the joints of her left arm.  I might even find out soon if Nissan USA will replace an engine that didn't even make it to 50,000 miles in just over 6 years, despite consistent and quality service from my Nissan dealer in WNY.  Plus, I won an election to become the new University Faculty Senator for Fredonia, representing the campus on the SUNY University Faculty Senate and returning to the Fredonia University Senate's Executive Committee.

I'll close this post with my election statement:

I ask for your vote in this election for University Faculty Senator. I welcome the opportunity to represent Fredonia in Albany as a voting member of the SUNY University Faculty Senate. I am prepared to shoulder the official and unofficial responsibilities that accompany such a privilege. The former are defined in Fredonia’s and the UFS’s Bylaws. The latter can be learned only by experience.

As a former Chairperson of Fredonia’s University Senate, I have attended multiple UFS plenaries and UFS-sponsored conferences in the last seven years. I know many Campus Governance Leaders, Senators, and current and former members of the Governance Committee--and the UFS Executive Committee. And they know me.

They know that I can be counted on to do my homework, to pull my weight, to step up to the plate, to listen to and engage my colleagues with respect and care, to remain calm and constructive in the midst of chaos and controversy, to develop reasoned positions on complex issues, to generate innovative solutions to pressing problems, to use persuasion, diplomacy, and charm to move the body and its leaders to speak and act on behalf of SUNY’s mission and faculty, and, above all, to do what it takes to make shared governance and public universities work--better and better.

They know that I wouldn’t become Fredonia’s UFS representative only to stay on the sidelines. They would expect more from someone...

• ...who challenged a newly-appointed Chancellor to consider incorporating into her campaign for the power of SUNY Christopher Newfield’s case in Unmaking the Public University (2011) that robust state investments in public higher education were crucial to America’s post-WWII prosperity and expanding middle class.
• ...who pushed a then-President of United University Professions to risk opening a window of opportunity for strategic partnerships with new SUNY leadership.
• ...who encouraged UFS leaders to stake out common-ground positions that could bring all the organizations representing SUNY together to change Albany politics.
• ...who helped upgrade Fredonia’s Bylaws and helped Fredonia win SUNY’s first-ever Shared Governance Award.

If you don’t know me, I invite you to examine my c.v., web page, academic blog, and twitterfeed. If you don’t know what to expect from me, I invite you to find out from the Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee (on which I served from 2008-2010 and 2011-2014), the Executive Board of the Fredonia Chapter of UUP (1999-2006, 2009-up), and the English department (1998-up; Chairperson as of this fall).

If you know me, I hope you share my confidence that my decades of experience in department-level and university-level shared governance, as well as chapter- and state-level union service, will serve you well in--and keep you well-informed about--system-wide shared governance. I hope you trust me to bring your views and voices not only to the UFS but also to the Chancellor and Chairman of the SUNY Board of Trustees. I hope you’ll make me your advocate for affordable quality public higher education in Albany.