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?