The Classroom Conservative

Lighting Out For The Territory

I ran into someone in Ottawa over the weekend whom I have known for more than twenty years. As it turns out, he spent twelve months on a contract at the University of Lethbridge. "Lethbridge," he said, repeating something he said to me a time or two before. "I was in Lethbridge for a year. Lethbridge is a good place to be for a year."

American academic life is dominated by these discussions. To accept the conventional wisdom, every American academic who does not end up in a top-tier private university spends time wallowing in the self-loathing my acquaintance hoped to fire in me. But it got me to thinking, is Canadian academia as concerned with the same kind of pecking order that exists south of the border?

On the surface, it seems not. Think about it for a moment: putting aside the vagaries of provincial economies, are the facilities or the students so different from institution to institution across Canada? It might be that the library is great in one place while the capital refurbishment policy is better somewhere else. The teaching load is a little lighter in one place while support for travel is better somewhere else. I hear from colleagues in institutions large and small that they teach a range of students from the engaged to the disinterested. While the realities of research funding have separated and reclassified us a little, working conditions are not much different from place to place.

On the other hand, the growing pains of our "new" universities, places that are seeking to establish the varied opportunities for Canadian academics, do present challenges, but it will take some time to determine whether this establishes the tiered system they have in the United States.

There is little doubt that my acquaintance was trying to be sniffy about my institution, itself. He perked up a little when I explained that our university has more than doubled to 8,000 students in the time I have been here. But we should not assume that he reflects a prejudice against small universities. There are a handful of small schools across this country that any serious academic would join in a heartbeat. So, he was needling me about place? Again, I do not think our assumptions are the same as those held in the United States.

Basically, goes the wisdom, if you discount the reputation of the institution, everyone wants to be in the northeast or in California. If you cannot achieve that, you had best hope to be in a larger center, in order to take advantage of the cultural scene there. But there are Canadian academics who find the east coast too remote. There are Canadian academics who do not want to be in a big city. It occurs to me that if Americans idealize a location or two or three, they agonize about not being there. As Canadians, prone to a different mindset, we see the limitations of every place, and that leads us to make certain choices and reconcile ourselves to them.

I think Americans think things could have been better; Canadians think things could have been worse.

March 25, 2010

"A professor," W. H. Auden quipped, "is someone who talks in someone else's sleep."

It rained hard the first day of graduate school at the University of Western Ontario in September 1992, and I -- a Newfoundlander away from home -- was without an umbrella. It was not the last time that I was caught unprepared during the orientation and mentoring of my cohort of twenty-something twentysomething academics. We were addressed at one point by a nice young woman on the faculty whose husband, an award-winning graduate student, was having difficulty catching on in what was, at that time, the obscure field of Children's Literature.

"If you are white, if you are straight, if you are a man," she said. "You will not get a job."

Her voice has been in my head for nearly eighteen years. I took it with me to England. I heard it when I worked as a sessional at Memorial. I took it west with me to Lethbridge. I even heard it when I was tenured.

When I was accepted at Western, my paternal grandfather, who had spent more than forty years as a Salvation Army clergyman until blindness forced him to retire, began calling me "Professor." He died two years later, as I was submitting my qualifying essay at Oxford.

Today, his voice is in my head.

Professor. It has a nice ring to it.

When Are You Writing A Book?

The question above, posed slangily, is the kind of thing you might hear during the "informal" part of a tenure-track job interview. What timeline do you imagine for revising your thesis as a monograph? At what point in the near future do you plan to publish a book?

But I am interested here in the question in the sense of where a book fits within a larger research program. I am always reading something, always annotating and taking notes. I seem frequently to be proposing or preparing conference presentations. I work on articles, solicited and speculative. Over the course of ten or fifteen years, a scholar in the humanities can be working on many threads of a related subject.

At what point, though, does this activity constitute writing a book?

It is not a question posed lightly or answered easily. Once one admits to writing a book, the clock is ticking. I have a colleague who no longer publishes papers or attends conferences; he works only in long form. He is always writing a book, but he is also always asked how his book is coming, how much longer before his book comes out. That amounts to considerable pressure.

After my study leave -- I have had only one -- a study leave granted in order to write a book, I had many threads, and there was considerable pressure to tie them together in book form. Every chapter of the eventual monograph had been presented as a conference paper; some chapters ended up containing material from more than one presentation. But there was great discipline needed to recast that material so that it worked as a monograph. My memories of Writing the Lost Generation are ones of editing: there was so much rewriting that I have forgotten what it was like to face blank paper with an idea in my mind.

Recently, I have been confronting that very thing.

I have been studying American little magazines for almost twenty years. In that time, a field has grown up around me -- periodical studies -- from which I have benefited professionally. But a book about the magazines I study would be huge, unwieldy to write and unprofitable for any academic publisher. Over the past twelve months, I have been able to imagine a monograph of reasonable length, something in the area of 80,000 to 100,000 words, a monograph that addresses the historical range I think necessary but has a provable thesis. I have been putting together notes and have begun writing a draft of a chapter.

I think that, finally, I am writing another book.

Look! Tories! Where?

Christie Blatchford has a wonderful column in The Globe and Mail today about the reaction to the plea bargain given former Conservative Member of Parliament Rahim Jaffer. Mr. Jaffer, for those of you who do not know, for those of you who are safely outside the bubble of Canadian political silliness, was last year charged with impaired driving and possession of cocaine. He eventually pleaded guilty to reckless driving. On what grounds the evidence against Mr. Jaffer collapsed so that the Crown felt certain they could not convict him of the original charges, we do not know. What we do know, thanks to the reminder provided by Ms Blatchford, is that as recently as 1999 only one in ten criminal cases in this country actually reached trial, and we have no right to assign guilt to those sentenced on charges that were dropped. It is pure political treachery to suggest that Mr. Jaffer, now a private citizen, is some manner of drug fiend.

But that is precisely what members of opposition parties have done in suggesting that, somehow, our government interfered to arrange a break for one of their own. "How is it that [Liberal MP] Ms [Anita] Neville gets to smear Mr. Jaffer?" Ms Blatchford asks. "Oh, yeah, because he's a Tory, she's a Liberal and it happened in the House of Commons."

The political climate in this country has deteriorated to the point where anyone who does not share your opinion is branded an idiot, and I will go so far as to say that anyone found to be to the right of your views is branded a devil.

I should know.

As you can imagine, with a blog called "The Classroom Conservative," I have felt the sharp end of intolerance on many occasions over the past three years. How many emails have I had branding me a Bush-era neo-Con?

The idea, originally, was that I was here describing, a little more provocatively, my stance as a "classroom traditionalist." Having worked out over fifteen years an approach to teaching based on organization, plain speaking, and a genuine belief that the liberal arts should be at the center of all that we do, I was reacting against those people who began telling me, on the heels of my Distinguished Teaching Award, that I must adopt electronic delivery, that I must embrace all manner of alternative pedagogies. I was, then, influenced by William F. Buckley, Jr.'s edict that his National Review stood "athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." If, along the way, I have come to think of myself as a Red Tory -- fiscally conservative and socially progressive -- when so much damage is being done to our society by politicians who are socially conservative and/or fiscally reckless, then I conclude that I have done no harm.

But let us look at the record, shall we? I have voted for every major political party in Canada, including the Greens. I have been critical of those on the left who propose huge new social programs with no sense of how to pay for them. I have been critical of moderates who, believing that a vast majority of Canadians would never support a "right-wing" party, moved left in hopes of achieving, I can only conclude, something like a one-party parliament. And, to conservatives who advocate all manner of tax breaks to big business, I have been a bitter disappointment, even as I spoke for the "West," for some time, on Charles Adler's radio program.

(Speaking of tax breaks for big business: you will note that the Alberta Tory party this week rolled back any progressive measures adopted on energy royalties. I do not get it. We have a progressive system of income tax. When times are good, you contribute more to public well-being; when times are bad, you do not. I still cannot see how it is impossible to arrange a similar system for people who are in the business of extracting, refining, and selling the resources that lie underneath our province. But, according to radio call-in shows in Calgary, I do not -- simply because I ask this question -- work hard enough or understand at all how business works. But I digress.)

I hoped, as well, over these years, to suggest to people that, by self-identifying as "conservative," a large minority of thinking people could help reject the tenets of the far right. Not so, I fear. To be a conservative, in the classroom, speeding in a car, or standing formally in the political arena means something very specific, something that scares many people.

Ironically, I blame American conservatives for this development. Rather than accepting that the world of thought is one of grays, they have held that the world is black and white, right and wrong. If we do not agree on everything, there can be nothing in our views that can influence each other. Two solitudes was always more than language, of course, but now it is more than culture, as well. Two solitudes describes so much of how we all interact.

Mr. Jaffer's plight demonstrates this intolerance far more than it suggests any weakness in the Canadian legal system.

University Affairs: The Importance Of Faculty Service

My opinion piece for the upcoming number of University Affairs on the importance of faculty service has appeared online at its website.  Have a look at http://www.universityaffairs.ca/we-are-the-pros.aspx.

O Canada? O Brother!

On Friday morning, I heard Kim Campbell on CBC Radio, where her suggestion for an alternate lyric to replace "in all thy sons command" in our national anthem seemed a remarkably sensible one.

Why not sing "in all of us command"?

It turns out that Ms Campbell had first made that suggestion twenty years ago. It is far less radical than reverting to the original words penned by Robert Stanley Weir: "thou dost in us command."

I found myself nodding my head. "From far and wide, O Canada" has been added to the version I learned as a child, so it is not as if our national anthem cannot be altered. And "sons" does feel anachronistic to me, while "us" is nowhere near as bend-over-backwards earnest as "he or she," "s/he" or "sons and daughters." So, even as the government was backtracking from an idea surely rooted in watching dozens of women olympians singing, it seemed as though Ms Campbell had the solution.

But she could not stop talking.

Why not take this opportunity to purge O Canada of all religious references, she wondered. And, while we are at it, let us change "our home and native land" to "our home on native land." No controversy there!

Ms Campbell's ideas, according to the speaker who followed her, demonstrate only that no amount of tinkering would satisfy everyone; while that is true, that is not what I found most objectionable about Ms Campbell's wider plans. What bothered me was how they demonstrated so clearly that people are never satisfied with incremental change, people are never satisfied with small, obvious fixes. If we are going to go to the bother of a fight, after all, we had really better make it worth that bother.

Small, meaningful change is hardly worth the effort. But other things are so dramatic, they scare us back to inaction. From health care to climate change, can we not see this is true?

My Life As A Deadbeat

I am an international student who skipped out of Canada after running up a large debt. Okay, I am not, but a number of collection agencies believe me to be.

When, last autumn, I got my iPhone, Rogers assigned me a recycled phone number. I should have known it was recycled because it was too good to be true. The last four digits, "2215," are wonderfully conventional, and the first three digits are part of a familiar exchange. (There you go, telemarketers: I have narrowed down my private phone number to under a thousand combinations. Fill your boots -- and your long distance bills.) So, it was not the kind of odd combination of numerals one usually gets for new cellphones. I could almost remember the number. And, honestly, is that not the struggle? How often does one call oneself, anyway?

Within days, I started to get calls from unfamiliar people, strange voicemails. When I decided to return one, I learned the extent of the ugly truth: the fellow who used to have my number owed a lot of people a lot of money.

At first, the collection agents did not seem to believe me. I was not a young student from Asia? Was I sure I was not? Okay, but did I know him? Did I live on Columbia Boulevard? Was I certain I did not? Eventually, they all agreed to flag "my" file with this information, and the calls stopped. But as the debts get passed from agency to agency, the calls begin again, and so does the cycle of explanations.

There are two things that have interested me through this process. Number one, these collection agents have been nicer than I expected they would be. Of course, they should be apologetic when they learn about their "mistake," but -- even as I have had to convince them of my real identity -- they have been polite, for the most part. They do, it must be said, answer their extensions rather abruptly, however: "What? Yeah?"

Number two, these collection agents take no care with this fellow's personal information. In an attempt to determine whether I am telling the truth, whether I might actually be his acquaintance, they tell me all kinds of things about him.

Still, I have never been able to bring myself to ask them exactly how much money he was given.  Oh, easy credit.  You really are a gift, are you not?  I believe that credit card companies and other similar businesses have pulled back from the big campus pushes that we saw in recent years.  I used to think that giving students access to all kinds of credit hurt students; it now seems clear that it hurt some creditors, too.