Good lord, but this is depressing.

So depressing, in fact, that I can’t even comment any further.

And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.

Though she doesn’t quite say so, many of the points she makes—particularly that, with respect to outside sources, “[e]ither they prove you right or you prove them wrong or they don’t get to be in your book,” and, with respect to audience, that you shouldn’t “write for the four people who know more about your subject than you do. They aren’t going to buy your book. Write for the five thousand people who are smart and curious but don’t know as much about your subject as they should”—are precisely the differences between a dissertation and a book.

The first trick, I think, in revising your dissertation into a book is to take all of that stuff—the outside sources who are there only to prove that you’ve consulted them; the references designed to demonstrate to the four people who are reading your dissertation that you really do know your field—and stick it in the footnotes. It’s not part of the flow of your argument, so into the backmatter it goes.

The second trick, however, is to eliminate the half of your footnotes that really aren’t that important, after all.

Are there other tricks and tips you’d care to share?

I’m still running pretty much a day behind—meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:

The Chronicle reported yesterday that the ACLS had released a report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” examining the state of “cyberinfrastructure” in the humanities and social sciences, arguing—unsurprisingly, perhaps—that these “softer” areas of the academy have a long way to go in order to catch up with the levels of development and support available to the hard sciences. Among their recommendations is one near and dear to my heart: “Encourage digital scholarship.”

Today is also the final day in the summer institute on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UC San Diego, sponsored by (among other organizations), HASTAC.

I’m very much hoping to hear what comes out of that institute, and looking forward to seeing how the ACLS’s report is received…

So here’s what’s going on around here, that made my dream so open to Meg’s instant analysis: as I’ve mentioned before, my department has suffered some major losses recently, with three senior colleagues all departing at the same time. The up-side of this is that I’ve got an amazing new office. This comes with a major down-side, though: because of those three departures, and a slew of terribly timed leaves, the department hierarchy, in terms of seniority, will in the fall look something like this:

– Our new chair, who’s been at the college for quite a while, but will be chairing for the first time.

– (Our new poet, who’s coming in at full prof, but who will be in her first semester, and thus can’t be expected to be up to speed yet.)

– (A co-terminous associate prof whose primary job functions are in the administration.)

– Me.

And that is all of the tenured/senior faculty who will be present on campus during the fall. And we’re doing a search, in a field that is quite far removed from my own, and I’m getting a lot of pressure to be very heavily involved in this search, despite the fact that my program is also going to be doing a search, which I’m co-chairing, at exactly the same time.

Let me emphasize that this field is quite far removed from my own, and that while I’m happy to be involved in the search, I’m not comfortable about being asked to play a key role in it, because I really, really don’t know what’s going on in the field today at all.

Did I mention that our new chair’s wife is a pianist?

Via if:book, an interesting draft policy statement proposed by Alan Liu on student use of wikipedia. (See also the followup discussion at Humanist and Kairosnews.)

new office
Originally uploaded by KF.

We’ve suffered a series of losses in my department this semester, and are about to find ourselves in a very different department, come fall.  I’ll put it this way:  as of Spring 2006, there were four women in the department who were senior to me.  Three of them are leaving the college—our much-adored Shakespearean is retiring, our Dickinsonian is headed off to chair a big R1 department, and our all-purpose Americanist, who has been serving as associate dean for the last three years, has been named dean of a quite great small liberal arts college on the other coast.  Suddenly, in our department of fifteen, there are only (depending on how you look at it) four or five folks more senior than I, and only one woman who’s been here longer than me.

There’s something vertiginous about this shift in the department’s center of gravity; I never, ever expected to be this senior this soon.  I keep telling myself, however, that this is a moment ripe with possibility, in which our department might remake itself into something dramatically new, something that can energize all of us intellectually.

And then there’s the offices.  Offices in our department have always been assigned following a slightly morphed version of seniority, one based less on rank than on length of time served within the department.  By that standard, I’m the fourth most senior person actually resident in the department (the one female colleague who is senior to me is a college administrator, and so is housed elsewhere), and so, as offices were being reassigned, I expected to find myself in slightly larger digs.

What I did not expect, not at all, was to find myself in the office of the eminent Shakespearean, a gorgeous, massive office on the upper southwest corner of the building.

As it turns out, I was right not to expect it; the colleague who is immediately senior to me should have been given this office (and did request it), but a communications snafu resulted in me moving in here before the mistake was discovered.  After a little negotiating, we’ve decided that, for this year at least, he’ll move into the office of the Dickinsonian, on the downstairs northwest corner, and next year we’ll check in with one another to see if he wants to switch places.

So I’m trying to strike a balance between reveling in my glorious new abode and maintaining a position of non-attachment, so as not to be disappointed if I don’t stay here.  This post constitutes a bit of reveling.  As does the phenomenal amount of work I’ve gotten done in the last week.  Now back to non-attachment, and to work.

This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:

Jerrold Nadler, Congressman from New York, 8th District, has written an open letter to the United States House of Representatives, asking his colleagues to sign on to a letter to John Sexton calling for negotiations between NYU and our union. GSOC members can aid in this effort by calling or emailing their representatives and urging them to sign. You can find contact info for your representative at: http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Nadler’s letter follows a similar letter from New York Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging all US Senators to sign a letter to Sexton demanding negotiations. The Schumer-Clinton letter can be viewed at: http://2110uaw.org/gsoc/clinton_schumer.pdf

You can find contact info for your senators at:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

We encourage all GSOC members to contact supporters across the country about these legislative letters, as they are an effective way to keep pressure building on NYU to negotiate over the summer.

The text of Nadler’s letter and his sign-on letter to Sexton are below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:

New York Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton have written an open letter to the United States Senate, asking their colleagues to sign on to a letter to John Sexton calling for negotations between NYU and our union. GSOC members can aid in this effort by calling or emailing their senators and urging them to sign. You can find contact info for your senators at: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Calls and letters from concerned non-GSOC members would no doubt be helpful as well.

The full texts of both Shumer and Clinton’s open letter to the Senate and their letter to Sexton are below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dear President Sexton,

As an alumna of New York University (Ph.D. English, 1998), I receive the usual set of appeals for donations, both from the university’s annual giving fund and from other fundraising bodies within NYU. In the past, I have given, not much, but happily—both to the Friends of Bobst Library and to the annual fund—but I feel it is important to let you know why, until things change, my response to any and all such appeals will be not just “no” but “hell, no.”

I was admitted to NYU in 1993, as a post-master’s Ph.D. student. I was given absolutely nothing in the way of funding during my first year—no fellowship, no assistantship, no tuition remission. Poor advising and a real desire to be in New York led me to make a decision I now counsel all of my undergraduates against—I enrolled anyway, supporting myself through that first year on loans and freelance work. Because of this decision, I graduated from NYU $21,000 in debt, a debt that was accumulated at your institution alone.

That I managed to hold my debt to $21,000 was due in part to the teaching position I applied, interviewed, and was hired for in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) in 1994. At EWP, instructors—all of us post-master’s Ph.D. students, from across the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—taught two courses a semester. This is, of course, the same teaching load as that of full-time faculty at NYU. These were, furthermore, student-contact intensive positions, as we were teaching required first-year writing courses, and we instructors thus spent countless hours not simply in the classroom, in class preparation, or in grading, but in student conferences, in faculty development programs, and in the evaluation of required writing proficiency exams. For this work, we instructors were given tuition remission (those of us still doing coursework, in any case) and a stipend of less than $10,000 per year.

In New York City. For more than forty hours of work per week. Less than $10,000.

Needless to say, nearly all of us held down a second job as well, simply in order to eat. Many of my colleagues picked up teaching at other institutions around the city; some worked in publishing; others did tutoring or worked corporate jobs. All of this, of course, in addition to both being full-time graduate students and to teaching a full 2-2 load. I was lucky enough to find freelance work in electronic publishing, work that has not only helped me in my career since graduation, but that was sufficiently highly-paid that I was able to make ends meet.

In fact, during my fifth and final year at NYU, as I was on the academic job market, my freelance work had become lucrative and enjoyable enough that I decided to leave EWP. I made nearly $60,000 that year. (Of course, I took a significant pay cut when I landed an assistant professorship. But that’s another story.) More importantly, I spent no more than 40 hours per week working for pay, freeing up many hours for my own work. Given that ability to maintain better control of my time, I was able to finish my dissertation that year, spending a total of a year and a half on it.

The point of all of this history is to make clear exactly how the treatment of graduate instructors and teaching assistants affects their lives. All of us struggled to make ends meet. Most of us graduated in serious debt, debt that our future salaries—if we were lucky enough to land full-time professorial positions—would not easily cover. And many of us were put in the position of having to sacrifice our own studies, our coursework, our exams, and our writing, to our teaching. If we did so, it was because it was our job to do so, as employees engaged in the core mission of the institution—the education of undergraduates.

Things changed somewhat after I graduated: the English department moved toward a policy of accepting only those Ph.D. students to whom it could grant funding, for one thing. And the graduate students organized, and won recognition for their union (the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, or GSOC), successfully bargaining for a contract that dramatically improved their working conditions. I was enormously proud to have graduated from the first private U.S. university to recognize and bargain in good faith with its graduate employees union, and I was thrilled to think that students who followed behind me might not have to make the same difficult choices that I did, compromising the quality of their studies or taking on insupportable debt in the pursuit of a degree.

This pride made it all the more heartbreaking when it became clear that you were going to take advantage of the National Labor Relations Board’s politically motivated 2005 ruling in order to refuse contract-renewal negotiations with GSOC, and that, worse, you were going to use ugly strike-breaking and retaliatory tactics in an attempt to bust the union. That you still, months later, refuse to negotiate with the graduate employees, even when urged to do so by both U.S. Senators from your state, is an appalling display of pigheadedness on your part, and begins to suggest to me that NYU has become less educational in function—that “private university in the public service” that I put myself in debt to attend—than, as detailed by NYU Exposed, a giant corporation, one working to undermine job security through an increasing turn to underpaid adjunct labor, while simultaneously (and underhandedly) overcompensating its senior executives.

I did not go $21,000 in debt and work two full-time jobs in order to receive my doctorate from Wal-Mart.

With this letter, I want to add my voice to the many others, including not only many of your own faculty but also thousands of professors and graduate students around the world, as well as untold numbers of sympathetic citizens, urging you to resume good-faith negotiations with GSOC.

But I also want to note, very clearly, that until such time as you do, what modest donations I would have made to the university will instead be sent to the GSOC Strike Hardship Fund. Moreover, I’m going to urge my fellow alumni to do the same. And I will advise my undergraduates, 75% of whom go on to grad school in some form, not to apply to or attend NYU. They will certainly receive a better educational experience at an institution that values their labor appropriately.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor of English and Media Studies
Pomona College

P.S. A video detailing the history of the GSOC’s strike can be found here.

Again, via email:

To the Pomona College Community:

This afternoon, I received a phone call from the Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office of the FBI, who apologized for any disruption caused on our campus by the visit of two members of the Joint Task Force on Terrorism to Professor Miguel Tinker Salas’s office on Wednesday. He assured me that no intimidation was intended and that he regretted that the timing and location of the interview request suggested otherwise.

A short time later, the FBI’s Los Angeles Office released the attached public statement. There has been a great deal of media interest in these events, and I believe that these latest developments may be covered by several news channels this evening or this weekend.

We are grateful to all of you who have helped bring about this apology by virtue of your communications with professional colleagues and professional associations across the country. I am very sorry that our colleague was subjected to this treatment, and I’m sure you join me in hoping that we will not have a repetition of this kind of incident in the future.

David Oxtoby

The attached public statement:

For Immediate Release

DATE:  March 10, 2006

FBI STATEMENT REGARDING INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEW OF POMONA COLLEGE PROFESSOR

Agents of the FBI and its state, local and federal task force partners routinely conduct interviews in the course of daily activity.  Being interviewed by FBI Agents or Task Force Officers should not suggest wrongdoing on the part of the interviewee.  The FBI takes great pains to avoid publicity when interviews are conducted.

The FBI and its task force partners in state, local and federal agencies are mindful of the need to respect the circumstances that might surround the timing and location of an informational interview.  When requested to participate in interviews, individuals are free to indicate a preference regarding these issues. 

With regard to the interview of the professor, the purpose of the interview was to seek information.  There was no intent on the part of the FBI, regarding the timing or location, to place the professor, his students or Pomona College in an uncomfortable situation.

I’m not quite sure that rises to the level of an apology, given the (mighty blatant, to my surprise) note of desire to avoid publicity, but I guess we take what we can get.  Thanks to any of you whose outrage helped provoke a response, and remember, when requested to participate in interviews, you are free to indicate a preference regarding these issues.