Update from Old Friend of the Blog (or, Kevin Hogan Is Back!)

Four years ago, I blogged about my old friend and colleague Kevin Hogan, a Massachusetts teacher who was ambushed in a parking lot by a Fox News reporter peddling a sex scandal.

Kevin has been suspended from his job. He is in real danger of being fired. And he will likely never find another job as a teacher. That is a sad thing, and not just for Kevin.  Teaching may be the single best thing he does for the world, and the world will be much the poorer if he leaves the classroom.

I was afraid that Kevin's educational gifts - and Kevin is a genuinely gifted educator - would go to waste, unused. But last week I got a surprise e-mail from out of the blue: Kevin Hogan, who has now become an LGBT activist. I cannot tell you how pleased and relieved I am to hear that news. If Kevin is being kept out of classrooms, his talents as a teacher and communicator can still benefit us all in the public square.

And Kevin does have important things to teach us, not least the hard truths of surviving the 21st century's vicious public shaming. He's currently finishing a book, Healing Stigma: A Survivor's Guide to Repairing Identity in the Internet Age, and I am looking forward to reading it. This is news that stays news. We don't yet have our minds around what we, in the internet age, are doing to private individuals, but Kevin's experiences and his thoughtful reflection can help us understand. Here is Kevin on the recent Ashley Madison hack, something widely taken as an opportunity for gleeful internet heckling:

On the morning of August 19th, I woke up early and went online to check the news. A headline in the business section caught my eye: "Ashley Madison infidelity site's customer data 'leaked.'"
A chill crept over me. I ran to the bedroom, where my wife was just waking up. She must have recognized a familiar look on my face, because she immediately reached for my hand and asked what was wrong.
"People are going to die," I whispered to her, dreading the words as I said them. 

You can read the rest of Kevin's post here. It's very much worth the read.

Welcome back to the fight, Kevin. This time, I know our side will win.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

In Praise of Fred Rogers

A county clerk down in Kentucky, Kim Davis, is refusing to do her job, getting herself thrown in jail for contempt, and posing as a martyr. Once again, an extremist and divisive version of Christianity, obsessed with minor points of doctrine and followed by only a minority of Christians, is presented to the American public as "Christianity." This is nonsense, of course. Only a tiny, tiny minority of Christians believe that handing same-sex couples a wedding license is somehow sinful. And disapproval of homosexuality is an incredibly minor Christian doctrine which some theologians exclude altogether, while on the other hand not setting yourself up as judge over your neighbors is a core Christian belief. I could go on, but then we'd be talking about Kim Davis instead of actual Christianity, which is just what Kim Davis wants.

I'd like to talk about a positive example instead: a genuinely devout Christian who spent decades in the public spotlight and did nothing but good there, who never turned his faith into a weapon of division but used it, day after day, to welcome and include all comers. I am talking, of course, about Mr. Rogers.

Or rather, I am talking about the Reverend Fred Rogers, ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. Rogers was, according to virtually everyone who knew him, a deeply committed believer. But he never preached on Sundays. The TV show was his ministry. Let me go further: it appears that the seminary that ordained him considered the TV show his ministry. Fred Rogers was, as Brother Elwood puts it, on a mission from God.

But you won't see or hear any explicit Christian symbolism on Mister Rogers's Neighborhood. It's not there. And I don't mean it's cleverly disguised, either. That was not Fred Rogers's game. The Kingdom of Make-Believe isn't some C. S. Lewis feed-the-children-Jesus-when-they're-not-looking propaganda. King Friday XIII is not God, X the Owl is not Jesus, and Donkey Hote is not the Holy Ghost. When Mr. Rogers feeds the fish, he's not doing some Christian fish symbolism. He's just feeding some fish. There is nothing sectarian in Mister Rogers's Neighborhood. There is nothing exclusively Christian about it, nothing aimed at one religious group and absolutely nothing aimed at converting or indoctrinating Fred's audience of impressionable preschoolers. This was by design. Terry Gross, of NPR's Fresh Air, once asked Fred why there wasn't any Christian symbolism in the Kingdom of Make-Believe. Fred answered, simply and directly, that he never wanted any child to feel excluded in the Kingdom of Make-Believe.

But not being sectarian or exclusionary does not mean that Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood was not Christian. Remember, the people who ordained Fred a minister explicitly told him that his show was his ministry. Fred's refusal to exclude children or insist on any doctrinal labels was part of the show's Christian mission. He did without the superficial religious symbols in service of a deeper Christianity.

Where was the religious content, then? Everywhere. And I mean that. Almost every syllable spoken on that show came from Fred Rogers's religious convictions. (Everything that he did or said on the air was deliberate and purposeful. Every show is a meticulously crafted and executed lesson.) The core message that Fred made sure to include in every single show, more than once, was the Christian message of universal, unconditional love: "I like you just the way you are." The central lesson, every day, was that the children watching were people deserving of love. Fred didn't talk about being Christian. He made himself an example of Christian love.

Now, you don't have to be Christian to entertain the idea of every individual's fundamental worth and dignity. There are secular versions of that. But the idea that every human is unconditionally worthy of love is both at the very heart of Christianity and broadly palatable to non-Christians. Nearly every religious tradition includes a mix of core ideas that are nonetheless widely attractive to outsiders and more peripheral beliefs that often serve to define sectarian boundaries. Most people can get on board with Talmudic teachings on justice and integrity. Most people are not eager to embrace the "can't touch the light switch on Friday nights" rule. "Love thy neighbor" is a big, ecumenical hit. "Stained glass windows are sinful idolatry" is, more or less by its nature, designed to divide and exclude.

The two kinds of religious teachings do very different things. There are a set of moral and philosophical positions, which offer believers guidance in the big questions. And there are a set of generally minor and sometimes even peculiar doctrines that serve to mark group identity and form community. "How do we live a just life?" is an essentially but not exclusively Jewish question. "Is it okay to eat milk and meat together?" is a question about whether you're Jewish. Religious groups focused on conflict with outsiders tend to focus on these relatively peripheral, sect-specific positions (or put another way, sects focused on peripheral doctrines tend to focus on conflict with outsiders). During the heyday of Christian-vs-Christian religious violence in Europe, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, the stained-glass-or-no-stained-glass question was treated as crucial, with love-thy-neighbor and thou-shalt-not-kill taking distant back seats.

Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood was all core principles and no checkpoint shibboleths. Fred was not interested in sectarian identity, because universal love has no room for Us vs. Them. He never talked the talk. He unrelentingly walked the walk. He did not preach lessons. He provided an example, and in doing so proved truly exemplary. 

Although he became a cultural touchstone, Fred Rogers's message was deeply counter-cultural. Our society, although superficially and nominally Christian, has a deep emphasis on teaching children to compete, to earn their parents' approval and too often their parents' love. Our children are bombarded throughout their childhood with messages about winners and losers. (Even the self-esteem movement, widely derided for not teaching children to compete enough, accepts the winners-and-losers premise, destructively telling children that they are all winners rather than pointing to a value system beyond winning.) There's no room in that for I like you just the way you are, but Fred Rogers insisted on that room. He made space for that message where there had been none. The only shame was that when students grew out the the pre-kindergarten age on which Fred focused, there weren't equally powerful voices communicating that message to first graders and up.

And part of Fred's greatness as a teacher (and make no mistake, Fred Rogers was a great master teacher) was his deep and evident humility. Humility is another central Christian virtue that doesn't get much attention or love in our nominally Christian country, but Fred embodied it. Listen to him singing on the show. He's obviously not a professional singer. He doesn't have a "good," i.e. media-ready singing voice. He'd get cut immediately on American Idol (a show obsessed with competition to the point of, what's that word, idolatry). But singing well is not the point. Fred is not embarrassed, and you aren't embarrassed for him, because his ego has nothing to do with it. He doesn't care whether or not his voice is good or bad. Singing is just something that helps his lesson, and so he does it, with the impeccable confidence of the utterly humble. That humility was part of his educational genius, because it meant that nothing was ever about Fred. It was always about the student learning.

What matters to Fred is not the technical polish of his singing, but the connection he makes with the kids. Singing is a way to make himself more emotionally present to them, to connect. And the very fact that he's singing in such an unpretentious way underscores that he is opening himself up to the kids, creating intimacy and trust. He is telling them that he won't laugh at them because he knows they won't laugh at him. (Ask yourself this: who do YOU feel comfortable singing in front of? See what I mean?) And the singing, which starts every single show, communicates something essential about the value system: it's not important to show off. You don't sing to impress other people, let alone to show who is a better singer. You sing to people as a way to connect with them. We are a country of showing off for the neighbors. Fred Rogers made every lesson about loving the neighbors, in every sense of that word.

Fred Rogers bore witness to his Christian beliefs every time he stepped in front of a camera. His Christianity was always inclusive and never divisive. It's humbling to watch, because I will never be that good a teacher or nearly that good a Christian. But being humbled is part of the point.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

Rachel Dolezal and the De-Professionalized University

Rachel Dolezal, currently this week's Object of Public Shame on the Internet, has apparently been fired from her job teaching at Eastern Washington State. Or rather, I learn from today's New York Times, they didn't have to bother firing her. You see, Dolezal was what's called an "adjunct instructor," someone who teaches on a course-by-course basis for low pay without any security for the next semester. There are more adjunct teachers than normal salaried professors in American universities today. So, EWU didn't have to fire her. She's just not hired for any classes for next fall. And they can tell the newspapers that she is "no longer employed" by Eastern Washington. Not fired, mind you. Just no longer employed. It was harder to take her off the Department web page (which happened sometime in the last four days) than it was to end her employment.

Now, you may think Dolezal deserved to be fired. I'm not going to argue the general Rachel Dolezal Situation, because frankly I don't think it gets us anywhere. Singling out one person's weird behavior  is not useful, and it's already very clear that no one is going to learn anything of from l'affaire Dolezal, because nothing about the case is changing anyone's mind.

But whether Dolezal had given EWU just cause to fire her or not doesn't matter, because EWU doesn't need just cause. And that I do want to talk about.

If you think Dolezal had it coming, ask yourself this: how did Dolezal get hired to an Africana Studies department in the first place? How did she get on that department web page? Didn't anybody check this person out? Probably not, actually, because of the terms of her employment. When you're hiring someone for zero job security and next to zero money, the search process is a lot more laissez-faire. And after all, the whole point of replacing permanent, full-time faculty jobs with short-term, allegedly part-time jobs is to save money.  There isn't money or time to do extensive vetting. So Eastern Washington had someone they didn't know much about in their classrooms. But they aren't the only ones. Most universities are employing a large number of teachers whom the school knows relatively little about.

Adjunct faculty and full-time faculty aren't necessarily different in terms of talent or skills. But the two hiring processes are incredibly different. The decision to hire a full-time, salaried college teacher, tenure-track or not, is typically made a year and a half before that new employee starts the job; many college administrations decided in March or April 2015 which job openings they would announce for a fall 2016 starting date. The job application process will take most of the 2015-16 school year, from official advertisements in the early fall to final decisions sometime in the spring, and then the lucky job-seekers will move to their new jobs in new towns over next summer.

That search process involves multiple rounds of interviews with several different interviewers; several letters of recommendation; a number of elaborate professional documents, typically including statements of teaching philosophy and one or more scholarly writing samples; and day-long visits to campus by the finalists for formal presentations, more interviews, and often a teaching demonstration, sometimes guest-teaching a class. Each of these job searches costs the deans thousands of dollars just to fly two-to-four people to campus and put them up in hotels. And of course all of the finalists' references get double-checked with phone calls from the hiring institution. Someone like Dolezal, who's not being entirely straightforward about parts of her background, might slip through that process anyway. But it would be much harder and rarer to do.

Adjunct hiring decisions are much less elaborate. The jobs aren't necessarily posted at all, and a department chair or program director might be hiring people to fill gaps a week or two before the semester starts. It's a local search, and not a national one. There's a resume and an interview with the program director or chair. There aren't necessarily letters of reference, certainly not in the numbers and detail that full-time jobs require. And that's about it; anything else is often up to the person doing the hiring. Certainly, references don't always get called. The most likely reason no one from Howard University told Eastern Washington about Rachel Dolezal's earlier self-presentations is that no one from Eastern Washington called anyone from Howard.

This difference between the two application processes is only getting sharper, as the pressure of the terrible job market for full-time jobs keeps raising the bar higher and higher. In an insanely competitive environment, applicants keep trying to get an edge by doing more (I've started to see job ads stipulate a maximum number of letters of recommendation, at least three but no more than five or six) and universities keep adding hoops because they can (one of the current debates at places like the Chronicle of Higher Ed is whether it's ethical to call references whom applicants didn't list). And the more adjuncts a department hires, the simpler that process has to be.

This two-track application process does a disservice to the people being hired on the low-paying track. Many adjuncts don't need to be educated about the tenure-track job search; they're fully qualified applicants for those jobs who have simply been crowded out because there are so few jobs to go around. Some adjuncts aren't interested in the qualifications for tenure-line work, because they have MAs instead of PhDs or because they aren't interested in doing research. But there are a number of people on the adjunct track who are interested in switching to the tenure track but aren't entirely clear how. Those people are not at all served when the process for picking up some classes for the semester bears almost no resemblance to the process for getting the full-time job they crave.

And in some places, sorry to say, there is little in the way of supervision or training for adjunct faculty. There is a mind-set, not everywhere but in too many places, that says that people being paid so little should be just left alone to do whatever they like in the classroom, because how much can you ask of someone you're paying two hundred bucks a week?

Many adjunct professors are wonderful and admirable professionals. But from the university's point of view, that's just luck. The universities themselves didn't do anything to foster that professionalism. They didn't seek it out, and they certainly don't reward it. When you de-professionalize an occupation, when you take away the salary, the benefits, and the job stability that go with being a middle-class professional, you undermine the professionalism of your own workplace. Most adjunct faculty do the right things the right way, because those things are right and not because they get any reward. But if you don't reward good behavior, you have to expect pockets of unprofessionalism or weirdness.

Eastern Washington University has a flood of publicity it doesn't want this week, because one of its many casual employees, whom it has only casually overseen, turns out to be fairly weird. But the real truth is that could have happened to almost any school in the country, and they would never see it coming.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

No, Colleges Still Teach Shakespeare

You may have seen news stories, timed for Shakespeare's more-or-less birthday, claiming that top American colleges have stopped requiring Shakespeare. This is not news (nothing about college requirements has changed lately), and not really true. The study uses a very specific and misleading definition which allows it not to count most of the ways that Shakespeare is actually taught in college English departments. The study refuses to accept anything but a required stand-alone Shakespeare-only course as a "Shakespeare requirement." If Shakespeare is only part of required courses, that doesn't count. And if a department has a requirement that drives most of its students into Shakespeare courses, that doesn't count either. This is misleading.

Worse, the study then rants about the various things that can be "substituted for Shakespeare" at various schools, cherry-picking various electives with titles like "Detective Fiction," "Digital Game Theory," or "Creatures, Aliens, and Cyborgs" and fulminating that these trendy classes are replacing Shakespeare. This isn't just misleading. It's outright dishonest. The authors of the study, having read the requirements for the fifty-two schools they're discussing, know full well that these courses don't fulfill the requirements that would otherwise demand Shakespeare. The schools offering the three courses I just named require courses in earlier literature, and those courses do NOT fulfill them. The authors of the study know this. They just pretend not to.

Now, I myself could only benefit from more Shakespeare requirements. I'm a professor of Shakespeare, after all. And I certainly value Shakespeare at least as much as the folks who wrote this study did. But this report is a big nothing. When you take out the dishonesty and spin, it's less than nothing.

A little background: this study is from ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is a conservative organization dedicated to having trustees and donors micromanage academic decisions that have traditionally been left to faculty. (ACTA says it's for "Academic Freedom & Excellence," but in practice it seems upset that academics have too much freedom to make academic judgements.) And ACTA, for its own reasons, limited its study to the fifty-two highest-ranked colleges and universities in the US, according to the US News & World Report rankings. (They got fifty-two by taking the top 25 "National Universities" and top 25 "Liberal Arts Colleges"; because of ties in the rankings, that's a bit more than 50). So they didn't bother looking at the schools the vast majority of students actually attend, which might or might not say something about ACTA's own biases.

What is notable is that the focus on "Top 25" schools means that ACTA included three schools that do not have English majors. West Point, Harvey Mudd, and MIT have "literature" majors instead. MIT's literature major has two tracks, one of which looks like a traditional English major (and thus tracks its students toward studying Shakespeare) and one of which doesn't. The others have more general literature requirements that aren't necessarily focused on literature in English at all, which makes the lack of a Shakespeare requirement not terribly newsworthy. French and Classics majors mostly aren't required to take Shakespeare either. That didn't stop ACTA from listing these schools without English departments as schools where the "English major" doesn't include Shakespeare.

Now, of the 52 schools that ACTA deigned to examine, it's true that only only 4 require a stand-alone course in Shakespeare-and-nothing-else. But there are three things that ACTA isn't telling you about:

1. Historical period requirements. Nearly every school that ACTA surveyed, 47 of 52, requires English majors to take at least one course, and sometimes three or even four courses, in literature written before a certain date. For more than 40 of those schools, that date is 1800 or earlier; for another half-dozen or so, it is before 1900, 1850, or 1830.

What does this mean? It means that to "get out" of taking Shakespeare you have to take something else from a similar time period, or earlier. There are about six schools on ACTA's list where you can hypothetically get off soft by reading Bleak House, Moby-Dick, or Wordsworth. (But to be fair, it would be pretty hard to fulfill all of Swarthmore's three required pre-1830 courses with writers from 1800-1830.)

At the rest of the schools, the vast majority that ACTA looked at, the choice isn't between Shakespeare and Lady Gaga. It's between Shakespeare and Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, or - at some places - Shakespeare and enormous quantities of Alexander Pope.

In practice, most students fulfill these requirements either with a Shakespeare course or with a thematic course that include a hefty amount of Shakespeare. (I once taught a course called "Love and Sex in Renaissance Literature" that included his sonnets, two of his plays, and his long poem Venus and Adonis, but also Sidney's sonnets, Spenser's sonnets, a chunk of The Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and healthy servings of poems by Donne, Herrick, Wyatt, Surrey, Petrarch, etc. This, by ACTA's lights, is "not a course focused on Shakespeare." And the word "sex" was in the title! Gadzooks!)

If students don't fulfill these requirements with Shakespeare, they're often taking a course in early literature that's harder, less popular, or both. Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, and Donne are all more difficult for undergraduates to read, and more challenging on a line-by-line level, than Shakespeare is. And here's an insider's tip: the 18th century, although wonderful, is the least popular literary period for English majors. It's much easier to get students to read King Lear than Clarissa.

This is not dumbing down the curriculum. Not by any means.  English majors graduating having "only" read Paradise Lost and not Hamlet is not a big crisis. But ACTA doesn't want to count these schools as "requiring Shakespeare." Smith College makes its students take TWO of three single-author courses: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Those who avoid Shakespeare by reading Chaucer and Milton aren't going to be especially ill-educated. And in practice, almost all of the students will take Shakespeare and one of the other two. What does ACTA say about this requirement? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required." Oh no, the sky is falling!

2. Survey Courses. These are less popular than they once were, but several schools on ACTA's list still require students to take survey courses that include Shakespeare. Those courses have titles like "Major Poets," "Literary History," or "British Literature to 1700."

Most of the few actual English departments that don't require courses before 1700, 1800, or 1850 require a survey instead. Some schools require a number of courses before 1800 AND the survey. So students do get taught Shakespeare, in a way that's required for all majors.

This doesn't count for ACTA, either. So, for example, Yale University requires its majors to take THREE courses before 1800 AND two survey courses: "Major British Poets from Chaucer to Donne" (the semester that includes Shakespeare) and "Major British Poets from Milton to T.S. Eliot." But students can get out of the surveys by taking four advanced courses on the poets on the survey, two from each semester. So you could theoretically get a B.A. in English from Yale by reading The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost instead of Macbeth. But it would be a pretty rare student who does. Yale actually has a fairly conservative curriculum. But ACTA's verdict? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required."

With requirements like that, does it have to be?

3. Limits to the number of Shakespeare classes.

Since the whole point of ACTA's polemic is that Shakespeare is being done wrong and pushed out of the curriculum, you'd think that they would point out that FIVE of the schools on their list limit the number of Shakespeare courses that can count toward requirements. (When we throw out the schools without English majors, that's 10% of ACTA's total.) At Bates, Bowdoin, Columbia, Princeton, and Rice students can only use ONE Shakespeare course to fulfill the pre-1800 requirements.

This doesn't mean that students at those schools aren't allowed to take more than one Shakespeare class. It means that the second, third, and so on Shakespeare courses are just electives. More importantly, it means that those schools require their students to read challenging early literature besides Shakespeare. The problem isn't that students at these schools are avoiding Shakespeare. The problem is that they use Shakespeare to avoid Chaucer, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Milton. So students have to be steered to reading more widely in early periods.

These schools don't require Shakespeare because Shakespeare is doing just fine on his own. Also, the dining halls at these schools do not require dessert. That's not some liberal War on Pudding. That's because the requirement isn't necessary in the first place.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

In Praise of the Late Term Paper

It's that time of year again, or actually one of the two times each year, when semesters end and bleary-eyed college professors scale mountains of ungraded papers and exams. One of my friends claims that he can track the academic calendar by the crescendo of professors griping on Facebook and Twitter about bad papers, worse excuses, and outrageous examples of student entitlement. Some of this is necessary foxhole camaraderie, some of it verges on the unprofessional, and some does a lot more than verge. Too many lame papers and excuses will put most people in an ugly mood. But I want to give two cheers to one group of students who never get any love at this time of year: the students whose papers are late because they take the assignments seriously.

I like an on-time paper as much as the next person. Meeting deadlines are an important adult skill that students should be learning. Of course, I admire the excellent students who always do their best work by the stated deadline. That is intrinsically admirable. And when every student is late, it becomes impossible to help any of them; the greatest obstacle to rescuing students from their last-minute emergencies is the sheer number of other last-minute student emergencies. 

But all that said:

I've read some papers in my time that should have been late. I have read papers that have been turned in on the due date or earlier but that the writer hadn't even begun to work on seriously. Oh, those papers were presentable enough. They weren't full of comical errors. There was nothing to quote on Facebook. The margins were correct. But the papers were nothing. The writers had done as little work on them as they felt they could get away with, and avoided most of all the labor of thinking hard about anything.

Some of those papers would have been good papers at a lower level. The writers just stuck with what had worked before, handing in a polished introductory-class paper in an advanced class, or a meticulous high-school paper in a college class. Faced with the problem of an assignment that explicitly demanded a rather different paper, some worked tirelessly to misconstrue the assignment and find some loophole that would justify writing a simpler, more familiar assignment. And then, hoping for extra points, the writers handed those easier pieces of writing in early. They preferred to be judged on promptness rather than thoughtfulness, and many of them reasoned that there was no more room to improve their essays, so spending a few more days won't help. The saddest part is, they were right. They had set themselves elementary writing tasks, using skills they mastered years before, and executed those tasks well. It is like watching a high school senior filling in a coloring book, or listening to a forty-five-year-old playing "Chopsticks" on the piano. There is no way to do those tasks better, which is why I did not assign those tasks in the first place.

Those are the most demoralizing papers that I read. The mess and chaos of students trying to write something that they are not yet quite capable of bringing off does not bother me. But the orderly, sealed-off neatness of a paper that refuses to learn or grow makes me ask myself what I'm doing in the first place. That refusal is polite but insistent and unbendable. And sometimes the only thing that breaks through that stubborn insistence is a grade that makes the student upset.

On the other hand, some of the students who do accept the assignment and try to do it honestly find themselves struggling. They are trying to work out new skills, in response to new demands, and that doesn't happen on a predictable timeline. The work is messy. Progress is non-linear. So sometimes the deadline rolls around while the student is still up to her or his elbows in wet clay, trying to find the piece's shape. Those students aren't late because they're lazy. They're late because they are working hard. Giving them a few extra days to complete an assignment is productive, because they will use that time productively. Their papers will genuinely be much better a few days after the deadline than they could have been on the appointed day. An extension leads to a better product.

Not that every student who needs such an extension will ask for one. Some do not feel entitled to one, and some students will simply abandon an entire class in despair because they don't have a paper written on time. Of course, the same class will contain some squeaky wheels who are trying to get themselves as greasy as possible, and who will have no qualms about asking for all kinds of special arrangements. Some of the more demanding students prompt eye-rolls, but the only real harm they do is distract the professor from the students who are suffering in silence. It's important to shake your head clear at the end of the semester and look for the students who are in danger because they haven't asked you for anything. Many times, those students are the ones who generally enjoy less privilege in their daily lives: more likely to be the first in the family to go to college, more likely to have gone to a troubled high school, more likely to find tuition a major burden. Those students don't expect to get any breaks because they usually haven't gotten any. They read the rules in your syllabus, which some of their more affluent classmates simply view as initial negotiating positions, and take those rules seriously. If they can't meet a deadline, they just assume they're done for, because that's consistent with their previous experience. The only way to persuade them differently is to show them differently, and you can't wait for them to come to you.

Do PhDs Expire?

cross-posted from Dagblog

Last week the annual job list for college literature professors went live, in an annual ritual I've blogged about before. And it looks like the worst list for Shakespeareans in history.

Two years ago, I used this space to explain how the 2008 crash had killed the already far-too-small job market for new PhDs, and how poor the rebound was two years later:

When the financial crisis hit in 2008 ... [w]hat had been about five dozen jobs teaching Shakespeare or Milton became four dozen, or less, although there were still the same hundred and fifty or two hundred or two hundred and seventy-five people trying to get them.

[In 2009] there weren't even four dozen jobs advertised in the fall. There were still 200 smart young Shakespeareans, Miltonists and Tamburlaine experts out there looking for work. In fact, there were more, because the forty or so who'd gotten jobs the previous year had been replaced by two or three times that many new PhDs.

 And in 2010 there were only about two dozen entry-level jobs for my younger Renaissance colleagues. Four years on from the crash, it's worse than ever: the initial job list has only 13 entry-level tenure-track jobs teaching Renaissance lit in North America. There were 19 jobs; three are outside the country; three are senior positions for people who are already well-established (as in "full professor at the University of Chicago" established). That leaves thirteen for new PhDs who want to stay in the profession and have a middle-class salary. Thirteen. Some more jobs will trickle in over the next few weeks, and there will be a smaller round of listings in the spring (if the listing can, indeed, get any smaller), but thirteen jobs for a year's crop of Renaissance lit PhDs is a famine. And it isn't just one year's crop of PhDs, but all of the accumulated jobless graduates from the past few years.

As if all this wasn't grim enough (and some other subfields are having better luck than Renaissance is, but not much), this year two universities that are hiring decided to declare that people who hadn't gotten tenure-track jobs during the crunch years were now persona non grata.

Colorado State advertised for a job teaching pre-1900 American literature, but specified that applicants had to have gotten their doctorates in 2010 or later. Their explanation was that it was an entry-level job with an entry-level salary, and they were trying to screen out people who'd already been on the tenure-track for several years. That part is fair enough. But their language obviously ruled out people who hadn't gotten a tenure-track job, and who'd been toiling away as adjuncts or lecturers since, you know, the whole economy cratered. An uproar ensued (see great posts from SEK, Historiann, Dr. Crazy, and what the heck, more SEK) and Colorado State changed the wording of the ad. It further turned out that Harvard's Comparative Lit department had published a job ad asking for PhDs from 2009 and later, and they too changed that wording. But the cynic in me doubts that someone who's been teaching college off the tenure track for more than a year or two will end up with the Colorado State job. (That someone who's been teaching off the tenure track for more than three years would land the Harvard job is out of the question.)

The ugly question, "Does a PhD expire?" has two answers: one for search committees, and one for job applicants. To search committees, I say: it is obtuse and inhumane to screen out job candidates because they've been underemployed in an irrationally savage employment market.  We all know that there are talented and deserving people without steady jobs, because there are many more talented and deserving people than there are steady jobs, so don't turn away qualified applicants for no damned reason. Just read their CVs. Yes, you have hundreds of CVs to read. Screening out the adjuncts and lecturers won't shrink your pile in a meaningful way. It will only shrink your heart, and blind you to potential hires who could help your department enormously.

But for the talented and deserving people working away out there, trying to find a job with a future in our profession, I have hard news.

PhDs do expire. Absolutely. But you have to let them.

I have two graduate degrees, in two related but distinct fields. One of my degrees has expired. I could not get a job, nor apply for a job with a straight face, on the basis of that degree. It is, at best, an interesting thing on my CV, but only to someone who is already interested in me because of my other degree, which I have not allowed to expire. One of my degrees has value as a job credential and the other has not, because I have maintained the professional value of one and not the other.

My first graduate degree is expired because I have not published in that field for years. It had expired by the time I got the second degree. (All my publications in the first field are from the years I was studying for that degree. My last publication is from the year I graduated and switched fields. It couldn't be more legible on my CV.) I no longer practice that discipline. I don't teach it, although I have taken over a beginner's class when the scheduled teacher fell through. But I would not teach an advanced course, let alone a graduate course, or direct even an MA thesis. I don't do that anymore. My qualifications have lapsed. On the other hand, I am working in the field where I got my second terminal degree, and that degree has kept its value as a job qualification because I continue adding value to it.

What about those tenured people who haven't published in years? Why haven't their PhDs expired? The answer is that they have. None of those people could get another job in the field. They can hold onto the jobs they have, but they can't even apply for others. Is it unfair that they hold onto those jobs? Sure. (Although sometimes not; I think that there are sixty-somethings who no longer have the fire in the belly for new research projects but who are nonetheless entitled to a professional autumn as teachers.) But the question isn't what's fair. It's what's best for you. And if you do not yet have a job, you need to keep your doctorate up-to-date by continuing to do work in the field.

In the humanities that means writing and publishing, no matter how heavy your non-tenure-track teaching load is. If you got your degree in 2008 and don't have a peer-reviewed publication since then, search committees won't give you a pass because you've been teaching so much comp. They have plenty of applicants who have been publishing more recently than you have, including applicants who were teaching the same brutal loads that you have. If you haven't published since you got the degree, departments will view that degree as nothing more than a technical qualification. It will no longer be a sign of your actual qualifications, no longer a reliable predictor of success. Not publishing suggests to search committees that you won't publish, and they are not crazy to think that. This isn't a job market where you can get credit for qualifications that are not in evidence. A degree that hasn't been followed up by published research will be construed as a sign that you're finished as a researcher. If that's an unfair assumption, it's also the only assumption that hiring committees can feel confident in making.

Getting your degree is an achievement you can be proud of. But more importantly, it is an indicator of your potential for future achievements as a scholar. And you need to keep demonstrating that potential by achieving more things. Your degree has as much value on the academic market as you give it. Use it or lose it.

Teaching Journalism at the University of Georgia

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, basically the whole staff of the Red and the Black, the University of Georgia's student newspaper, walked out after the newspaper's Board of Directors promoted the paper's non-student "editorial adviser" to "editorial director" and gave him complete veto power over the student staff. The Red and the Black has always been a student-run newspaper, independent of the University itself, where students have final say. So the walkout is predictable and even laudable.

The final straw seems to have been a draft memo, which has been put on line by the students who walked out, which laid out the new standards, such as an emphasis on "more GOOD than BAD." (caps original) The memo is ragged, not always coherent, and spells "libel" as "liable," all of which is forgivable in a draft but maybe less so when you're pontificating about basic standards. Even less forgivable is using the word "journalism" in scare quotes when addressing student journalists. As in:

BAD
- Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is "journalism." I think we are aligned on Crime and "who started the year off with a police record". And that the freshman class lacks some minority demographics".

If in question, have more GOOD than BAD.

What's really striking about that draft memo is that it's very much aimed at teaching students how to create a certain kind of newspaper: a small-time local newspaper. The emphasis is on feel-good stories, running as many feature photos of readers as possible, having a generous letter column, and so on. If you grew up in a small town, like I did, you know the type of newspaper I mean. It covers Little League games and church suppers. It's a perfectly respectable enterprise. But I have to ask: if you were a student journalist at a flagship state university, would you only want to be trained for jobs at that kind of newspaper? Because, let me tell you, it's pretty hard to make a living at those places.

And this is where we run into one of the larger problems in pre-professional education: sometimes an emphasis on "practical" skills that students will be able to use in the "real" world, ends up teaching them skills that are only practical in a small corner of the world. You teach your journalism students how they do things at a "real" newspaper, but what you teach them limits them to jobs where they'll never be able to advance much. (Lots of "pre-professional" undergraduate majors teach students to do exactly one kind of job, usually a decent but not glamorous job which will keep them solidly in the lower middle class. Nothing wrong with learning to be an x-ray technician. But you have to know that x-ray technician school never takes you to any job except being an x-ray technician.)

Here, the focus was going to suit students well for gigs at the Bedford Falls Gazette or the Daily Mayberrian, but leave them unprepared to even apply for entry jobs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, let alone the Washington Post or New York Times. Try getting a gig at one of the big places when even your undergraduate clips look like they're from a small-town daily. Here the teaching approach, however well-intentioned, strongly favors the weakest (or least ambitious) students, the ones who the teachers don't expect much from, at the price of limiting what's possible for the more ambitious students. The memo represents a shift of focus to lowest-common-denominator "professionalism," training students for jobs that even the weakest of them could probably get, at the expense of what the better students might be able to do someday.

The memo also brings up one of the constant struggles with teaching writing, or any of the other arts (broadly speaking): the tension between assigning tasks that the students are 'ready for' now and can complete successfully, on one hand, and on the other setting tasks will inevitably end up being the student's first, imperfect try.

The logic of giving assignments that the students are "ready for" is pretty obvious. They understand what they've been asked to do, they mostly end up doing a good job, and they're generally a lot happier. The down side is that they don't stretch, and if there's too much of an emphasis on students "succeeding" at things they can already do well, they don't get much better. I've certainly met students who seemed, from my point of view, to have been badly served by earlier teachers who only taught them simple tasks. Some of those students seemed totally unprepared for more advanced classes.

There are some things that are very much worth learning that are impossible to do successfully on the first try, or even the third. You have to learn them by trying them, and it can take a while to improve. One of the reasons colleges exist is to give students a place where they can have the first and third and fifth tries they need to master a complicated set of skills. Most jobs don't have a place for that. That's why an emphasis on producing a quality product at the Red and Black seems misguided to me. That's not a full education. Helping students turn out an unambitious but "successful" paper will teach them a little. Letting them turn out a flawed but ambitious daily paper teaches them a hell of a lot more. And that's what's unforgivable here: losing sight of the education.

Student journalists are supposed to care about turning out the best paper they possibly can, and as budding journalists they're supposed to focus on their readers. But the adults involved should never mistake pleasing the readers, or the quality of the morning broadsheet, with the actual goal. The world doesn't actually need the newspaper. What matters is that the students learn. A campus newspaper that makes everyone who reads it happy but doesn't force the students to stretch is a criminal waste of everyone's time.

When I teach writing to undergraduates, I go in with the knowledge that none of them are going to write anything, this semester, that anyone else would ever pay to read. Understanding this reality is one key to my job. I could assign them writing tasks that they already have the skills to do well, and everyone would feel good about themselves and I could pat them all on the heads. The reason no one would ever pay money to read those "successful" assignments is that the things the students already know how to produce are, by their nature, not worth a stranger's time. ("Oooh, look! A summary of the plot of Othello! Just what I've been looking for.")

On the other hand, I could assign the students to undertake tasks that they aren't yet capable of completing perfectly, and maybe even that they won't be able to do without two or three more tries. The results won't be worth a stranger's time to read, because even the best will have some problems and one or two will be a hot mess.  But I will read them, at least two or three times apiece, because it is my job and because what I'm interested in is not what the student wrote this semester so much as what the student might write down the road. My job is to get them further along the road, no matter how bumpy reading through any stack of assignments seems. That also means, of course, that I talk to my students about things that are holding their writing back. But when you worry mainly about "results" and "quality" you've taken your eye off the ball. You've stopped being an educator.

The point of student writing is what it does for the student. It isn't to make it easier on my eyeballs when I sit with a stack of papers on the coffee table, and it isn't to make the nice folks of Athens, Georgia happier with their morning copy of the Red and Black.  It's to move the students closer, one unsteady step at a time, to producing a piece of writing that will hold a stranger's attention and do its writer some good in the world: the writing sample for graduate school, the published story, the  portfolio that gets you hired at the Journal-Constitution or Newsweek. The "results" a teacher gets paid for worrying about aren't coming tomorrow, but years in the future. But that future, as every year teaches me, comes very fast. You can't ever stop preparing for it.