Archive for academia
New Chalk
I begin my sixteenth year at Kwantlen Polytechnic University today. This summer I’m teaching a couple sections of Advanced Professional Communications and one of Technical Report Writing. These are healthy, hearty classes! I am looking forward to meeting my new students. This gig has been such a blessing.
[Addendum – this came in from my university’s administration a couple hours ago: “Surrey RCMP have alerted us to an unsubstantiated threat against KPU, specific to today. The threat is not specific to any one campus. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution and with the highest regard for the safety and security of our students and employees, KPU is evacuating all buildings immediately and closing all five of its campuses for the remainder of the day. All classes at all campuses are cancelled for rest of the day and our buildings will remain closed while security reviews the situation.” No update on this yet.]
genius sister
I actually have two genius sisters! But it is the younger of my two younger sisters, Jenny Basil, who just won The Claire Tow ‘52 Distinguished Teacher Award. “The award, in the amount of $10,000, recognizes a senior member of the faculty for outstanding qualities as a teacher and for being a role model to students and other faculty” at Brooklyn College.
I am a pretty talented, even occasionally inspired professor, but I am not a genius by any stretch. I am delighted I can count on my siblings.
“pure capitalist intent”
This tweet by Kwantlen Polytechnic University colleague and marketing instructor @AndreaNiosi is my April favourite:
Showing my students the dark side of marketing. Cultural appropriation, mis- & under-representation, stereotypes, & the pure capitalist intent lurking behind (some) cause marketing campaigns. I’m now writing an open book to go as deep as I can into this.
Saudi “scholarship students” leaving Canada
I’ve had a number of superb students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University from that country. This is awful news.
From Inside Higher Ed this morning:
Saudi Arabian students in Canada are caught in diplomatic crossfire.
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education is making plans to transfer students out of Canada to institutions in other countries after a diplomatic meltdown between the two countries sparked by Canada’s criticism of the kingdom’s arrest and detention of human rights activists.
A spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s education ministry said on Twitter that the ministry is “working on preparing and implementing an emergency plan to facilitate the transfer of our students to other countries.”
CNN reported that 7,000 Saudi students on government scholarships in Canada will be relocated.
Dan Drezner of the Washington Post has three “not mutually exclusive” explanations for the Saudi action:
– Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is “trying to demonstrate that he is in control [in his country], even if these sanctions will not lead to any Canadian concessions.” …
– “Another possibility is that these sanctions are less about compelling Canada and more about deterring other Western countries from criticizing Saudi Arabia.”
There is one final, more speculative explanation. There has been some recent international relations research into “prestige goods” or “Veblen goods,” things that states spend costly sums of money on with little tangible return. … As I explained this summer: “Veblen goods are positional goods, in which demand increases along with price because the good is seen as a display of prestige. Veblen goods can explain why some countries choose to invest in aircraft carriers or space programs when they should be allocating scarce resources elsewhere.” …
Maybe, just maybe, economic sanctions themselves have become a kind of Veblen good. Not many countries have the resources to impose economic sanctions of any kind on another state in world politics. The United States sanctions a lot, the European Union sanctions some, so do Russia and China, and then . . . crickets.
Except for Saudi Arabia. If Saudi Arabia is seen as a country that can sanction others, it starts to look more like a great power. The very fact that these sanctions are costly is what makes them such a compelling Veblen good. According to this logic, it does not matter whether they work: Most sanctions fail anyway. What makes them successful is that Mohammed has demonstrated that he can impose them in the first place.
The Chambered Nautilus and Memory
My sister Dr. Jenny Basil, Biology Professor and Department Chair at Brooklyn College, appears in this week’s “You’re the Expert” podcast. “Dr. Jennifer Basil studies how animals navigate the world and remember where they stored food. Her main research organism is the mysterious and beautiful chambered nautilus [link added]. Comedians Jo Firestone, Zhubin Parang, and Shalewa Sharpe discover what secrets lie hidden in the deep sea.”
It is an entertaining and illuminating half hour! My sister is an exceptionally fine explainer of things, and she is also super funny.
Created and hosted by Chris Duffy and produced by Pretty Good Friends, each episode features an expert in a specialized field. Through games, sketches, and hilariously misguided guesses, three comedians try to figure out what our expert studies all day. Over the course of the show, we hear about the latest findings and why their field is important.
Stanley Cavell
Visiting a couple of friends at Harvard back in 1982 or so, I was invited to attend a seminar on Shakespeare taught by Stanley Cavell. Holy moly – it was amazing! Graduate students piped up now and then, but the class was essentially a monologue – one of surpassing learning and agility – that felt wholly improvised.
He asked a question that has stayed with me all these years: Does an interpretive approach need to account for every word of a literary work, as it would, let’s say, of each note in a symphony or an opera, or is it enough that the approach makes sense of only certain passages? (It was not a rhetorical question.)
This short memoir of Cavell in the New York Review of Books is very good.
RIP.
Love deserves …
In a marvellous Tukwila, Washington used bookstore the other week I picked up a copy of Yvor Winters’ Uncollected Essays and Reviews for $2.99. I am glad I did because it sure was worth it. I would have been happy to have paid five.
Winters was a Stanford University English Professor and a literary critic and moralist. Long after he passed away, in the 1980s graduate students like myself could leaf through his bound and yellowing PhD dissertation in the Briggs Room library (I was the librarian) in Building 50 next to Memorial Church on the quad. We all read Winters, particularly his book In Defense of Reason, if only to disparage his conviction that a poem should be a rational statement of an abiding human truth. We were more amenable to his discussions of prosody, but could not help but find him often wanting there as well.
As a reader of American poets of the early 20th century, Yvor Winters’ views went from testy to lacerating and back again. I enjoyed his limpid prose. And I certainly enjoyed some of his take-downs of silly poems and poets.
Most interesting to me were his discussions of William Carlos Williams, who was the subject of my first scholarly publication. His ambivalence was all-out, as if he had fallen in love with a drug dealer. This is from an essay called “Poetry of Feeling” found in the Uncollected Essays:
The romantic principles which have governed Dr. Williams’ work have limited his scope. … The combination of purity and of richly human feeling to be found in his language at times reminds one of Thomas Hardy or of Robert Bridges, and of beauty and of execution he is their equal, though in so different a mode; but his understanding is narrow than theirs, and his best poems are less great. On the other hand, when poems are so nearly unexceptionable in their execution, one regards the question of scope regretfully: Robert Herrick is less great than Shakespeare, but he is probably as fine, and, God willing, should last as long. If I may venture … a prediction, it is this: that Williams will prove as nearly indestructible as Herrick; that the end of the present century will see him securely established, along with Wallace Stevens, as one of the two best poets of his generation.
Winters wrote a “postscript” to this piece 25 years later, not long before he died:
My general remarks may stand, but by this time, I would restrict my choice of successful poems much more narrowly. … To say that Williams was anti-intellectual would be almost an exaggeration: he did not know what the intellect was. He was a foolish and ignorant man, but at moments a fine stylist.
“But at moments.”
I find this postscript terribly poignant: What had happened to Professor Winters that permitted scorn to upend his aesthetic attentiveness and delight for work he had loved truly, if never with the wholeness of ease?
–
“No love deserves the death it has.” – Jack Spicer
– reposted from nocontest.ca
Summer term
Summer is my favourite time to teach. The long hours of sunshine leaven my mood and extend my focus. Students seem happy. Colleagues relax. Goodness knows how much trouble I’d get into if I actually had a “summer vacation”!
This semester I’m teaching Advanced Professional Communications and Technical Report Writing. These are not the most promising-sounding course titles, I know, but the coursework is often stimulating, if not exactly enchanting.
More on Solidarity
From the wonderfully amazing Clarissa:
Look at the teacher strike in West Virginia. Isn’t it a wonderful, inspiring thing? The teachers refused to be further mistreated and abused. They organized, stuck together, and achieved a victory.
If you have ever done any organizing, you know that it’s not about making a logical argument, showing the numbers, and proving points. What’s a lot more important are human relationships, emotions, trust, feeling comfortable with people in your unit.
It’s a lot harder to organize in an environment of mistrust, suspicion, and mutual dislike between workers. Any collective action requires an enormous amount of trust between participants because getting atomized, alienated consumers to do any collective action at all is ridiculously hard.
The vision of self as an island that is better off outside of any collective process is formed slowly and by means we don’t even notice. Those people who tell me, “I don’t need a union. I can negotiate on my own behalf” or “and how do I know you won’t tell the dean what we’ve been talking about here?” are guided towards this vision of self and others. There’s a million strategies to make workers fear and avoid each other.
All of these microaggressions seminars, ethics trainings, gender parity tutorials – their whole point is to make workers detest each other. We tell ourselves they have no effect on us but that’s delusional and well in line with thinking that an exceptional individual can bootstrap themselves out of ideological and intellectual processes that everybody is subject to.
It does have an effect. All of these exhortations to suspect and fear our fellow worker have an effect. Nobody is an exceptional cookie that can rise above this. This is poisoning the workplace for all of us. This is what we need to resist.
Unless we have a clear vision of all the anti-labor strategies employed against us, we won’t win.
Wow
Poetry collector Raymond Danowski truly ‘lived the dream.’ The thoughtfulness of his gift of 75,000 volumes to Emory University and his insistence that undergraduates would share in it have terrifically moved me.
The New York Times’ Sam Roberts writes a very good obituary.
(Photo by Kay Hinton/Emory University)
Applications
There is no better you than you.
Write with that in mind.
(It’s that time of year for students of mine.)
Honour Code
We’re entering the third week of the fall semester at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and I am very much enjoying my two Advanced Professional Communications classes.
This semester KPU’s Richmond campus has seen the reappearance of posters advertising “ghostwriting” services to Chinese students. The service charges $60 per double-spaced page and guarantees that the results will fool plagiarism-detection programs.
It is depressing to consider the possibility that any of my students would hire a ghostwriter to complete their assignments. I tell my whippersnappers that I can always detect a change in their use of language, and whether that change has resulted from his or her own improvement or from a substitution of author. Alas, this is more difficult for me to pull off in an online course, in which students can hire another person to complete *all* of the assignments (but not the final exam, unless they forge an I.D. to get seated).
Scientific thinking
“Solving the Heroin Overdose Mystery: How small doses can kill.”
This is a fascinating article. (Short take: Getting messed up in unusual places prevents your body’s “conditioned” anti-intoxicating responses.)
“Virtue Signaling”
My friend Jonathan Mayhew has been on a tear over at his blog Stupid Motivational Tricks these last few months: an astonishing amount of writing – on poetry, criticism, daily life, creative hygiene, social rhetoric, translation, as well as on academia and a ton of other things, all with his characteristically vivid lucidity. It has been thrilling – and also *very* humbling – for me to read.
I had never used this phrase before but it struck me that this is what I don’t like in emails from the provost or chancellor. I realize that this is part of their job description, but I just automatically delete, after reading the first few words, any message to the entire university community that is intended to verbally signal commitments to certain values. It doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy inside to see these statements, and of course I’m not crazy about times when departments compete with one another to come up with statements of solidarity, pursuit of excellence, and so forth.
When my group of friends meet every week people start by rehearsing bad things Trump has done recently. How he is the worst ever, etc… It’s not that I disagree, but come on, I know this is a social ritual and so does everyone else. And it doesn’t happen to be my favorite ritual either. You won’t find bumper stickers on my car.
Right-wing virtue signaling is the same thing, except the causes are different: “life,” “freedom,” “the troops,” “guns.” Empty patriotic gestures and ritualistic affirmations of support for Israel.
The opposite of virtue signaling is the deliberately transgressive shitting on virtues. That seems refreshing at times, doesn’t it? W.C. Fields style. What makes it refreshing is that we all react against manipulative virtue signaling even as we are doing it. Think of the children! For anyone not old enough to know, Fields would say things like “Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad.” We all know that the cute commercial with the happy family at McDonald’s is manipulative, as morally bankrupt as the lite beer commercial with bikinis.
Bad Mess at Evergreen
The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington has earned its renown as an experimental – indeed avant-garde – institution; its ‘progressive’ bona-fides have been warranted as well. Back in the day, I explored the possibility of taking a faculty position in entrepreneurship there. Although it didn’t come through, this institution has remained close to my heart.
A recent controversy at Evergreen has made national news and has placed at least one professor as well as students and staff in potential peril. From the New York Times:
[Professor Bret] Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.
This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.
A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”
Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”
Seattle’s The Stranger reports on the “campus lockdown” ordered at Evergreen late this week “after local law enforcement officials received a call with a “direct threat to campus safety'”:
Student activists say they’ve been unfairly maligned. “While it is probably true that some of our strategies were very passionate, they were also peaceful,” an Evergreen student, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote in an e-mail. “And while it might be true there was some ‘harassment’ (a subjective term), it was on the lines of condemnation and scorn, rather than threats and stalking.”
One student, who asked to remain anonymous out of safety concerns, said death threats to campus activists followed Weinstein’s media appearances. “A swastika appeared on campus. Student personal information was published on 4chan channels and other neo-Nazi and violent racist internet communities,” the student told The Stranger.
Said another student: “Calling these people ‘Weinstein supporters’ would be irresponsible of me. These people are mostly organized racists from off campus that use internet presence, anonymity, and misinformation to disrupt a narrative, and the threat of violence to suppress those who would fight back.”
Professor Weinstein fears that his and other students have been placed at risk:
On Twitter, [he] claimed that his student supporters were being threatened online by his critics. He subsequently tweeted: “I’m told people are doxing those that protested against me. I don’t know if it’s true. If it is, *please stop.* No good can come from that.” The biology instructor also said that Evergreen campus police warned him that he was “not safe on campus. They can not protect me.”
Student demonstrators refuted Weinstein’s claims that their supporters had attempted to dox the teacher’s supporters. They believe the media’s focus on Weinstein is a distraction from their chief concern: ongoing issues revolving around racism, sexism, and transphobia at Evergreen.
Many of Weinstein’s faculty colleagues want him punished.
Look at Bret Weinstein’s “Rate My Professors” page.
Here are some of the demands from students who objected to Weinstein’s published statements .
A member of the State Legislature has introduced a bill to de-fund and privatize Evergreen.
As a professor and as a person with many fond memories of the energetic intellectual and moral debates I shared or witnessed as a young student at SUNY/Buffalo and Stanford University, I find this Evergreen mess dismaying to the point of heartbreak.
h/t LH
Summer teaching
Tomorrow I meet the students in my Advanced Professional Communications class for the first time, out at Kwantlen Polytechnic University‘s Surrey campus. What a splendid gig I have!
“Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence”
From Emory University professor Scott Lilienfeld’s recent paper on “microaggressions”:
The microaggression concept has recently galvanized public discussion and spread to numerous college campuses and businesses. I argue that the microaggression research program (MRP) rests on five core premises, namely, that microaggressions (1) are operationalized with sufficient clarity and consensus to afford rigorous scientific investigation; (2) are interpreted negatively by most or all minority group members; (3) reflect implicitly prejudicial and implicitly aggressive motives; (4) can be validly assessed using only respondents’ subjective reports; and (5) exert an adverse impact on recipients’ mental health. A review of the literature reveals negligible support for all five suppositions. … Although the MRP has been fruitful in drawing the field’s attention to subtle forms of prejudice, it is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application. I … call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.
Columbia University professor Musa Al-Gharbi’s response to Lilienfeld’s paper provides some edifying context.
This is a very contentious topic on campuses, as you can imagine. This New York times story from last fall gives you a good picture.
h/t to C on clarissasblog
“If you are pro Black, pro Hispanic, or pro Asian, why don’t you say so … ?”
After we got back in touch with each other in 2009, Lorraine sent me the correspondence below – between me and a ‘literary agent’ – which she had kept after leaving Prometheus Books decades before.
Lorraine wrote me: “In one of my periodic cleaning binges, lo — my Prometheus ‘DO YOU BELIEVE THIS’ file re-emerged this week, after a disappearance of nigh onto twenty years! The attached provided me with a cascading set of giggles. I hope you will still find the exchange as amusing as I did.” I did, and do. Thank you, Lorraine.
(I’ve obscured my antagonist’s information.)
Note #1 to my students: The approach I chose here is generally not recommended for your own workplace correspondence. Please stay courteous! Your goal, almost always, is to foster and maintain relationships.
Note #2 to my students: You also might want to avoid misspelling *your own job title* in workplace correspondence. I was the senior “Acquisitions” editor for a year before I remembered that “acquisitions” has a “c” in it. (That was around the same time I was shocked to see that “smooth” wasn’t spelled “smoothe.”)
PS – The “LMP” is The Literary Marketplace guide.
Teaching
Early this morning I guest-lectured, via Skype, in Professor Frank Grasso‘s class on parapsychology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. The students were wonderful. I arrived prepared! Such a beautiful day.
Salut, Mayhew
I have been writing and publishing very little lately; profound family events seem to have taken most of my words away.
In a weird way, my friend Jonathan Mayhew has kind of stepped in, writing so much and so brilliantly that I would not have wanted to be writing anyway. No writer charms me so often or so well.
One of Jonathan’s current projects is a book on the pedagogy of poetry. He’s writing it on a private blog to which I’ve been invited. Ideally I will be providing helpful feedback, but until now mostly I have just been … amazed.
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