The Little Professor

Accident

I've been trying to explain Book Three (a.k.a. Inexpensive-to-Write Book, a.k.a. Book on Neo-Victorian Fiction) to people for a few months now, and have usually met with polite incomprehension.  Obviously, that's not the response Yr Humble Servant has in mind.  So I've done all my usual routines--chewing over this and that while walking to and from campus, doing more reading (I can always do that), working on conference paper proposals, and the like.  Then, one day, I read a book on what appeared to be a totally non-related topic, and said, Aha! That's what was missing! And voila: now I have a research program to follow, a narrative to construct, and a more precise set of novels to target.

On the one hand, such accidents are part of the romance of research, as it were.  There I was, stumbling along, minding my own business, and...inadvertently solved my problem.  All very convenient, if not fated.  Hence academic angst about libraries relegating books to weird underground (or offsite) repositories: we all have stories about the Brilliant Insights we obtained just by wandering through the stacks.  On the other hand, these accidents are, in many ways, much less accidental than they first appear.  I wasn't "just" reading Totally Non-Related Book (at least, that's what I thought it was)--it was on my radar in the first place because it speaks to one cluster of my usual run of scholarly interests.  In this case, I simply hadn't yet made the right connections.   Even when I'm reading randomly, I still have a set of parameters lurking at the back of my mind, clicking and gurgling away.  By the same token, when I'm meandering amongst the library bookshelves, I'm still likely to be meandering in a specific set of locations.  The discoveries are "accidental," but not in any sort of chaotically free sense.

I was thinking about this question of accidents because of the Sherlock Holmes course in particular (yes, I'll post the syllabus shortly...).  The undergraduate and graduate seminar experience teaches "research strategies," yes, but in ways that don't really mimic the experience of research and writing as a professional scholar.  The time constraints, for example: we have deadlines, but our deadlines generally don't fall into neat fifteen- or ten-week increments.  More to the point, it's hard to encourage undergraduates to have productive accidents when they don't yet have those silent (or relatively quiet) parameters yet in place--for the accident to "help," the ideas already need to be churning about.  But in a seminar, one's frame of reference, often enough, is just what's on the syllabus: the student enrolled in a course on Chaucer is highly unlikely to have read John Gower.  This is true even at the graduate level, where fulfilling your single-course requirement in early modern literature doesn't necessarily entail having much in the way of previous experience with it. 

In which I remain restricted to short observations, thanks to jet lag

It is a truth universally acknowledged that instructors who wish to write syllabi are IN NEED OF THEIR DESK COPIES. 

Longman, I am staring really, really hard in your direction. 

In which I am stubborn (and skeptical)

I am deeply dubious about calls for massive overhauls of doctoral programs in the humanities.  Not because doctoral programs are not in need of reform (anybody have a door to which we can nail some theses?), but because these calls seem to be missing the administrative forests for the departmental trees. 

1.  As Marc Bousquet has been reminding us all for goodness knows how long, we do not have too many Ph.D.s; we have too many t-t lines transformed into low-paying adjunct positions.  (Or, as Claire Potter observes of the Stanford article, "The proposal says nothing about the role that Stanford, like every other university, has played in cutting tenure-track lines and in sitting on the sidelines while state legislatures and the federal government cut funding to state unis and community colleges.")  Reworking graduate programs into training grounds for "alt-ac" careers does little to challenge the casualization process.  If anything, it tacitly agrees that adjunct labor will be the new normal.

2.  It is not immediately obvious to me that students who do not plan on going into academia will be best served by remaining in, say, a Ph.D. program in English.  In an exchange I had with Michael Berube on Facebook, Michael noted that Ph.D.s who went on for careers related to higher education found a use for their doctorates--which is fine, except that many Ph.D.s will not be doing anything related to higher ed, and should probably be counseled out of their programs posthaste (and, quite possibly, into a program that might actually be of practical use to them).

3.  The IHE article on Berube's speech notes in passing that "many graduate students only want to be professors."  Surely this qualifies as a "well, yes"? If you had taken me aside in year two at the U of C and told me, "You know, you might want to think about a career in grant writing instead," I probably would have been more than a trifle irritated--I was in graduate school because I wanted to be an academic.  Now, quite a few people decide along the way that they don't want to be academics after all, in which case see #2, but for most students, the purpose of struggling one's way through graduate school is an academic career. 

4.  More emphasis on pedagogy would be a good idea, but attempts to slot people into, in effect, "R1" and "teaching" graduate programs--a "a rigorous four-year master's program," as the CoHE report has it--is a terrible plan.   Again, it's not clear what these alt-Ph.D. programs are intended to do, other than preserve the status quo of graduate enrollments in Ph.D. programs so that faculty still have teaching assistants (and graduate seminars to teach).  One could, of course, suggest that some of the teaching currently being done by TAs be handed over to--wait for it--t-t faculty.  (How about giving the composition programs some actual t-t lines, for instance, and not resting everything on the shoulders of lecturers, instructors, TAs, and part-timers?) 

Incidentally, it is also perfectly possible to do research at a non-R1. 

5.  In my old age (OK, I'm 41, but I'm older than when I started teaching, right?), I have become increasingly grouchy about "interdisciplinarity" as a proposed solution to...well, any sort of problem, really.  It's exceptionally difficult to learn how to do one discipline well.  And once you've mastered that discipline, you tend to think in terms of its questions and methods.  (Despite the reputation for being a historian that I've somehow acquired, I don't think like a historian; I think like a literary historian, which is not actually the same thing.)  Interdisciplinary work at the dissertation level is very likely less interdisciplinary than it first appears, much like interdisciplinary work by senior faculty is also very likely less interdisciplinary than it first appears. 

For the record, I finished my doctorate at the U of C in five years (I had one of the now-defunct five-year Mellon fellowships, and had no intention of outstaying my funding).  I emerged from the program with no teaching experience to speak of, and while my dissertation was a good one, it was completed under the assumption that dissertations are there to finish, not to polish. It turned out that I was pretty much unemployable until I had notched a year of (really terrible--sorry, former students!) non t-t teaching on my figurative belt.  

How to increase your popularity with the students

[It's the last day of class in my MW section.]

ME: ...And now, when are your papers due?

STUDENTS: Saturday.

ME: ?

STUDENTS: They're due on the eighth.

ME: What? No.  They're supposed to be due on the tenth.  Monday!

STUDENTS: [erupt into loud cheers]

STUDENT: I love you so much right now.

Choose your own adventure! (OK, barring that, write your own final exam question.)

I tried a little experiment this semester: I asked all three of my classes to develop an essay question for their respective final exams.  (It will be one of several options, I hasten to add.)  The students had a sample essay question in front of them and a list of requirements, ranging from the equivalent of "please make sure your question doesn't come out of left field (look at your notes!") to "please make sure you can answer this question in three bluebook pages/about thirty minutes."  At the end, I typed up the questions, projected them on the screen, and had the full class discuss each option.  And then, they voted.  Ta-da, instant essay question.

In all three cases, one of the most frequent comments I got or overheard during the process was "Wow, this is hard."  As an undergraduate, I certainly never gave any thought to the process of developing an examination, let alone coming up with five or six essay questions that were neither too big nor too small.  One of the points I made during this exercise was that the essay should enable students to show off something that they've learned; I'm not simply trying to torture their fingers. 

At the risk of raining on the DOWN WITH EVALS parade

While I can get as knee-jerkingly DOWN WITH COURSE EVALUATIONS as the next professor, an article that cropped up in my Twitter feed (retweeted from the New Faculty Majority) prompted my poor knee to jerk in the opposite direction.  Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa, ran an experiment that proved "that students who received poor grades were 10 to 19 times more likely to make negative comments about their evaluator than those who received high grades."  Ah-ha! Validation! What we cranky dragons have always known! (Certainly, most of us have already figured out that "'once a poor grade is received, the feedback is all but ignored and the focus is on the grade.'")  But wait, hang on:

To test her hypothesis that poor teaching evaluations are a form of revenge, Vaillancourt designed three related studies, each involving between 150 and 176 mostly first-year university students.

Students were given up to 20 minutes to write a short essay on an assigned topic, and were told their work would be graded by professors or teaching assistants. The essays were then randomly assigned a high or low grade and, in some cases, comments such as “No suggestions, great essay!” or “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!” [my emphasis]

Students were then asked to provide feedback to their evaluator about his or her marking ability, fairness, helpfulness and general competence.

In the first study, participants given poor marks and negative comments were almost 10 times more likely to rate their evaluator harshly than those given high marks and positive comments.

It also found that students’ level of self-esteem influenced their ratings. Among those whose essays received low marks and negative comment, high self-esteem was associated with the lowest evaluations. Conversely, those with high self-esteem who received positive feedback from their evaluators rated them the highest.

The grades were "randomly assigned"? It's not as though students are robots, spewing out papers and then mechanically processing the grades.  Randomly grading (really, "grading") the students inflates something, all right--it inflates the likelihood that students in the survey received grades wildly off the mark of their own self-assessment, for no obvious good reason.   Sure, there will be students who respond with joyful cheers and popping champagne bottles to that unmerited A, but what about the student who received an F and knows perfectly well that s/he didn't earn one?  Students are perfectly capable of grasping the difference between tough grading and grading by chucking papers down the proverbial stairs.  Moreover, a comment like "this is one of the worst essays I've ever read" is...suboptimal, to say the least; when I deal with truly disastrous prose, I at least try to preface my comments with "I'm afraid..." As presented in the write-up, the negative comments seem designed to exacerbate the negativity and downplay the helpfulness.  In other words, the methodology seems designed to inflate outcomes at both ends of the scale: happy students (woo-hoo! awesome instructor is awesome!) and annoyed students (death by ballpoint pen!), with some (or many? we don't know) justifiably infuriated. 

Faculty get "grades" too

To what extent do faculty discuss referees' reports with their students?

Most of our students, I think, assume that once you become a professor, your writing somehow transcends evaluation.  We grade, as it were, from on high.  Oh, there are the student evaluations of our teaching, but our prose? That's a different matter.   It's the rare student who looks up reviews of her professors' books in the scholarly journals, but it's the even rarer student in the humanities (the STEM fields may be different) who hears much about responding to peer reviewers. 

I occasionally insert my own undergraduate prose into the classroom as practice for peer workshopping.  "It's a real paper," I say.  "How would you advise this student?" (As it happens, the sample paper I use got a higher grade than I would have given it myself; such is life.)  This produces some anxious tittering at the moment of the big reveal, but the underlying point is simple: look, nobody emerges from Zeus' head writing brilliant academic essays.  Even professors spend their undergraduate careers looking for a thesis in all the wrong places, neglecting to append a conclusion, or dangling their modifiers every which way. 

However, the undergraduate example still positions professor-me as "all grown up."  My theses are informative! The conclusions conclude! And the modifiers are not dangling, let  alone squinting! Yet at the grand old age of 41, I still have a hard time writing introductions (endings are easier). Speaking of which, I just fixed a dangling modifier in the forthcoming introduction to Robert Elsmere.  Moreover, peer reviewers tell me to change things, and...well...I have to change them.  (In his or her final suggestions for Book Two, the second-round peer reviewer gently pointed out that I hadn't done something s/he had requested the first time around.  Guess what I was doing this morning?)  I grumble loudly, but nevertheless, there we are.  I may not be receiving letter grades, but the comments are still there.  We, too, are subject to judgment. 

The Shadow Scholar

In 2010, the pseudonymous "Ed Dante" took us on a voyage through his own professional Inferno: writing papers for all sorts and conditions of college students.   At the time, I commented that "[i]t sometimes feels as though academics are being sent off to chase the Holy Grail of assignments--That Which Cannot Be Plagiarized."  Few are pure enough to approach the grail in question, which is another way of saying that at a certain point, many begin to wonder about how much can actually be gained from playing a very advanced game of hall monitoring.   In any event, Dante's article set off enough of an uproar that forum discussions, blog posts, and the nightly news soon came calling.  So, too, did a book contract.  Enter The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat, published under the author's real name, Dave Tomar.

Tomar may not be an academic (although he plays one on your computer screen), but his memoir soon runs into exactly the same problem that every academic memoir does: the sad non-resemblance between the author, who spends his days (and nights, and sometimes his poker games) writing, and Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones had, all told, a relatively interesting life, what with the lost ark and Sean Connery for a dad.  Academics sit in front of computer screens, read books, go to archives, lecture students, attend meetings, and, when they're feeling especially adventurous, go to conferences.  Much of interest may come out of this life; the life, however, is rarely interesting.  Many of us thanked the heavens when the brief vogue for academic memoir went the way of all flesh.  Tomar, alas, has an academic life, without the archives, lectures, meetings, or conferences.  "As soon as I finished one paper, I started another," he tells us.  "As soon as I submitted an assignment, I went to the writers' board and picked up another one to take its place" (loc. 2818).  Blown up to book length, Tomar's career as serial cheater turns into a blur of miscellaneous papers and the occasional doctoral dissertation, occasionally punctuated by the outside world (the romance that hangs fire for a decade) and/or drugs and alcohol.

In the memoir's overall narrative arc, Tomar progresses from glum and alienated student at Rutgers to glum and alienated paper mill employee (after having been a glum and alienated high school student, who "thought of Gandhi and chose passive resistance as the chief mode of my rebellion" against the regime [loc. 3037]), before finally hitting an epiphany while generating a doctoral candidate's entire run of papers, up to and including the dissertation.  By working through the candidate's "research" on trauma, Tomar not only begins to understand his fear of heights, but also finds himself starting "to make peace with my more encompassing anger and sense of displacement" (loc. 3476).  It is after this project that Tomar eventually decides to "graduate," at age thirty, from a life of shapeshifting authorship into the adult world--and, hence, to write the article that set off the fireworks in the first place. 

But this pilgrim's progress (with a very long stay in the Slough of Despond) is not all that interesting, any more than my own life is all that interesting.  "[S]elf-indulgent and meandering" are, I fear, reasonable adjectives to apply here.  Nor do Tomar's reflections on How We Got Here add much that is new: college debt, skyrocketing; students, entitled; athletics programs, overfunded; unemployment (and underemployment) for college graduates, high.  Matters are not notably helped by the disjunction between Tomar's vague leftism, which primarily resides in snark against George W. Bush (who "always reminded me of one of my customers, the kind who paid for their assignment and handed it in without bothering to read it" [loc. 316]), and his simultaneously unoriginal and unexamined mother-blaming.  Seriously: "My customers--years in this business reveal--have been made half-dead by the suffocating proximity of their mothers" (loc. 1685).  (I'd like to read this as Swiftian satire, except there's nothing in the chapter to support that position.)  As Blaine Greteman observes, "his argument rarely reaches beyond the level of Googling, like one of those machine-authored books that use an algorithm to collate information about a given topic."  Readers will probably be more intrigued by Tomar's secondhand account of a pseudonymous friend's administrative work at pseudonymous for-profit universities (which supply "some of my best clients" [loc. 2048]), supported by anecdotes from an interview with one Claudia Shapiro.  Here we have incompetent faculty and unqualified students, glued to each other by pure fraud (e.g., refusing to drop students who have chosen not to return, thereby sticking them with hundreds or thousands of dollars in bills).  For-profits appear here as the capitalist vultures of academia, "part of a market so saturated with product that it has lost all quality control" [loc. 2201]).  (By the end of the chapter, the reader no doubt feels either that the end of the world is at hand or that winter is coming, whichever seems worse.) 

Tomar's brave new world for faculty would involve turning them into Internet traffic cops of a sort.  "Teach us how to use Facebook responsibly," he begs, "how to differentiate between sharing and stealing, how to engage openly in a discussion about the blurring of lines between these two acts.  Don't tell us not to use Wikipedia [...] Show us how to read it, how to verify its claims, how to spot and debunk its errors, even how to correct  it and contribute to its improvement" (loc. 1473).  He is especially irate about faculty who dare demand that students use non-Internet sources, even though outside of the STEM fields, there's still relatively little significant scholarship available on the 'net that hasn't already been published in paper format.  Not no significant scholarship, but relatively little.  (Books? Remember those? Those things that are often extremely expensive on Kindle and available in only "preview" or "snippet view" on GoogleBooks? Which are available to libraries in electronic format only from selected publishers?  One could go on.)  Enough has been written about Wikipedia and its problematic relationship to "truth," crowd-sourced or otherwise, that this cheerleading (with or without an acknowledgment of errata) gives the reader considerable pause.  Tomar offers us a hazy outline of the problems facing contemporary faculty and students, but a life of churning out one paper after another doesn't seem to have equipped him to reflect on potential solutions.   

 

Evaluative

I'm assembling pull quotes from student evaluations for my file ("Dr. LP is the awesomest instructor who ever awesomed!!! W00t!").  Or I would be, if they were there.  My hazy sense of my evaluations has always been that written comments are nowhere to be found.  As I go through my ever-increasing collection of evals en masse, it looks like my hazy sense was, after all, quite clear.   I have no written comments when students love the class; I have no written comments when students hate the class.   A couple hundred (or more) evals so far have yielded about ten comments across the board.  Occasionally, as happened a few years ago, enough students--by which I mean three or four out of a class of fifteen or more--felt worked-up enough about something to articulate their complaints; in that case, I took steps to fix the problem(s) for later students.  But numbers alone don't help me fix anything.

I can see the course evaluations now...

[I'm teaching The Heart of Midlothian.]

EARLY ON IN THE CLASS:

ME: ...And so Jeanie walks all the way to London [dramatically walking across the room].*

LATER IN THE CLASS, WHEN WE'RE BACK ON THE SUBJECT:

STUDENT [raising hand]: Are you going to do the walking thing again?

[Everyone starts laughing, including me]

[I dramatically walk across the room again]

ME: Oh, I can see the course evaluations now.  "Instructor does strange walks across the room."  This will be right up there with "Instructor's technique for erasing the blackboard was poor."

[Students laugh]

ME: No, seriously, I actually got that comment once.

[Students stare]

*--ETA that that is technically an exaggeration, as she manages to pick up a coach for the last few miles.