Obama takes a bow

As I put it on my Facebook page when I posted this there a few minutes ago…  Today’s most egregious entry into the who-give-a-shit-o-sphere…

In case you missed it (because you weren’t watching CNN or Fox), President Obama took a deep bow while meeting the Emperor of Japan.  Wow.  Apparently he’s violated some rule of imperial machoness by doing so.  Gee.

To see how inflamed people are getting, start here:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/11/obama-emperor-akihito-japan.html

Then Google “Obama bow Japanese Emperor” and watch the flames spread like wildfire.

C’mon people.  This is as, if not more, ridiculous than anything I’ve heard out of you wingnuts since the election.

What’s in a name?

So I finally figured out this morning why my blog has gotten hundreds of hits in the last couple of days, when a typical day’s hits is more like twenty.  Apparently, a student at FIT, who happened to have the same name as mine, died the other day when he was hit by a bus.

If you’re one of the people looking for news about him but finding this instead, sorry I can’t help.  And if you’re somebody who knew him, although I wouldn’t expect my condolences to mean much, I’ll offer them anyway.

It’s unusual to find other Seths, and it’s especially unusual to find other Seth Kahns.  I know there are a couple of others on Facebook (because I get occasional friend requests and e-mails that are clearly not for me), and I know the person who was awarded the patent for the aerosol spray paint can shared the name.  I also know somebody used to publish under this name as a byline in the Weekly World News when I was in high school.  The only article I remember was one about a kid getting thrown out of a roller-coaster car at an amusement park in Dallas, one of the few verifiably true stories I ever saw in that esteeemed (!) publication.

Why nobody should get “release time”

I’ve been grinding the axe for a while now, in the hallways at conferences, at parties and what have you…

Yesterday (Sat) morning, I was on a panel at the APSCUF Labor in Higher Education Conference.  By the way, public kudos to APSCUF VP Amy Walters and all the office folks who organized the conference; it was a blast.

Anyway, one of the presentations in our session focused on adjunct labor issues (hard to have an academic labor conference that doesn’t, and rightly so).  The presenter, Amy, contended that in addition to fighting for better working conditions for adjunct faculty, we need to recognize that experts in our fields often wind up administering programs rather than teaching in them.  This claim, which is extremely incisive and correct, led to a conversation in which members of the audience wanted to talk about “release time” for administrative work.

I couldn’t help myself, after hearing the phrase two or three times, and made the same pitch to the audience that I’m about to make now.

We need to stop referring to non-teaching-work-time as “release time.”  Why?  Because asking to be “released” from teaching reinforces the devaluation of teaching.  It says that teaching is something to be let out of in favor of other (more important) matters.  It evokes teaching as a trap, or a prison, or some other place that somebody else has to let you out of.  I could keep stretching the metaphor, but I hope the notion is clear enough.  Especially if you work in a teaching-intensive institution, reinforcing the idea that you want to “escape” from teaching is bad–not just for you, but also for anybody who teaches.

I’m not saying that management shouldn’t allocate paid time for non-teaching work.  Of course those who administer programs should get paid time and support for their work, which I’ve recently stopped doing and couldn’t be happier (see recent post, “Back to teaching 4/4″).  The problem isn’t the time; it’s the name we give to it, and how that name constructs a system of (de)valuation.  Call it “reassign time,” or “alternate work assignment” (which is what our system calls it) or whatever.

But don’t call it “release time” unless you want administration and everybody else to think that we agree with the idea that teaching isn’t as important as other work we do; that teaching is something to be let out of; that it’s OK to hire and exploit part-time faculty without expertise in our fields because the experts have been “released” to do other things.

Coming up next: Seth’s busiest month ever

October starts tomorrow.  As it stands already, not including anything new, this promises to be the busiest month of my entire career (at least to date). Along with the usual load of teaching and committee work…

1.  I have to finish an overdue assessment report for our writing program’s research-writing courses.  I’ve gathered the data and just have to write the thing, but still.

2.  Grievance Committee meets this weekend, and we have the largest stack of cases I’ve seen since I’ve been on the committee.  I also just filed some new ones, which are going to take some meetings to work out.

3.  The APSCUF Labor Conference is Oct 15-17.  My paper is ready, but it’s too long for the presentation slot I have, so I’ll need some time to cut (and practice) it.  If you’re an academic labor activist (or just interested in it), the conference promises to be a blast.

4.  I’m going to TCU in late October to give a talk about activism and rhetoric, and to visit a friend’s research methods course.

5.  The Rhetorical Activists manuscript is due to Routledge by the end of the month.  Most of the chapters are in fine shape, so that won’t be hard to manage, but I have to assemble the manuscript into one document (which is the kind of tedious work I’m really bad at), make sure I can print it (they ask for one complete hard copy), and collect contact info for all the contributors, make sure they sign their own contributor agreements, etc.  It’s all this kind of management work that makes me nuts, but we’re too close to the finish line not to get it done.

See you in November!

Pins and needles

9:30 am.  At some point today, a group of people (editors/managers) at a major publishing house will decide whether to publish Rhetorical Activists and Activist Rhetoricians, an edited collection my comrade Jonghwa and I have been working on for 5 years.

Another publisher has offered us a contract already, so it WILL be published at some point soon.  We are hoping for this particular contract today or tomorrow, though, because the publisher has a strong presence on both of the fields represented in the text (English and Communication). 

All the way through graduate school, my friend Tobi tried to coach me to deal with moments like these; she’s much better than I am at dealing with the times when a decision is no longer in her hands, when there’s nothing else she can do or say.  I’m not a control freak, but neither am I comfortable with situations that are entirely out of my hands. 

In the meantime, I still have two more classes to teach.  The first went well this morning, so I’m obviously not too distracted to concentrate.  I’d be really upset if I couldn’t concentrate on my teaching because of my scholarship; that would make me exactly the person I claimed not to be in my “Back to teaching 4/4″ post from a few weeks ago. 

But it’s a nervous time nonetheless.  Hope to have an answer soon. 

pant pant pant…

Ready to kick off the new semester

Saturday afternoon at the Gryphon Cafe in Wayne.  Ann and I came out for our typical worky Saturday, and to see “In the Loop” at the theater next door.  I figured it would take hours to get ready for Monday and Tuesday’s classes, even though both courses I’m teaching (Comp and Conventions of Reading and Writing) are courses I’ve taught many times before.  Instead, I’m about as prepped as I’m going to get.  So I’m going to think about what to expect this semester, partially an exercise in speculation like I’m asking my comp students to do.

As I wrote in my last post, I’m really excited about teaching 4 classes again.  While my non-teaching commitments have certainly grown, I no longer face the daily dread of directing the comp program.  I don’t have to wig out every time the phone rings or an e-mail pops up, thinking that every contact is a demand for something.  One of the things I’ve learned in the last two years is that my leadership skills, such as they are, are really specific.  I’m at my best when I work among a group, working on projects with a bunch of people.  I’m not strong with administrative details.  I knew that already, of course, but to say that’s been reaffirmed would be an understatement of the first order.

One of the things I’m most excited about this semester is getting back to doing nothing but ethnographic writing in my comp classes.  For the last several years, I’ve experimented with putting ethnographic writing into a variety of contexts, that is, putting in service to other curricular or pedagogical goals.  A worthy experiment, I think, but maybe the most important outcome is that I’ve reclaimed my commitment to ethnography.  The essay for Writing Spaces certainly helped; it made me reflect on 12 years of teaching, what I’ve learned about it, and how to talk about ethnography to students.  I’ve also thought about the other kinds of writing I asked students to do, and none of it has been as satisfying.  In revising the course for this semester, I’ve put back together some pieces that needed taking apart and examining individually.  Now we’re ready to go.

The Conventions course should be better.  I’ll be teaching for (I think) the fifth time.  Over the few years I’ve been working on it, I’ve generally been satisfied with the results, but it’s never felt like it really made sense.  One reason for that, of course, is that the description is still too big.  At some point, I imagine we’ll be able to sort that out–the assessment I’m so not interested in working on will probably show us where we’re not getting and where we probably shouldn’t go.  But I think I’ve figured out how to frame the course, from the beginning, so that the disparate threads we explore (yeah, I know, mixed metaphor) make at least some sense together.  I’ve managed, especially the last two semesters, to pull together some coherent description of what we’ve learned.  The students shouldn’t have to wait ’til the last week of class, though, before they hear that description.  As I’ve gotten a little less resistant to lecturing in recent years, I’ve realized I can tell them in the first two days of class most of what they need to know in order to establish a reasonable context for our pursuits.  We’ll see how well it works this time.

Heading into a second year as Grievance chair, my big hope is that I can begin to assemble a working knowledge of all the policies and procedures that people ask me about.  I’ve joked with several people that our last 4 Grievance chairs (two of whom have also been Chapter presidents and one vp) can cite the CBA chapter and verse, and I can see why they need to.  There’s a part of me that would like to stop being involved in Meet and Discuss; it’s easy to want to defer complicated grievance issues to M&D and vice versa.  But I don’t really think that’s a good idea; maybe it’s just an urge to go to fewer meetings.

The big new service project this year is participating in a Work Group for our accreditation self-study.  I know a little about accreditation processes, but not much.  I also know that several units around our system manage to use accreditation standards to argue for all sorts of pro-faculty policies.  The Dean of our College of Business and Public Affairs, for example, uses his field’s accreditation standards to argue that his faculty all need one–course reassignments in order to produce scholarship worthy of accreditation.  From an outsider’s point of view, it’s outrageous (and worthy of some jealousy) that he pulled this off (even though I personally want to teach 4, I know most people don’t).  So I’m hoping I can learn enough from being involved in this process to be able to advocate for faculty from a position of something other than empathy.

And if all goes well, JongHwa and I will be finished with the Rhetorical Activists manuscript; we can sign a contract, let the editors have their way with it, and be finished with a project that has taken waaaaaaaay too long to complete.

A good hopeful note to end on!

Back to teaching 4/4 and happy about it

In a couple of weeks, after two years of having one course reassign time for co-directing the Writing Program, I go back to teaching four courses.  I can’t wait.

It’s mostly a matter of wanting to teach.  I came to West Chester fully aware that teaching four courses per semester isn’t the ideal for most faculty.  During my interviews, even the faculty who were interviewing me told me several times that reassignments were possible and even generous, as if they needed to convince me that I wouldn’t have to teach too much.  They seemed a little bewildered when I told them I wasn’t terribly concerned about that.

During my first four years, I had a couple of reassignments.  One was grant-funded to work on the Rhetorical Activists book; I needed the time to read and respond to submissions, and to put together proposals for publishers.  That was time well-spent, as was the one course reassign I got for the Curriculum Integration Seminar.  But in both cases, I missed my fourth class and was happy to get back to it the following semesters.

The two years I spent as Writing Program co-director is a different matter.  I took on the position because among the fourteen comp/rhet faculty in our department, we rotate through directorships (or have, since I’ve been here, although that’s likely to change somewhat).  So it was my turn.  The only other position I’d have considered was directing the Writing Center, but there were other faculty who were both more interested and better suited for the job, so I didn’t really push for it.  I figured three years, splitting the job with a colleague who I’ve always worked well with, wouldn’t be so bad.  And it wasn’t horrible or anything.  I didn’t enjoy it, but I didn’t terribly botch anything either.  What I did realize, though, in pretty short order, was that the leadership function of the position didn’t suit me well.  I could handle the mechanical stuff–assessment, textbook selection and dealing with publishers, etc.

So I decided, about halfway through my first semester, that the best I could expect was to leave the program in essentially the same shape I found it.  If you’re a sports fan, you know that it’s hard to do well when you’re in such a defensive posture, playing not to lose instead of playing to win.  I’d like to have felt differently about it, but I didn’t.

When the Dean made clear, near the end of the Spring semester, that we were losing one of the reassignments for Writing Program administration, it was pretty obvious that I’d have to give mine up.  Although she’d never say this in public, I think my Dept chair was surprised when I didn’t even quibble with the decision.  I’d had enough of a job I wasn’t doing well (adequately, I think, but not well).  I do feel a minor tinge of guilt that I left the position without completing my term (it’s supposed to be three years), but that guilt is certainly outweighed by my happiness at getting back to the part of the job I’m best at, and most committed to–teaching.

There’s a rumor flying around that in our next contract negotiations (the CBA expires June 2011), our system is willing to negotiate a reduced teaching load in return for higher scholarly expectations.  Let’s just say for now that, if we go there, we argue for some flexibility to account for people like me, who chose to come to PASSHE because we want to teach a lot.  If I’d wanted a more research-intensive job, I probably (?) could have gotten one, but I didn’t.  And I’d hate for the terms of the job to change in mid-career.

I realize how strange this must sound to those of you who teach more than you’d like, i.e., who feel like you don’t have time for your research and scholarship.  I like to write now and again, when I feel like I’ve got something I want to say, but I never, ever have felt like I didn’t have enough time here.  I just don’t want to write as much as some (most, apparently) people do.

Looking forward to the new semester!  I get to be myself again!

Town Hall meetings

So today, for the first time, I saw Obama supporters step over the line in an attempt to respond to Freedom Watch and the Tea Baggers’ disruptions at town hall meetings.  What CNN didn’t comment on, when they showed the clip, was how totally furious the Obama supporter was.  And I don’t think it was the security that was not-very-gently leading her out the door.  She seemed like she was headed straight for the conservative contingent, and wanted to tangle with them.

Probably best that she wasn’t able to; it sure wouldn’t be very helpful for the first blood to be drawn by somebody who’s ostensibly on the same side I am.  I don’t want any blood drawn, of course, but the fury emanating from the right on this issue isn’t much different from the fury that emanates from anti-abortion activists; seems like the right has adopted that page from the playbook.  Infuriate your opposition, and then jump up and down celebrating when one of us acts on it.  Lovely.

I appreciate what the Dems are trying to do as they respond to this madness in their own meetings–to call the tension out, make a point of asking for some decency (civility is just too much to ask for these days, I guess), and do the best they can to keep the meetings moving while assholes try to shout them down.  It makes the assholes look really bad, as if they didn’t already.  Unfortunately, the people who need to be convinced that the assholes are assholes won’t be convinced even by direct evidence.  Not sure what to do about that.

By the way, a public shout-out to CNN, who hasn’t handled this whole mess very well.  But today, Rick Sanchez actually got on the air and explained to viewers that most of what the Freedom Watch people and the Palinites are spewing is just wrong.  I’m not sure it’ll make a huge dent in the problem, but at least somebody tried.  It’s a start.

Why unions should fight for single-payer health care

This is an extension of my last post, or maybe one direction it could have gone but didn’t…

One of the main reasons, oft cited even by those who don’t really support healthcare reform, that we need heathcare reform (even though some of those who say it don’t really mean it) is skyrocketing costs.  We also need it, according to some, because small businesses can’t afford the costs of insuring their employees and feel like they shouldn’t have to.

The union member and officer in me bucks against the claim that employers shouldn’t have to insure employees.  Health insurance was a hard-won battle, and in an era where corporations are earning (and often frittering way, but that’s their fault) huge profits, it’s not workers’ faults if those corporations choose not to invest in their own employees.  I realize it’s different for small businesses.

At my own job, when I got hired, our health benefits package was one of the big selling points (not to me–I’d been uninsured for so long that to have *any* insurance seemed like a luxury).  Our faculty didn’t pay for our insurance at all.  Combined with our (at the time relatively high) salaries, the package our system offered was really hard to turn down.  The 2007–11 contract changed all that; our salaries are coming closer into line with peer systems, and for the first time, we had to start paying a portion of our health insurance premiums.  It was a bummer, but we were convinced that it was high time we shared some of the burden of our own expenses.  And we traded that for some other concessions during negotiations, which I won’t get into here because if you’d be interested in them, you already know what they were .

But in retrospect, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the labor movement needs to be heavily involved in the fight for single-payer healthcare.  And for several reasons–

1.  Labor cares more about workers than management does, and certainly more than the healthcare industry does.  If anybody is going to conduct this fight out of proper motivation, it’s us.

2.  Labor has a history of winning healthcare fights.

3.  Management uses healthcare as a bargaining chip with which to push labor for concessions.  Give up salary, for example, or we can’t afford your insurance any more.  In academic contexts, we might here something like “If you don’t accept furloughs, we can’t insure you.”  Or, “If you insist on keeping your insurance benefits as they are, we can’t afford to hire more faculty eligible for those benefits.”  Nothing you haven’t heard before if you’ve been involved, no matter how distantly, with these kinds of conversations.

4.  Linking labor with other progressive movements/organizations will reinvigorate labor.  I realize not all labor activists/organizers are progressive, but I’m convinced one of the reasons the labor movement has lost momentum over the last few decades is that its focus has become almost entirely on contracts and negotiations.  When those don’t go well (even when they do), it’s hard to keep memberships interested and, more importantly, mobilized.

On that happy note…

[ADDED later:  If you belong to a union that hasn't yet signed onto this effort, check out <http://unionsforsinglepayerhr676.org/union_endorsers>.

Making people mean what they say

[Long and rambling; beware]

Well, I suppose it’s impossible to *make* people mean anything; that would require changing people’s psychological states, which I wouldn’t want to do even if I could (not very democratic, is it?).

What I’m thinking about this morning is ways of making people responsible for their own declarations and positions.  It’s easy to say one thing and do something else.  But once somebody has articulated a position, how can somebody else work to make sure they actually enact that position?

Let me be more concrete.  The summer before I started my Masters program, I worked for the Florida Public Interest Research Group (FPIRG).  Our director at the time, Tom, gave a talk in which he argued that corporate attempts at greenwashing (which was an embryonic cottage industry at the time, nothing like the slick professional operations we see 15 years later) showed that corporations had already lost the fight.  Once they adopt green rhetoric, Tom said, they’ve lost the battle even while they believe they’re using it to their own advantage.

In retrospect (as I’ve spent more time as a leader in activist/organizing settings), I realize that most of the payoff from that talk was motivational.  He knew that we were getting more and more frustrated, as a canvas office, with our public’s beliefs that corporate America was getting more responsible (and therefore didn’t warrant attention from groups like ours).  So he was reminding us that greenwashers were actually helping us by reinforcing our message.  And that greenwashers were establishing a high bar for themselves to meet.  Once polluters announce their greenness, that is, it becomes much easier to pound them for doing bad things.

OK, so it wasn’t all that simple.  If I’d heard of post-Fordism at the time, I would have argued with Tom that what we were saying was the appropriation of environtalist discourse into capitalism, the marketing of green without actual green practices.  Tom, I imagine, would have replied that the greenwashers were enabling our demands; by making green a marketing issue, we could know put pressure on them to live up to their own pronouncements by organizing customers for or against various companies.

While that approach has had mixed results (I tend to take a very long view about environmental activism, much more so than other kinds), the principle is important.  People say stuff all the time; what would happen in a world where they had to live up to what they said?

The current health care debate has provided some juicy examples to think about.  If you read this blog, you’ve probably heard already about the guy at a townhall meeting (and Prez Obama says he’s received a bunch of letters along similar line) who insisted that we can’t have government run health care, and followed up by saying, “Keep your hands off my Medicare.”  In the world I’m imagining, he would have instantly lost his Medicare (not permanently; I’m not a sadist) at least for long enough to learn that Medicare is, in fact, a government program.  That is, if he’d meant what he said and had to live with it, he would give up his Medicare.  I would kick Libertarians off sidewalks.

My current project has me thinking about this again, in a different setting.  I’m writing a conference paper in which I argue that our faculty union needs to do more with the concept of shared governance.  Although our Board of Governers doesn’t use the term in any official document, neither do they contest it when we do.  My sense is that they’re more than happy to let us believe that we’re sharing both power and responsibility for running the system, at the same time they pretty much do whatever they want–at least as much as our Collective Bargaining Agreement will allow.  They also use this concept to divide faculty, by putting intractable decisions in our hands and leaving us to reach conclusions that nobody is happy with.  But since we reached them, they’re our fault if we don’t like them (I’ve been talking about this problem for a couple of years now in various conference presentations, and apparently haven’t reached any useful conclusions since I’m still talking about it now).

So what would it look like if shared governance were actually practiced in a meaningful way?  Let me start with what it wouldn’t mean.  As long as the interests of faculty and management are at odds, which they currently are, I’m not seeing a huge, sudden shift into consensus-building lovefest.  That is, while shared sounds like a kind of starry-eyed romantic term, it doesn’t have to be.  But neither can it be the kind division of labor Christopher Carter describes/critiques in Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate University.  Carter argues that the origins of shared governance–as a hegenomic device–were in the move to leave financial decisions to management while faculty focused on teaching and research.  As soon as faculty left financial decisions to management, the marketing and framing of higher education went with it.

I’m hardly the first person to think about how we get that back; every academic group I’ve ever been part of wants to talk about how we reframe public perceptions of higher education, faculty work, our own disciplines in relation to the “real world” (a phrase I utterly despise), and so on.

My current line of thinking is to wonder how important that PR war actually is, especially given that we’re not in position to fight it very well.  Instead, it seems like we might be able, in an aikido kind of way, to use their own energies to our benefit.  How?  By jumping up and down in celebration every time we do something their discourse says it values.  And by stomping and booing every time their actions prevent us from doing something they say they value (I hadn’t really thought about it that way until Shelley, a friend/colleague, put it that way in a listserv discussion).

Celebrating our successes seems obvious enough.  We know when we’ve done good work.  Our students do well, graduate on time, get into successful programs, jobs, etc.  We get grants, publish articles, present at conferences.  It’s not about measurability, when we talk about it (it is when management talks about it, and that’s part of my point).  And it’s not about puffing up accomplishments disproportionately, which would be a serious strategeric (!) error.  It’s simply a matter of chronicling our successes regularly and publicly.  As they accumulate, so the theory goes, they’ll gain power exponentially, providing us grounds from which to argue the importance of our work.  Moreover, and I wish this were as much of a “duh” as it feels like it ought to be, we’ll have a much easier time acting collectively if we know each others’ work better.

I’m going to jump a couple of steps in my thinking so I can get somewhere I haven’t been before.  What I want to think about now is some strategies for enforcing shared governance that I’ve seen work elsewhere, or that have provoked me to consider some possibilities at least.

1.  Organizing outside the union: our union has certainly worked on affiliations of various kinds over the years–with other teacher/faculty unions, with other labor unions, and so on.  The situation at the College of Dupage earlier this year, which I blogged about, suggests a different (in the sense of additional) approach.  When CoD was struggling to fight against an Academic Bill of Rights campaign running through (if not by) their Board of Governers, the faculty union at CoD went to community-based actvist groups for help.  Of course, they had an obvious reason to do so–their BoG is elected from the local community, so it makes obvious sense that community organizations would have a stake in their elections.  In our case, membership on the BoG is by appointment, so the direct effects of community organizations isn’t as obvious.  I would argue, though, that in addition to help with strike-related activities, coordinating with other activist groups would help to: (a) embed us in the local community in ways that we can’t do through PR; (b) make for more efficient, if less far-reaching, networking; (c) tap into already mobilized groups; (d) invigorate our own membership as we established collaborations in which our members actually wanted to participate.

I know it’s bad form to number a #1 and not keep numbering, but I’m going to stop here.  Should be writing the paper instead .