CompSpot

North Central Investigates

2009-04-10T12:58:00.002-05:00

An addendum to "A Whole New Perfect Storm": Scott Jaschik has a new article in Inside Higher Ed reporting on the investigation the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools has launched into three universities it accredits, Fort Hays State University and two for-profits, Ellis University and Grand Canyon University.

Apparently the universities in question didn't bother to check with their accrediting agency before outsourcing developmental and gen ed courses to StraighterLine, so that North Central had to read about it in the "papers" (actually, in Scott Jaschik's original article on the outsourcing). According to Lawrence V. Gould, the Fort Hays provost, he didn't see any reason to notify North Central because they accept transfer credits from other institutions; but according to a North Central spokesperson, it makes a huge difference that StraighterLine is not an accredited degree-granting institution.

StraighterLine CEO Burck Smith says he welcomes North Central's investigation, saying his company's courses will hold up to any comparison. And as I suggested in my previous post, my guess is that this will indeed prove to be the case. North Central will pass on StraighterLine, and everything will be kosher. And more and more universities and their accrediting agencies will begin to recognize and accept and use this new business model, and higher education in this country will be transformed.

A Whole New Perfect Storm

2009-04-06T09:52:00.006-05:00

In my inbox this morning I find an email from Eran Ariel of WhiteSmoke, suggesting that if we "are interested in providing immediate enhancement to the clarity and professionalism of students’ writing, WhiteSmoke can help." As their PowerPoint presentation shows, WhiteSmoke is essentially an amped-up grammar-checker that improves enormously on Word: catches far more problems, is far more accurate, and gives writers far more constructive advice.

This reminds me of the buzz on WPA-L over StraighterLine, which cwerry on Kairosnews describes as "an alliance between the largest online tutoring company (Smarthinking), one of the largest media/publishing companies (McGraw Hill), the largest learning management company (Blackboard), and a number of partner educational institutions." (See also Scott Jaschik's Inside Higher Ed piece.) What they're offering is a solution to what StraighterLine CEO Burck Smith calls the "perfect storm" facing higher education these days--"budget cuts, surging enrollments, lower endowments, increased competition and needier students"--through the online outsourcing of developmental and gen ed courses. As cwerry writes:

StraighterLine promises to help universities cut costs, manage higher enrollments, expand revenue and course offerings, reach new markets (such as foreign students) and increase the quality of education. They offer 'turnkey' courses in developmental writing and composition (as well as business and mathematics) that cost $399 per class, with 24 hour, seven-days-a-week access to teachers, and up to 10 hours one-on-one instruction (with the option of more teacher contact if the student pays for it). Students will get 'instructional support that is more convenient, more immediate, and more consistent' than regular classes. The explicit model for such teaching is the call center, with its sophisticated tools for optimizing "utilization capacity."

As Burck Smith writes on his blog, the goal of this initiative is to "transform the cost structure of higher education":

The StraighterLine model only provides general education courses. By working with partner colleges, StraighterLine can carve out these high enrollment courses. The courses that are the best candidates for standardization and commoditization at volume. In this way, students that successfully pass StraighterLine courses can receive real college credit at a fraction of the cost of traditional college courses… If all goes well, in 3 years or so, StraighterLine will be a primary provider of general education courses.

Note the keywords there: "standardization," "commoditization," "pass courses," "receive real college credit," and "at a fraction of the cost." StraighterLine is not interested in taking over the liberal part of a liberal education, the business of liberating students from prejudice and fear to critical thinking and creativity; they recognize that there is a part of higher education that is "lesser," inferior, a part that most universities and colleges aren't crazy about having to deliver anyway, and so should be eager to outsource:

While there certainly are some teaching functions that are best not outsourced--particularly those that require a high degree of socialization, such as most teaching of elementary students--there are many functions that can be easily outsourced. For instance, math, science, and writing fundamentals are essentially the same across schools, states, and countries. Most schools are already comfortable with outsourcing at least some elements of education--many schools that offer distance-learning courses do so through third-party providers, and textbooks and courseware are the result of outsourcing content development and delivery.

Not to put too fine a point on it, these are the courses that are technically speaking "college prep." In countries where only a small elite attends university--most of the world, in fact--these courses are taught in high schools, and universities devote all their undergraduate attention, energy, and money to teaching in the majors. In the US, so-called "college-prep" high school students take these courses too, and AP or CLEP out of their equivalents in college. The problem arises with open admissions, or generally the democratizing impulse to make higher education available to as broad a spectrum of the American populace as possible, including those who didn't take college-prep classes in high school. Those students now have to spend two years, fully half of their college experience, getting up to speed for college-level coursework.

And you know, the outsourcing or "call center" impulse does seem to make a lot of sense here. To the extent that we see gen ed courses in "math, science, and writing fundamentals" as sheer rote learning, why not outsource them to Asia? The $3500 we at the University of Mississippi pay adjuncts per FYW course provides a few full-time people a barely adequate lower-middle-class income here in Oxford; but a lot of colleges and universities, including the community college branch campus in town, pay less than $2000 per course, which means that a married person can earn just barely enough to stay above the poverty line by teaching a 4/4, but once that couple has a baby, the adjunct has to teach a 5/5 to hit the poverty line. That same money, say between $14,000 and $18,000 a year, is an upper-middle-class income in India, enough for a nice apartment and great vacations. A lot of Indian college graduates would be happy to do it for a lot less than that.

But, you say, what about quality of education? If quality of education is defined in terms of standardization and commoditization, passing the courses and saving money, no problem. I'm sure Indian call-center workers could be trained to do just as good a job answering student writers' questions about WhiteSmoke corrections as they do answering tech support questions for Microsoft.

I'm in the middle of a book by Daniel H. Pink called A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. His argument is that the information age, ruled over by "left-brain" knowledge workers, is essentially over, and we're entering a new age, which he (inadequately, I think) calls a "conceptual age," involving a spreading "right-brain" concern with design, story, the big picture, empathy, play, and meaning. Two of the big reasons this is happening: automation and globalization. Many of the high-end professions that used to require a graduate degree and superior logical and analytical skills are now being computerized and outsourced to Asia. More and more functions traditionally performed by doctors and lawyers, for example--diagnosis and creating legal documents--are now increasingly being performed by computers, run either by clients themselves or by call centers in Asia. Pink suggests that Garry Kasparov is the John Henry of the information age: having bragged in 1987 that "no computer can ever beat me," he was beaten by a 1.4-ton chess-playing IBM called Deep Blue just ten years later, in 1997; and having wrestled a successor to a draw in 2003, he now predicts that it will only be a few years before computers beat every chess Grand Master every time. Chess, of course, is the quintessential left-brain information-age knowledge-worker game: all logic and strategy.

In the world of FYW, automation is WhiteSmoke, and globalization is StraighterLine. To the extent that FYW is teaching students to write letter-perfect papers, there is no reason for anyone in this country to keep expecting to get paid to teach it. It can already--or will be soon--be taught much more efficiently and cheaply by computers and call centers in Asia.

I'm not being snarky here. I do believe that there is a standardizable element to writing instruction, and I recognize that the current trend toward automation and globalization of information-age functions means that those elements will increasingly be taken away from us. Nor do I think this is a terrible thing. If the standardizable element of writing instruction is what we call "current-traditional rhetoric"--the teaching of mechanics and structure according to universalized rules, or what Burck Smith calls "writing fundamentals"--it is no great loss to have that taken away from us.

To the extent that there is a real danger here--a "perfect storm"--it lies in the likelihood that university administrators will blithely equate all writing instruction with the teaching of mechanics and structure according to universalized rules and want to outsource all of it. Obviously, the field of writing studies has developed a long list of interactive and systemic concerns, from rhetorical situation to social justice, that could not and should not be standardized, commoditized, or outsourced; and if current trends continue, we may find ourselves faced with a choice between complete capitulation (letting administrators outsource all writing instruction) and dividing and (not really) conquering--that latter entailing some kind of compromise solution where, say, Comp I is outsourced but Comp II is not, or FYW is outsourced but WAC/WID is not.

But if Pink is right, that as the global economy continues to automate and outsource knowledge work we are going to see a growing need for creativity and empathetic integration in design, story, and play--if, in other words, the humdrum knowledge-worker jobs in cubicles that standardized writing instruction prepares our students for are increasingly sent to Asia--we're going to have to make the case that the value FYW adds to a university education lies not in correctness but in creativity, not in perfect papers but in play, not in formulaic argumentative structure but in story. We're going to have to argue that in pursuing liberal ideals in education--educating the whole person, and indeed the whole community--we are not just clinging to an outmoded ideology but actively and effectively preparing our students for the workplace of tomorrow.

Making Writing Come Alive

2009-02-03T10:44:00.003-06:00

In today’s Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik reviews a book that is about to be published by Cornell entitled My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture, by Susan D. Blum, an anthropologist at Notre Dame. Her argument is not a new one; writing scholars have been making much the same argument for some time now. (See Rebecca Moore Howard’s Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators (Greenwood, 1999), Howard’s new book with Amy Robillard Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies (Boynton/Cook 2008), and a new essay collection (published by Utah State UP two months ago) edited by Carol Peterson Haviland and Joan A. Mullin entitled Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures. See also Barry Gilmore’s how-not-to books on plagiarism for students and teachers. And here is a previous CompSpot post on the topic.) But it’s good to have someone else joining the fray as well. There are way too many triumphant plagiarism-catchers out there who don’t know the difference between plagiarism and the improper (untrained) use of sources. The more people we have trying to educate these indignant warriors, the better.

Blum’s argument, based on a qualitative research study she conducted into students’ attitudes toward plagiarism at Notre Dame, is that while students know that buying papers from paper mills is wrong, they really see nothing wrong with borrowing other people’s ideas without attribution. Who really owns ideas and words anyway? They circulate. Her analogy is with P2P music downloads, which students continue to participate in and justify despite enormous legal pressures from the music industry and their own universities. That seems like a really lousy analogy to us writing instructors, but students do seem to lump the P2P sharing of ideas and words and music all together. Ironically, given the deep conservatism of most of our students, for them it’s a kind of happy communist utopia in which all property is collective, to be shared. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. If you can write a song or a paper, you share it with those who can’t. It’s that simple.

And there’s something powerfully attractive about that idea--and, as Blum says, with her anthropological background, the “culture” based on it. And to some extent even the harshest anti-plagiarism norns believe in that culture too, and participate in it. After all, what’s the difference, structurally speaking, between allusion and plagiarism? In both you use someone else’s words without attribution. (It’s teh lame, as the leetists would say, to cite your source for an allusion. Here's how lame I am: I "quoted" Marx allusively, without attribution, in that last paragraph.) The only real difference is that in allusion the speaker or writer expects the listener or reader to recognize the quotation, and understand what the speaker or writer is doing with it. But what if you misjudge your audience, and they don’t recognize the allusion? It happens all the time. Then the (quite legal and ethical and widely accepted) cleverness of allusion becomes virtually indistinguishable from plagiarism.

The only problem with this happy communistic culture is that it isn’t widespread enough for our students to get away with it. Capitalist intellectual property laws are still in place. And even though those laws are extremely complex, so complex that even writing instructors can’t untangle all the complications, they are based on the ideology according to which property is owned by an individual person or corporation and anyone who uses that property without proper attribution (and in many cases payment of permission fees) is a thief, to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It is this punitive mentality that leaches down into the academy and takes the form of anti-plagiarism jihads, often conducted by professors who profess to despise capitalism. And it is this punitive mentality that Blum wants to defang--well, a little. She still wants to catch and punish people who buy papers from paper mills, or who copy whole papers from the Web. But, like all of us compositionists who have been trying to educate colleagues and students on this matter for years, she wants to offer a less punitive attitude toward inadvertent plagiarism--which is to say, toward the improper use of sources. We have to teach students to summarize, paraphrase, quote appropriately, and critique other people’s writing. It’s very hard to do well. Some of our colleagues, in fact, don’t seem to know how to do it; and it’s amply evident that they don’t know how to teach their students how to do it.

How? The model I like to give my students is a spoken conversation with friends, where one friend has an unpleasant habit of repeating other people’s words, clever phrases, jokes, and stories, and taking full credit for them, as if s/he had made them up. To the extent that the whole group recognizes that this is going on, they tend to roll their eyes at such behavior: it is just too lame for words. If you’re so boringly unoriginal that you can’t come up with your own stuff, at least have the decency to say “I really like what Mary always says …” and then quote or paraphrase what Mary says. Give credit where credit is due. When a bully or showoff in a group systematically steals one person’s lines and takes full credit for them, and the group doesn’t notice--or pretends not to notice, because they’re so enamored of this person--the friend whose lines are getting stolen usually gets extremely angry and resentful. (A lot of sketch comedy is devoted to this sort of situation.)

This is a culture that students are familiar with. It’s a culture that they value highly, and one that is steeped in the collective values surrounding friendship. The only trick in getting them to transfer their values governing “intellectual property” in conversation with friends to the kind of academic intellectual property that we value and they often don’t is that they aren’t friends with the people they steal from. The value system that governs their conversation with friends doesn’t seem to apply to situations where the people aren’t friends--indeed, where the authors of the writings they borrow without attribution aren’t really “people” at all, but mere dead words on the page. Since we tend to meet these people at conferences, and become friends with them, and generally participate in the scholarly conversations in our field as if the authors we haven’t met could become friends (or for that matter enemies, but in any case living, breathing human beings), this seems cold and uncaring to us; but our students aren’t old enough or established enough or interested enough to join in the scholarly conversation at our level, so the sources they use do seem to them basically just dead black marks on the page.

The answer? Make writing come alive for them. Have them read two or three articles by professors on campus, and then have those professors come in and address the class, or send a student to interview each and report back.

That still won’t make it easy for them to master the complexities of summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and critiquing. That’s never easy, even for those of us who have been doing it for decades. But at least then they may come to see the importance of trying to master those complexities.

Students as Consumers

2009-01-27T11:46:00.005-06:00

On the WPA-L list recently there was a discussion of a situation that arose at one of the list members' institutions where an adjunct writing instructor had simply disappeared shortly before the end of the semester, leaving no paper trail (grades, notes, or actual graded papers) that would enable the WPA to construct realistic grades for the students. A wide-ranging discussion ensued not only concerning what should be done with the students--make them take the class again (higher administrators' approach on that campus)? make them write another paper and base their final grade on how well they do on it? give them all Bs, or even As?--but also on expectations, realistic and otherwise, that students bring to a college education, and how we should feel about and react to those expectations.

Keith Rhodes, WPA at Grand Valley State University, protested the idea of giving everybody a B or an A: "I'm not getting the idea that a grade should come from paying money and doing time." Brian Donohue-Lynch, professor of anthropology and sociology at Quinebaug Valley Community College, agreed, in theory, but noted that in practice "unfortunately this is a big part of the problem here. We deal, ultimately, in opaque 'grades' rather than in any evidence of actual student learning; ultimately, students get these grades once they have spent so many hours in class/homework. And this is institutionalized in our institutional records system at the core of our programs--we give grades on transcripts, in relation to how many hours (credit hours, Carnegie Units) students spend in class."

Keith replied:

I'm reminded of a a quip I used to use to some effect with TQM-in-education advocates: we have to remember that college education is one of the few products people buy and then hope they don't get. The "customers" supposedly bought access to abilities. Being clever wizards and giving them certificates instead of the real thing only makes sense if they are going to stay in Oz. Eventually, they'll figure that out.

To repeat myself for clarity, they bought an education, not a grade. The fact that they have to participate to get what they actually bought is an inescapable part of the deal. Giving away free grades to cover for a failure to deliver the actual product would not be analogous to anything we would call good business practice as to any normal product.

Students aren't tidily customers. It's an incomplete metaphor that we're all better off complicating.

Right, but surely the punchline in "college education is one of the few products people buy and then hope they don't get" depends on our assumptions about the exact nature of that educational "product." If the product is critical thinking, say--our own idealistic notion--then yes, students by and large resist "getting" the product we think we're selling them. If the product is a degree, however--made up of a major and a minor, made up of credit hours with grades attached to them, as our students tend to think--then they are going to be extremely angry if they pay their money and put in their time and effort and don't get the product they paid for.

I wonder too about Keith's notion that "being clever wizards and giving them certificates instead of the real thing only makes sense if they are going to stay in Oz." I'm guessing he's alluding to the scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz where the "professor" gives the Tinman a heart-shaped clock, the Lion a badge of courage, and the Scarecrow a diploma--instead of "the real thing," namely, an actual heart, actual courage, or an actual brain. But that scene seems to me a little more complicated than he's suggesting. The binary "certificates instead of the real thing" implies that there is nothing real about the feeling Dorothy's three friends have that they've gained something of what they need. It implies that snake oil is snake oil and can't have even the slightest placebo effect. Does a student with a college diploma and the feeling that s/he's learned something really take nothing "real" away from an institution of higher learning?

Or, to put that in terms of The Wizard of Oz, doesn't the feeling the three friends have that they've gained something valuable at the end come from the fact that they have gained in heart, courage, and brains along the way, and the symbolic "certificates" that the professor gives them only yields them an outward sign of what they've already gained, and thereby some "professional" self-esteem?

And our students: isn't the difference between a "dumb"/"ignorant" student and a "bright"/"learned" student often largely a matter of self-esteem, so that the former keeps undermining his own learning by convincing herself that it's not happening, and the latter keeps learning no matter what's going on in class because she's convinced that it is happening?

Or, more cynically: isn't one of the most important lessons our students learn at college how to take orders, follow instructions, cope with boredom, sit quietly for hours every day doing mindless make-work and pretending to learn? Isn't this in fact their most important skill for cubicle work?

In other words, I guess, I'm suggesting that the "certificate instead of the real thing" binary Keith Rhodes offers excludes worlds of really important learning in the middle.

Paul Turpin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Senior Fellow at The Jacoby Center for Public Service & Civic Leadership (University of the Pacific), added an important rethinking of the student-as-consumer metaphor:

The student as consumer metaphor, I believe, is a bad one, not because it is an economic metaphor but because it is the wrong economic metaphor. While we do in fact have monetary and contractual relations with students, they are not *consumers* of learning; they are *investors*. Moreover, they are a particular type of investor -- partners -- which requires them to participate in the activities and responsibilities of education in their own persons. The fiduciary (faithfulness) obligations in the fiscal and contractual relationship between faculty and students go both directions, as befits a partnership, even though students are limited partners in relation to faculty.

In simple terms, students do not buy a commodity, product, or even a service in their classes (though they do in the bookstore, cafeteria, and residence hall). What tuition pays for is the right to undertake a course of study with someone who both teaches and certifies their command of the knowledge, practices, or skills in a class, a disciplinary major, and so on. The most student-friendly version of this explanation I've heard is "College is like a health club. You pay your fees and can use it or not, as you please; we keep the money in either case." Even this analogy has its limits (because health clubs provide services like access to equipment and training but do not evaluate their customers), but students can understand the idea that the user has to do the workout to get the benefits.

The certification that gets expressed in grades, transcripts, and degrees are forms of testimony of our judgments of students' their relative level of achievement, or to use another economic metaphor, judgments of their development of educational capital.

The choice of metaphor matters because the consumption metaphor leads toward a logic of what consumers can and should expect in a market, particularly with respect to the quality & price of the commodities available to them. Students come in feeling like they should be able to shop for courses and that they should pass because they show up, because it's "paid for"; parents paying tuition feel like they should be treated like customers -- as in "the customer is always right", "give the customer what she wants", and similar commercial sentiments that lead in the direction that "paying for a degree" comes to be taken literally.

What counts as accountability to a consumer differs from that to an investor, above all in the developmental expectations in each case. Consumption is nearly always immediate; investment develops more slowly, not just across a semester, but across a major and a course of college study. Remaining caught up in the consumer metaphor increases our difficulties in making the case for broader and more holistic forms of assessing educational development. Clarifying what can be talked about in consumer terms and what should be talked about in investment terms -- and especially partnership -- is crucial to resisting the tendency to frame education as a simple consumer market.

Paul's metaphor is helpful in other ways as well. It helps us ask the difficult questions about higher education today. For example, if I'm paying for a gym membership so I can get into shape, and I don't go, but keep paying my membership fee, that's my prerogative (and also my loss). If on the other hand I go three times a week, and enjoy it, and benefit from it, but they keep jacking up the membership fees to pay for services not strictly related to fitness (at least my fitness), like sinking millions of dollars into sponsoring sports teams and building luxury dormitories, I may gradually become disaffected, and decide that I'm better off buying my own elliptical trainer and some free weights, or watching a fitness program on TV and doing exercises in my living room.

In order to lure students-as-customers to become their consumers, to buy their products--however we define those products, the main thing in this model is tuition dollars--institutions of higher learning have been expanding their expenditures on bells and whistles that are perceived as attractive to "students" but may only be attractive to a certain fairly small segment of the possible entering freshman class, and that have the effect of making a college education much more expensive, so expensive that fewer and fewer families can afford it. There are equations of intangibles like prestige into which winning seasons and bowl games in football figure that are too complex for the mind of an English professor to work out, but people around here are predicting that our victory in the Cotton Bowl this year will translate into increased donations and enrollments--and yet I can't help but feel that these equations are ultimately unsustainable. How important is it, really, for our universities and colleges to fund farm teams for the NFL and the NBA? A winning football season like we had this past fall more than repays Houston Nutt's $1.9 million annual salary; but successive losing seasons did not repay Ed Orgeron's $1.3 million annual salary, and not everybody in the country can have a winning season.

Meanwhile, the legislatures and general public love our football games and despise the research we do, and blame high tuition on faculty research, which in fact brings in more money in indirect costs than many football programs do, and the call goes out to put universities on starvation diets and force us lazy professors to teach four or five courses a semester (because what other possible value can the student-as-consumer expect for his or her money?).

Something's got to change. And it's almost certainly already changing, all around us, as our current situation becomes more and more untenable, and alternatives like the University of Phoenix spring up like weeds. But that's a subject for another post.

Creepy Treehouses

2009-01-09T13:06:00.003-06:00

Routledge has just published a book entitled Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture, by Ana M. Martínez Alemán, chair of educational administration and higher education at Boston College, and Katherine Lynk Wartman, who is resident director at Simmons College and working on a doctorate at Boston College. The two of them studied student attitudes toward and use of Facebook, and reached some interesting conclusions about faculty and administrators (especially student affairs people) friending students for academic or student-life purposes. In yesterday's edition of Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik interviewed Alemán about their findings, including their recommendation that faculty members not friend students:

What does it mean for a faculty member to “friend” a student or accept a friend request from a student? Do the norms and rules of real-world student-faculty relationships fit the world of Facebook campus culture? Students may feel undue pressure and intimidation given the power that the faculty has over students. Unlike the majority of their relationships with friends, the pre-existing, real life faculty-student relationship is not a peer relationship. Students may feel intimidated or obligated to engage in an online social network relationship with a faculty member simply because they recognize the authority and power resident in the faculty. Students may feel powerless to refuse the online invitation, and despite privacy controls, college users can feel that their community boundary has been breeched. My advice: don’t friend students and don’t accept their invitation to be in their network. A code of Facebook ethics for faculty currently exists on the site and I would recommend that faculty review it.

I'm not sure where that "code of Facebook ethics for faculty" is; I ran searches for "faculty" and "ethics" on the Facebook help page and got no hits. If anyone can direct me to it, I'd love to see it!

Alemán also makes an interesting prediction:

SNS [social-networking sites] will become an instructional tool soon. Facebook has already partnered with a course management system; some faculty have begun to use Facebook groups to foster peer learning, conduct group projects, etc. Computer mediated communication technologies have already made it necessary for academic faculty to modify or simply transfer traditional modes and norms of real-life academic and pedagogical communication online. It’s just a matter of time before we see a SNS as a “classroom” experience.

The commenters on the IHE page have tended to disagree somewhat with both the recommendation and the prediction. "Associate Prof at State U" writes:

Definitely don’t “friend” a student, but I do think it is different if a student asks to friend you. In an informal poll, most of my students have said that they feel rejected if a faculty doesn’t accept their friend request, and I have students communicate with me through Facebook who have never come by office hours or emailed (it is somehow less risky to initiate contact with a prof on Facebook). I also have students to whom I am professionally close but who have not “friended” me, and I respect that choice to maintain personal privacy as well. Once students graduate, it is a great way to keep in touch as they move around and change email addresses.

Just remember that if faculty have student friends, they have to keep their pages far more professional and neutral than a normal Facebook page; student friends can see all of our materials, too!

And "W" adds:

I don’t see a problem with accepting a students’ friend request. And you can do so as a professor, and still make your profile as personal as you want it for your friends. How? Facebook has amazing privacy settings. You can make a friend list (all students, for instance) and then restrict how much of your profile they can see, and how much of your activity they can see. Students can see my basic work, school and contact info, but cannot see my status updates, photos tagged of me, or what my friends write on my wall.

That way my friends and I can have our friendly, and sometimes silly banter back and forth, and comment on each others pictures, and my students can still use Facebook to contact me if they want. And joining Facebook means you can set up (and control!) your own groups for courses etc.

The director of "discovery advising" at Virginia Commonwealth University agrees, calling it unnecessarily "'old headed' to think sustaining fairly antiquated rules of professor/student relationships should prevent faculty from engaging their student population in these spaces." This commenter adds: "An overwhelming majority of my advisees are positively giddy that I’m accessible to them in these spaces—our trust-based relationship is strengthened making them more apt to accept my counsel and advice," and "the typical student appreciates a little irreverence from the experts who are their educators. They desire no less expertise from us mind you, just an appreciation of that fact that we’re also human beings." Also: "After having spent the better portion of four years utilizing this valuable tool, I’d like to suggest that we’ll not be able to truly encourage buy-in from the student population unless we 'friend' them in these spaces first."

Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral Inc, notes that "There are ways to interact with students via Facebook without being friends," especially building your own applications. His company has done so, and their app allows instructors to "send gifts, post on walls, share links, see status updates, and play a name game — all without being friends."

Staton also challenges Alemán's claim that Facebook is going to become a course-management system soon:

I contest Aleman’s statement that Facebook will be an instructional tool, and the statement that Facebook has partnered with a Course Management System is false.

Facebook does not partner with application developers. ClassTop, Cramster, and my company Inigral were all early movers to provide LMS features as a Facebook application. Blackboard’s vaporware was late to the game, ClassTop’s app CourseFeed is better and interfaces with Blackboard through their API.

As someone who has built an LMS on Facebook, I can tell you the more you move towards “instructional tool” the more resistance and less use you will end up with.
However, students and instructors are VERY interested in using Facebook as a kind of “ice breaker,” as a tool that can accelerate a sense of community and belonging amongst classmates and the wider campus in general. That’s why we moved our efforts from our Courses app to our Lifecylce Engagement Platform “Schools on Facebook.”

Facebook, as far as I’m concerned, will always be a tool to predict, accelerate, and maintain real world relationships. If you don’t fit within that paradigm, you won’t get much traction.

I like this a lot. Facebook is a great place for maintaining real-world relationships, and while teaching is a real-world relationship also, it's an inherently hierarchical one, and students resist letting those hierarchies leach over into their facebooking. Two of my first-year writing students have friended me after the semester was over and grades had been delivered and viewed, and I confirmed both of them, though I have to admit I wondered what they wanted from me, why they were even interested in friending me--and neither one has ever sent me a msg or gift or written on my wall. Maybe five or six of my former students have friended me after graduation, which I think is quite nice--it's good to be able to keep up with them in their new jobs and cities and even relationships. And I'm quite happy to be Facebook friends with many of the grad students and adjunct instructors who teach in our FYW program. Even though I'm their boss, which might make a Facebook friendship with them a creepy treehouse, they're also my colleagues.

What I don't know about, and would like to hear from commenters about, is the use of Facebook groups for teaching purposes. I know at least one instructor in our program has used it that way, apparently with good results. My guess is that, following Michael Staton's provisos, (a) it's a good way to minimize the hierarchical gap between teachers and students, but also (b) it only works if that gap has already been minimized in class, and the Facebook interface is set up in ways that don't inadvertently accentuate the hierarchy.

In Defense of Buzzwords

2009-01-03T10:13:00.002-06:00

Lake Superior State University has just published its annual List of Words to be Banished for overuse:

green

carbon footprint or carbon offset

maverick

first dude

bailout

Wall Street/Main Street

-monkey

<3 (heart or love)

icon or iconic

game-changer

staycation

desperate search

not so much

winner of five nominations

it's that time of year again

And I agree that some of these can get annoying. Watching the presidential debates and reading the punditry about them, I got thoroughly sick of "maverick," the "Wall Street/Main Street" divide, and Joe the Plumber. But I'd like to lodge a small protest against the kind of thinking that would ban these and other such words--especially insofar as that mindset inspires first-year writing instructors to mark their students down for using them.

First off, let's differentiate a little. "Not so much" is a trendy phrase, which will die out on its own, though not, of course, before millions overuse it some more. Same with the habit of adding -monkey to nouns to make them funnier, like love-monkey. "Staycation" is a totally different kettle of fish, a cutesy nonce word that I would associate with Madison Avenue if it didn't so overwhelmingly have the heartlands written all over it. "Game-changer" seems to me a really useful new concept that should survive. While "maverick" was unquestionably tainted by partisan association with John McCain and Sarah Palin, it is a useful concept that has been around a long time and will be around for decades to come. The distinction between Wall Street and Main Street took on special relevance and urgency in the debates over the $700 billion bailout (how else would you refer to it, LSSU norns?), but it refers to popular synecdoches for the investment banking industry and small-town America, two segments of American culture that are invested with enormous symbolic and emotional capital. So the distinction was overused in political rhetoric for a few months, and we all got tired of hearing it bandied about; that's a reason to ban the terms? And "carbon footprint" may be a buzzword that we hear a lot lately, but doesn't hearing it frequently also constantly remind us that we should be doing more to save energy and reduce emissions?

The larger point to make for first-year writing classrooms, though, is that buzzwords are good things for students to know and use in their writing. The latest trendy words and phrases are "trendy" in the sense that they are being used by the discourse community. They are the godterms, to use Kenneth Burke's word, by which the community organizes reality in the present. Using them signals the speaker's or writer's belonging, his or her inclusion in the community. Knowing them and being able to use them correctly is a form of communicative literacy. Rather than banning them, we should be encouraging our students to compile lists of them themselves, and use them in their papers.

Of course there are students who write well without buzzwords--those who pay close enough attention to the ways the discourse community uses language to enter into conversation through more complex communicative channels. In a sense, in fact, this is the unstated goal of projects like the LSSU word bans: to move sophisticated writers and speakers to this next level. But most of our first-year writers are not sophisticated enough to manage that kind of conversation--not, I suggest, because they're stupid or lazy or illiterate, but because they're young. They haven't been exposed to adult discourse long enough to have mastered it in complex ways.

There are also students who use buzzwords in order not to have to think complexly about a subject--a habit that we should take seriously enough to push on in effective ways. But there are two points to remember there: first, that using buzzwords as conceptual shorthand for huge complex issues (and thus not really thinking about those issues) is typical of pundits and politicians too, seasoned adult professionals, not just 18-year-olds, so we should cut our FYW students some slack if they do it too; and second, that this sort of usage in a draft is an excellent occasion for discussion. "What did you mean here by 'green'?" "Uh, well, you know, green. Like, I don't know, green." "So what does 'green' mean?" "I can't really describe it, exactly." "Environmentally friendly?" "Yeah. That's it." "Is everything that's green environmentally friendly?" "Uh, sure. I don't know." "Golf courses are green. Are they environmentally friendly?"

And so on. Not quite knowing what the word means, but knowing that it's an important word that intelligent adults use when speaking of the environment, is a critical part of our FYW students' transition to membership in the discourse community. And our job is to help them make that transition. It's not to vent our own annoyances at the overuse of certain trendy words.

Nessie on Writing

2008-11-14T13:38:00.003-06:00

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE, known as "Nessie") released its annual report this past Monday; the report itself can be found here, and a press release about the report is here. The report has received a lot of media attention, at USA Today, Inside Higher Education, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The NSSE is interested, as their title suggests, not so much in how much or how well students are learning, but how engaged they are in what they're learning. To measure that, they have developed five "Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice": the level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment.

The level of academic challenge is surveyed with questions concerning how many books and papers of various lengths are assigned, to what extent coursework emphasized "ANALYZING the basic elements of an idea, experience, or theory, such as examining a particular case or situation in depth and considering its components," "SYNTHESIZING and organizinig ideas, information, or experiences into new, more complex interpretations and relationships," "MAKING JUDGMENTS about the value of information, arguments, or methods, such as examining how others gathered and interpreted data and assessing the soundness of their conclusions," and "APPLYING theories or concepts to practical proglems or in new situations." It also asks students to identify whether they had "worked harder than you thought you could to meet an instructor's standards or expectations."

The active and collaborative learning benchmark generates questions regarding the student's contributions to class discussion, giving of class presentations, working with other students on projects in or out of class, tutoring or teaching other students, participation in community or service learning, and so on.

The student-faculty interaction benchmark asks to what extent students "discussed grades, assignments, ideas, career plans with a faculty member," "worked with a faculty member on activities other than coursework," or "worked on a research project with a faculty member."

The enriching educational experiences benchmark asked students about interactions with people who are "very different" from them in views, ethnicity, or class, their participation in organizations and class listservs and web-boards, their experience with community service, learning communities, study abroad, and capstone experiences.

And the supportive campus environment benchmark explores students' experiences with institutional support for academic, social, and other non-academic success, and their relationships with other students, faculty members, and staff and administration.

The first two of those, the level of academic challenge and active and collaborative learning, are the benchmarks of most obvious traditional interest to writing programs--and the results provide the kind of numerical justification that deans will take seriously for the pedagogical best practices that have been established by five decades of research in composition studies.

But the other benchmarks are surely relevant too, if a writing program aspires to teach not just the mechanics of writing but writing as a lifelong engagement with various personal and professional discourse communities. What forms of community service, learning communities, and interethnic involvement might be incorporated into FYW instruction? One of our instructors, Phyllis Nobles, will be pairing her students up in the spring with international students, having them do things together--go to a movie, go to a sporting event, work on a project together, etc.--and then talk and write about the experience. What writing-related activities could FYW faculty and their students work on together outside of class?

This year the NSSE worked collaboratively with the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) to develop 27 new questions about writing instruction. These were grouped into five scales:

Pre-Writing Activities: How much students got feedback from faculty and others about their writing ideas and drafts

Clear Expectations: How much instructors provided clear explanations of the goals and criteria of the writing assignments

Higher-Order Writing: How much students wrote assignments involving summarization, analysis, and argument

Good Instructor Practices: How much students collaborated with classmates, reviewed sample writing, and assigned practice writing tasks

Integrated Media: How much students included numerical data, multimedia, and visual content in their writing

These new questions were given to 23,000 students at 82 U.S. institutions of higher education. The NSSE's summary suggests that "while a majority of students usually talked with instructors to develop ideas and received feedback about drafts from faculty and others, less than a third of first-year students and only one in five seniors regularly sought help from writing centers. The most common writing tasks were to analyze something or argue a position, while writing about numerical data was less common. Finally, most students said their instructors explained their learning objectives and grading criteria in advance, but fewer reported short writing assignments that were not graded or the use of peer review, particularly in the senior year."

And they note:

Results affirmed that when institutions provided students with extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the students engaged in more deep learning activities such as analysis, synthesis, integration of ideas from various sources, and grappled more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. In turn, students whose faculty assigned projects with these same characteristics reported greater personal, social, practical, and academic learning and development. Taken together, these findings provide further support for the movement to infuse quality writing experiences throughout the curriculum.

To view the NSSE survey, go here.

Beating the Term Paper Artists

2008-10-22T07:22:00.007-05:00

People have been writing about their experiences writing papers for term-paper mills lately.

The novelist Nick Mamatas, in an article entitled "The Term Paper Artist" published recently in Drexel University's interactive online magazine The Smart Set, tells of the years he spent writing papers on every imaginable topic for a term-paper mill. The job was lucrative--who says you can't live off writing!--and he was phenomenally good at it. He could write a five-page paper in 20 minutes. Intelligent, well-educated friends of his tried their hands at it, and ended up in tears, defeated. He reports:

The secret to the gig is to amuse yourself. I have [sic for "had"?] to, really, as most paper topics are deadly boring. Once, I was asked to summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three). Then there was this assignment for a composition class: six pages on why "apples [the fruit] are the best." You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers — several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups.

He also tells us that he never felt too bad about helping these students cheat the universities they were attending, because it felt to him as if the universities were cheating the students by taking their tuition and not educating them.

Scott McLemee, in an article entitled "Paper Money" in Inside Higher Education, is more remorseful: he meets and gets romantically interested in a grad student who hears through the grapevine that he's been writing term papers for students:

Now, cheating my customers out of an education had never seemed a cause for concern. They were doing a pretty thorough job of that on their own. But suddenly I could picture things from the vantage point of an earnest, hard-working instructor who would no more have gamed the system than she would have held up a bank.

All the rationalizations fell away in a second; the embarrassment, so long evaded, now finally hit home. The experience was mortifying. Twenty years later, I still feel it. Regret always comes too late to do anyone much good, but better late than never.

Okay. But let's be honest. Students are going to cheat, if cheating is at all possible and affordable. Some students cheat because they're what Mamatas's employer called "DUMB CLIENTS" who shouldn't be in college at all; others cheat because they're overwhelmed with work and need a shortcut. But they're going to look for ways to cheat.

The real question here, it seems to me, is not whether buying or writing bought term papers is ethical, but what institutional conditions make it possible for such an industry to exist. In fact, the crappy writing prompts Mamatas's clients had been given suggest that instructors who give such assignments are cheating too, for some of the same reasons the students give. They're ignorant--ignorant about teaching: willfully and obtusely ignorant about the very nature of the job the university is paying them to do. They're too lazy to seek out help in improving their teaching. They're overwhelmed with work and need a shortcut, so they slap down any old tired drivel and call it a writing assignment, and then bitch and moan about student stupidity when they get boring badly written papers in return.

It really isn't difficult, of course, to prevent students from buying term papers. Help students brainstorm their papers in class, in small groups and with the whole class. Require that they submit outlines and annotated bibliographies. Take them to the library and require them to find three sources off their list. Require three drafts of every paper, and mark students down for not submitting all of them, or for not improving their papers from one draft to the next. Hold paper conferences, and get students to talk about their papers. Hold peer-review and peer-editing sessions in class. Not only do students not buy papers for this kind of process; they don't plagiarize, either. Not only that: they tend to become emotionally and intellectually invested in their papers. They care.

The problem with the regimen outlined in that preceding paragraph, of course, is that it takes work. You have to learn how to teach writing, and you have to work hard at writing effective writing prompts, and you have to devote considerable time to preparing for and improving and grading student writing outside of class. It's not for lazy teachers.

That makes me uninclined to point fingers at people like Nick Mamatas and Scott McLemee who help students cheat, in fact. Lazy instructors who make it both easy and rewarding for lazy students to cheat deserve what they get.

More than that: universities and colleges that ghettoize writing in FYW programs are complicit in this cheating as well. As long as the reigning assumption at an institution of higher learning is that FY students should be "inoculated" against bad writing in a course or two taught by English adjuncts and grad students, so that professors in the disciplines can either not assign writing at all or give crappy writing assignments, nothing will change. Universities and colleges that think of writing instruction as something that is done by a cadre of underpaid part-time English instructors, rather than by every instructor on campus, are practically begging their students to cheat. They're generating the market for the term-paper mills. As long as deans and chairs and roster faculty in the disciplines believe that "summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three)," is a reasonable paper assignment, people like Nick Mamatas and Scott McLemee will be able to earn a decent living. After all, they're just giving the professors what they want: not a slow painstaking learning process, not critical thinking, but boring papers.

But note that, in calling universities and colleges that do this complicit in their students' cheating, I'm emphatically not saying that all universities and colleges are like this. Not at all. Drexel University, whose magazine The Smart Set published Nick Mamatas's article, currently designates close to 200 courses on campus as "writing intensive"--and every student has to take three to graduate. They offer a three-hour one-semester workshop that trains undergraduate students to work as writing-intensive tutors (WITs). They train faculty members to teach writing-intensive courses.

And Drexel is not the only university doing this. More and more universities are getting the writing-intensive bug (also called Writing Across the Curriculum or Writing in the Disciplines), and a new academic culture centered in learning-to-write and writing-to-learn is growing up. If those programs continue to grow, and university and college administrators and faculty continue to get excited about them, pretty soon the term-paper mills will have no clients, dumb or otherwise. The students will be writing their own papers, and caring about them, and maybe even--stranger things have happened--taking ownership of their own learning.

Course Blogs: Writing in a Collaborative Environment

2008-10-19T12:00:00.018-05:00

Teaching Digital Composition with Blogs

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

In "Teaching Digital Composition with Blogs," Krista Kennedy lists four different types of course blogs:

Individual blog by Instructor: an instructor's blog offers an alternative course-management system through class announcements, lecture notes, syllabi, policies.... But an instructor's blog preserves a traditional classroom hierarchy, reduces the students' understanding of writing to what the teacher can advise, de-emphasizes writing as a contextually determined practice, fails to promote the students' voices. And it offers absolutely no infrastructure to entice students to keep writing after the course.

Individual Student Blogs: promote ownership of work, encourage reflection, are less constrained by community norms, demand some technological responsibility, and increase the likelihood of a student's writing after the termination of the course. But individual blogs make classroom community more difficult, demand an outgoing personality, and require more time for assessment.

Small-Group Blogs: encourage collaborative reflection, are conducive to peer review, and are a good communication tool for other group projects. One of the problems of group work is the teacher's inability to assess who is doing the most/least work, and the students' frustration from this inequality of effort with an equality of grade. The blog infrastructure alleviates this problem. Because the blog documents the author of each post, the teacher can see who is doing the work and who isn't. But the group nature of a communal blog diffuses responsibility for (and pride from) the blog as a whole. And the students will not keep writing after the end of the course.

Class Blog: promotes ongoing discussion, is more conducive to comments, and is easy to assess. This type of blog is great for a literature course. But individual voices can get subsumed, and the lack of individual ownership diffuses responsibility and pride. And the students will not keep writing after the end of the course.

The last three of these four types of course blogs encourage students to have a voice in a community that extends beyond the classroom. Because of this transformation of the classroom's community, blogs provide opportunities for students to address multiple audiences simultaneously. In other words, not only do non-student readers increase the likelihood of a student's enjoyment from writing, they emphasize the role of audience in writing.

The first class discussion about audience has to address privacy concerns. The general guiding principle for online behavior is "Don't write or upload what you wouldn't want your parents, kids, or future employers to associate with you." Bring articles to class that exemplify potential problems and facilitate discussion.

Once students readily acknowledge privacy concerns, they're ready for the expanded community. This means the teacher has to find ways to draw external readers to her course blogs. One way to attract readers is through a free ad-exchange service, like Entrecard.

Don't think of an ad-exchange service as a distraction from the course. Entrecard's categories facilitate a discussion of how students can establish a theme for their blogs, and how those themes help to determine their blogs' audience.

Entrecard offers still other pedagogical opportunities. If a course uses individual student blogs or small-group blogs, then the students will have to create advertising banners like this one on the left. An advertising banner is an opportunity for a class discussion about image design, a popular topic for most composition textbooks.

While composition textbooks limit discussion to the interpretation of images, advertising banners enable a conversation about the creative process: how to use the image to define an audience; how to attract and control the viewer's eye movement through imaginary lines, color, contrasts, shifting planes; and how that eye movement plays a role in the viewer's interpretation. In other words, a teacher easily can transform an ad-exchange service into a pedagogical tool.

When used effectively, Entrecard can solicit a minimum of 300 extra visitors a day to a course blog. Of course, there are other marketing tactics that you can assign:

1) Students can label their posts with tags that will help search engines find the students' posts.

2) They can leave insightful comments on popular blogs; the comment template has a field where students can leave their blogs' URL and thereby link their comments to their own sites. (Teachers can have the students email links so the teacher can find them and give the students credit.)

3) Students can advertise the title and link of each new post on Twitter.

4) Students can join blogging communities through an interface like MyBlogLog and send a message to their communities with the title and link of each new post.

5) Students can Digg their posts. If a student adds the appropriate code to her blog's template, more readers can rate her post, and each post's rating will appear on the post itself. The higher the post's rating, the higher the likelihood that the post will attract even more readers.

But if you don't require it, the students won't do it, and if you require too much, the students won't do it. Although I would provide the students with a lengthy list of marketing tactics, I would assign only two or three that I as their teacher can easily keep track of--like their exchanging ads on Entrecard, commenting on popular blogs, and Digging their own posts. If you don't require any form of advertising, you're decreasing the likelihood of strangers commenting on your students' posts, which diminishes both the attractiveness of blogging and the learning opportunities that a blog provides. Students need a hearty traffic of visitors in order to practice addressing different audiences.

Of course, "visitors" are not the same as "readers," but this difference can promote a valuable classroom discussion about how to turn "visitors" into "readers": the timeliness of a post's topic, a captivating title that clues the reader into that topic, an image or video that draws the viewer's attention to the post (or a series of images that move the viewer's eyes throughout the post). Once the visitor is already looking at the post, stylistic devices, an effective sequence of information, vivid illustrations, and other standard topics of a composition course will transform that "visitor" into a "reader."

The next class discussion to have is how to turn a "reader" into a "return reader." Interestingly enough, the best advice for turning "readers" into "return readers" doesn't come from composition textbooks. Students will find the best advice in other blogs--on blogging-resource sites like Problogger and Blog Assistance, as well as buried in marketing and money-making blogs. Have your students run a Google blogsearch on "return readers" and "blog building." Ask them to bring advice from the blogosphere into the classroom. This will acclimate them to research, include them in the teaching process, and encourage an active-learning environment.

Free services like Google Analytics show a blogger how many new and repeat readers she has each day, which posts they read, how long they spend on the site, how they encountered the site, etc. If the course blog doesn't belong to the teacher, require the students to sign up for such services, because they help students determine what what worked and what hasn't, what has given them a voice, and what deprived them of it. Services like Google Analytics provide rhetorical mirrors that reassign the pedagogical role from the teacher to the student--in her desire to enhance the inherent draw of her writing.

Another important class discussion to have is how to encourage comments. Timely posts catch readers while they're still experiencing an event, before they've had a chance to intellectually process their opinions; in other words, a timely post can capture a reader's desire to discuss its topic.

Polarizing statements help a reader to identify her own stance in a debate, which increases a reader's recognition that she has something to say. But this can have negative consequences, too. Consider these comments on a post about the last presidential debate:

TheBoBo says:

Obama is still stuttering around Ayers and ACORN - I sure hope McCain hits him hard on those again because he just completely sidestepped that altogether. Obama just continues to lie about his associations.

pak lah says:

i dont really follow this presidential debate but isnt mccain suggesting nuclear energy that seems blurry on its policy and may cost burden to taxpayers? but anyway i dont side to anyone and im not american either. Should any of these men wins it is time to walk the talk.

Jenny Lynn says:

BAHZING! Finally! I kept yelling at the tv screen, and THIS debate he was finally listening to me! LOL! Thank god for Joe the Plumber, we just needed a good clear example, and "poof" thank you Joe. Still would hav like Romney, but I really like John McCain and Palin. AND! (I swear HE could hear my screaming at the TV because when I said to him WHAT ABOUT THE PALIN is a C*NT t-shirts, McCain brought it up just a breath later!) BAHZING!!!

Akira says:

Remember Obama? : "If you have something to say to me, say it to my face!" Finally McCain realized the friendly old fair-minded grampa routine is not getting respect or support.

I think McCain is still too polite. If he's gonna go down, he should at least go down in a blaze of glory, not pretending that Obama is just another mainstream politician.

Too little, too late?

Eowyn says:

Yes, McCain was much tougher in this last debate, but I was exasperated by how inarticulate he is. But at least he provided more specifics, instead of the usual mantra of "I can do it. I know how to get it done."

It was Obama that truly amazed me, changing so many of his prior positions. He sure sounded like a moderate. This is yet another reason why I find him frightening: It takes a very very facile liar to be able to lie so smoothly. He is the biggest con-man this country has ever seen. God save us.

Zephyra says:

I didn't like either McCain or Obama in the debate. What do you think about Bob Barr?
A is A

Robin says:

I thought McCain was much better than in the previous debates. I'm not American but I've been following the campaign because, like it or not, whoever gets elected in the States affects the rest of us as well. We've just gone through an election here in Canada where the campaign lasted a total of 38 days and there were 2 debates. It amazes me how Americans can put up with a process that lasts almost 2 years and that to become President you have to spend in excess of 500 million! Watching the news the day after the debate, I think Joe the Plumber received more coverage than the candidates!!!

AVROHOM BILGREI says:

When is B.O. going to talk "ENGLISH" rather than "FIGERIN" and start "FIGURING" out how to talk ENGLISH rather than EBONICS ?
TO MENTION LOUSY DICTION IS VERBOTEN ?
HEAVEN FORBID ONE NOTE HIS "BLACK" ENGLISH !
Perhaps he should be more "discriminating" and articulate the final "g" , not to do so is "N.G." !
Eloquent is one thing, inarticulate is another !
Verbal detail is one of the building blocks of "eloquence" !

Anonymous says:

Apparently you haven't noticed that Palin rarely pronounces 'g's in words ending in 'ing'.

Three different types of readers commented on the post: named (and linked) conservatives, named foreigners who don't have a vested interest in the post's topic, and an untraceable anonymous commenter. Although the blog's conservative slant helps readers to identify their own positions in the argument, its polarizing statements prevent dissenters from feeling that their comments are welcomed.

Notice that the commenters are not replying to each other. This is the result of the post's failure to acknowledge different viewpoints. Because the blog preaches to the choir, those who feel comfortable enough to reply don't express different enough opinions to get a conversation started. When dissenting readers get the gumption to reply to such a post, their responses are likely to appear both agitated and agitating, like they're flaming a war by just responding. By simply acknowledging different viewpoints, even polemic bloggers can reduce the likelihood of this conundrum.

Timely posts and polarizing statements are not the only way to solicit comments. A post can directly ask readers a question.

But when this tactic appears forced, it ultimately fails. Not only do questions have to be relevant to the post as a whole, but the readers' answers have to provide missing pieces to the puzzle. In other words, the post becomes a collective effort at understanding.

Once a post attracts comments, the student's replies to those comments can either encourage future comments, or dissuade other readers from contributing. Dave Taylor reminds us of what a blog's reader looks for: "I don't want to read just your [the blogger's] opinion. I want to read other people's responses to your opinion and, ideally, your retorts to them" (See Michael A. Banks' Blogging Heroes, p.9). The experienced blogger routinely has to think of answering one reader in terms of writing to other readers. Taylor offers the following advice: "Instead of reacting defensively--or offensively--what you want to do is what any business needs to do when they encounter criticism. Take a deep breath, and then come at it from the perspective of 'How can I make this a plus?'" (7).

But this should be open to debate in yet another class discussion. Bring a post's comments to class. Discuss how the blogger's replies affect the students' desire to join the conversation. Role play "blogger," "commenter," and the "silent reader." Ask the "silent reader" to explain how the "blogger's" response affects her desire to pay attention to or participate in the discussion. Let the students use their observations to make their own authorial decisions.

Internet popularity won't appeal to every student, so I encourage students to earn an income from their blogs. I tell my students they can use their blogs to host advertisements, sell their own products, write reviews, or collect donations (tips for their posts).

I also recommend that they Google the term "widget" to learn how to modify their blogs for self-expression.

While I'm a strong supporter of course blogs, I have to discourage teachers from assigning technology and marketing tactics that they themselves don't use. If you're thinking about assigning blogs next semester, sign up for a Blogger or Wordpress account. Start blogging and applying these marketing tactics ASAP.

If you encounter problems or develop any questions, feel free to reply to this post or contact me.

Spinning Spin for the FYW Classroom

2008-09-26T10:24:00.003-05:00

It's the morning of the first presidential debate here in Oxford, Mississippi--or, possibly, the morning of the first non-debate, the townhall discussion with Barack Obama that superseded the debate when John McCain didn't show. It's ten hours till the debate is supposed to start, and we still don't know.

As we bite our nails and worry whether all these preparations will be for nothing, or almost nothing, clicking Renew on our Google news feeds every five or ten minutes to see whether McCain has decided to come after all, one of the things that strikes a rhet/comp person is the rhetoric--from both the McCain and the Obama camps, from the media, and from the impassioned commenters at the bottom of every news story.

Most particularly, I'm interested in the spin-in-advance that the candidates' spin-doctors have been putting on the debate--specifically, the shaping of the ideal viewer for it, not just what Walter Ong calls the "fictionalization" of the viewer/listener/reader but the affective construction or organization of the audience.

Fox News, for example, writes:

With three days to go until the first general election debate, each presidential candidate is predicting a strong showing for his opponent — a sign the campaigns are trying to manage expectations for the event.

Barack Obama’s campaign is spreading the word that John McCain enters this Friday’s match-up with a "home court advantage," since foreign policy, considered McCain’s strong suit, is the topic of the night.

Likewise, John McCain said Tuesday that Obama is "very, very good" when it comes to debates, stressing his opponent’s skills as an orator in making the case that Friday’s duel at the University of Mississippi will be no cakewalk.

What interests me about this is that the spin-doctors (including the candidates themselves, presumably on advice from the hired spin-doctors) are doing brilliantly what we attempt to teach our first-year writing students to do: constructing, organizing, shaping, fictionalizing their readers. They're setting their audiences up to expect little of their own candidate and much of the opponent, so that audiences will be pleasantly surprised when their own candidate does better than expected and disturbed and annoyed when the opponent does worse.

And it occurs to me that political spin, thus conceived, might well make an effective classroom tool for helping students learn that skill. Surely they can feel the shaping influence on them of spin? If we can only get them to become conscious of that feeling, learn to articulate not only how spin shapes their response but how the spin-doctors do it, maybe they'll get better at it?

Rethinking Plagiarism

2008-08-31T08:45:00.003-05:00

Jerry Nelms, a professor of rhetoric and composition at Southern Illinois University, recently posted to WPA-L about the types of "plagiarism" articulated by the Australian scholar Brian Martin. Most the types are in fact not legally or ethically considered plagiarism at all, even though they are functionally very similar to the acts of plagiarism we traditionally penalize heavily in writing classes.

Martin identifies one whole area of "plagiarism" as "institutionalized"; Nelms amends that slightly to talk about the transfer of authorship credit in institutionalized contexts. There are, he says, three such contexts: hierarchical, for-pay, and open-access.

In hierarchical contexts, Nelms writes, "authorship credit is distributed up the hierarchical ladder. So a tech writer writes a report that the entire organization takes authorship credit for, or a speechwriter writes a political speech for a politician, who, in effect, takes authorship credit for the ideas expressed in and the language of the speech."

In for-pay contexts, a writer is paid to create a text whose authorship is then implicitly or explicitly claimed by someone else--ghostwriters are the main example here. Nowadays ghostwriters usually get writing credit, on the cover of the book: LT, Over the Edge: Tackling Quarterbacks, Drugs, and a World Beyond Football by Lawrence Taylor, with Steve Serby. We assume there that Lawrence Taylor talked into a microphone and Steve Serby did the actual writing (Taylor tells us in his preface that the only books he ever reads are the ones he himself wrote--using "wrote" there loosely). But there are still cases where a paid ghostwriter remains an uncredited ghost.

In open-access contexts, Nelms writes, "the discourse community itself provides access to previously produced texts for its 'authors' to adapt and even fully adopt 'as their own.'" Technical documentation, for example, is rarely "authored" in the Romantic sense. It is written piecemeal by lots of technicians and tech writers over many years, revised at regular intervals, always facelessly. Legal documents typically contain long stretches of so-called "boilerplate" that is reused by every "author" who writes a new document. Even at universities, the evaluation and assessment and other reports that administrators write contain such boilerplate or other text borrowed casually from other such reports. Not only is this not considered plagiarism; it is expected.

As Nelms writes: "Young employees, given the assignment to draft reports, might actually find themselves criticized if they try to write an original text. That takes too much time. Efficiency trumps originality."

Nelms also writes about research into plagiarism proper that undermines key myths we have about it: that it is invariably a sign of laziness or immorality or both. This research establishes, for example, that "most plagiarism is unintentional--e.g.., due to a lack of sufficient familiarity with academic citation conventions." If the student changes all the nouns in a sentence but leave the sentence structure intact, legally that's plagiarism; but for the student it's almost certainly unsuccessful paraphrase. If the student cites the source but neglects to put quotation marks around the quote, that's plagiarism too, but it's pretty obvious that the student is not trying to "steal" the original author's words, take credit for them; it's an error, a lapse. In correct citations, in fact, we don't put quotation marks around indented quotes--and not remembering the difference between the two types of quotation, in-text and indented, hardly seems like a capital crime. For example:

A considerable body of research and scholarship has been published since the early 1980s that testifies to the overwhelming importance of self-efficacy and other forms of self-concept to learning. Self-efficacy is the set of "people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. Self-efficacy beliefs determine how people feel, think, motivate themselves, and behave" (Bandura, "Self-Efficacy," Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. Vol. 4. Ed. V. S. Ramachaudran. NY: Academic Press, 1994. 71-81. Rpt. in Encyclopedia of Mental Health. Ed. H. Friedman. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998. http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/BanEncy.html. Paragraph 1). Students with low self-efficacy doubt their ability to accomplish the task assigned. They tend to shy away from taking on difficult tasks and view them as personal threats, rather than challenges to overcome. They cannot commit themselves to any goals related to these tasks, and they tend to dwell on their own personal deficiencies, on obstacles they encounter (or just expect to encounter), and on the adverse outcomes they anticipate (the less than stellar grade, the teacher's thinking less of them as students, and so on). "Self-efficacy beliefs also help determine how much effort people will expend on an activity, how long they will persevere when confronting obstacles, and how resilient they will be in the face of adverse situations. The higher the sense of efficacy, the greater the effort, persistence, and resilience. People with a strong sense of personal competence approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. They have greater intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities, set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them, and heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. Moreover, they more quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks, and attribute failure to insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills that are acquirable" (Frank Pajares, "Overview of Social Cognitive Theory and of Self-Efficacy" [2002],
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/eff.html, paragraph 14). (Nelms)

Most likely, therefore, Nelms adds, "students with low self-efficacy are more likely to intentionally plagiarize than those with higher levels of self-efficacy": they don't trust themselves to produce adequate text, so they rely on sources they know (or believe) are authoritative, namely, those in print (or in Wikipedia)--and they rely on them to the point of grabbing whole segments of the authoritative text and claiming it as their own. Nelms concludes by citing an empirical study that did indeed find something like this to be true: Helen Marsden, Marie Carroll, and James T. Neill. "Who Cheats at University? A Self-Report Study of Dishonest Academic Behaviours in a Sample of Australian University Students." Australian Journal of Psychology 57.1 (May 2005): 1-10.

I used to have a colleague who delighted in catching plagiarizers. He bragged about it to all and sundry, about how he gave the offenders the choice between failing the course or facing disciplinary action at the university level, possibly leading to expulsion, and invariably they agreed to take the F for the course. Since he caught between five and ten such offenders every semester, I have to assume that most of these students had plagiarized unintentionally, through ignorance of proper citation and paraphrasing techniques, and that the ones that did plagiarize intentionally were students with low self-efficacy. When I tried out that line of argument with him once, though, he scoffed: "So what," he said, "I should feel sorry for them? If they can't handle the norms of academic discourse, they shouldn't be at the university."

Maybe. But maybe also it's part of our job to teach them the norms of academic discourse? And, if their previous education has instilled low self-efficacy in them, maybe it's part of our job to help them develop strategies for overcoming that low self-efficacy, and not just to throw the book at them?

Student Intolerance

2008-08-20T06:58:00.003-05:00

The University System of Georgia has responded in a novel way to pressures from conservative pundits and lawmakers all across the country to require universities to demonstrate "intellectual diversity," by conducting and releasing a survey on student perceptions of intellectual diversity on their campuses. "Intellectual diversity" as a concept is a conservative response to "cultural diversity" or "ethnic diversity," which they consider inappropriate values in an academic venue (why should educators care about the color of their students' skin or what cultures they come from? why should it matter if, say, a student body is predominantly white and middle-class?); since their brief is that universities have become exclusively liberal and anti-conservative, "intellectual diversity" would mandate some tolerance for conservative views in the classroom.

This new study was planned, as Scott Jaschik writes in his Inside Higher Ed piece on the survey, "both with faculty groups and with Republican legislators who have previously called for intellectual diversity legislation — thus making it difficult for either those in higher ed or who like to criticize it to write the study off as politically fixed."

What they found was that students perceived the greatest threat to "intellectual diversity" on their respective campuses to be coming not from professors but from other students. Professors were far more open to differing ideological views than students. The complaints about intolerant students came from both sides of the aisle, finding the left just as intolerant as the right, but both to be about twice as intolerant as professors.

The study also suggests that about one-third of the students surveyed were unwilling to have their ideological views challenged by their professors, and that nearly one-quarter said that they had felt at least once in their college careers that they had to agree with a professor to get a good grade--the majority saying that this had happened only once. One-tenth of the students surveyed felt that some of their professors had spoken inappropriately about their political views, but two-thirds of those said that they had felt free to argue with those professors. And fewer than half of those who complained that they felt they had to agree with their professors to get a good grade said that the professors had done or said something to make them feel that way; apparently the other half-plus brought those fears to the classroom from their stereotypes.

Putting Professors into the FYW Classroom

2008-07-22T11:46:00.003-05:00

In the most recent issue of Inside Higher Education William Major, associate professor of English at Hillyer College of the University of Hartford, has an article entitled "Teaching Composition: A Reconsideration." Addressing the question often posed by our colleagues in other departments (and even sometimes in our own) of why our students can’t write, Major asks questions that he describes as "more practical, if not more overtly political: Why is the teaching of writing so readily given over to the novitiate? If writing is that important as a university and life skill, why do we assign its teaching to graduate students and part-time instructors? Where are the associate and full professors of English, for it is exceedingly difficult to find them in writing classroom?"

He is not suggesting, he hastens to assure us, "that teaching assistants and part-timers are incompetent or careless; perhaps no one in the English department works harder, save for the staff. And there’s little doubt that the composition classroom is the best training for the part-time grunt work that often follows the Ph.D. in English. Even today - after more than 20 years of empty promises - the dirty little secret that doesn’t often make it to graduate orientation is that a large number of doctors of philosophy will be stuck in part-time employment fixing thesis statements and correcting schizophrenic syntax."

We all know why this happens, he says: "Graduate students and adjuncts are cheap labor. They fill untold numbers of sections and receive minuscule pay and laughable benefits, if any." But why do English departments not only tolerate this situation but actively perpetuate it, even like it? Why is teaching writing "work for the masses - graduate students, adjuncts, and those oddballs in rhetoric and comp" - and teaching literature is for the elite? "Since when did writing become anathema? If writing is so important that virtually every student at nearly every college and university must take at least one composition course (and usually two), why aren’t more professors of English teaching it?"

Well, obviously: "The English professor rarely teaches freshman writing courses because it is beneath her to have to worry over catchy introductions, pithy thesis statements, and thoughtful conclusions. Certainly she cannot be bothered by grammar and form, except briefly and in passing. There is a workman-like quality to the teaching of writing; it is as close to blue-collar as you can get in the liberal arts classroom."

Major also mentions with excitement and enthusiasm a post to Stanley Fish’s New York Times blog (presumably this op-ed piece from May 31, 2005), saying that if Stanley Fish enjoys teaching writing, perhaps there’s hope. (But see the reactions to Fish's insistence that the writing classroom should be "devoid of content" from rhet/comp bloggers like Steve Krause and Jeff Rice.)

Major then launches into his utopian conclusion:

At the very least, full professors of English belong in the composition classroom because they might learn a thing or two about writing themselves. Moreover, the benefits to those students who will not see a professor their first year could be intangible. They would understand that we in the university take writing seriously enough that someone with gravitas and experience is teaching it. They would benefit from close contact with instructors who are not looking to move up or into the more ethereal realm of literature, those who believe that strong, clear writing is as essential as oxygen.

There could be other structural and institutional benefits. Might we see smaller Ph.D. programs because there is less need for composition instructors and because the professors are more fully engaged with undergraduate education? Might we have fewer doctorates awarded? A meaningful loosening of the job market? Imagine a world where positions teaching literature and composition are actually available for the professionals we graduate from our programs.

I'm not sure this scenario is the best possible future for English departments in this country - do literature professors really make better FYW instructors than our current grad students and adjuncts? do we really need to cut back Ph.D.-production by a factor of what, 10? 20? 50? what happens to research, the construction of new knowledge, if teaching loads are increased to meet this new need at R1 universities? - but I think Major's article is extremely useful nonetheless. It may be utopian to reimagine the delivery of writing instruction in something like this fashion for the simple reason that the economic pressures are against this sort of change; but it is still an extremely useful thought-experiment to crumple up what we're doing now and rebuild it from scratch. What should the role of writing and writing instruction be in higher education? What kinds of resources do need to be devoted to it (them)? What kind of departmental division would best serve our students' need to be able to write? Shouldn't we really have colleges of writing, with departments of first-year writing, business writing, legal writing, technical writing, and so on? Some universities have created colleges of "the arts and communication," with departments of writing studies or rhetoric or professional communication thrown in with theater arts and theater management, design studies, arts and arts management, and so on; but if writing is as important as everyone says it is, do writing programs really need to be thrown in with the arts to make up a full college?

The Core of the Research We Do

2008-07-14T23:16:00.012-05:00

In her provocative plenary talk at the opening session of the WPA conference this past weekend in Denver, Andrea Lunsford challenged her audience to rethink what it is we "compositionists" study. It is writing, obviously, or rhetoric and composition; but what is that? If, as Aristotle says, rhetoric deals with whatever subjects or ideas people have in common (ha koina) and does not have a field or discipline (episteme) of its own (1.1, 1354a2-3), perhaps the same is true of "writing studies," or "rhet/comp," or whatever we decide to call it? Perhaps, in fact, our uncertainty over what to call the field is reflective of its lack of a unified subject matter, and thus of an episteme of its own? One of Lunsford’s points, taken from John Guillory at a recent lecture delivered at Stanford, was that writing is the most important skill in the professional world today, and yet the discipline devoted to improving students’ ability to perform that skill is despised. Why? Because that field or discipline has no real field or discipline? Because the members of that field or discipline have been lax in articulating what it is they (we) do?

My first thought, listening to Lunsford’s talk, was that English doesn’t exactly have a unified field or discipline either. But of course many English professors specializing in the study of literature would say that literature is the core of English department research and teaching; and even though that notion marginalizes writing, linguistics, and English education, essentially making English departments an impure mixture of disciplines in need of purification or purgation, that doesn’t seem to pose a serious threat to the literary “core.” Many literature professors, in fact, have welcomed the splitting off of writing programs into separate departments or centers for that very reason: get rid of the stuff that doesn’t really belong.

So that inner protest against Lunsford’s challenge came to nothing, in the end: I realized, sitting there, that English departments do have a core, a center, and by contrast writing, linguistics, and English ed do not (at least in this country: writing studies is virtually nonexistent in other countries, and linguistics tends to be the core that organizes departments of modern languages, including English, in European universities).

And yet, obviously, English departments tend to remain highly respected even when they lose or expel their writing programs, linguistics course offerings, and other "peripheral" non-literary appendages. This suggests that the source of that respect has nothing to do with professional applications and everything to do with the socio-ideological clout of literature, perhaps based on the Romantic cult of the creative genius, but perhaps also on pervasive ideological assumptions about the "humanizing" power of literature—its ability to raise its readers to a higher cultural potency. Law schools, after all, are widely said to "like" English majors because "they can write"—but that liking and the belief it is apparently based on are almost certainly linked not to the course or two or three English departments typically offer in "writing," but to the dozen or more courses English majors are required to take in literature. Reading literature somehow magically teaches English majors to write.

This would suggest that the pathway to expanded institutional/intellectual respect for writing studies lies not through a convincing rearticulation of what we study but through magic—the magic of ideology—and since few of us, I suspect, are magicians, it may well be (this was my next inner protest) that there is nothing, really, we can do. It’s hopeless. Writing memos (Guillory’s example in "The Memo and Modernity," cited by Lunsford) may be far more important in the working world than reading literature, but that pragmatic professional importance is not going to alter the ideological balance between the production of despised written texts and the reception of venerated ones.

Still, as I walked away from Lunsford’s plenary, and in the days that followed, I couldn’t shake her challenge. It kept nagging at me. What is the core of the research we do? Is it just "writing"? Is it just the production of despised written texts, like memos and instruction manuals and proposals? Worse, is it just the production of "English papers" or "essays" or "themes" or "compositions"—texts that are not only despised but decisively cut off from pragmatic usefulness in the workplace, including the academic workplace? And even if we attempt to shore up the usefulness of the essay by theorizing the "academic article" as an essay, and thus our work as significantly contributing to academic literacy, how exactly does that help our case? Haven't the best and the brightest been learning how to write publishable academic articles without our help for centuries? And, given that our colleagues in other departments typically don’t believe in "writing" in our sense of the word, as a discipline-specific rhetorical appeal to a well-organized audience—writing for them is often sheer mechanics—how exactly does a close linkage between our field and academic writing help our case? First-year students, we say, need to learn to write "academic essays" for their other professors; but those other professors typically don’t want "academic essays" from their students, either because they don’t require their students to write at all (seniors in my applied writing classes almost without exception tell me that the last writing assignments they faced were in their first-year writing classes) or because all they expect from student writing is good grammar, punctuation, and spelling; and in any case instruction in "academic writing" only prepares students (if at all) for the next three-plus years of their lives. How, again, does our promise to deliver that instruction improve our intellectual and institutional status?

Like Students, Like Professor

2008-05-16T13:41:00.003-05:00

In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, a first-year writing instructor who styles himself "Professor X" writes a long diatribe against first-year writing students entitled "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," asking:

My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading "Araby" or "Barn Burning," their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?

My first thought, reading this, is: isn’t that a good question? Isn’t that precisely the kind of question that students should be asking aloud instead of with their eyes, and that instructors should be thinking seriously about and answering thoughtfully, rather than dismissing as sheer laziness or stupidity? Why should future police officers read Joyce and Faulkner? Surely there are texts that they might find more relevant, which would still allow the instructor to push them intellectually?

Part of the problem may be that these courses have a set curriculum, mandated by the department, and the instructors are not allowed to deviate from it. Even if that’s the case, however, surely even the most traditional (and irrelevant) readings can yield some kind of interest, if they’re taught with any kind of attention to the students themselves, what they know and what they care about, what they’re already reading and writing in their ordinary day-to-day lives?

Part of the problem, too, is that teaching these courses isn't terribly lucrative. They are, as Professor X says, the basement of the ivory tower. That means that the competition to teach one or two of them is never particularly fierce, and writing-program administrators often have to take whatever warm bodies sign up to teach them, providing they have the minimum qualifications (an M.A., preferably but not necessarily in English). That also means that the people do who teach them may or may not know anything about teaching first-year writing, and may or may not consider it incumbent on them to learn. If you're only getting paid four or five hundred bucks a month to teach the course, is it worth going out looking for extra training so you can do it better? As Professor X says, no one even seems to notice what he does anyway, so why worry?

Another part of the problem, though, patently, is that Professor X is cut from the same cloth as his students. He admits this:

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

He landed in these classrooms in exactly the same way his students did: out of inertia; out of laziness; out of a sense that it was too much trouble to go any farther afield.

By the same token, it’s probably too much trouble for him to go any farther afield in other ways as well: by, say, studying composition and rhetoric and learning some of the best teaching practices established by five decades of research and scholarship in the field. The whole comp/rhet field for X is too far afield. He doesn’t want to put out that kind of effort: he just wants a paycheck. And then, mirabile dictu, he finds himself in class with first-year students who are just like him, only with fewer years of education under their belts, and he despises them. He doesn’t even recognize the similarities between them and himself. They’re just "trouble."

The article is not all whingeing: "Class time passes in a flash—for me, anyway, if not always for my students. I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point." Here’s a man who loves literature so much that he loves lecturing on it. Hence, presumably, his choice of occupation.

But is a love of literature enough for any teaching job--even an upper-division or graduate literature class? Don’t you sort of have to love the students, too? If you love the subject matter and despise your students as much as Professor X does, isn’t that pretty much a recipe for disaster?

And what good, really, is a love of literature in a first-year writing class? Okay, the college where he teaches ENGL 102 requires him to teach his writing students to read and write about literature, but does that make it a literature class? No: it’s a writing class, a reading-and-writing class, whose readings happen to be literary. What he needs here is not a love of literature but a love of reading and writing of all kinds, including Sports Illustrated and Cosmo, including texting and facebooking--and, of course, a love of the people who do that reading and writing, his students. Or, all right: you can’t love them? At least respect them. I personally think that if you don’t love your students, you shouldn’t be teaching, but all right: at least find something to respect in each student sitting out there paying your salary.

And one other thing: it’s pretty clear from Professor X’s article that he mostly lectures. These are first-year writing classes, and he lectures to his students, and leads discussion. This is a model he learned from his own literature professors, presumably—obviously not from competent first-year writing instructors who know something about best practices for the writing classroom—and he more or less slavishly parrots that in his own teaching, then gets annoyed when his writing students don’t respond as he did, back in the day: don’t respond as avid literature students.

X, tell me: if you signed up for a class on everyday math, balancing checkbooks, doing your taxes, that sort of thing, and your professor lectured you on differential equations, wouldn’t you be bored too?

"Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes,” X writes. "Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence."

Okay. Yes, many of our students are ill-prepared for college. That is certainly the case at the University of Mississippi, not a "college of last resort"; friends at Harvard tell me that the same is true there as well. So what are we going to do about it? Moan about the destruction of reading culture by television and the Internet? Sure, if you’re into that sort of conservative nostalgia and are of a blaming mind. But aren’t teachers hired to teach people, whatever people walk in through the door? It ain’t pretty, true; it’s very difficult to get students who have never read much, or paid much attention to language, to write a coherent sentence. But there are ways to do it, most of them involving the ability to draw on what they already know, what they’re already good at, and teaching them strategies for infusing their writing with it.

(The main one we use in Writing as Drama: create a named drama. Create a named writer and a named reader, and put them in relationship with each other. How do they know each other? How do they feel about each other? What happened last time they met? What happened the time before that? What do they expect to happen next? How old are they? What sex are they? What do they look like? What do they do? What do they want to do to each other? It’s amazing how even nonreaders learn how to write in this sort of named drama.)

Clearly, though, X doesn’t really want to help his students learn to write better. He just wishes he were doing something else. He longs for the "objective" subjects: "How I envy professors in other disciplines! How appealing seems the straightforwardness of their task! These are the properties of a cell membrane, kid. Memorize ’em, and be ready to spit ’em back at me." What some of us think of as the creative flexibility of reading and writing is to him only a burden. He wants right and wrong. He wants absolute rock-hard certainty, so his students can never negotiate with him. He wants to be a scientist. He wants to be an accountant.

But, since he’s too lazy to go back to college and get a Ph.D. in accountancy, he’s stuck with the degree he’s got--and, of course, the students he’s got, at whatever colleges are nearest his home.

The sad thing is, he realizes this, sort of:

But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.

Right. We’re of a piece, but I give the grades, so my students are the ones with the deficits, not me. We’re of a piece, but it’s just too much work to rethink my teaching in this place, to rethink how I see my students, so I’ll just blame them for everything. We’re of a piece, but I’m disinclined to do anything about it, so I’ll just write a bitch-and-moan piece to The Atlantic and keep slogging on.

And I won’t use my actual name. I’ll call myself Professor X, and sound hip and above-it-all. Above all, I’ll hide behind a pseudonym for fear I might lose my pathetic second job, which I despise as much as I despise my students, because my despicable students are my job.

Even the Student Who Fails Learns a Valuable Lesson

2008-05-16T13:18:00.008-05:00

At NSU, Dean Sandra DeLoatch has denied Steven D. Aird tenure because of "the overwhelming failure of the vast majority of the students he teaches." This decision did not come out of the blue. Over the course of his tenure track, Aird repeatedly had received pressure to raise his passing rate to DeLoatch's standard of 70%.

Aird argues that this would require grade inflation. From five different professors, Aird gathered the statistics on two standard exams for a core-curriculum freshman-biology course. In the Fall of 2005, the median grade was an F.

Attendance probably plays a significant role in this low performance. According to Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed, "Other professors at Norfolk State, generally requesting anonymity, confirmed that following the 80 percent attendance rule would result frequently in failing a substantial share — in many cases a majority — of their students." Aird's attendance record shows that the average student attends his class only 66% of the time.

Aird interprets the problem to be one of where to set the bar. He produces a clever sports analogy to support his position:

“Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone,” Aird said in an interview. Continuing the metaphor, he said that officials at Norfolk State have the attitude of “a track coach who tells the team ‘I really want to win this season but I really like you guys, so you can decide whether to come to practice and when.’ ” Such a team wouldn’t win, Aird said, and a university based on such a principle would not be helping its students. (Jaschik)

According to the logic behind this analogy, students are merely potential players who can get cut from the team.

University spokeswoman Sharon Hoggard maintains that NSU upholds the accreditation standards imposed by SACS. She feels that Aird's pedagogical strategy "goes against our [NSU's] very mission, which is to provide an affordable high-quality education for an ethnically and culturally diverse student population." The diversity factor is relevant since NSU is a historically African-American university that caters to students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

However, race is not the heart of the discrepancy. The heart of the discrepancy is a conflict between opposing pedagogical strategies. According to Hoggard, "Every student doesn't learn in the same way. It becomes the duty of the faculty member to find ways to ensure that his or her students are understanding the material." In other words, Hoggard would argue that the only bar to be set is not for the student, but rather for the teacher. While Aird puts the onus of performance on the student, Hoggard and DeLoatch put the onus of performance on the teacher.

What is the role of the teacher in a university classroom? What is the role of the student?

One way to explore the first question is to figure out to whom or what the teacher is responsible. Aird would argue that the teacher is responsible to the material. He sets the bar for the students to jump into the material at a certain degree of proficiency. Those students who can't or won't jump high enough are banned from the material--presumably because the material is sacred enough that careless or un-knowledgeable hands shouldn't touch it.

Hoggard and DeLoatch would argue that, with American citizens' diminished access to math, science, and reading-comprehension skills, and with minorities' even further reduced access to these skills, the teacher works not for the material or even for the student, but rather for our country or a particular race. In this scenario, the teacher has a responsibility to prepare the student for the active engagement that democracy demands of its citizenry. In order to salvage our nation's economy in the face of outsourcing science and research, this active engagement includes the student's adaptability in our highly competitive global economy.

From this perspective, the teacher sees our society through the avatar of the student. It's a fascist perspective in the sense that we are all just servants of our nation's or a particular race's history. If we eliminated the concepts of the nation state and race, and the teacher envisioned instead a global society through the avatar of the student, the perspective would be Stalinist. In both perspectives, the student loses his or her individualism.

When American students lose their individualism, they get angry. They don't like it when we teachers say, "Don't focus on what I want. Interpret me solely as a tool to facilitate your servitude to our country/world." They dismiss us as fascists or communists--because structurally, we are.

Of course, Aird's strategy also ignores each student's contingent identity. The student's face either disappears in the face of the material, or gets excluded for the failure to do so.

Ironically, this exclusion preserves the student. In other words, Aird's pedagogical strategy does more to maintain the student's individualism than Hoggard and DeLoatch's, specifically via the exclusionary act of failing the student. For this very reason, some students might prefer Aird's pedagogy--because it preserves their ability to resist, which endows them with the agency of choice: they can choose to pass or fail the course. When students can't fail as easily, because they're infrastructurally surrounded by a totalitarian university's "student support system," resistance is futile, and so too is the individualist desire to take control of one's own fate. The student becomes reduced to an object that gets cradled or mishandled. The only individualist voice such a student can assume is a victimized one that blames the teacher, university, or even the injustices of the social system.

Obviously there is a way to merge strategies. The teacher doesn't have to remain aloof, deny each student's different personality, or avoid technology that produces infrastructural support for the student's engagement with the material. These aren't necessary factors in drawing the clear line in the sand that endows the student with the freedom of choice. But students need a high bar, not because the material is too sacred for unworthy hands to contaminate, but rather to evoke the concept of aspiration, and to encourage the student's understanding of the role of his or her own determination. This isn't exclusionary. Quite the contrary, even the student who fails learns a valuable lesson.

The Venkatesan Affair

2008-05-06T09:33:00.003-05:00

On April 30 of this year, The Dartmouth Review published a lengthy interview with a former Dartmouth professor and alum, Priya Venkatesan, when it became known that she was planning to sue seven students from her four sections of first-year writing for aggressive, abusive, and disrespectful behavior in class. She has since decided not to sue, but the incident has received a lot of press, including this in thedartmouth.com and this in The Wall Street Journal. A detailed profile of her is here.

Who knows what really happened here. The students say Prof. Venkatesan blathered on and on in an impenetrable jargon and would not allow questions, and exploded with anger if anyone disagreed with her; Venkatesan says that the students were arrogant and full of their own importance and treated her disrespectfully. The superficial impression Joseph Rago offers in the WSJ piece is that Venkatesan considered disagreeing with her disrespectful; Venkatesan herself says that she is always happy to explore differences of opinion, but that the incessant questions were interrupting her lecture (in a first-year writing class!?) and some students really wanted to learn from her, so she made a new rule: no questions during the lecture; all questions will be held till the end.

There is a wealth of interesting material here. Venkatesan is Indian, and suggests that her predominantly white upper-class students reacted badly to her out of racism; she admits in the interview that she has no real evidence of that, but suspects it. Given the nature of her English in the interview, I'm guessing there may have been a certain amount of xenophobia in students' reactions to her accent and syntax; at least down here in Mississippi any foreign instructor, no matter how wonderful his or her English is, is subjected to this. "I can't understand a word she says!"

What interests me most in the incident, though, is Venkatesan's commentary on her interactions with Tom Cormen, director of Dartmouth's first-year writing program:

Tom Cormen was consistently rude to me and he was very unsupportive of my teaching in the Writing Program. I am perplexed as to why he would give me an offer to teach four sections in the Writing Program and then show absolutely no support, no professional support, and I wasn’t even looking for personal support, no professional support or guidance, and trying to do my best job to be a writing instructor. Now to give you the background, I taught writing in my graduate school at the University of California San Diego. I was what they call a teaching assistant. The students get graded by teaching-assistants in the research universities, not like Dartmouth where the professors grade the students. I was a teaching assistant at the University of San Diego, and I have three teaching evaluations. They were all spectacular. They were all spectacular. They were all positive. I could fax them to you. I don’t mind, I could honestly fax them to you, but no professional support or guidance from the beginning. But, I was confident in my ability to teach expository writing, so I went about it with very little support or direction from the department. That is, in itself, very unusual to have a writing program that does not have a structured orientation program for its new writing staff. Very, very extraordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Very unusual. Usually if you go to schools that have established writing programs or institutes for writing they will give you a two to three day orientation that introduces you to teaching that gives you some pointers, some advice, some suggestions on how to be the most effective teaching instructor. These orientations are not meant to dictate your teaching philosophy or ethics. They are meant to orient you, to guide you in the teaching process to be an effective expository writing teacher. There was no orientation. That in itself is questionable. It is very questionable. It raises flags about the quality of the writing program. I did approach some administrator saying where’s the orientation. She gave me this blank, actually it was a phone conversation, so I can’t see a blank face, but it was like a blank expression over the phone, like I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no orientation.

She's right, of course: properly run writing programs do offer consider professional support and development. A presemester workshop is the absolute minimum.

She goes on:

So Tom, when the students started complaining about me to Tom, Tom did bring me to his office a couple of times and said, “Tell me how things are going.” But what is unusual about what Tom did as a professor, as a writing program director, is that he did not side with the colleague. That is also very, very strange. That is odd. In any professional academic setting it is not academic de rigueur to go against a colleague when students are bitching about them. I don’t know how else to put it. ... Tom did not side with me. He did not show any official support for me. When incidents happen, when suspect incidences were happening, he would essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy. He used very strong language in telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of the students. I think yeah, you need to meet the needs of the students. But sometimes students have a different agenda than just learning. Who knows, what the agenda of the students are. I can’t read their minds. That is very strange because when I talked to my colleagues in California, they came back to me and they said, “Why isn’t your boss supporting you?” And I said, “I don’t know.” That is really strange that the boss doesn’t support you, we’re colleagues.

Here I start to have qualms. It's the WPA's job to support the instructor blindly? The WPA has no responsibility to the students, or to the program as a whole? Venkatesan obviously has an us-against-them mindset here, and is angry at her WPA for not sharing that mindset.

Obviously, I wasn't there when Tom Cormen "would essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy," or when he "used very strong language in telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of the students." Was he shouting at her? Was he using foul language? And what exactly does she mean by "essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy"? That word "essentially" suggests to me that he wasn't trying to dictate how to teach, but was trying to push her in a certain direction, which she experienced as trying to dictate how to teach. There is this widespread ethos that says "my classroom is my kingdom, I do what I want and nobody dictates to me," which makes the WPA's job difficult. Grad students typically don't have that attitude yet--I'm guessing Venkatesan didn't have it when she taught as a GI at UC San Diego--but adjuncts often do, and professors almost always do. If the WPA's job is to look out for program coherence and fairness and evenness, and to push on everybody to keep improving and expanding their pedagogical strategies, and the instructors' attitude is "don't dictate (and anything you do to push me past what I'm already doing will count as dictating)," there will be problems.

And it looks very much as if Venkatesan was "teaching" first-year writing by lecturing and then answering questions. No exercises or group activities. No brainstorming on paper topics. No freewriting. No peer-review or peer-editing. Lectures and "discussion"--I'm guessing, here, but I threw those scare quotes up around "discussion" because all too often "discussion" is construed (by the instructor who likes to lecture) as a series of leading questions to which the students provide the right answers, all in the service of the instructor's lecture. "Discussion" in this sort of case is a sham, a way of pretending to be open to the students' ideas and opinions while actually simply dictating to them. If in fact Venkatesan did and does think this way, and did and does teach first-year writing this way, then obviously real questions and critiques from the students would come across to her as aggressive bullying. I'm supposed to be in charge of this class!

One of my colleagues from San Diego told me, and I’m not sure I agree with it, but she told me, and please don’t quote me with saying that I agree with this, don’t take it out of context, but she said the classroom is not a democracy and the way she runs her classroom is with an iron fist. I’m not like that. I’m not the iron fist, but I think my genuine attempt to teach them—I think they tried to take advantage of some of my ability not to be this iron fist. I think a lot of professors are like, I’m the boss of the classroom and you listen to me, and that’s probably the norm. I’m a little more lenient, I’m a little more liberal, and I think this was kind of taken advantage of. I think also that many times when I was lecturing, many of the students would take over the class.

While they took over the class, the students that were questioning me would not question the student, but they would consistently question me. In other words, in that setting, the student had more authority than me. Usually the student that questioned me was a white male. When this white male spoke he was given more authority of knowledge, more respect than I was given.

The thing about authority, though, is that sheer institutional authority is never enough. Students outnumber you in the classroom. If you really want to dominate them, cow them into submission, you need a gun; you need armed guards ready to bludgeon them into silence. Barring such police-state tactics, if you can't coopt their resistance, they will dominate you, either by "taking over the class" or by checking out, staring out the window, doing the crossword, texting each other, chitchatting. If you really want to dominate them, you have to do it by stealth, by coaxing them into complicity with your authority.

And of course in some sense all teaching is social regulation. The instructor is in charge, is hired by the university to lead the students through a series of steps from less understanding and fewer skills to more, and to assess their performance along the way and at the end. But there are lots of ways to stage that regulation, some more iron-fisted than others. Venkatesan complains that Tom Cormen is a computer science professor: "My first response is what is someone who has a computer science background going to know about teaching writing? What are they going to know? They haven’t been trained in literature or composition rhetoric." By implication, of course, Venkatesan has been trained in "composition rhetoric." But if she has, surely she has heard about Peter Elbow, and the idea of writing without teachers? Utopian as Elbow's idea from the early seventies undoubtedly is, it's an important landmark in the field, but one that Venkatesan has apparently never heard of--or else, perhaps more likely, has heard of but dismissed as too soft, not rigorous enough.

Ultimately an instructor's most important pedagogical tool is her or his own personality. Whether that personality is shy or bold, domineering or self-effacing, serious or funny, it has to be crafted into an effective teaching tool, or the teacher will fail. My sense, frankly, is that Venkatesan doesn't yet know how to do this. If she wants to run her classroom in a more or less authoritarian style, fine--but she has to learn how to do it so that students go along with it. She can't just expect them to submit to her, just because that's what she did when she was at Dartmouth.

And it's the WPA's job to help instructors feel their way from this sort of fumbling and stumbling to an effective mobilization of their own personalities for classroom use. This is not "essentially dictating my teaching philosophy"; it is professional development. I would personally prefer a more egalitarian classroom, but if an instructor really wants to be the sole authority, it's my job to help him or her develop pedagogically effective strategies for doing so.

A Conversation

2008-04-27T15:07:00.004-05:00

This is a writing-program blog, but so far, in addition to me only Gray Kane has regularly contributed to it. After I posted on Byron Hawk's book, I tried to get him to post about vitalism, and he responded to my email ("Have you had a look at ...?") with another email:

Yeah. I haven't read the source and didn't find a point of entry into the subject matter to get me excited one way or another about it. I understand the desire for consistency between the form of an argument and its content, but I didn't see what was so exciting about the content for me to care.

To put it another way, forget for the time being how "true" vitalism might be and the corresponding imperative to bring this "truth" to the larger critical community. What does this "truth" enable us to do that we weren't able to do before? That's what I didn't find.

What does interest me is this critical tendency to dismiss the content as "crackpotty" because of its form. This aspect of the post of course reminds me of the arguments levied against "convoluted" theory in general. To communicate the ideas to a broader audience, a writer has to abandon each idea's form, but to a certain extent this damages the idea's content, such that people who already know the ideas easily see where the clarity paradoxically convolutes. I see that this is also what happens to vitalism. When critics fail to address each other's arguments in such a way that acknowledges how vitalism posits their relationships, the act of writing initiates a mind-body divide and disembodies an argument about somatic exchange. This perspectival problem not only reduces what is visible through its lens, but also distorts what it does see.

If a writer of perspective A wants to communicate idea "a"
to an audience of perspective B, how does that writer avoid transforming "a" into something contaminated by the audience's different framework? How does the writer stop "a" from looking like "b"?

I replied:

The point of entry I imagined was that, while you and I have some points of contact in our theorizations, there's a fundamental difference between our approaches, and this book has made me think that it's maybe that I'm a vitalist and you aren't. Specifically, you seem to me to be interested in the critical thinking going on in individual heads, and at most in individual teacher-student dyads, and seem to resist my pressures to understand critical thinking in the larger systemic (ideosomatic) terms. You recognize the potential validity of those larger terms, of course, but don't seem particularly interested in them--and so leave them for me to theorize.

Which is interesting, because Hawk draws a lot on Heidegger--as well as Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, of course--specifically, the technology article and the passages from Being and Time where Heidegger discusses tools and their "ecological" situatedness.

Gray's dissertation, a rough draft of which is now being written, is on Heidegger and Lacan in the FYW classroom--specifically the four discourses of a Heideggerian Lacan and pedagogical theory. He responded:

As you acknowledged, it's not that I disagree with vitalism. It's that I don't see how it can help us. I see the answer to that question more in your textbook, but that answer still isn't worked out for me.

What I most appreciate from your textbook is the strategy for primary and secondary audiences and the distancing of authorial persona from the imagined configurations of a "true" self. In other words, what I most appreciate from your textbook is not necessarily tied to a theory of embodied exchange--at least from my perspective. In fact, I see the paradigm in terms of Other/other and split subjectivity.

That question of "usefulness" is my lack of point of entry in vitalism. And I find it interesting that in your reply to my email that you didn't offer an answer to that question.

I realize that Heidegger produced an interpretation of "meaning" that involves our retrospective configuration of how other human beings have manipulated the material world such that we are engaging those beings in our engagement with the material world. This is why he disagreed with technology: it impossibly distances the human fingerprint from the being's manipulation of the world, which consequently encourages the mind-body divide. But even though I can find usefulness in parts of Heidegger's paradigm, his desire for the "truth" of his subject matter overcomplicates his analysis to the point of his obfuscating its usefulness, from my perspective.

I realize that I'm caught in a paradigm of "usefulness" (bourgeois bricolage) that limits my ability to appreciate tangential lines of thought as equally central lines of thought. I think the comps and prospectus processes damaged that part of my appreciation: the external pressure for me "to get to the point." However, I don't feel a need to correct this problem since my abidance to it will help me publish and get a job.

So, since I'm not going to correct my interpretive lens' starting point of "usefulness," let me try to clarify how that usefulness plays a role in my interpretation of what others see to be useless. Maybe this can help you target my concerns about vitalism.

In Lacanese, "meaning" is always a somatic exchange and might have more in common with vitalism than you realize. Objet a is the source of bodily pleasure that we ignore but that nonetheless is essential in our "meaningful" attachments to objet a's externalizations, its semblances (in Schema L, a'). It's why we enjoy chasing the soccer ball even when we're so intent on the ball that we forget that what we're enjoying is our bodies. Meanwhile, we can't experience our bodily objet a in a "meaningful" way (in other words, objet a doesn't exist) until we locate it in the Other-- for instance, in the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye. Lacan's dialectical desire and its "short circuits" through the drive are always somatic
exchanges: the discovery (and repression) of the body in an ontological network of human interaction.

I find "usefulness" in this because I can see in it a strategy to intentionally move the perception of "meaningfulness" (like Dupin in Poe's "The Purloined Letter"), which has incredible applications in pedagogy. (And politics, although I'm tiring of the unification of pedagogy and politics.) This is what I don't see thus far in either Heidegger's Dasein or vitalism.

So again, how does vitalism enable us as teachers or critics to achieve something that we otherwise couldn't achieve without it?

And I replied:

Yes, the split self is part of the poststructuralist/ postmodern bolus I'm smuggling into FYW. But for me a vitalist approach is so important precisely so that we recognize the ways in which a split self is not merely a pile of dead fragments that we can gloat over in a death-of-the-subject spirit, but a living (vital) complexity ORGANIZED for us by society. When we split off a part of ourselves and call that part "reader," and then split off another part and call it "writer," and give them new names and contexts and purposes and so on, we aren't just playing clever games; we LIVE the lives of those parts. We are invested in them. If we weren't, of course, writing and reading literature would be impossible, watching plays and movies would be impossible. (Or perhaps not so much impossible as cognitively difficult and affectively empty, affectless, disaffected.)

Hawk argues (drawing on someone else's reading of Heidegger, someone whose name I can't check because the book is in the room where Agnes is sleeping) that Heidegger didn't so much argue "against technology" as against the reduction of technology to efficient cause--against the instrumentalization of technology. According to Heidegger, EVERYTHING is technology, but it's a technology that's complexly saturated with the local ecology of meaning-production. In fact, that ecology is also the ecology of das Man. It's an ideosomatized ecology, the highly nuanced and constantly shifting production of reality and meaning by the group. (Something like that. I'd need to check the book again to get the argument exactly right.)

As for Lacan, I'm just learning to use the term "vitalism" in connection with his thought, but I've always read the Other AS the somatic exchange. In your paraphrase you mentioned "the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye," but as I read Lacan that is exactly wrong. The Other is never another person; that's the other-small-o. As the Subject enters into a dyadic (or as I insist group) interaction with an other, that interaction is vitalized by both the idealized ego and the Other, both of which are collective (I would say ideosomatic) organizing "forces" or "vitalities" that bring complex order to the interaction.

The pedagogical usefulness of this perspective to my mind is that teaching is always a group interaction, and it's extremely useful to have a conceptual framework for the exploration of those vitalizing/organizing forces that work behind the scenes to structure and impose meaning on that interaction. At the sheer "textual" level of student writing (and peer-editing, etc.), those forces vitalize/organize text-production through an imagined (but actually felt) writer-reader interaction; at the pedagogical level of teacher-student interaction, the pressures of print culture and various other Others for us, and of SMS culture and MTV culture and whatever else for them, all impose various kinds of divergent and difficult to (re)organize vitality on our classrooms. And to my mind (Freud: where id was, let ego be) the more AWARE we are of those vitalities, the better able we may be to channel them.

(Re)Vitalizing Berlin

2008-04-21T09:23:00.007-05:00

I've been reading Byron Hawk's 2007 book A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity (Pitt) with a good deal of excitement lately. The "counter" or contradictory impulse in Hawk's counterhistory is his attempt to rescue vitalism from the "forgotten history" dump to which it has been relegated in historiographies of rhetorical theory since about 1980.

What happened that year specifically, according to Hawk, was that three extremely influential articles were published: Richard Young's "Arts, Crafts, Gifts, and Knacks" (in Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle, eds., Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition, 53-60 [CCTE, 1980]), James Berlin's "The Rhetoric of Romanticism" (Rhetoric Society Quarterly 10.2 [Spring 1980]: 62-74), and Paul Kameen's "Rewording the Rhetoric of Composition" (Pre/Text 1.1-2 [Spring-Fall 1980]: 73-94). Hawk identifies Young as the one who--drawing on a 1975 dissertation by one of his students, Hal Rivers Weidner, and first disseminating his views in an influential NEH postdoctoral seminar in 1978-1979--first buries vitalistic rhetorics as assuming that "creative processes ... are not susceptible to conscious control by formal procedures" (quoted in Hawk 22) and therefore in some sense are not rhetorics at all. For Young a rhetoric is an art or a techne, a process enacted with conscious control, and he believes that vitalism vitiates such control. In Hawk's paraphrase and commentary (drawing on Kameen's article): "Though Young does not use the term romanticism in 'Paradigms and Problems,' his reading of vitalism has questionable supports. One says the individual writer is not in control of invention (32) and the other says some aspects of invention cannot be taught and exist in the writer (32n5). Both positions may have associations with some romantic philosophies, but neither has any clear connection to vitalism" (23).

What is vitalism, then? Here is Hawk's summary:

While vitalism has romantic variations, at its roots it is theoretically and historically distinct. The fundamental question that cuts across all vitalisms is "What is life?" Each episteme, period, or paradigm answers the question of life differently according to its own situation and within its own discourse, but they are all trying to come to grips with what drives self-organization and development in the world. Historically, the general answers have ranged from an animistic, abstract, or mystical power that exists outside of and operates on the world, to an evolutionary and physio-chemical process that operates in the world, to a complex combination of material, biological, historical, social, linguistic, and ultimately technological processes that produce emergence. Life is situated in the relationships among these bodies and their forces. Rather than seeing life as an autonomous force, or as caused by physico-chemical or purely biological processes, this latter [read: last] view [complex vitalism] situates life within complex, ecological interactions. I see in each of these answers two key assumptions: that life is fundamentally complex (and that complexity must be accounted for or addressed) and that life is fundamentally generative (force, energy, will, power, or desire is central to this complexity). (4-5)

The first thing I note about this description is that my somatic theory is vitalist. The generative "force, energy, will, power, or desire" that drives the organization or regulation of (social) life in somatic theory is the somatic exchange, the circulation of shared evaluative affect through the group. Since my construction of somatic theory owes a lot to Deleuze and Guattari, on whose complex vitalism Hawk relies heavily as well, I suppose this isn't surprising.

The second thing I note, though, is that--at least so far, and I'm only on page 79 in the book--Hawk doesn't seem to be interested in constructing a vitalist counterhistory of composition. His counterhistory seeks to redress the "forgetting" of vitalism, and thus to reinsert it into our historical understanding of the field, but it is itself not vitalist.

For example, in chapter two, his careful tracing of James Berlin's historiographical trajectory in his books and articles from the eighties, Hawk cites William Desmond in Beyond Hegel and Dialectic to the effect that "The thought of everything other to thought [in Hegel's dialectics] risks getting finally reduced to a moment of thought thinking itself" (7, quoted in Hawk 74). Hawk comments:

Berlin's use of dialectics and mapping is also susceptible to this charge. Everything the historiographer attempts to mediate is reduced to that historiographer's framework. In thinking his or her Other--history--the active, engaged historiographer is thinking himself or herself. This folding back onto the self, this inability to finally attend to the Other, creates the inevitable blind spot as a result of Berlin's mapping. Dialectics is always self-dialectics: the self's interpretive framework is always to a certain degree reductive to that particular perspective; Berlin's maps will let him see only what he wants to see and, therefore, will necessarily forget the Other, history. (74)

Now obviously Hawk is critiquing Berlin with his own "particular perspective" in mind, his own "only what he wants to see": he wants to show how Berlin sidelined vitalism. But how vitalistic is it to suggest that this blind spot or this forgetting is Berlin's alone? That Berlin "forgets" vitalism because he wants to--that he is an isolated individual with a "particular perspective" and an individualistic intellectual agenda that he alone desires?

Berlin is working at this point in his formulations with a tripartite conceptual framework, dividing rhetorical theories into "objective," "subjective," and "transactional." The referents of these adjectives change over the eighties, but ultimately "objective" rhetoric is current-traditional, "subjective" rhetoric is expressivist, and "transactional" becomes social-epistemicist. Presumably because Berlin uses these terms to categorize rhetorics, Hawk too uses them to analyze Berlin's historiographical categories. At first this just means turning Berlin's categories back on him: "His way of dealing with this 'paradox' of competing dialectics--of arguing for openness and totality, of arguing against objectivity, then calling for it--is not surprisingly to imply a dialectic of dialectics" (75). But then Hawk seems to buy into those terms, identifying the inevitable (and for Berlin salutary) failure of objectivity as "subjective history": "Nevertheless, the subjective history must operate as if it were objective" (76).

Hawk then goes on in his next paragraph to call the "objectivizing" uptake of this "subjective history" a "problem": "The problem is that even if historians take this stance--realizing that in theory their maps are not total while using them as if they are--in practice readers can and will take the maps as total" (76). Yes, all right. But my question is: shouldn't a vitalist take on this recognize the complexity of the social interactions that produce these results? Aren't Berlin's interactions with the people he reads and the people who read him part of an intellectual economy that circulates value and collective desire? Is it really a problem that the thousands of readers influenced by Berlin took him to be describing "reality" "objectively"? It is if you're an objectivist yourself, who believes that vitalism should be in this history, and that its omission is therefore an objective error--a product, in other words, of subjective bias. If you're a vitalist, interested in the complex ecology of desiring-machines that produce "reality," surely this whole field looks very different?

But then I wonder: perhaps Hawk is leery of committing the imitative fallacy? Maybe he thinks his argument against the subjective-but-objectivizing exclusion of vitalism will be more effective--more persuasive to objectivizing academic readers--if he objectivizes it? Maybe he's afraid he'll sound like a crackpot if he writes more like Deleuze and Guattari? Doesn't in fact the whole concept of the imitative fallacy come out of an antivitalist tradition, an objectivizing tradition that wants to set it up as a negative exemplum in order specifically to warn us off vitalism?

Also, couldn't it equally well be argued that in invoking subjectivity and objectivity in his critique of Berlin on subjectivity and objectivity, Hawk is committing the imitative fallacy anyway?

Not, in fact, in vitalist perspective. Viewed vitalistically, the scene in which academic agents invoke objectivistic criteria in order to accuse others of subjective bias is itself a collective agent or agency, a desiring-machine, that perpetuates its values and ends by circulating them (and the regulatory pressures that maintain them) through the group. In this view, Berlin sidelines vitalism in the eighties not because he wants to (though his desire might certainly serve as the agency of a collective agent) but because "the field" wants to; and "the field" takes his construction of the history of rhetoric as objective truth not because of some "error" (subjective bias) Berlin committed, but because the exclusion of vitalism was somehow crucial to the desiring-machine that was "the field" at that time. Hawk is able to critique that construction now, and win the Winterrowd prize for doing so, because "the field" (the comp/rhet desiring-machine, especially as it begins to pay more attention to affect) wants him to--but wants him to do so objectivistically, because obviously objectivism is the sign and seal of academic discourse.

Doesn't that sound crackpotty? "The field" as a desiring-machine that wants Hawk to write a certain critique in a certain style? If I'm right, that feeling you have that this is the way a crackpot thinks (and theorizes) is the sign that I am right: that there is a collective agent that continues to condition us to objectivize, and to valorize objectivizing arguments as worth taking seriously (and giving academic awards to), and to feel uneasy when anyone deviates too sharply from those collective norms.

CCCC in New Orleans

2008-03-30T15:35:00.003-05:00

The Conference on College Composition and Communication, or the 4Cs, begins in New Orleans on Wednesday, April 2. Go here for details.

Good Writing: The Resistance to Certain Ideas

2008-03-20T17:19:00.005-05:00

I have a problem with the concept of "bad styling of sentences." This type of language gets thrown around as code to reject certain theoretical methods and frameworks. For example, many critics politically/philosophically oppose the idea that as social beings, they lack agency or even a substantively whole existence. They want to see themselves as being in control over their actions. As a result, they cannot stand when other authors syntactically realign agency to reflect the subject's lack of authority over itself. (Yes, "itself": according to such theory, gender is a construct. "Subject" does not equal "person." "Subject" is the symbolic construction of "person," and that symbolic construct is always incomplete and contradictory.)

Writing about decentered subjectivity, gaps in subjectivity, and the effects of negative spaces on positive spaces can get pretty complex when the subject of discussion is how a character, person, institution, or culture thinks and acts. Look at it this way: If you're trying to describe how a car runs, but in your description you won't acknowledge anything larger than quarks, electrons, protons, or neutrons, then the writing is going to get fucked up.

Let's finally admit what we refuse to admit: There are different schools of thought when it comes to what qualifies as "good writing." Some of the theoretical schools of thought equate "good writing" with "conscious choices." If you the writer mean the semantic and syntactic implications of what you write, no matter how counter-intuitive the result is, it's good writing.

I am offended (literally, no joke) when one school of thought dismisses another school of thought as being merely "bad writing." To me, this is not really an argument about writing. This is an argument about what ideas we are allowed to express. The appeal to "good writing" in academic discourse is usually an attempt to censor thought. I see such arguments as in fact contributing to ignorance. That's why I feel so strongly about them--strong enough to get offended.

So I would never challenge another author, even a comp teacher, on the form of what was said, unless I was challenging what the form communicates about the content.

And in a classroom, I teach students to apply conscious decisions. That's the closest I will come to the concept of "good writing." I won't even utter the words.

On Fast and Slow Writing

2008-03-18T19:32:00.015-05:00

At Collin vs. Blog, Collin Brooke has posted a critique of Lindsay Waters’ March 10 article in Inside Higher Ed, "A Call for Slow Writing," which in turn is a written version of a talk he gave to the Council of Editors of Scholarly Journals meeting at the 2007 MLA convention in Chicago. Waters is executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, and author of the 100-page pamphlet Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (2004), which also makes the case he makes in IHE: that the widespread trend of requiring a book for promotion and tenure is destroying the academic scene, and that instead of rushing to get a book into print, junior scholars should be striving to write a single wonderfully written essay.

His most radical (and not entirely serious) suggestion: "I am tempted to say — in order to be maximally provocative — that anyone who publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D. should be denied tenure. The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely."

What junior scholars need to do instead of rushing their dissertations into some kind of publishable form, Waters argues, is to slow down, take their time, linger over their sentences as over fine food, polish and planish, make every sentence a work of art. The result of not allowing them to do this--the result, obviously, of the book-for-tenure requirement--is a world of execrable prose, in which mediocre and unoriginal thinking is obscured by convoluted sentences clogged with jargon.

What bothers me about Waters’ article (to postpone engagement with Brooke’s blog post for another minute or two) is that it is so shoddily written. If you were writing a piece on careless, sloppy, substandard academic writing, wouldn’t you be extra-careful with your sentences? Wouldn’t you linger over them as over fine food? Not Waters. Look at that second sentence in the quotation above: "The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely." The chances is? And doesn't he mean "the chances are small," or "that a person at that stage can have published anything worthwhile is unlikely"? And isn’t something worth chopping down trees for?

Or this: "In his Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly lambasted Joseph Addison, co-founder of the journal The Spectator because he was 'an apologist for the New Bourgeoisie.'" Okay, it’s petty to insist on the comma after that parenthetical item--"In his Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly lambasted Joseph Addison, co-founder of the journal The Spectator, because he was 'an apologist for the New Bourgeoisie'"--but the way Waters writes it, the sentence means that Addison’s status as "an apologist for the New Bourgeoisie" was his reason for cofounding The Spectator.

Or this: "In fact, where I hear people talk the most about journals edited according to international standards for refereeing, it often attached to mediocre publications and is a reason for excluding from counting towards one’s record publication in essays it is almost impossible to get into because they have their own, very high standards, like Critical Inquiry." "Publication in essays" is a typo for "publication in journals," obviously. But what does "it often attached" mean? Is there an "is" missing there ("it is often attached")? Or is "attached" a typo for "attaches"? Worse, what is the antecedent of "it"? The most obvious noun that "it" could be referring to is "talk," but "talk" there isn’t a noun; it's a verb. Does he mean "where I hear people talk ..., their talk is often attached"? Do we "attach" talk? And try as I might, I cannot figure out what Waters thinks is a reason not to count publications in the most exclusive journals "towards one's record." The sentence seems to be saying that talk about mediocre publications is that reason; but that makes no sense at all. And what exactly is the relation among "journals edited according to international standards for refereeing," "mediocre publications," and publications with very high standards? It's the relationship marked by the "attachment of talk," obviously, but that's a very loose kind of talk. Waters seems to be saying that the publications people usually praise as edited with very high standards are in fact mediocre; but somehow he gets from there to the recommendation that we not count articles published in exclusive journals like Critical Inquiry toward promotion and tenure. What's the connection? Is he saying that Critical Inquiry is a mediocre publication? It's hard to imagine he means that, but the sentence is so shoddily written that I cannot for the life of me come up with anything else that it might mean. And is "it ... is a reason for excluding from counting towards one’s record publication in essays it is almost impossible to get into because they have their own, very high standards" a good model sentence in a jeremiad against unnecessarily convoluted academic prose? Sure, Waters avoids jargon, and the sentence does parse, sort of, if you read it slowly and carefully and analytically enough. But "insisting upon clearer language set forth in rhythmical sentence," in his terms, would have involved breaking that multiply embedded phrase up into smaller pieces: "there are journals that it is almost impossible to get into because they have their own, very high standards; publishing in them should not count toward one’s record," or some such. And I don’t know about you, but Waters' sentence doesn’t seem particularly rhythmical to me. I don't feel like I'm eating curry as I read it. I feel more like I'm tripping down stairs. Maybe it's the missing words?

Again, it would seem nitpicky to draw your attention to these errors in Waters' article, if it were not the burden of his argument that we are requiring junior scholars to write too fast, with the result that they write badly. Who is requiring Lindsay Waters to write this fast, and this sloppily?

Collin Brooke mostly dislikes Waters' writing, and has attacked him in the past; but he finds some things to praise in this IHE piece. He likes Waters’ critique of the book requirement for promotion and tenure, and says he felt the pressure to write faster when he got a tenure-track job. Strangely, though, one of the things he likes about it is how well written it is: "First, it's a well-wrought piece, showing off Waters' own skills at prose." Really! It's certainly lively and provocative, and some of Waters’ sentences do work nicely; but it only seems "well-wrought" and "skillful" to me at the macrolevel, at the level of general impressions. A close look at any paragraph reveals deeper problems.

Brooke also finds a lot to pick at in the article, and specifically things that I frankly find even stranger than his praise:

To imagine that an entire profession sits around thinking, "hmmm, how can I write a really crappy sentence here?" is beyond laughable to me. Is there writing in the humanities that is largely indefensible from a stylistic point of view? Almost certainly. Are there writers in the humanities who consciously set out to produce inelegant prose? I seriously doubt it. So the notion that an entire tenure system is going to be changed by our conviction about the quality of our prose just sounds cranky to me, to be honest, and not serious at all.

Where exactly does Waters even imply this? His argument is not at all that humanists set out to write badly, but that they end up writing badly, due first of all to time constraints--they have to publish that book or perish--and then, secondarily, to a whole culture of shoddy writing, a widespread acceptance of "bad styling of sentences":

It seems to me that when bad styling of sentences became accepted, we got used to it. We compensated for the lack of quality and impact of the sentences that people wrote as evidence of their scholarly abilities by asking them for more of them in the hopes we could get the same buzz going that we used to get from fewer sentences.

When Edward Said predicted the decline of writing by professors in the early 1980s, I did not believe him; but he was right and I was wrong. A lot of bad habits developed, and now they are protected by power by those who write poorly who have now risen in rank as a result of what I called "social passing" in educational levels above the primary and secondary schools.

The problem Waters is attacking here is not a deliberate, conscious attempt on the part of academic writers to "produce inelegant prose," but a culture of gobbledy-gook, bad writing that was originally generated by fast writing--writing under pressure of the tenure clock--and eventually became entrenched as acceptable writing: "The reason for the persistence of gobbledy-gook is that it's a lot easier to hide mediocre thinking under the cloak of gobbledy-gook."

(This is once again not, I would note, a particularly elegant sentence. The rhythms are off, which undermines the stylistic impact of the repetition of "gobbledy-gook"; burying the rheme of the sentence, "mediocre thinking," in the middle of the repetition of its theme weakens its force. A slower writer would have studied that cliched word "cloak," whose single syllable and plosive k’s have such a deleterious effect on the sentence’s rhythm, and considered alternatives: "the garment of gobbledy-gook"? "the tattered rags of gobbledy-gook"? But no: Waters grabs the first obvious cliche and throws it in. He's a man in a hurry.)

Should we conclude that fast writing is even more endemic than Waters says? Is the proper response to his article a "physician, heal thyself"? Or is he, as an editor at Harvard UP, exempt from the strictures he places on us academic writers? Is it all right for executive editors at university presses to write op-ed pieces and 100-page pamphlets decrying bad academic writing, and in doing so not worry overmuch about their own prose styles?

Or should we conclude instead that writing well is harder than it looks, even for an expert like Lindsay Waters--and give academic writers a break?

4 numbered afterthoughts:

1. Is five years really that overwhelmingly short a time to revise a dissertation into a book? Say a dissertation is 500 paragraphs long, and that's a bit on the short side, so you're going to revise those 500 and expand them with another 300. That's 100 paragraphs a year to revise and another 60 a year to write. Is that a killer pace? Do you really have to rush your writing to get through that load? Can we really explain bad writing by reference to the superhuman speed required to revise a dissertation in five years?

2. Does Waters really believe that junior faculty members are too stupid, or too young, or too inexperienced (which is it?), to write a worthwhile book? Or, since he admits that he's being deliberately provocative, is he actually making the more elitist argument that the number of professors who have a good book in them is extremely small, and we'd all be better off if the one-book wonders in our departments were not forced by P&T requirements to crank out that one sucky monster?

3. Or, since we currently believe that professors should be engaged in research--studying things and writing up the results--and in most humanistic disciplines the measure of that research is the publication of books in university presses and scholarly articles in refereed journals, does his suggestion that we should require junior faculty members to write essays rather than scholarly books and articles actually constitute an attack on the research ideal? Does he really want to repopulate universities with faculty members who write well rather than doing research?

4. As things are set up now, people like Lindsay Waters serve as gatekeepers for P&T decisions, and that puts enormous pressure on him to read and edit vast quantities of crappy writing. Changing the current P&T requirements in most humanities departments along the lines he suggests--requiring a single essay rather than a book--would relieve him of a lot of that apparently quite unpleasant work. Should we feel sorry for him? Should we wish an easier professional life for acquisitions editors? Is that what this is about?

Lies, Truths, and Dangling Modifiers

2008-03-13T07:53:00.002-05:00

"How do we deserve the trust of readers," Tina McElroy Ansa writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “if we don’t vet for truth?” She is incensed at Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, recently published by Riverhead Books--a memoir, specifically, of a mixed-race gangbanger named Margaret B. Jones, actually written by a white woman from the San Fernando Valley named Margaret “Peggy” Seltzer. Riverhead Books, a Penguin imprint, has recalled every unsold copy of the book and canceled the author’s book tour. This, clearly, is serious business.

The amazon.com page provides this “editorial review" of the book, with a telling preamble:

Book Description
Note: The following book description was written before the recent revelations about the book.

A stunning memoir of a mixed-race girl growing up in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles, where she followed her foster brothers into the Bloods before she hit puberty: what she witnessed, how she survived, and--against all odds--thrived.

This is a powerful portrait of life in L.A.'s gangland and drug trade as told through one household: a single, overworked grandmother, her two grandsons (who drop out of school and become Bloods before puberty), her two crack-baby granddaughters, and the foster child--the author--who comes to live with them at age eight, joins the gang, and then defies the odds, using education to climb her way out.

After her two foster brothers were "jumped in" by the Bloods at ages twelve and thirteen, Margaret--renamed "Bree" in her new street life--followed their example. At twelve she was making deliveries for local dealers in the gang. For her thirteenth birthday she received her own gun. At sixteen, forced to find a way to keep the water from being shut off in her foster home, she learned to cook crack cocaine. Soon after, she fell in love for the first time, dating a seasoned gang member until he was sentenced to life in prison. We observe the lives of these characters from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood. For some, this means following a trajectory of crime, pregnancy, imprisonment-and ultimately, death. But for Margaret, her obvious intelligence, will, and tenacity--aided by sheer luck--enable her to break free, to graduate from high school, and then college. The strength of this book is testament to the remarkable adult she has become.

This unvarnished, humanizing portrait of people living in urban poverty transcends both statistics and stereotypes, and reveals the power of family in a chaotic world-and the poignancy of smart, philosophical teens who dream of a safer life waiting for them beyond the streets.

To my mind, the interesting question here is not whether Jones lied or told the truth, since all writing is a mixture of both lies and truths; rather, the interesting question is what she’s trying to do to us behind the scenes of her fictitious memoir. In our terms from Writing as Drama: what is her unnamed purpose? Is it to make a ton of money? Is it to swindle the reader? That would be an unnamed purpose to wax indignant about. Or is it, as the author herself says, to dramatize the plight of the inner-city poor in a rhetorically powerful way?

"For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing--I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."

Since reviewers did find the fake-memoir-cum-novel both moving and novelistic, it would seem Seltzer’s aim was in fact realized.

The vicious attacks on Seltzer for her success--er, sorry, her "mendacity"--remind me, in fact, of the eighteenth-century bishop who wrote of Gulliver’s Travels: "I personally believe that every word of this book is a damned lie." That novel was a fake memoir too. So was Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. So was Fielding’s Tom Jones. So in some sense is every first-person novel ever published. So what’s the difference now? That the publisher marketed the book as a memoir rather than as a novel?

What I find much more disturbing than Seltzer’s ostensible mendacity is the high-minded pontifications of her critics. Looking back at Tina McElroy Ansa’s editorializing on the book, for example, I wonder: how do we deserve the trust of readers--

"As a journalist for more than 35 years, a novelist for 20 and as a new publisher concentrating in African-American literature, these are questions I have discussed, considered and struggled with for some time."

--if we don't vet for dangling modifiers?

Actually, I've begun to suspect that dangling modifiers are an important constitutive component of pompous, self-righteous rhetoric. Could it be that the slippage between "these are questions" and "I have discussed" is an essential dodge for this sort of finger-pointing pontification? That Tina McElroy Ansa would be (or feel) rhetorically too accountable if she began her main clause too with the grammatical subject required by "As a journalist"?

Or here:

"For a public facing the shrinking and elimination of conventional venues of reliable information such as daily newspapers, Sunday magazine sections and talk shows of substance, the recurring revelations of fake memoirs leave us all vulnerable to lies."

That isn't exactly a dangling modifier, but the sentence again obfuscates what is happening to whom and how and why and in what context. "For a public" and "leave us all" push or pull the contextualization of danger and blame in different directions. Are "we" and "the public" the same people there? If so, "we" are first the indirect objects, then the direct objects, of the danger-laden verbs. The grammatical shift in between suggests that the people who are left vulnerable to lies are not the public at all but someone else, perhaps those responsible for educating the public; except that the shift isn't decisive enough to push us across this sort of binary gap, leaving us stranded somewhere in the middle between an us/public identification and an us/public split.

Okay, okay, so she just didn't edit her copy attentively enough. Am I being nitpicky? Should someone who proudly establishes her bona fides as a journalist, novelist, and publisher not be allowed a few grammatical solecisms when she castigates what she takes to be shoddy writing in public? Don't we all do this?

As an English professor for 33 years, a novelist for one, and as a writing-program administrator, it would have to be said in all honesty that I never do.

Plagiarism in High Places

2008-02-29T13:17:00.005-06:00

One of the big running debates over the last few weeks--"big" for those of us who teach first-year writing--is Hillary Clinton's accusation that Barack Obama "plagiarized" his good friend Massachusetts Governor Devall Patrick in a speech of his. The Obama campaign's response was first that (a) Patrick had given Obama permission to use his words; then, after the Clinton campaign protested that approval doesn't make a difference if the intent is to deceive the American people into thinking that Obama is a great orator, they added, more substantially, that (b) political speech is not protected, and American politicians borrow from each other all the time, and (c) that Hillary Clinton does this herself, even borrowing, over the course of this campaign, several catchphrases from Obama. The Clinton campaign's response to that last? "Plagiarism" only counts if Obama does it, because Clinton isn't running on her rhetorical prowess.

The pundits on the left and the right have been fairly dismissive of Clinton's charges, largely along the lines of (b), above. Now, though, we seem to have a new plagiarism scandal brewing in high places: Nancy Nall, a blogger who used to write a column for the (Fort Wayne, Indiana) News-Sentinel, just this morning has outed News-Sentinel columnist Tim Goeglein, whom one of the commenters on her blog describes as a "White House Public Liaison officer and Karl Rove gopher" (primarily he is a liaison between the White House and the Christian Right), as plagiarizing extensively from "What is a College Education?", a late-90s piece in the right-wing Dartmouth Review by Jeffrey Hart, a long-time Dartmouth English professor who also served as an aide under Nixon and Reagan. She provides long quotations from both sources, showing just how little Goeglein changed in stealing Hart's words; Goeglein has now admitted the plagiarism (Nall broke the news this morning, and Goeglein had confessed online by noon).

But meanwhile, Nall's readers have been busy, and have uncovered numerous other plagiarized pieces "by" Goeglein, and have documented them in the comments section to her post.

As one commenter pointed out: how stupid do you have to be to plagiarize off the Internet? We shake our heads in amazement at our freshmen, who apparently aren't savvy enough in the ways of the world to avoid ripping off other people's work from websites; but this is a senior public liaison in the White House ... and a conservative guru on (get this) media ethics ... writing on education!

Ayn Rand, Devil's Advocates, and Academic Addictions

2008-02-24T07:59:00.003-06:00

A few days ago on the WPA-L list (for the full thread, click here), Lauren Sewell Ingraham--one of our rhet/comp Ph.D.s from the nineties, now WPA at UT Chattanooga--wrote about a problem student of hers who is giving her trouble:

In short, he discovered Ayn Rand a few months before the semester started and now fashions himself an infallible, morally superior, savior-of-the-masses Rand-inspired Hero (I am using all caps here because he does). This student, as Hero, appears as the main protagonist in everything he writes.

Never having read Rand myself, I didn't recognize the student's initial bizarre writing as being so completely influenced by her. I just thought its sentiments were oddly cocky for having been so poorly written. The student's drafts of the two formal assignments we've attempted so far have both centered around this inflated sense of himself, often with direct references to _Atlas Shrugged_. I've tried using strategies that usually work with students who have an artifically inflated view of their own writing prowess, but I am getting nowhere fast. This guy seems to have sealed up his core personality in some shiny Randian protective suit. It's a little unnerving.

WPA-ers have responded to Lauren in a variety of ways. John Gravener at De Anza College, for example, seems to believe that the solution is to escalate the instructor’s authority:

Gawd, Rand should be banned, or at least no student under 40 should be able to read her (hopefully by the time they hit 40 they will have had their blind idealism knocked out of them--kind of like teenagers who find that it actually costs money to live in the real world and that they have to work for that money). I'm kidding, of course, kind of.

I once had a student of Rand in a FYC class, and it was all I could do to not slap him upside his head. One of the texts we were reading was Kozol's Savage Inequalities, and he could not get his head around the notion of the cycle of poverty. His belief, based on Rand, was that poor students in horrific schools were to blame for their situation because they would not pull themselves up by their bootstraps. He, too, had some inflated sense of self, which caused him to have no charitable or empathetic bone in his body. Unfortunately, he was not the well-groomed (not counting the missing teeth) type of student you have; he fashioned himself as some new bohemian (raggedy clothes, uncombed hair, Birkenstocks). It was a tough semester. Every one of his essays would cite Rand, and I would dread having to read the essays, but I held my tongue (and pen) and just stuck to working on the essays themselves. I, of course, pointed out the grammar and mechanical issues, but I also pointed out the argumentative fallacies he presented. We never did see eye to eye ideologically, but at least his essays got clearer, cleaner, and more focused.

Dennis Ciesielski at the University of Wisconsin – Platteville seems to agree with John, except that, where John bites his tongue and just tries to improve the student's writing, Dennis encourages more reading and pushes to have the student attack his own position:

Sounds like the problem of: one student who has read one book in one lifetime -- sort of a scary secular fundamentalist. My advice: More reading to flush out or dilute the Randisms.

Perhaps a good advanced comp assignment would be to have the student play the devil's advocate in an essay that challenges Rand's libertarian schlock, including a research project aimed at discovering the other side . . .

Since we agree that Rand's thought is "libertarian schlock," the instructor needs to do everything possible to undermine or "flush out" the student's ideological adherence to it, which is "scary fundamentalism." Seth Kahn at West Chester University of PA adds to this approach:

Echoing (riffing on?) Dennis' suggestion ...

I had a student a few years ago who did research for an entire semester so he could argue for privatizing all higher education. About 3 weeks before the end of the term, I had everybody updating everybody else on their progress, and he did about a 5-minute diatribe on the subject. When he was done, and a couple of students had asked him some detail questions, I couldn't help myself and had to ask, "Does it strike you as at all ironic that you're arguing in favor of privatizing higher education while you're sitting in a public school classroom? If you believe what you're saying, why are you here?"

His response, in the grand tradition of Michael Dukakis' running mate (whose name I'm blipping on right now--must be the snow), "Well, the law says I can come here, and I can't afford a private school."

I suggested that he do some more research into the operating budgets of WCU, Villanova, Temple, and some other nearby schools with an eye towards figuring out whether WCU is less expensive because it costs less to operate, or because his and other students' tuition is subsidized by the state. It was a marquis moment in my teaching when he came back a week later with numbers that clearly showed him how much he benefits from subsidized higher ed.

He didn't give up his argument, exactly, but it sure helped him, uh, modulate it.

The basic assumption here, again, seems to be that when a student gets locked into a certain argumentative or stylistic strategy, it is the instructor’s duty to get him or her to "give it up." But note also that Seth encourages his student to do more research not to "flush out or dilute the Randisms" but to help him see the bigger picture.

I then posted a Writing As Drama-based suggestion similar to Dennis’s, except that, instead of being set up to attack Rand, it is designed to give the student a chance to explore another side of Rand, so as to foster critical-thinking skills without (overtly) setting him in rhetorical opposition to Rand:

I don't know, why not try something a little more creative? Why not require that he write his next essay in the voice of Lillian Rearden, or some other character in Atlas Shrugged that is as LITTLE like him as possible? That way he'll be exercising his critical skills a little and not just idealizing.

Nick Carbone at Colorado State opens up a different approach:

I remember reading Rand and finding a lot to admire at that age and that time. There's stuff from her that still makes sense to me, though it's mightily tempered.

You've caught a student at first blush with her ideas; enthralled and literally captivated. So much so that he's trying them on.

I've just finished reading Tom Wolfe's _A Man in Full_ and it has a character who finds his way by reading the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. If you have Wolfe's book, there's a chapter where that philosophy is brought forth via that character's view of it.

Getting that to your student might be a good way of showing that Rand's not *all* that original on the one hand. Or heck, have him go to the source (http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/epit.htm) and ask him to compare Stoicism to Objectivism.

It will at least give him the start of wider view of things but in a framework that isn't necessarily contrary, which he just might not be reader for.

Rand's philosophy, since he's in the grip of it, is of the kind that will make it hard to talk/reason him out of it for now. But expanding his view of its variations might begin to open for him longer term, intellectual options.

A radical idea: instead of assuming that you know better and should do everything in your power to get the student to agree with you, or disagree a little less violently, start with where the student is, what the student believes, take it seriously enough to encourage him to take it more seriously as well, by studying it--with an eye not to refuting it but to understanding it in its larger context. Geof Carter at Saginaw Valley State University finds another positive approach to Rand:

Your quandary reminds me that Slavoj Zizek, a leading Lacanian scholar, once said during an interview. When asked which film he would take to a desert island, he said his he would take Rand's -The Fountainhead-.

This choice intrigued and I did some looking into Rand and this film. Recently, Shelia Kunkle has published an article in the International Journal of Zizek Studies entitled "Zizek's Choice" that explores his relation to Rand. It's perhaps a bit "heavier" perspective than what you're looking for with regards to dealing with this student, but perhaps thinking about Rand in terms of Zizek will offer a valuable perspective.

Here's the link to Kunkle's article:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22zizek+and+rand%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a">http://www.google.com/search?q=%22zizek+and+rand%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Bruce McComiskey at the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggests another approach based less on the contents of this students' papers, more on how he addresses them to his readers:

I've also had some "interesting" students (a self-proclaimed satanist, a practicing witch, both of whom were otherwise quite normal and pleasant). I usually bring them back to reality, at least in my writing classes, by emphasizing the constraints of academic discourse and, more importantly, emphasizing the relationship between ethos and audience. A self-inflated ego fails rhetorically if audience is considered remotely important. Interest in Rand is no problem--I've been into some "out there" folks, and it's done me little harm. The problem here seems to be that your student's ethos is inappropriate for the audiences he wants to address. If he's interested in spreading the word about Rand (a perfectly reasonable purpose), then he's not doing it effectively with self-important language. Ethos and audience are the directions I'd take this students.

Andrew Winslow at the University of Arizona adds a psychotherapeutic note:

In terms of practical suggestions, I think Bruce McComiskey's right on; it's hard to go wrong with having the student address the issues of (target) audiences and ethos in his papers.

If you're the God-fearing sort, I'd also recommend setting aside some time daily to pray that the student receives humility from a divine source.

Aside from the divine, I think your best bet with the "more attitude than talent" types is to recognize the problem as an academic addiction.

Gravitating toward Rand so strongly is probably due to academic frustration and a sense of alienation; echoing Rand gives him a comfort zone with a seemingly built-in method of success, a comrade-in-arms, access to an elite group, and a justification scapegoat for low grades (i.e. "no one gets me/us--the truly enlightented"). I ran into the same problems myself in undergrad psyc echoing Stanley Milgram, in grad school echoing Karl Marx (and there are a few craters still smoldering with the faculty over that flirtation), and more lately with Kenneth Burke, though not to the same extent. Solving the addiction means finding a more appropriate solution for frustration and alienation in the long-term. A series of compassionate interventions might work best in the short run. Keep your doors open to him and perhaps set up a regular meeting schedule.

This will evolve the relationship from "him and Ayn Rand against you" to "you and him against discursive ignorance." In effect, you'll be his new sponsor. Also, incorporate him in as much group discussion as possible, no matter how ridiculous he sounds, and keep your correction light or humorous. Students in the class are generally perceptive of behavior outside of the norm, and will begin policing him as well. Getting the "family" on board even if they don't know it will take some of the burden off of you. If the environment is light enough, he'll begin to see the absurdity of his ethos in comparison to the group without hostility. I managed to win over a few students this way--especially when I occasionally agreed with the individual student against the class. It demonstrated that I was on the side of good arguments and not particular favorites.

There were a lot of really good suggestions on the list already; the more reading he gets into the more at home he'll feel with academic discourse and the less likely he'll be to continue posing on his not-so high horse once he's disillusioned with Rand. No one goes cold-turkey these days; wean him off on academic barbituates as part of the system until he's flushed it out entirely.

Excellent advice! For academic addictions, go here.