The Classroom Conservative

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.

Brother, Can You Spare Ninety Million Dimes?

If you have been reading this blog over any period of time, you must acknowledge that I have gone out of my way not to embarrass my employers. The opinions expressed are my own; I never speak here for the university. The experiences I relate are things that have happened to me as a teacher and an administrator. But, over the past two weeks, there have been letters released publicly and meetings held throughout campus to spread the word. Like every postsecondary institution in the province of Alberta, we find ourselves short of money.

The recent budget instituted a funding freeze we had been told to expect. Unfortunately, this "frozen" amount brought with it the elimination of a number of other revenue streams upon which we had come to rely. Say, for example, that you held a salaried position but had the opportunity to work extra overtime on weekends. If, after years with this arrangement, your employers maintained your base pay but eliminated overtime, they could claim that there was no change to your salary, but your household would still have less money coming in. In this way, coupled with increases in costs, we here find ourselves looking to save $9 million within an overall budget of approximately $150 million.

Now, membership in any university community is a tremendous privilege, and I do not for a moment intend to suggest, with so many people suffering so much, that our struggles represent a tragedy to be compared with other hardships. But, as the old song used to lament, "They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead." Yet, for the first time since I moved to Alberta nearly fifteen years ago, I must question genuinely my province's commitment to postsecondary education. I think if universities had been cut as part of an austere budget, that would be one thing. But, in fact, the budget had a lot of red ink, drew heavily on one-time "rainy day" money, and included a big funding increase to health care. Should our overall situation not improve and more "across the board" cutting become essential, what more could post-secondary education endure?

I have been criticized for discussing the business of running a university in "corporate" terms. (And, in fact, I hope to write more about this in the weeks ahead.) But the fact of the matter is that when you manage $150 million, and much of that money is public money, you can be sure that you will be held to account. What is clear to me is that universities are tremendously responsible stewards of those funds. What none of us are skilled at doing is responding nimbly to varied and changing demands. For example, as students have come over time to expect more flexibility -- more courses at different times in different semesters taught through different modes of delivery -- we have all had to spread out and carry a fair bit of extra capacity for the sake of choice. It is unfair to ask students, as you might expect "customers," to pay for all of that.  (If you must fly at 2pm on a Friday, you will pay more than someone willing to fly at 6am.  No such differential exists in education.) Insofar as some of those demands also represent government priorities -- think, for example, about small class sizes or more electronic delivery -- access to additional public funds is opportune. But the nature of university structures makes it difficult to contract, quickly, when those funds are then cut off.

Moving forward, it is possible to scale back contracts for sessional instructors and not hire replacements for people who depart, though these measures, themselves, cause great personal suffering. But those "savings" are always distributed unevenly. It might be, for example, that most of the retirements one sees come from two or three units. Should they suffer while others do not? A highly specialized work force necessary for a university -- there I go: that "corporate speak" again -- cannot be moved from department to department. So, in hard times, we reduce choice, sometimes disproportionally, increase class sizes, and make the kinds of tertiary cuts other "businesses" could never consider. When, at another university at which I taught, we experienced a budget shortfall, all contract instructors lost the use of the telephone! Imagine, if you will, giving a syllabus to students with a phone number that, suddenly, went out of service.

The elephants in the room here are, of course, tuition fees and faculty salaries.

As I said, students do not -- and cannot -- pay the full price of their education. Society benefits from the investment it makes in post-secondary education, and if you need evidence of the fact that governments and universities in this country will always be inextricably entwined, consider the fact that the former controls both main revenue streams for the latter: governments grant us taxpayers' money and decide what students are charged. That said, I believe student groups are preparing to fight back against demands that they pay more. They should fight back, especially in the absence of a system of loan repayment tied to income.

One gets the sense that governments, and perhaps you, too, dear reader, believe professors overpaid. I do important work, in preparation for which I attended university for nine years. Compared with other professionals, my salary is but competitive, I believe. When I was at school in England, the impression was that people who wanted to "get ahead" went to work in London. People with a commitment to education, first and foremost, stayed at university. I think something similar was true in Canada, too, and it is still the case that no one gets into this business for the money. What is clear is that faculty salaries are negotiated in a marketplace, and no ready mechanism exists for rolling back competitive salaries in an international industry. There are many examples, even in tough times, of universities losing good people to other institutions over salary disparities.

Still, when I visit other schools or attend conferences, there is the sense from the people I meet that money flows throughout Alberta, flows to everyone and everything. This was never the case, but since the widespread cuts throughout the province under Ralph Klein in the early 1990s, there has certainly been the sense that universities had become a priority for the people and its government, even if -- at times -- we have not done enough to explain to them fully the importance of what we do. There is reason to fear that this might no longer be the case. I have experienced post-secondary education as an afterthought, elsewhere, and I hope not to experience that here.

Writing Ben Yagoda

Ben Yagoda, a Professor of English at the University of Delaware, has been taking some heat in the letters section of the New York Times Book Review for an essay he published on authors' correspondence with their readers. Subscribers seem to have interpreted the piece as chiding them for their queries. I read the original piece and found it but an interesting airing of some attitudes towards such correspondence; it would be difficult to see it as a reproach. On the other hand, I am surely biased: I once sent Professor Yagoda a request for assistance.

While researching a piece on early sports coverage in the New Yorker, I was deeply influenced by two books: Thomas Kunkel's Genius in Disguise, a brilliant biography of editor Harold Ross, and Ben Yagoda's About Town, a comprehensive history of the magazine itself. I had dozens of articles about ice hockey from the first years of the New Yorker. As was Ross's frequent practice, he attributed them simply to "N.B." Staff writers from established magazines would moonlight at the New Yorker, and this was one way for Ross to protect their identities. In any case, my best guess was that "N.B." was Niven Busch, a young writer whose relationship was Ross was typical, as Yagoda demonstrated, in its tempestuousness.

Was "N.B." likely Niven Busch? After kicking around the idea with some colleagues, someone suggested that I ask someone else who had done scholarly work on the New Yorker. What a novel idea! It honestly had not dawned on me. One meets regularly with colleagues at conferences; one even shares ideas on listservs. But "cold calling" someone with whom I was unacquainted? As it turns out, as a fellow academic, Professor Yagoda was the obvious choice. His email address was, and is, available on the website of his department. I sent off a brief message, and he immediately sent back a short but helpful reply that was, to me, completely satisfactory. Who am I? Helene Hanff? I was not looking for a long-distance friendship, after all.

The recent death of the reclusive J.D. Salinger reminds us that some authors preserve their privacy at all costs. But academics, as writers and teachers, have a very different relationships with their admittedly smaller publics. When I spent full days in our English department, not a month went by without us getting a telephone call from some member of the local community with a question about grammar or a desire to have their poetry analyzed. I believe my opinion on poetry, certainly, is little better than anyone else's, but I took all these calls, forwarded from our administrator, with good cheer. Much of my salary is paid by the citizenry, after all. Similarly, a little spike in unsolicited emails that accompanied the release of my book on expatriate autobiography was actually quite amusing, as most of them proposed my working on other people's projects without acknowledgment or remuneration.

I find in Professor Yagoda's essay on the topic much the same opinion, though he goes further to suggest that some authors actually welcome the distraction brought by unsolicited emails. But the real question, I believe, is what happens when ones audience grows? Where I seek to sell hundreds of books, Professor Yagoda sells thousands. Would best-selling authors, authors who sell tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of copies, lose all obligation to engage with her or his audience in this way? Is the simple volume of correspondence the only difference between these different types of writers? Because, if so, I do not find this satisfactory. The most esteemed scholars at the most elite schools teach someone, right? I know how those students access those classes, through ability and money, and often through a combination of both. If the world of "Contact Me" is, itself, as cruel, who is able to write authors whose achievement makes them less accessible?

On Hearing "No"

An old professor of mine, long gone to glory as a university president, once confided in me how difficult he found hearing "no." It is a strange thing, of course, as this job is filled with "no." We hear it from our students in complaints on teaching evaluations; we hear it from our peers on applications for study leave or for promotion; we hear it from publishers and journal editors when we submit our work. My old professor heard it from his chair: he burned through thousands of pieces of paper and destroyed a photocopier disseminating additional material for our class.

Of course, the odds of someone considering graduate school ever getting that tenure-track job in the professoriate are long, indeed. Our whole enterprise is founded on hearing, and ignoring, the word "no."

But my old professor's lament is still sound. If you hear "yes" enough to get through school, get a job, and progress through the ranks, you can isolate yourself just enough that "no" -- a genuine, final "no" -- feels foreign to you.

What to do when you hear "no"? It is not something with which I deal well. I used to have a paper route as a kid in Newfoundland, for the only local publication that did not have a subscription list. Asking the same hundred and fifty people each week if they wanted to buy the paper they did not want the week before will scar you, rest assured. Is that why I prefer having my work solicited? Even though it is still -- and still should be -- vetted thoroughly, negative feedback in that situation feels different from a rejection received from a speculative submission.

I give myself credit when I let myself pursue anything for which I might likely hear "no." It represents for me genuine growth.

The best advice I ever got for how to deal with rejection from a publisher or a journal editor is to simply turn around and resubmit it elsewhere. Over the years, that has been remarkably effective. The problem, of course, is that it minimizes the value of feedback. If "no" really means "not now" or "not for us," we need less to grow than we need to find the right opportunity.

And that, really, is the issue, is it not? When "no" comes in search of a job, one that you really want, it is hard to imagine any consolation. Do you feel better if you failed in putting forward your best foot? It is less a personal rejection than it is a lost opportunity. But if you know that you did and said what you really wanted to do and say, it is key to accept that "no" means that "yes" would have been fraught with trouble from the start. It should make the personal rejection easier to bear.

Here, for me, is the consolation. I really believe that life is not what you have but what you have done. I knew, as an undergraduate, an Oxford graduate who fretted, constantly, about not being in England. I enjoyed living in England; I would live in England again under the right circumstances. But I do not dwell on trying to recreate something I had for the simple reason that I am satisfied to have had it, already. It is perfectly okay to move forward, seeking new dreams, new opportunities. To imagine a goal moving forward, one that you fail to attain, is not the end of your goals, just the end of one opportunity. If anything, I suffer from a lack of sentimentality, so I am not mawkish in saying these things. I just believe that to focus on one thing, to let any one failure crush you, is to imagine that something in the past was perfect or that something in the future could ever be.

Neither is possible.

I have always admired those creatures in nature that respond to the destruction of some half-completed enterprise with apparent indifference: they just begin again, as if nothing happened, as if they have forever to achieve what they set out to achieve. Knowing that a door has good and truly closed makes it impossible for us to begin again, thus, but it is a fine thought to have, you must agree.

A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: Reading With A Reader's Guide, Part One

I know it is a little late for a(nother) New Year's Resolution, but I have been inspired by the efforts of my friend Rohan Maitzen, picking up Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy over at Novel Readings. It is time for me to take another run at Marcel Proust. But, this time, I'll accept some help. I recently bought Patrick Alexander's "reader's guide" to In Search Of Lost Time. "Except for those fortunate enough to spend several years confined to a hospital bed or a federal prison, or to be stranded on a desert island with their preselected library," Alexander warns, "few modern readers have the time to tackle a novel with more than three thousand pages, a million and a half words, and more than four hundred individual characters." I know my work is cut out for me.

When I teach James Joyce, I always assign as a companion Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book. But when I first read Ulysses, I used a comprehensive gloss, so I do not have a lot of first-hand experience with the kind of book meant, specifically, for the terrified reader facing a huge obstacle. Well, this time, I have an obstacle, and I certainly still have the terror.

I will let you know how I do.

Reviewing Teaching Evaluations In A Crisp, New Shirt

In advance of the start of the semester, I am reviewing the teaching evaluations for our sessional instructors in Calgary and Edmonton. We are very fortunate to have some fabulous teachers in those cities, individuals who are available and willing to undertake part-time work for us. Evaluations are not available to instructors until grades are submitted, of course, and so it is nice to provide quick turnaround on the data after that so instructors can make necessary adjustments early in the new semester.

For tenured and tenure-track faculty, there is no established schedule for reviewing evaluations. I like to look at mine as soon as they are available, but I will admit that they can be depressing if read, say, just before Christmas. I am fortunate to have had 97% positive responses over fifteen years, but one comment from a disgruntled student can stay with you through multiple egg nogs, I assure you. I have a colleague who compiles all his evaluations and has a look every two years, just before our progress reports are due with the Dean. Imagine the shock of ten or fifteen disgruntled students all presented at the same time.

Now, I am not suggesting that there is no practical value to these forms. Indeed, as I have said, I am reviewing them promptly so that their benefit may best be felt by our sessional instructors in the north. But evaluations are not without problems, and our faculty is looking to improve the questions asked. One of my pet peeves over the years has been how students have used more general questions to comment on the physical appearance of instructors.

Women and men, old and young, get the same feedback: complaints about hair, clothing, body odor. I think university instructors are less vain than your average professional, but having a nineteen year-old who lives in a cap comment on your favorite sweater seems to be universally galling.

As I was steaming my woolens and pressing my cottons over the holidays, I could not help but remember a spring day years ago when, walking between the physical education building and university hall, I ran into a graduating student, a young woman who had completed successfully, and with some elan, a number of my courses.

"You must be happy to be done," I said.

"Yes. No more having to listen to professors in cheap suits day in and day out!"

I was stunned.

"Cheap?" I thought to myself. "Cheap?"

Perhaps I am more vain than are my colleagues.

Some Christmas Cheer For Stephen King

This year, I got two books for Christmas: Nadirs, a collection of short pieces from Nobel laureate Herta Muller, and The Death of Bunny Munro, the new novel by Nick Cave. I have been getting books for Christmas for as long as I can remember, and this memory takes me back to one of my first holiday traditions: reading whatever Stephen King brought out in the autumn.

Now, this is not a post about high art and low art. I am arguing neither that Stephen King deserves more attention than he gets from the academy, nor that his literature warrants that attention. (I have had students petition for King on American literature surveys; I cannot remember, in depth, any plot of a King book that has not been made into a film.) I am simply giving credit to Stephen King for igniting in me a love of reading.

Walking through the bookstore this holiday season, I noticed that Stephen King has released the 1088-page Under the Dome, precisely the kind of doorstopper I loved to open on Christmas morning. The challenge was to finish the book before I went to bed on December 26, giving me approximately 24 waking hours. This could mean, for hours at a time, I was averaging a page a minute. Our tree was always placed in front of the window in the living room, temporarily displacing a stuffed chair, and I would take up residence in that chair -- in the middle of the hustle and bustle -- reading Stephen King. I think of it now as an exercise in concentration. I was not cloistered away; rather, I participated in two full days of visitation, meals, festive films, all while immersing myself in a world vividly drawn by Mr. King.

I did get video games and all other manner of trendy gifts for Christmas, and I would have to wager, to judge by the bounty of my friends, that my Christmases were utterly "normal" in this regard. But this experiment in extreme reading was, in retrospect, very important to my development, and whether or not they are reading the current equivalent of Stephen King, I would like to think that kids today are still reading, assiduously, through this holiday season.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Teaching, Week Fourteen: Final Examination Questions

The questions I set for a final examination, like all the senior-level questions I set, require students to respond to a quotation and draw a comparison between two texts they have studied. This accomplishes two things: first, they bring focus to their thoughts by engaging the thoughts of others; second, they demonstrate that by reading one text, they bring something unique to the reading of another.

The quotation is inevitably the more difficult of the two tasks. Another discipline might demonstrate best. Imagine that I wanted you to discuss municipal politics. (I do not mean to suggest that the study of Political Science is any easier than the study of English: only that while not everyone has an opinion on Gertrude Stein, everyone has an opinion on garbage collection!) The basic question could be, "Discuss the management of services in your municipality and the one down the road." Such a broad question might solicit responses that discuss specific issues like garbage collection, snow clearing, or potholes; some responses might look at more global issues like ward distribution, business taxes, or budgeting policies. Some responses might try to address all these things.

If I was asking the question, it might go like this: "'Towns and cities are preoccupied with neighborhood issues,' claims Some Expert, 'so council members are too distracted by potholes to make good decisions when new businesses want to relocate.' Discuss the management of services in your municipality and the one down the road." The idea would be that students could narrow their discussion of services to those provided by third-party businesses. They could contrast small and large service issues, and they could raise the issue of parochial ward conflicts. There is probably more meat in my imagined quotation, of course, but the general idea holds: students can begin by agreeing or disagreeing with "Some Expert," and they can use her assertions against which to compare their own ideas. This, to me, is preferable to a free-for-all.

The question of comparison is also interesting, as I demand of my students a "staggered" approach. For my question, above, I would expect that students would discuss businesses in their town and in that of their neighbors; they would discuss small and large service issues in their town and in that of their neighbors; they would discuss ward conflicts in their town and in that of their neighbors. I have discovered that the instinct of too many students is to tell me everything about their town and then tell me everything about the other one. This is a less effective comparison, of course, as the contrast is tacked on in haste at the end, or -- worse -- is left for the reader to do. So, done improperly, an essay may demand that its reader flip between two or three pages to see how potholes are filled in two adjacent municipalities. The larger assumption, of course, is that by considering how potholes are filled in the other town, students gain a new perspective on how they are filled in their own.

Essays without focus, essays that present as two separate descriptions stapled together get a "C" or a "D." Papers scoring "A" or "B" engage the quotation in a staggered comparison.