The Classroom Conservative

Reif Larsen, The Selected Works Of T. S. Spivet

One way to approach The Selected Works Of T. S. Spivet is as an encyclopedia of narrative conventions, new and old. This story of a brilliant "mapboy" from Montana features, for example, the manuscript within a manuscript, as twelve-year-old Tecumseh Sparrow finds and reads his mother's fictional imaginings of their ancestors. This story is read on the road, as our protagonist travels east to Washington, D. C. But the defining characteristic of the text is its hybridity, the illustrations that demonstrate T. S.'s capacity for drawing maps. Readers must alternate between the body of the text and the extensive marginalia. The cartography trope is pervasive; Larsen examines various ways of knowing, determining finally that an intuitive understanding is preferable to a scientific examination of our physical surroundings. While T. S. sketches more than his local geography, finding ways to map processes, it is his mother's writing that remains beyond the realm he can draw, his mother's writing that maintains his sense of wonder once he has tamed his environment.

The first third of the book is, in many ways, the most compelling. The Spivet Family, living on the Coppertop Ranch just south of Butte, presents a fundamental dichotomy. Dad is a rugged rancher; mom is an obsessed scientist. T. S. is, himself, quite different from his sister, who lives a conventional teenaged reality of benign rebellion. Always in the background is the memory of a brother who died in a rifle accident. There are questions whose answers T. S. cannot chart: what relationship has his mother with his mentor, Dr. Terry Yorn? what responsibility has T. S. for Layton's death?

But just as readers sharpen their curiosity about life in Montana, T. S. flees to ride the rails to Washington. Yorn has nominated him for a Fellowship at the Smithsonian, and the trustees award it, not knowing that their favorite new illustrator is pre-pubescent. Our protagonist makes the appropriately reckless decision to tell no one. The "fish out of water" stuff is deferred, though, as we follow T. S. across the country. Brilliant but not particularly resourceful, this young man is no Huck Finn. Larsen can do little but get him into an RV on the flatbed of a train and drag him to Chicago. What, in other books, would be the conflict is underplayed, for the most part, and, when it is central to the plot, it is resolved in unbelievable ways. This is the part of the novel that relies on "Dr. Clair" Spivet's notebook fiction, and it takes some time to build empathy for new characters. By the time T. S. sleeps his way through the final leg to Washington, in the cab of a racist trucker's rig, we are ready for resolution.

T. S. is, like so many people before him, disillusioned in D. C. Administrator Gunther Jibsen, and everything else at the Smithsonian for that matter, is not what T. S. was led to believe. There are some touches, like a secret society, that are either red herrings or, perhaps, central to the plot all along. One wishes that Larsen had left himself more time for this final section. The politics of this book are delicious, lambasting both an unnamed, jingoistic administration and those politically-correct effetes who fail to grasp the true importance of T. S.'s work. But, that said, the lightning-quick resolution feels perfect, and it leaves readers with profound questions: what really happened? and what will?

Mourning Michael Jackson

I was in a hotel room in Edmonton when I heard that Michael Jackson had died. In case this proves to be as significant an event as, say, the death of JFK, people may ask this of us all. I was actually in a hotel room in Edmonton when CNN first reported that he had collapsed and, then, that he was in a coma. The BBC news service soon pronounced him dead, as did TMZ online. CBC Newsworld simulcast the BBC while Perez Hilton, online, proclaimed a hoax that never was.

How different is the media from a dozen years ago when Princess Diana died? I had three channels back then, and no internet at home. CBC broke the news, running in the late evening the stories to which Londoners were just waking up.

I have hundreds of channels now, and, as so many of them are obliged to report on this story, there are many, many ridiculous angles covered. I have no doubt that the outpouring of grief is genuine, but when compared to that afforded his friend Diana, the coverage seems forced, contrived.

How many people mourn Michael Jackson through their own disappointments? How many people see him as one who found his greatest fame when we felt our greatest promise, as individuals and perhaps as a society? How many people lament their own unfulfilled promise, knowing how much more he could have been, and wondering what we might have done? And, I wonder, how many people look back at Michael Jackson and remember a time when everyone, seemingly, shared the same point of reference, a time when everyone knew Thriller?

On Frauds Large And Small

"I'd just as soon be hung for a cow as for a calf," my father is fond of saying. He says this in the spirit of "go big or go home," of course; there is not a lot of livestock theft in the Newfoundland suburbs. The real meaning behind the phrase is that when the risk is no greater, why not double down on the potential reward? If your video store charges a flat penalty of a dollar for not returning an item on time, why not keep it two more days?

The problem, of course, is that the risk is often greater for transgressions more conspicuous. Drive five kilometers over the limit, and a cop will wave you by; drive twenty more, and you are sure to get a ticket.

I could not help but think of this very thing as innocent Iranian protesters were being shot in the street last week. What began as a certain landslide for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently tightened as the vote neared, and then anger erupted as the incumbent was returned with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Some districts returned more ballots than they had registered voters. Recounts have only widened Ahmadinejad's margin.

I will assume that Mirhossein Mousavi won that election. Why else would Iran refuse to demonstrate to its citizens, and to the world at large, that it was fair? But if the results were doctored to benefit Ahmadinejad, why did the Iranian establishment have to give him such an unbelievable percentage of votes cast? Might opposition leaders have accepted that they lost by two or three points and shrugged in resignation? Perhaps not, but you cannot help but conclude that the audaciousness of the fraud came back to haunt the hucksters.

It is the same with academic offenses. Cheaters on assignments seem never satisfied with a purloined fact or two: student miscreants will cut and paste huge sections from the internet, drawing attention to themselves. But, unlike the scenario my father often imagined, the penalty is far more harsh as the transgressions grow more bold.

A Crack In The Piggy Bank On The Conference Circuit

The first year after I returned from school in England, I was fortunate that the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, what we then called "The Learneds," was held in St. John's, where I was living and teaching. I gave a paper, met a bunch of new colleagues, found a book at the book fair that, eventually, led me to write my own book, and prepared myself to leave for Alberta and assume a permanent job. In short, it was a valuable, and inexpensive, experience.

All I needed to do was pay my conference fee and my association fee.

I cannot tell you that, over the subseqent years, as I travelled to places like Edmonton, Halifax, Saskatoon, and Toronto, I have not wondered if the trouble is worth the expense. After all, I am not curing cancer. But, while there, I never once questioned the value of meeting people and exchanging ideas. Without exception, I have come away each year feeling reinvigorated, temporarily reconnected with English professors flung far and wide throughout Canada.

My concerns about expenses have not gone away, however.

The conference fee and the association fee persist, and these are compounded by airfare and accommodation costs. This year, to go to Ottawa, I used Aeroplan points for my flight, and I still spent a thousand dollars for three days away. The least expensive conference hotel ran about one hundred fifty dollars a night, and this is the only reasonable option short of sharing facilities in a dorm. I stopped using dorms after the Winnipeg Congress, where I stayed in the same building in which the Wishmaster III horror film was shot. Sharing a mouldy bathroom with a couple of geezers will dent the enthusiasm of anyone, I reckon.

There are all manner of incidental expenses, as well. You can expect that transportation to and from the airport will not be inexpensive; you can expect to pay to get back and forth to campus each day. You can expect to take some colleagues out to dinner, though if you are lucky they will reciprocate on subsequent evenings. You will not escape the above-mentioned book fair without denting your credit card.

I remember being hassled at the American border one year on my way to a conference in Wisconsin.  Was I getting paid to speak?  Was I, heck.

I am fortunate to have institutional support for my activities, of course, but the total of that support does not pay the airfare for my upcoming July speaking engagement. What about young scholars at small colleges? What about graduate students? If there is widespread value in attending conferences, should we not be concerned about their viability?

Ralph Klein's Persistent Mediocrity

With schools and hospitals scrambling to cover escalating costs as governments freeze funding, former Alberta premier Ralph Klein has weighed in on the situation in this province by claiming that, if still in power, he would cut "ten per cent or five per cent across the board... everything" in his next budget. In retirement, Mr. Klein has shown that his imagination has not at all grown. My "blue dog" tendencies favor smaller government, smarter government, a government that is judged on its priorities at the ballot box. Does Mr. Klein really believe that, in tough times, we can just as easily defer teaching and healing as we can road works?

Imagine you were paid on commission and ran your household in the fashion Mr. Klein advocates. During months when you sold lots of things, you could pay your rent, go to restaurants frequently, and buy a new outfit every couple of days. But during months when you sold few things, you would choose to move out of your house and onto the streets, because you could cover only nine-tenths of that rent, still go to restaurants, but skip dessert, perhaps, while buying a new outfit only once a week. Would it not make sense to decide that your home is a priority and really cut back meaningfully on those other things that are not genuine necessities?

If it does not make sense at the level of household finance, it does not make sense for the whole province -- or for the whole country for that matter. Approaching everyone and everything as an equal priority, throwing out money when government has surpluses and cutting across the board in the face of deficits, may maintain the status quo, but it also nurtures mediocrity.

Thoughts On A Dire Job Market And A New Lost Generation Of Scholars

For someone who grew up in a province crippled by high unemployment, I really did not pay enough attention to the perils of the academic job market. In my senior year at Memorial University, the English department canceled a job in my area, and when I moved to the University of Western Ontario a young woman professor just past tenure addressed us all on our first day: "If you are white, if you are straight, if you are a man, you will not get a job."

I did, of course. I did not know what English professors made until I had my first contract, granted, but I did get a job. I was fortunate to have actually a choice of jobs. Moreover, most everyone in my cohort who stuck with it got a job, too. I will not defend government support of universities over the last decade -- social science and humanities research has really suffered -- but it is an indisputable fact that salaries in the professoriate have improved and there have been jobs.

All that is over.

From the deep cuts in Ontario to the anticipated funding freeze in the West, governments have little money for post-secondary education. This Spring, for the first time since I came to Lethbridge, we did not fill an advertised replacement position in our English department. If you look at University Affairs, you will notice a decline in advertisements, and I expect this Autumn to be grim. During even the good times, you could find at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association platoons of lean and hungry graduate students marching off to preliminary interviews in hopes they might graduate with a job -- or, at least, escape the sessional track. Next Christmas in Philadelphia, there will be desperation in the air.

Back in Canada, we have eleven months before we all come together again at the Congress in Montreal. By the time we meet, jobs are settled for September. There is less pressure. All we have to do is prepare a face to meet the graduate students who come to give papers. I have, for the last decade, given the same advice. Give good papers; meet influential people. If you love the life, keep studying until someone asks you to start paying for it yourself. My rationale has been, in a decent job market, that the profession has preliminary competitions that help determine future competitiveness. But, now, there are likely to be no jobs for scholarship and fellowship winners, award-winning teaching assistants, and those students who already know that they can publish.

I could hardly look them in the eye this year. What about next?

The Agony Of Chairing A Conference Session

The Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, a professional group to which I belong, did not ask me this year to chair a session at the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Some years they do; some years they do not need the help. I try never to turn down such a request, but I must admit that I am relieved when I am passed over. I find chairing to be a very difficult job that gets more difficult each year.

It is common for each seventy-five minute session at the Congress to have three, or even four, speakers. These speakers are asked to present papers of fifteen to twenty minutes length. It is prudent, in my view, to try to stick to the fifteen minutes if there are four speakers; a longer paper is really a luxury for when one does not have to share time. Ideally, there should be ample time left in order to answer questions and initiate discussion.

Increasingly, I see people roll into sessions with papers that bulge beyond twenty minutes. Speakers often begin with a preamble and pause throughout their papers to provide lengthy asides. Tolerant chairs find it very difficult to interrupt speakers to rush them along. Who are these speakers, anyway? Are they so in love with their own voices that they cannot bear to cede the lectern to others? Are they so lonely, cloistered in small corners of the Canadian academy all year, that they cannot bear to cede the dim spotlight at an academic conference?

Years ago, when I first began to speak at this conference, I was required to submit to my chair a polished version of my paper in advance of the meeting. A chair had a solemn duty, more enjoyable than simply keeping time, and that was to read all the scripts in order to try to tie them together by leading the question and answer period at the end of the session, Of course, if one was dragging to the conference a half-hour script, there was also a chance for the chair to make a preemptive intervention.

Why do we no longer do this? Are we pandering to the stereotypically absent-minded professor who finishes a script on the plane - or in the hotel room? Are we expecting everyone to throw fifteen polished minutes off the cuff? Or are we afraid of asking for such a thing of our speakers, afraid of imposing upon the ivory tower?

40

"An old man is a nasty thing," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who had been dead nearly eight years on June 5, 1969.

The Slight To Teachers A Real Mark Against Alberta's Bill 44

As the debate over Bill 44 rages in Alberta, a wide range of issues have been aired. It seems fairly clear that social conservatives, faced with the inevitability of protecting gay rights in provincial legislation, sought an opportunity to establish for parents the prerogative to pull their children from classes in which a "homosexual agenda" might be pushed. While the existence of a "homosexual agenda" in schools is absurd, it appears that no one can do a better job in describing an approach formed by progressive thinking on sexual orientation. That parents would be permitted to exclude their children from discussions of sex, religion, and sexual orientation underlines only how difficult it is to parse intertwined cultural issues. In Newfoundland in the 1980s, we had a high school class called "Family Living." God knows what we learned: I do not remember a specific topic covered, even though my transcript tells me that I received 98 per cent. (Sorry, Mrs. Pope.) Now because someone thinks that it would be wrong to have a unit in such a course acknowledge that gay couples raise children together, we intend to arm parents with a tool that could, potentially, allow them also to keep their children home from a religion class that discusses Christian denominations that happen to sanction gay marriage?

Obviously, I do not teach high school, but my own lesson plans underline how difficult it is to differentiate classes that discuss sexual orientation in passing from classes that are organized around the topic. In the wake of the popularity of Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994), I used to teach W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues," the poem read by Matthew at Gareth's funeral. That Auden, a gay man, was drawing on his own experience in mourning was relevant only when students, responding to all the masculine pronouns, assumed Auden was Wendy or Whitney or Winnifred. On the other hand, the author's willful manipulation of readers' expectations about gender has always been more central to my teaching of Jeanette Winterson's masterfully clever Written on the Body (1992). If I was teaching this material to fifteen year-olds, could I expect everyone aboard for Auden and absenteeism for Winterson?

It is ridiculous, of course. I do not think that it takes a village to raise a child, and parents have a responsibility to see their children educated. But in spite of what the "home schoolers" say, almost all parents lack the capacity and the time to provide children classroom instruction. There is more to education than what is given in schools, and parents should embrace that role enthusiastically. For the other, they rely on professionals, the teachers. This is where my conservatism comes in: teaching your children is why, for some time, we have trained and hired teachers. And while I know that some do, I do not think that parents should meddle in the work that professional doctors and lawyers and mechanics are called upon, sometimes, to undertake for children of high school age. Similarly, they should not meddle with the work of trained, qualified, vetted teachers who are subject to supervision, scrutiny, and evaluation.

To suggest otherwise is the height (or is it depth?) of disrespect.

Emily Toth, Ms Mentor's New And Ever More Impeccable Advice For Women And Men In Academia

Every month for more than ten years, Emily Toth has published to the Chronicle of Higher Education the latest installment of "Ms Mentor," her academic advice column. This current volume of contributions spans a fair bit of time and reflects, as much as anything, the persistent anxieties of university and college professors. We read about inconsiderate colleagues, bullies, people who will not erase the blackboard. We follow newly-minted Ph.D.s as they are stymied on the job market and more still whose feet slip on the path to tenure. There are also, as I suppose there have always been, Ivy-League-educated scholars who feel stuck in the south or the midwestern United States. It is clear that Dr. Toth's skill is not in solving the unsolvable, just as it is not in simply letting people vent; rather, she provides excellent practical advice for simply getting along. And, at the end of the day, that is really the only solution, is it not? If you absolutely cannot stand to read anywhere but under the shadow of the Washington Arch in Greenwich Village, will a tenured professor in New Orleans really be able to sell you on the joys of Dubuque? But Dr. Toth does provide practical tips for embracing your university community, your community at large, and she is also not afraid to say that, for some people, leaving the academy might be the best option for them. This goes, especially, for people whose health seems imperiled by having to piece together a living teaching part-time at multiple schools across broad geographical areas.

There is nothing particularly shocking about what Ms Mentor has to say, then. It is simply that Dr. Toth has an engaging way of saying it directly, using a third-person voice of delightful pretension. I am struck at how consistent she has managed to beover time. It has always been the case, presumably, that individuals on the tenure track need to dress to fit in, whether that means eschewing acid-washed jeans, dramatic hairstyles, piercings, or tattoos. Academics should always be kind to staff. Ms Mentor keeps bringing the discussion back to the same dozen books on getting jobs outside the university, on making friends and making the right impression. And, as I said, beyond these extreme examples there are indispensable, simple rules to follow: keep a file of material you will need to make a tenure case; record indiscreet observations off-campus. Academic life is not tawdry; it is monotonous. But the joy of Ms Mentor's advice is that it is presented as urgent.

There is a profound sense of isolation in this business. Often, you work alone. If you talk to your colleagues about private issues, you likely talk to the same group of colleagues. Wider collaborations can take place at infrequent intervals, at annual conferences, for example. Dr. Toth's columns, and this book, help reinforce a network that corrodes over time, buried under piles of term papers and under snowbanks as North Americans plow through the academic year. We are not alone. Ms Mentor's column in the Chronicle does not, to my knowledge, print follow-ups to the advice given. I find it interesting to read here, therefore, of the general tone of the responses she has received to her writing. But even more satisfying is when letter-writers have volunteered updates to Dr. Toth, providing confirmation that she does make a difference.