The Classroom Conservative

Finding Me On The Internet

I must apologize for being away.  I come across neglected blogs all the time, and I imagine that their owners must have no discipline at all if they cannot come up with a few minutes on a number of occasions through the week to keep current.  Well, I have over the past fortnight been working on an index for a book, and I can tell you that I have not encountered a more taxing chore in twenty years in academia.  Professional indexers have my respect.

   

There are a few people who look in on my blog each day, and those people can be mildly discouraged to see the same post day after day.  But, truthfully, a lot of blog traffic is generated by linking and google searches, and typepad allows bloggers to track referring addresses to their blogs.  I have, over the last six months, noticed some interesting patterns in the ways people stumble across my little plot of cyberspace.

   

Obviously, posts I have written that have been picked up by national and international media have generated a great deal of traffic.  When The Chronicle of Higher Education made reference on their site to my policy on term paper deadlines, the number of hits on my blog went through the roof.  The only thing that came close to competing was a post I did on Harry Potter.  There are, you can imagine, a lot of muggles out there with computers.  I have done a few book reviews, and my thoughts on Jim Kunstler’s World Made By Hand have proven popular, as have my thoughts on Douglas Kennedy’s The Woman in the Fifth.  I wish Bruno Arpaia and David Thewlis had attracted more attention: they deserve it.  My review of Radiohead’s last album was linked from one of their fan sites, and that generated some traffic.

 

But when it comes to “random” searching, the results seem quite odd. Recently, I complained about Air Canada service to Lethbridge, and I discovered that quite a few googlers were looking for “the distance between Lethbridge and Calgary.”  I did a post on student uses of doctors’ notes, and I found that many people found me by searching “fake doctor note template.”  I kid you not.  You would not believe how many web surfers want to see nude pictures of 1950s television stars: google oddly conflates posts I did about nudity on television and, separately, Leave it to Beaver.  The funniest of all came just as students here were looking to register for September classes, however.  Someone was checking me out by googling “Craig Monk rate professor,” and I assumed that was a prospective student; I can only conclude that the person who looked for “Craig Monk mental illness” must be a current student having a laugh.

Funding The Humanities: A Modest Proposal

I suggested, in October, that Robert Fulford of the National Post was a little harsh in his assessment of current humanities funding in Canada.  I disclosed then that I am involved with a national granting agency in this country; having now completed my related duties for this year, I can confirm what I said then: while some funded projects in the humanities might leave you scratching your head, you can be certain that researchers who get money are all scrutinized heavily.  This is not to say that we always do an excellent job funding the humanities, and there are simple things that we can do to improve the system, in my opinion.

   

Unlike scientists who may require expensive pieces of equipment to do their work, many programs of research in the humanities are modest, “text based” enquiries.  Our current model of funding, nationally, imagines that most of them require a great deal of travel or involved collaborations, however.  Now, it might be that a scholar is doing archival research that might require long stays at various libraries, but should these even be considered in the same competition with things that can be accomplished on our own campuses, in the main?  Similarly, it might be that a project is best tackled by a “team,” but these are relatively uncommon, and yet these proposals with their duplications siphon money from envelopes over which many solitary researchers compete.  Collaborations with students are more problematic.  It is one of my responsibilities to train the next generation of researchers, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council encourages student expenses on grant applications, for example.  But, in reality, many of the tasks students can undertake for us in our research are menial, and to involve them more fully is to risk crossing a line between collaboration and exploitation.  Should we not be funding students adequately to undertake their own research, anyway?  And the final thing that makes me a little queasy is this: funding agencies have too little control over how funds are spent.  Now, I am not suggesting that researchers are dishonest, not at all.  That bears repeating: I believe that the vast, vast majority of scholars are scrupulously honest.  Additionally, the safeguards in place prevent grant recipients from spending their money to renovate their houses.  But if a researcher is given tens of thousands of dollars to retain a student, and that individual decides, instead, that an additional trip to a library is more important, that money can be redirected.  That is how it should be because projects grow and develop over a number of years.  I mention this only to suggest that if we are emphasizing student funding and training through our granting agencies, there is no guarantee that this mandate is being met.

   

I would like to see a system where applications involving large travel budgets, teams, and graduate researchers are considered separately from the vast majority of projects.  In fact, I would like to see individual researchers and their programs funded continuously on a modest scale.  Imagine that having been hired to a tenure-track job in the humanities in Canada, a scholar was eligible for a small amount of money each year to keep computer equipment up-to-date, do some library and conference travel, buy some books and journals, and bring on a student in the summer.  Should this scholar maintain reasonable results (papers, articles, and books appearing at reasonable intervals), the annual funds -- something less than five figures -- would continue to come from national granting agencies.  With such an approach, our committee this year would have been able to fund more than twice the number of people who even applied to us!  This number would stand in contrast to the one-third success rate we were able to achieve.

 

The reality is that colleagues who get off to a fast start and people at mid-career who have been prolific get a genuine advantage in attracting funding in the humanities.  Perhaps these are the people the Canadian public should be rewarding.  But by imagining that a little bit of money spread more widely would help achieve a great many more results, I can foresee a situation where even “abandoned” scholars at all stages of career are encouraged to get back to (and stick with) regular research programs.  Who knows? These varied results might even accomplish some goals a wider, skeptical audience would appreciate.

Calgary Does Not Need a Poet Laureate

Ian Robinson got it right.  His discomfited argument against using Calgary tax dollars to fund a poet laureate for the city fumbled upon the essential short-sightedness of the proposal brought forward by Druh Farrell and Joe Ceci.  Robinson used his space in the Sun on the weekend to proclaim his love for poetry; he found it useful, after all, when convincing women to sleep with him, and he is currently rereading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  But even Robinson knows that culture is what we do and “not what’s done to us.”

   

The idea of a poet laureate for Calgary misinterprets the artist’s struggle.  While such a solitary figure could perform a civic duty by marking significant events in verse, encouragement for others would come only from example.  What poets in Calgary really need is an opportunity to share their works.  If there is any money to be diverted from Ian Robinson’s pothole projects, it could be used to sponsor poetry workshops and readings.  Here’s another good idea: why not take some of the money that is used by politicians at all levels to buy proclamations and use them, instead, to support the arts?  When the mayor of Calgary buys some space in a paper to run his picture and a nice message about the things going on in the city, why not mark that thing with verse written by a local poet?  Other large cities with public transportation systems have been very successful printing poems in its buses and trains: why not rhymes on the LRT?  That wouldn’t cost very much, surely.

   

But, then again, what business is it of mine?  I do not pay taxes in Calgary.

Mourning McNally Robinson

The news yesterday of the impending closure of the McNally Robinson Bookstore in Calgary was a crushing blow to me.  The space in the Clarence Block on Stephen Avenue was beautiful: three floors, including a little area for remaindered titles and magazines in the back.  It was a little piece of heaven.  Okay, okay, I don’t want to suggest that it was perfect.  The café upstairs was run with “wait to be seated” table service, at odds with the usual informality of the “coffee shop bookstore.”  It could have done more with music and films, as its admirable little collection was often overlooked.  Its prices could not always compete with the internet/mail order box chains, but its shelves were efficiently stocked for the lost art of browsing.  It was a place to meet Calgary authors, and it will be sorely missed.

   

On the surface, it might appear to be another casualty of the internet age: the pleasure of scanning new books sacrificed to the efficiency of the point-and-click websites.  But it is not really that simple.  The small Winnipeg chain bought the building before the most recent real estate spike, and virtually no business plan going forward offered the same rewards as surrendering the Clarence Block to someone else.  What a pity!  Stephen Avenue has seen this before, though: A&B Sound once operated an absolutely stunning electronics store at an old bank just a few doors down.  I have to assume that this was rented space, and who needs to lease four or five floors to display CDs?  It was scale, in the end, that made both businesses less economically viable.  McNally Robinson might have thrived in a space half its size.

   

Its departure is a blow to Stephen Avenue.  Although it is undoubtedly a hassle to get into downtown Calgary, it is wonderful to be there.  Having kept an apartment for a time down at the end of the tenth street LRT line, I can attest to the joy of being able to walk or take the free train to bookstores, movie theatres, record stores, delis, and pubs.  The grand old Hudson’s Bay store is a gorgeous retail anachronism.  There is virtually nothing in the downtown core that cannot be gotten or done at a variety of these retail satellites throughout Calgary, but what does that do to the sense of community?  If one wanted to launch a book, for example, which Chapters/Indigo outlet would you choose?  The goal of a high-quality core for living and shopping, a real centre of the community, remains a lofty and admirable goal for our Western Canadian Metropolis.  It is just that the fall of McNally Robinson reminds us that this goal seems less and less achievable.

Another Facebook Outrage?

If one of the legitimate complaints about conservative thought is that it is prone to a habitual nostalgia, progressives must accept that they appear always to disparage the past.  In our current climate, it seems as though we are expected always to reinvent the wheel.  Even when contemporary problems have a demonstrable historical precedent, we act as if they are anomalies detached from our best practices.

   

Take, for example, the situation outlined in Shane Dingman’s recent story in the National Post: Ryerson University is seeking to expel frosh Chris Avenir for starting a Facebook group called “Mastering Chemistry Solutions.”  The only details I have about the case are those in the newspaper, but at first blush I have to agree with the student in his claim that this group is not necessarily “any different than tutoring, than tri-mentoring, than having a library study group.”  That the group is on-line makes absolutely no difference.

 

I am no fan of Facebook, generally: I am aware of a couple of situations where it has been used to disseminate one-sided accounts of some initiatives with which I have been involved.  It is a powerful tool that can be used to harass.  But it is not fair to say that its existence represents for universities a coming apocalypse.  If Mr. Avenir was simply using an electronic tool to run a study group, there is no issue to discuss; if the participants were collaborating to the extent that they can be shown to be plagiarizing, the matter should be pursued as a university would pursue malfeasance on the part of a library study group like the one Mr. Avenir references in his statement.  There is virtually nothing new here.

   

This seems like a matter best handled by a conservative approach.  There is a way to deal with cheaters that works; rather than rewriting these approaches, we just need to identify their underlying principles and update their procedures for the internet age.

Reasonable Accommodation

I am in Ottawa this week, seconded to the adjudication process of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.  Our nation’s capital has endured one of the wintriest seasons on record, and I have been witness to one tremendous dump with another threatening to delay my return west on the weekend.  Watch for me on the news, camped out in the airport with the other poor schlubs.

   

The city has done an awful job clearing the streets, and jumping snow banks at intersections has brought physical exercise to decrepit old professors across a range of disciplines.  In front of the Parliament Buildings, where the wind blows a little warmer, the slush is deep enough to ruin your shoes.  I should have brought a pair of rubber boots.

   

It is not all fun and games, however.  I was coming out of the Bay at Rideau last night, and there was a paraplegic man in a wheelchair nearly blue from waiting at the door.  The snow had settled against the building where the mechanism for the automatic opener was installed, and the gentleman could not get his chair close enough to activate it.  I helped him access the store, but he seemed embarrassed about the whole matter.

   

While some people seek to alter the world to imagine away our differences, a simple example like this demonstrates how we struggle to honor the commitments we already have.  When you can make a cause of pledging that a gentleman like the one I met last night should be able to do anything, you can forget to ensure that he has the opportunity to do those things he must do.

Learning to Lose at the Spelling Bee

I was, on Saturday, a judge at the Southern Alberta Regional Spelling Bee, held at the Yates Theatre in Lethbridge.  We had the event at the recital hall at the University of Lethbridge last year, and there were more relatives in attendance than we could accommodate in the space.  The interest in a spelling bee is a wonderful sign for a fellow like me.  The ability to spell is precisely the kind of traditional value that I bang on about all the time in this space, to my classes, to my colleagues. Think about it for a moment.  Erroneously, we tell children from a very young age that the sense of what they write is really all that counts; they should not worry about how those thoughts are presented, as if an individual’s ideas are somehow exempted from the duty we have to strive for precision and decorum.  That is how we got a culture in which sprayed graffiti and slurs in the street became more important than the written word.  Moreover, when we can set a computer to automatically check and fix our spelling, the idea that we might want to learn to spell effectively ourselves is sometimes dismissed, mistakenly, as an anachronism.  But who wants to rely on a computer, solely, for such a fundamental skill of effective communication?  The forty-three students who came to the Yates on the weekend, ranging in age from nine to fourteen, surely do not.

   

Our winner was Tegan Odland, a ten-year-old from Enchant School, who later told The Lethbridge Herald that she “reviewed lots of the words over and over and over” in preparation for the competition.  Young Ms Odland was a gracious winner, but her competitors were equally gracious in defeat.  “Last year I finished eleventh, so I was hoping to get at least that far,” said runner-up Alissa Going, a seventh-grade student from Vauxhall High.  “I’m not sad at all, but really happy I made it this far…”  She hopes to compete next year, and if I am fortunate enough to be invited back I expect to see her there.  Similarly, a young contestant who was eliminated early was heard to say, backstage, that she did not mind because she had years of eligibility remaining.  Another young man approached the judges’ table between rounds to learn the correct spelling of the word he got wrong.

 

Does it seem to you that these kids deal well with competition, understanding what it is to win and what it is to lose?  What a healthy attitude they have.  Ms Odland did not “trash talk” her competitors, needless to say, and while I would not suggest that there was no disappointment amongst the forty-two children who heard the judge’s dreaded bell, they all accepted their fate with an admirable resolve.  Why, then, do we coddle children so?  Why do we tell them everything they do is worthy of honor, even when it is not?  Why do we hesitate to identify one child as the winner on the few occasions we acknowledge that they actually compete, even from a young age?

   

As the CanWest CanSpell National Spelling Bee has grown to include more and more regional competitions, the need for each of them to send a winner and runner-up to Ottawa has fallen away.  One child from each region gives the organizers a competitive bee where every contestant is eligible to travel to the Scripps National Bee in Washington, D.C.  Even this unfortunate change was accepted pretty readily by the children: one winner gets one trip.  Each contestant got a medal to signify standing as a finalist; after all, these forty-three kids emerged from competitions in their schools, a pool of more than twenty-five hundred children.  But you could tell that they were less interested in a prize for participating than they were in actually winning the real prize.

 

While the politically correct crowd will be quick to say that everyone is a winner, I still came away feeling optimistic about a future in the hands of these spellers.  These kids know the score: when you fall short, you try again.  There is no shame in not winning; the shame is in accepting that second-best is all you can be.  Shame on us for coddling children into thinking that everyone is a winner.  If that was the case, everyone would always be second-best.