Mass firing in the History department at Boise State

March 8, 2015 By

This past week, the History department chair sent out an e-mail with the subject line “Grim News.” In the e-mail, she detailed extensive cuts to the History department’s funding, apparently emerging from the Provost’s office. Among the cuts are:

  • The Public History faculty line I recently vacated
  • 2/3 of the funds we use to support graduate assistants
  • Two lecturerships
  • A visiting lecturership
  • All adjunct funding

I’ll have something more substantive to say about this soon, but right now I’m grief-stricken.

In the meantime, you can read this Idaho Statesman article to get a sense of the university’s party line. As you might imagine, though, “declining enrollment” is not the whole story.

I’ll leave you with these tidbits, calculated by one of our endangered lecturers, who used to work in college finance and administration:

The department offered 49 full-semester 3-credit courses with 1,385 students total in Spring 2015. Of these:

  • 17 classes with 556 students were taught by tenure/tenure-track faculty (41%)
  • 15 classes with 449 students were taught by 3.5 lecturers (33%)
  • 14 classes with 340 students were taught by 8 adjuncts (24%)
  • 3 classes with 40 students were taught by full-time faculty not housed entirely in the history department (2%)

The lecturer estimates the department’s instructional expenses constitute less than 45% of the revenue it brings in through teaching alone, and that there’s no way the now diminished tenure-line faculty can accommodate all of the students currently being taught by lecturers and adjuncts. Even trying to accommodate them will mean History faculty won’t have time to do research during the academic year. Currently we have two NEH fellows, an NSF fellow, a Fulbright scholar, and the editor of a top journal—as well as everyone else’s research agendas—so our department isn’t exactly shirking its research responsibilities. Many of us have also service commitments that already are untenable.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true, Wait. . . I moved to where?, Whining Exhortation and Angst

All I have are bullets (many of them literal)

September 7, 2014 By
  •  You may recall I fought very, very hard to keep guns off of Idaho’s college campuses. On day 6 of the semester, a gun went off in the middle of a class at a public university classroom on the other side of the state; a professor was negligent with his concealed firearm. Honestly, my money was on a student, later in the semester.
  • I hope the students in that class are allowed to drop the class without penalty, transfer to another section, and sue the state. (I know for a fact there is pro bono legal assistance available; if you’re one of those students or another who was impacted by this crime, you can get in touch with me and I’ll put you in contact with the right people.)
  • The concealed carry permit holders I spoke with who wanted this law passed all emphasized how highly trained they are before being issued this particular license. I was skeptical then, and I’m even more skeptical now.
  • A nine year-old with an Uzi. A 5-year-old with a shotgun. An 8-year-old boy with an Uzi. Why do people give guns to children? Why is it legal for children to use firearms?
  • I’ve seen people I admire post photos of their kids–some younger than Lucas–firing weapons. It chills me to the bone, and saddens me, too because both common sense and extensive research suggest this is not a good idea.
  • I’m sad so many of my friends, both male and female, live in fear at a time when crime rates are at historic lows.
  • In talking about recent incidents of gun violence, my mom and her sisters recalled my grandfather, a police officer who never really enjoyed being a police officer, told his daughters that “If you decide to carry a gun, do so knowing you likely will be killed by a gun.” (Research bears this out, by the way.) I’d extend his caution to family members: if you carry a gun, your family members are in jeopardy, too. (Especially in Idaho, which is second only to Kentucky in the number of domestic homicides committed with a gun.)
  • It frustrates me when proponents of less restrictive gun laws claim the statistics, and researchers’ interpretation of them, are not objective. As a professional researcher, I can assure you they are.
  • Here in Idaho, more of my friends own guns than don’t. They see guns as a solution to a problem that I see as improbable based on crime stats: the likely sudden outbreak of armed violence on a personal or community scale. And when there is an identified threat, the solution is always to be armed. Right now, there’s a lot of talk about a prowler breaking into homes in northwest Boise and its neighboring city, Meridian. I see locked windows and doors, good relationships among neighbors, a deep-barked dog, an alarm system, and neighbors’ willingness to call police as reasonable solutions. My friends suggest that a gun is solution #1.
  • It makes me profoundly sad to know that the odds are good that I will lose at least one of these friends to gun violence or negligence. I adore many of these people, and I know not all of them keep their guns stored in safes or with trigger locks. (One study showed that 43 percent of gun-owning households had at least one improperly stored weapon, and others demonstrate that firearms are not used in successfully in self-defense as often as people claim they are–in fact, they’re more likely to be used to escalate an argument or in ways that are illegal.)
  • It makes me sadder to hear, on many occasions, that my gun-owning friends have felt threatened by the mere presence of men who are not white—even, in one case, when being passed repeatedly by them on the highway.
  • I don’t mean to belittle these concerns—not at all. Rather, I’m profoundly saddened a (our?) culture has inspired these concerns.
  • I don’t know what the solution is, other than ending racism and increasing restrictions on gun ownership and access. Since ending racism is nigh impossible, I continue to work for the latter.
  • Some people think my sentiments here arise from a hatred of guns. Really, though, I feel as I do because of my deep love for people.
Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Whining Exhortation and Angst

On fear at 39

June 2, 2014 By

Years ago, when I was working in academic technology and faculty development, I teamed up with a group of extraordinary women—Laura Blankenship, Barbara Sawhill, Barbara Ganley, and Martha Burtis—to present in various ed tech venues about a phenomenon we termed Fear 2.0, the constellation of fear-mongering around the use of social media in higher education, student-created media shared publicly, and born-digital, non-peer-reviewed scholarship.

Recently, I’ve been thinking again about fear.

Several weeks ago, a friend told me that when she heard several loud booming noises on her block, she retreated to the basement, opened her gun safe, retrieved her handgun, and began loading magazines in the dark, lining them up just under the windowsill, all while peering through the mini-blinds to scout for threats.

Two senior colleagues whom I also consider good friends reminded me that I should be careful what I post on social media, particularly when it’s about Boise State. (So did my mother, repeatedly, though she has never been on social media to see what I post.)

Every few weeks at his Taekwondo studio, along with Taekwondo techniques and forms, my son learns a new self-defense method to geared explicitly to protect him against strangers who mean him harm.

A month ago, two older women tried to make me feel anxious about dressing appropriately for a job interview for a relatively senior, high-profile position.

Another friend told me it takes several days for her to open readers’ reports on the articles she has submitted to academic journals. She fears the commenters will be abusive (as they sometimes are; in fact, just this week I received feedback on an article from three readers, all of whom offered great suggestions for revision, but one of whom couched it in the form of ad hominem attacks).

The common thread here, of course, is anxiety, paranoia, and fear.

I’m not going to say I don’t feel fear.

Reading the #YesAllWomen thread on Twitter last week, I was reminded that as a woman, I live an imperiled existence relative to men.

And of course, as a parent, as one therapist pointed out to me, it’s normal to always feel “a low-level terror.”

Plus, even my work duties can inspire fear. For example, this week I have to provide the names of eight potential external reviewers for my tenure case. The very thought gives me palpitations, as my work is deeply interdisciplinary and I’ve neither focused my publishing in traditional journals nor have I shopped around a book manuscript.

To list particular scholars for my tenure case is to constitute a new tribe rather than to delineate an existing subfield to which I belong. And that’s a frightening thing, as I’m asking these people I’ve never met to say Yes, this is an established scholarly community and yes, Leslie belongs, even though that community (which must comprise only tenured faculty, not alt-ac folks or museum professionals) does not in fact exist in any form these people would recognize. In fact, the people on my list might never have heard of one another, so diverse are my interests and publications.

But there are other options.

I returned last week from the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History. There, I reconnected with Cathy Kudlick, a mentor and former colleague who embodies (for me, at least) fearlessness, who in turn introduced me to the absolutely amazing Katherine Ott, a deeply generous and insightful soul who also struck me as fearless.

In talking with Katherine, I was reminded of my Fear 2.0 days, and I expressed to her the belief that, though I may be on the job market now or in the future, I’m at a point in my life where I worry very little about what people will think of what I say on my blog or in social media. Rather, I want to be relatively transparent; I don’t want to work for or with anyone who would reject me outright because of what I write here. Katherine made clear that was an obvious conclusion, but it’s taken me a while to get here.

Thank you, digital world, for making it easy for folks to discern that I am not the right person for them—and conversely, for me to discern that they might not be the best colleagues for me.

Once again I’m at an inflection point.

The last few years have been full of them.

I interviewed a month ago for a terrific staff position at a phenomenal institution, and I felt I nailed the campus interview, really connecting with the students and faculty—but at this point I’m guessing the job has been offered to someone else.

At about that same time, I realized my antidepressant had stopped working. It’s not a big deal in the long run; it happens, and I know intellectually how to deal with it, even if emotionally I feel like a wreck. I am fortunate, as I’ve said before here, to be an exceptionally high-functioning depressive, so I was able to show up for work and get things done; doing so just took more energy than usual.

But the combination of high (a strong interview) and low (transitioning to a new antidepressant) kicked me back into a deeply self-reflective mode in which I asked myself, yet again, what I really want to do with my life.

Today is my 39th birthday, you see, and I’m finally feeling that time is not unlimited—nor is my energy.

The answer? Beyond being able to support my family—a dicey proposition at best at the moment—I want to be in a place where I can be professionally fearless, where I can admit I’m still learning, where no one is going to try (even with my own best interests in mind) to shame me or frighten me into silence.

Also, about that supporting-my-family thing: I want to shift my perspective.

I’ve been helping a family member with a job application this week, and the application requires a salary history. Twenty-four years ago, this woman, working as an entry-level public high school administrator, was making 10% more than I earn today.

If I have one fear, it’s financial insolvency. I have expressed my concerns about salary and cost of living to a few colleagues, and while many of my junior colleagues understand exactly what the challenge is in living on my salary, a senior colleague recently pointed out to me that (more than 10 years ago) another colleague (whose life context is entirely different from mine) managed to make the salary work with two kids instead of one.

I don’t need that kind of comparison and subtle shaming.

I don’t need to be told it’s more expensive to live in California than it is in Idaho. Because here’s the deal: it was cheaper to live in Davis than it is to live in Boise. Really. No one believes me, but my bank statements don’t lie.

I especially don’t need people who own houses to tell me my rent is unreasonable (it’s not), when they haven’t looked at rental prices in a decade or more.

And yes, I realize some parts of California are exceptionally expensive places to live. Salaries in those cities also often are commensurate with the cost of living, unlike my salary here.

Confessing about professing

I admit it: I take a good deal of pride in being able to say I’m a professor. I love being called “professor.” I’ve worked toward this title my entire adult life. And many of the people I’ve most admired over the past 20 years have been my professors. To be counted among them is a joy. To give it up would cause me great sadness.

Yet I’m not yet convinced the profession is sustainable for me, either financially or emotionally.

I really had hoped that by the time I turn 40, I would be able to support my family without fear of not being able to pay the bills. That’s looking less likely with each passing year because of career choices I’ve made and because of a lack of state and public support for higher education, especially here in Idaho.

Dancing with fear

Seth Godin emphasizes that the process of building a professional life and forging an individual identity requires a good deal of dancing with fear. He’s absolutely right, and since my internship with Seth last summer, I’ve been more serious than ever about identifying points of resistance and dancing with the fears that underlie that resistance.

For me at this moment, this dance is about balancing progress toward tenure (playing the game) with a desire to experiment in new fields (breaking the rules), about bringing home a paycheck while also seeking more remunerative work, whether that be a different job or launching a freelance/consulting endeavor that I hope will provide me with a comfortable income—all while living in a context (academia) where I’m supposed to do the work because I love it (which I do), because I’m supposed to eschew material reward because only the uncultured value money.

I want to be fearless professionally, but there it is, laid bare:

I’m so tired of the fear that comes with living paycheck to paycheck.

I’m weary of the fear-mongering around work I enjoy but which other people deem professionally risky.

I want to do new, exciting things, but sometimes doing them—thanks to an academic culture that rewards conformity over risk—jeopardizes my ability to put food on the table.

Still, I’m off-contract in the summer. Summer is, then, the best time to embrace fearlessness, to break new ground, to embrace the advice a spectral James Joyce gave to Seamus Heaney:

Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.

Filed Under: Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Idaho is waiting. . .

January 6, 2014 By

The Boise Convention and Visitors’ Bureau recently commissioned a video about Boise:

When I first saw it posted by a friend on Facebook, I commented, “This has not been my experience of Boise.”  The response was basically, “You should get out more.”

Ah, I would. . . if only I could afford skiing, snowboarding, horseback riding, whitewater rafting, a nice road bike, hanging out in wine bars. . .or even tickets to cultural or athletic events.  (A bit of good news: the Boise Art Museum is excellent and affordable, and BSU faculty have been admitted free for the past couple of years.)

But the truth is, even as a professor, I can’t.  (Spoiler alert: My neighborhood and its environs aren’t featured anywhere in that video.)

I joined the professoriate not just because I love ideas and teaching, but because I had seen the comfortable lives my undergraduate professors led, and the relatively comfortable socioeconomics of my grad school profs.  My parents were high school teachers, and I figured I could take a step up from there.

I know it’s gauche to talk specifics about income, but it’s important here, and my salary is public information anyway, so I’m laying it all out on the table.

My salary is $50,000 a year, plus usually a stipend of $3,000 in recognition of overload work I’ve undertaken (managing the department’s internships), which sounds comfortable, especially in Idaho, where the median household income is $45,500.  In fact, my income is close to the average per capita income in Idaho’s wealthiest enclave, Sun Valley.   And in fact, when you look at the median income numbers on that Wikipedia page, things don’t seem that bad in terms of income inequality.

After taxes and various deductions from my paycheck, I bring home about $31,000.  The basic cost of living for a family of four in Boise is $56,491 per year. (Note: I used that site’s number-cruncher and discovered it calculates the cost of living for a family of two parents and one child to be $49,000, but it doesn’t include student loan payments.) When we moved here, Fang had to become a contractor and freelancer instead of an employee for the primary company he works for; the company cut back his hours, and now, of course, he has to pay self-employment taxes on that lowered income.  He ended up working as the front-desk person in the History department for a couple of months, but he was working almost full-time and bringing home around $600 a month; he decided to find additional freelance work instead.

Fang’s experience with low-wage work in Idaho is not unusual.  Idaho’s wages are the worst in the nation; the Spokesman-Review reports that “The Famous Potatoes state ranks 50th for average annual wage, per-capita income, and for wage increases since 2007. It also has the greatest percentage of minimum-wage workers in America.” Amen to the wage increases; this is my fourth year here, and my salary has increased a whopping 2 percent.

So yes, when I see the video “Boise is Waiting,” I’m thinking it’s waiting for people with far more disposable income than what I have, even though I’m clearly the demographic the video targets: a white, 30-something, culturally literate person, with kids, who has some leisure time.  All those lists that suggest Boise is a great place to live typically only discuss the amenities in a part of Boise that constitutes less than 20 percent of the city’s area. Worse, urban planners here don’t talk about the rest of the city when they write articles about the city’s future; the vast majority of us, those who live in unfashionable neighborhoods, are largely invisible in city boosterism.

I shared my concerns with another junior faculty member at Boise State, and ze confessed ze had to go into forbearance because ze couldn’t pay hir student loans. Worse, ze has a serious, costly medical condition that isn’t adequately covered by the state employee insurance plan. Last year, Fang and I spent more than $10,000 on healthcare costs—only a small part of that total constitutes pre-tax employer-subsidized premiums—and we’re pretty healthy.

It’s not just junior faculty thusly challenged: I have a full professor colleague who can’t afford any internet but dial-up because hir partner can’t find a job—and hir partner doesn’t qualify for benefits at the university because theirs is not a “traditional” marriage. To use the iPad the university gave hir, my colleague has to go to McDonald’s to use the wifi.

I had to explain to a classified employee on campus today, someone new to higher ed, that while faculty spend our summers undertaking research and writing, which is required for our jobs, we don’t actually get paid for those three months.  She looked at me as if I was crazy.  Maybe I am.

It’s not as if the state and university don’t have the funds to compensate faculty appropriately.  Like every other university, we have a recent proliferation of pricey vice presidents. Plus, look at these NCAA stats from USA Today: In 2012, Boise State spent $11 million in state appropriations and student tuition on athletics.  Bonus: even with all this money, athletics doesn’t break even at Boise State, with a shortfall in 2012 of $1 million.

Screen shot 2014-01-06 at 3.34.36 PM

As you can imagine, it’s pretty demoralizing, especially considering we faculty are always hearing about how important it is for academic programs to be self-supporting.

It’s not just hurting Fang and me, of course; we send our kid to school in a state that ranks 50th in per-pupil spending. We’re definitely seeing the effects of that—and not just academically. Today, when I dropped the boy off at school, because it was 20°F or above (it was 21°), the kids had to stay outside.  That’s school district policy, and our school has decided not to institute a more compassionate policy, even though children don’t thermoregulate well, and after a few minutes on the playground, the children become wan kidsicles. I’m guessing this decision to keep the kids outside stems partly from the school’s and district’s insufficient funds to hire child-minders for densely populated indoor play.

And yes, I understand these are all First World problems, and I’m luckier than most. (After all, I won the tenure-track lottery after only five years on the job market. And no, I’m not being sarcastic when I say that.) Still, within the U.S. and academic context, these remain problems that need to be addressed. We’re not just hurting faculty and students; we’re causing long-term damage to the state’s culture and economy.

But I’m confounded at the particular perfect storm of politics and culture that has engendered the situation here in Idaho.  Lots of people are hurting, in the academy and beyond.  Today I’m depressed because it’s the first day of the state’s legislative session, and I don’t expect anything to change this year.

Comment Zen

I know some of my readers are going to have anecdotes of being outside at colder temperatures (as do I), and stories of working for lower wages (as have I), and tales of their partners struggling to find meaningful or reasonably remunerated work (waves hand). I, too, have adjuncted, and I, too, have worked with my hands and body, and I know first-hand the financial struggles of contingent academic labor and minimum-wage work. I sympathize—nay, empathize—with all these experiences. I read the higher-ed horror stories on blogs and in IHE and the Chronicle.

Some who read this will undoubtedly call me a complainer, but I offer up this information in the spirit of critique and hope that people will realize the myths they cling to—that there’s a low cost of living in Idaho, and that the BSU football team generates revenue, for example—are in need of some serious reappraisal.  We must reconsider where we’re putting our resources.

If you leave a comment, then, I’d like to hear not just how well I have it relative to others—I already know that, and I’m grateful for what I do have, though I also know things could be much, much better for me and for others.  Rather, I’d like to hear your experiences, particularly similar ones, and ideas for better investing our resources in Idaho and elsewhere.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Whining Exhortation and Angst

A survey of what?

October 1, 2013 By

As my university goes through program prioritization and redesigns its undergraduate core curriculum to feature all the right buzzwords, I’m once again reminded of how broken the history survey course has become.  I’m not the first to say it, nor will I be the last, but the thought woke me up again at 3:30 this morning, so I’m writing about it here.

English departments figured this out a while ago.  They wrestled with the canon, yet–in my experience at least, as an English major and a former lit and comp instructor–they settled on a wide variety of representative works in their lower-division survey courses rather than pretending to cover literature comprehensively. In the broadest surveys that serve more non-majors than majors, there’s some poetry, drama (often Shakespeare), short fiction, and a novel or two.  Maybe some creative nonfiction.  But no one is pretending to offer any kind of coverage beyond “hey, here are some samples of a few genres that have proven particularly significant over time.”

I’m noticing the opposite is the case in many history surveys.  Textbooks purport to share a comprehensive narrative. Publishers’ supplementary materials (ugh) offer quizzes that are more about fact acquisition than any skills listed on the top half of Bloom’s taxonomy–as if the point of the history survey is to ensure students know what caused the Panic of 1837, or what happened during the Salem witch trials, or that Gettysburg is often seen as the turning point of the Civil War.

Recently, my university revised its general ed requirements, and in order for a course to count toward those requirements, we had to send department faculty to a course design institute to ensure the courses met university-wide learning outcomes. I was actually fine with that, as we were allowed to be pretty damn vague about what would go on in each section of a course–e.g., “assessments may include, but are not limited to, essays, exams, and group presentations.” Recently, however, the people who run that program appear to have added another wrinkle: formative and summative assessments.  Quantitative formative and summative assessments, across course sections.

And so one of my colleagues took the initiative to develop a proposed assessment for one of the survey courses we moved into the new core.  It was a 10- to 15-question quiz that asked students to demonstrate some basic knowledge that any eighth grader who has just finished a (very) traditional Western Civ class should be able to pass.  The idea is that students would take the exact same multiple-choice quiz at the beginning and end of the course, and voilà! We can measure and document learning with the quiz scores.

 

The gap between the university’s assumptions about teaching and what I think works grows ever wider.

I’m teaching the first “half” (Pleistocene to 1877) of the U.S. history survey this semester.  It’s my third time teaching this course, and I struggle with it every damn time, particularly in the first six weeks or so of the semester, when I’m trying to adjust students’ expectations of what a history course is and their understanding of what a history course does.

The course schedule looks fairly traditional: readings from a textbook (I know, I know–I vacillate on this; I didn’t use one last time, and next time I’ll drop it again), punctuated by fairly formal writing assignments, a midterm (an in-class essay), and final exam (also an essay).  But a glance at the syllabus does not reveal at all–at all–what happens in class.

So, for example, for yesterday’s class, we read Chapter 5 of Foner’s Give Me Liberty.  It’s dry, it’s boring–think Stamp Act–but when I ask students here what most interests them about history, the Revolutionary War ranks right up there with the Civil War, so I feel compelled to give a nominal nod toward coverage of the subject.

Once we were in class, I asked students to summarize what the colonists who were protesting the various British acts wanted.  After the students discussed this briefly in small groups, we made a list on the board.

I passed out a press release on the current-day Tea Party’s platform, and I thumbnailed for students Tea Party demographics.

I then asked students if today’s Tea Party adherents, who claim the Revolutionary era as their intellectual and political legacy, are actually in line, ideologically speaking, with the original Tea Party.  My students agreed that, at first glance and even with some reflection, they did, if we’re looking at their political planks. We also discussed what today’s Tea Partiers find attractive, politically and culturally, in that historical moment, at least as it’s traditionally chronicled.

But, as I said to my students, “If there’s one thing you take away from this course, I hope it’s that when someone is drawing conclusions from history for political ends, you say, ‘It’s actually more complicated than that.'”

So, my next question for students was, “How does today’s Tea Party perceive and use Revolutionary-era history? And why does it matter how Tea Partiers represent history?”

We watched two videos that feature history as told by Tea Party darlings Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck:


 

The first is an easy one for students to analyze, Colbert’s enjoyable theatrics aside: Sarah Palin is a big Second Amendment rights advocate, and she tells a popular story in a way that emphasizes her concerns and inflates their importance.

The second is more complicated. Glenn Beck talking about black history in early America? And taking a vaguely art historical approach?  What the hell rabbit hole have we fallen into here? On the surface, he’s asking for the same thing Clarence Walker does in Mongrel Nation, which we read last week: that Africans and African Americans be fully integrated into our stories of the founding of the American republic because it will change how we understand American history and race relations.

I encourage you to watch the video; it’s a very rich text that, on close reading, yields all kinds of insights into the hopes and fears–but mostly fears–of the Tea Party.

The first thing I highlight for students is that Beck is arguing for less emphasis on slavery as central to the black experience in the United States. As he explicates various paintings, Beck (along with everyone’s favorite early American historian, David Barton) names the African-American men depicted in them, then asks why we focus so much on slavery in telling the stories of black lives.

(Hint: Every single African American Beck names in that clip was a slave.)

My students and I talked about why Beck wants to downplay slavery, why Beck might believe the Tea Party should take an interest in black history at this time, and why this black history instead of the history Beck dismisses rather casually (Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights movement). It was a lively discussion among students from a broad political spectrum.

If this course were in the university’s new core–which many are arguing it should be, if only to keep enrollment up–how would we assess these students, formatively and summatively, in a quantitative way?  Hell, I struggle to assess such learning qualitatively.

I feel just as some of us were beginning to push back successfully against the content coverage model that keeps student learning low–very low–on Bloom’s taxonomy, university administrators and the state board of ed (which, alas, controls all public education in Idaho, not just K-12) once again demonstrate they have no idea whatsoever what the humanities are or what they do for students.

Idaho in particular needs students who can engage in informed, reflective civic discourse, not students who can parrot information from a textbook or lecture. (Our statehouse is filled with party-line parrots.) My students would do miserably on formative and summative assessments like those proposed by my colleague.  But which kind of person would you rather have participating in our democracy–a student who shows one-semester improvement on a quiz, or one who can thoughtfully evaluate politicians’ and pundits’ motivations for deploying history in political discourse?

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Whining Exhortation and Angst

A matter of fit

September 12, 2013 By

I.

This week in our upper-division U.S. women’s history course, my 40 students and I are reading and discussing Susan Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820.  I’m really enjoying the book because I’m learning a ton from it, but it’s clear some students have already given up on it. Last class, one student commented that she found the writing terrible, and I said it takes time to learn to read an academic book like this one, and that I found it an easy read, but that’s only because I’ve paged through thousands such tomes.

I then asked students for whom the book was written.  Several answered “for us”—by which they meant students in a history course at a regional four-year university.

I explained it’s unlikely the author ever imagined undergraduates at Boise State would constitute the book’s primary audience, or even its secondary or tertiary one.  Students seemed surprised.

“Well, then, who’s it written for?” one asked.

“Other academic historians.”

Students seemed puzzled.  Why would anyone write for such a small audience, and why would they use such dense language?

 

II.

I don’t lecture in my classes.  It’s not my style.  Years ago, when I would attend humanities conferences where I was expected to present my research, I might prepare a paper, thinking I would play by the rules, but I’d end up speaking off the cuff, often in front of the podium instead of behind it.  When I do conferences now, I prefer roundtables and discussion over panels and presentations, and I like to talk about the state of the field rather than my own work.

But recently I’ve been invited to give more formal presentations on my work.  I’m even keynoting at an unconference.  (And yes, I get the irony.)

While I’m happy there’s interest in my work, I feel uneasy with the medium of the research presentation.

The last time I read part of my work aloud was during my job talk for my current job, when I was extremely nervous and pretending not to read.  When I was finished, the assembled faculty asked me to have a seat.  The chair fell apart under me.

Honestly, that’s how I feel after any formal presentation.  Disoriented and slightly embarrassed.

 

III.

I was talking with a friend today who was trying to figure out if she should stay in her current (exceptionally sought-after and rare) job in a field she loves but in a context she finds challenging.  Her alternative was a pink-collar job with great benefits and just-about-guaranteed raises every year, but which would likely be brain-deadening.  She wasn’t sure if brain-deadening was better than soul-killing.

I asked if there was a third path.

She moved on to talk about the land mines at work, which may or may not be metaphorical.

 

IV.

It’s all a matter of fit.

It’s no secret to longtime blog readers that I have a slippery academic and professional identity.  I move across fields, degrees, departments, and programs.  I switch sides, from staff to faculty and back again.

And back again?

Perhaps.  There’s been a lot of bloggy soul-searching recently–even more than usual, it seems–about how the dysfunctions of academia, and faculty life in particular, are beginning to snowball in earnest.  Work-life balance is more off-kilter than ever.  Faculty governance is disappearing along with the tenure track.  MOOC-thinking—education driven by efficiency rather than pedagogy—has widely infiltrated university administration. Pay is stagnating, with many faculty barely maintaining a fingerhold on the middle class.

If I were a single person without a kid, I would be counting my blessings. I adore my colleagues and my students.  My teaching load is ideal, and I have a good deal of autonomy in choosing what I teach.  I get course releases (although they’re never enough, are they?).  I find sufficient small grants to fund whatever project I might have at hand.  I’ve grown so much here in confidence and in skill, thanks to the supportive environment of my department.  (It’s entirely non-pathological, a rare beast!) And–again, if I were single–I might be happy with only a small apartment to maintain in a city whose scale is, if not walkable or bikeable (for me, at least), entirely reasonable.

But I’m not single.  I have a family, and accordingly my current position is not financially sustainable.  On paper, the salary is below median.  Once taxes and retirement savings and whatever else are taken out of it, my take-home salary is less than half what experts estimate it costs to maintain a family here in Boise.  Yes, Fang works, but he’s self-employed in the newspaper industry; I’m grateful for what he brings in (more grateful than ever), but we don’t know how long it will last.

Two clear paths forward:

1) Go up for tenure next year.  That would increase my pre-tax salary by around 14 percent starting roughly fall 2015, and would bring me almost back–in three more years–to where I was in my staff job in Davis.  It would likely be my last raise until I went up for full professor, however.  Make up the difference between my salary and our needs by doing some college admissions consulting with wealthy families.  Keep my fingers crossed that newspapers don’t disappear during our lifetime.  (Ha!)

2) Seek sustainable employment elsewhere—a tenure-line faculty position, an academic staff position, an alt-ac job in industry, etc.  Or start my own thing, which isn’t immediately realistic because while living in Boise we’ve spent down our savings to a point where I can’t justify striking out on my own.

 

V.

Some people think I’m crazy to be discussing this in the open, under my real name.  And yet when I burst into my department chair’s office on the first day of classes this fall and ranted that the HR folks from a top university where I applied for a fabulous staff job way back in early July chose that day to get back to me, she merely told me, “Of course you’re available. Immediately, if need be.  Take the interview.”

 

VI.

And so I’ve been thinking about fit.  Do I serve a community better as faculty or in another role?  Am I happier with the relatively autonomous but always-on faculty life or in a staff position where I don’t typically have to take work home every evening and work on weekends?  Which is more important to me–the prestige of a tenure-line position or something resembling financial security?  What’s best for my spouse and son?

Must it be either/or?  Because I spend an awful lot of my faculty job doing things that don’t cleanly fit into teaching, research, outreach, or service, but which are sometimes all four simultaneously.  And when I was on the staff side of academia, I engaged with more intellectually challenging and paradigm-shifting material at conferences than I ever have as a faculty member.

I’m thinking a research institute would be a really good fit, inside or outside a university—but probably inside would be better.  If the job’s primary mission was conveying complex information to a public audience, that would be awesome.

It ends up that the job for which I have a second interview on Monday is at a research institute in a terrific interdisciplinary field of study, and it involves lots of interpretation of research and social issues for the public. Without discussing exact numbers, the HR rep who conducted the first interview said the salary would be “comfortably above” my current one.  (I’ve done my research, and “comfortably above” is a euphemism for “a hell of a lot more.”)  On top of it all, I find the university’s location very attractive.

Wish me luck?

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Fatigued

September 11, 2013 By

On September 11, 2001, Fang and I had just moved to Davis. We only had rabbit ears on the TV and we were using our old dial-up internet access from Southern California. We were watching NBC, and when we saw, through the static, the first WTC tower fall, Fang said, “This country is about to go screaming to the right.”

He was, alas, correct, and I regret all the pain countless U.S. Americans and others around the globe have experienced on that day and since. I see my students who are veterans struggle with PTSD and physical pain, and I think about all the first-responder and war widows and widowers, as well as the vast suffering and loss of life of civilians in the Middle East.

I’m tired of Islamophobia, which I still see not only in the media but also in my Facebook stream from people I respect and trust and love.

I’m tired of jingoism and shallow, flag-waving patriotism and end times rhetoric. I’m tired of the profiteering of American companies in the Middle East and North Africa.

I’m tired of it all.

Can we please, today and always, speak and act with love and compassion and generosity rather than fear and violence?

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Whining Exhortation and Angst

None of this would be possible, of course, without Fang

August 17, 2013 By

All my big dreaming, all my traveling hither and yon, with or without Lucas (but especially without), would not be possible without Fang’s steadfast support.

How amazing is he?  Check out his latest post, in which he braves wildfire to get the dog to surgery. . .

. . .and then realize he’s spent just about every minute since then trying to keep the dog calm.  The dog is normally pretty unflappable, but thus far, he’s in full freak-out mode:

  • The dog has eaten his sutures, which is quite a feat, as they were under his skin, not outside it.
  • The dog rejected the Cone of Dumbness that would have prevented him from eating his sutures–Fang hypothesizes the freak-out was part from the dog’s dislike of collars, and part from a belief that his body may have disappeared since he can no longer see it.
  • Fang tried bitter apple spray on the dog’s wound, but the stuff aerosolizes, which means Fang has had bitter apple taste in his mouth for days (not pleasant, I assure you).
  • Fang has taken the dog to the vet for additional wound wraps and sedatives.
  • When all other measures didn’t work, Fang sat on the floor with the dog, which was the only thing that kept the beast from hyperventilating.  The dog now will only sleep with his head on Fang’s lap.
The big dog, briefly in repose.

The big dog, briefly in repose.

Here’s to Fang, who was supposed to have a vacation from family responsibilities this week, and instead has all the responsibilities of a toddler’s parent.

Filed Under: Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

The Leslie multiverse

August 17, 2013 By

When I returned home from the final day of my short, grossly underpaid stint as a staff writer for a newspaper named for a fish that climbs out of the water to mate, Fang–then the art director of the paper—sent me an e-mail in which he expressed his delight in working with me and announced that “in a parallel universe, we made a terrific couple!”

My first thought—after shit shit shit! (because I had harbored a crush on him for a couple months, and in ten days I would move from Long Beach to Iowa City)—was, “Wait a minute; I live in a parallel universe.”

That sentiment emerged from my experience as someone who was socially awkward and thus lived intellectually and psychologically on the margins of my world even as I seemed to bodily inhabit it.  I like to think I’ve overcome most of my social awkwardness (ha! more like embraced it), so in recent years I’ve seen myself as on a sometimes unconventional path through Earth Prime.

 

But then, suddenly, this summer has been all about parallel universes.

I’ve spent almost as much time outside Boise as I have in it: a dozen days or so in the Bay Area and Davis, California for a women-in-technology unconference and archival research; two weeks in a village just north of New York City for my internship with Seth; and ten days in Long Beach visiting family and trying to recover from what turned into a summer in which I worked a lot and accomplished much, but none of it what I projected in my faculty activity plan.

I stayed in Davis long enough to feel as if I had moved right back into the town. My evenings and weekends were packed with visits with friends and former colleagues, and it was downright charming—perfect, in fact, except for the absence of Lucas, Fang, and a bicycle. And indeed, in a parallel universe, I never left Davis, never landed a job in the ultra-collegial history department at Boise State, never met all the funny and awesome Boiseans whose friendships I treasure.

Then there was the internship with Seth Godin. As you know, I’m still processing it. But for two weeks I inhabited a parallel universe in which I wasn’t an academic, in which people valued my expertise and skills differently (more highly! more openly!) than in my everyday professorial life.

And Long Beach. Honestly, I’ve long had a love/hate relationship with this city. It would take a lot of therapy, and a lot more writing, for me to distill what exactly it is I believe about Long Beach—typical, I suppose, of any place where one’s family has lived for nearly a century. But this trip has been delightful thus far. I’ve spent lots of time with my sister, helping her with her business, but more importantly hanging out with her mercurial two-year-old daughter and absolutely charming three-month-old son.

Today, for example, I breakfasted with Lucas and my parents, then headed down to a local saltwater lagoon because my parents said with its restoration, it’s possible to stand on the pier that runs across it and see jellyfish.  Lucas and I saw huge moon jellies, yes, but also lots of fish, an egret, crabs, a skate, and an octopus that put on quite a show of locomotion and camouflage. Then we went down to Newport Beach, where, just as I settled into my beach chair, a pod of dolphins swam near shore and stayed for a while to play and feed.  I headed out into the waves with Lucas and my parents, and we took turns body boarding in the excellent surf. We were amused by the biggest, fastest fish I’ve ever seen in such shallow waters—maybe three feet long and six to eight inches tall. I finished out the day with my sister and her family at a concert in a park featuring a really fun 1980s cover band.  We dined on some of the best Thai food I’ve ever had.

 

It would be easy to dismiss such relaxing, delightful experiences as a vacationer’s indulgence. And for me, at the moment they are. And the story I’ve been telling myself all these years is that Long Beach is too expensive a place to live on an academic’s salary—hell, Boise is, too—yet millions of people manage to live in Southern California, and probably hundreds of thousands of them end up at the beach each day during the summer, even on a weekday. The secondary narrative is that even if I did see an academic job advertised here that paid sufficiently, the applicant pool is too competitive because the weather is nice and the cultural resources are plentiful.

With these thoughts running through my head, I count down the days—three, now—before I must return to Boise for the new semester (at a job, remember, I love—but whose salary is insufficient). I look at the news and see that much of the country immediately outside Boise is on fire, which means horrifying air quality (Lucas and I both have asthma). I think about how unhappy Fang has been in Boise, and how few connections we’ve been able to make in the city because everyone else at Lucas’s school seems to have deep family roots in town and established social networks that can be difficult to penetrate.*  And I wonder why the hell I’m going back there.

Because despite my mild-mannered academic life, the truth is, I fully inhabit a parallel universe—one in which as a professor I apply for stuff that seems crazy, like two weeks of 7 a.m.-to-1 a.m. days as an intern for a mystery project with a marketing genius on the other side of the country.

 

During that internship, Seth dedicated the last couple days to not only tying up loose ends, but to having individual conversations with each of us about where we’re headed next.  My private meeting with Seth lasted only a few minutes, but what emerged was this: I’m way too intelligent and talented to feel underappreciated, and I’m too smart to stay somewhere I’m not adequately financially compensated for my work.

As I mentioned in a previous post, later that day, during the business brainstorming session, I tossed out an idea I had no intention of following up on myself, but which a room full of frighteningly bright people seemed to think was a perfect fit for me.  I began reading the websites of other people in this professional niche, and I realized—I admit, to as much horror as delight—I would very likely succeed in it.

I pulled Seth aside and asked him what he would do if he were me, in an academic culture that (a) expects us to give 110% of our waking hours to the job and (b) doesn’t usually smile upon professorial entrepreneurialism unless it directly benefits the university.  As I remember the conversation, Seth pressed me: Was I worried people wouldn’t like me if I took on a side project that had a high financial return on a small investment of my time?  Yes, I said, I was.  Then he asked which was more important to me: making six figures or being liked by my colleagues. I averted my eyes and said, “Making enough to fully support my family.”  To which he added quickly, “They’re going to like you anyway.”

I ran this conversation by a friend and colleague, and she confirmed that yes, indeed, this narrative of doom-and-gloom was mostly in my head, and not based in reality.  The university, she says, wants faculty to be out in the community, and now that she knew about this potential side hustle, she’d think I was crazy not to pursue it.

And it is crazy not to at least give it a try. It shouldn’t prove much of a distraction from my university duties, nor a conflict with them. So I’m spending the final evenings of summer researching the field, creating a website, and filing the appropriate paperwork with the state to make everything above-board.

Worst-case scenario?  I fail, and I learn to survive on a professorial gig I love and at which by all accounts I’m excelling. Somehow, I find ways to make Idaho life less corrosive on my family’s individual and collective psyches.

Best-case scenario?  I try this for a couple of years, I’m crazy successful at it, and I get to pick which path to take: an intellectually rich but financially unstable life as a tenured historian in a state for which I’ll never be a booster, or this other thing—I promise not to be coy about it much longer—that would allow me to live wherever I want (read: near my extended family).

So here’s to parallel universes, as confusing as they can be when they become less-than-parallel and intersect.  This should be fun.

*When complaining thus, I need to acknowledge my gratitude for Lisa V. and Bert V., who have been so generous with their kindness and their Thanksgiving dinners. Without them, we’d feel completely alienated from non-university life in Boise.

 

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true, Wait. . . I moved to where?, Whining Exhortation and Angst

RBOC, guppies and tech support scams edition

July 16, 2013 By

guppy

  • Here, I’ll admit it: The guppies were a bad idea.  But because the boy likes them, I will continue to distribute them for free through Craigslist, perpetuating the 2012-13 Boise Guppy Pyramid Scheme.  Once the two big mama guppies die, we’re going all-male, guppy stewardship wisdom be damned.  (None of our males fight with each other, even when we remove the females from the tank.)
  • Despite my distance from them, I remain my parents’ go-to tech support. Why they didn’t call me, then, when their printer malfunctioned, I don’t know, but they ended up looking for a solution online, calling some fly-by-night operation that claimed to work for Epson, and allowing this company’s tech “support” representative to install remote software.  Once the guy had control of their computer, he tried to extort them out of $299.  My parents hung up, and he called back, offering to remove the remote software for $99. My parents unplugged their computer immediately, hung up again, and tried to log back in, but their password had been changed.  So. . . they reinstalled some of the system software (I’m surprised they got this far!), changed their passwords again. . .and that’s when I happened to call.  In case anyone else finds themselves or loved ones in such straits, as a public service announcement, I’d like to point you to these directions on how to remove LogMeInRescue from a Mac.  (And no, I’m not available to talk your parents through the removal process.  You’re on your own there!)
  • The kicker to the above?  Although the original error messages from their printer indicated the problem was with the print cartridges, it ends up they really were just using paper their printer didn’t like.  Anyone need a ream of crappy Staples copy stock?
  • I’m expecting the next month to be pretty much awesome, though I’m not happy that the day I return from an extended tech support session trip to see my parents, I need to go back to work.
  • All of a sudden, a bunch of people I know want feedback on drafts of all kinds of stuff.  It’s fun to see what other people are working on, and it’s nice to have my comments appreciated.
  • I’m so excited to meet everyone participating in the internship I begin next week.  We have a back channel established already, and these are some super smart, creative, initiative-taking people.  (Though I admit I’m feeling a bit old. I hope I don’t come across as a curmudgeon: “You kids and your technology!”)
  • My fall courses are going to kick my butt. I had 12 students in the spring, and I’ll have 90 in the fall.  I know some of you have far more than that every semester, but it’s a lot for me right now with all the other projects I have going on.  Plus, I’m completely revising one of the courses, and the other one is new to me, which means I’ll have to do a ton of reading during the semester.  In addition, there will be a lot of writing in each course, which means lots of commenting on student work.  Maybe, as just happened in a MOOC I’m following, I can just tell students to self-assess their work!
  • Suddenly my skin looks like it did at 16!  Those who knew me then know this is not a good development.  Things that make my skin break out these days: touching my face, spray sunblock, sugar, air conditioning, sweat, chlorinated pool water, thinking about guppies, moisturizing lotion, over-the-counter acne treatments, air.
  • I just learned that the auto body shop needs to order additional parts to fix our rear-ended Toyota Avalon.  The other driver’s insurance company rep tells me this means the car will likely be totaled.  Blue book value of the car: $2200.  Actual cost to replace the car with a similar one, based on local Craigslist ads: $5,000-$6,000.  Grrrrrrrrrrr.
  • Lucas read 350 pages yesterday.  This morning he couldn’t figure out how to zip up his backpack.  Finally my genes are showing up!

 

Guppy photo by PINKE, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Filed Under: Technobabble, Whining Exhortation and Angst
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Header image credits

origami beetle by Emre Ayaroglu, mounted butterflies by Black Country Museums, First Lady Sarah Polk's dress and the Jefferson Bible source book by the National Museum of American History, and lionfish by Martyn Steiner, all used under Creative Commons licenses.

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