Sullivan's Laws

Question of the Day: How could a university president hired from the outside who's only been on the job for two years inspire such fierce loyalty that faculty, students, staff, and alumni from all over the state would interrupt their lives and summers to stage a mass insurrection against an ill-conceived and badly managed plot by a corporate board to force her to resign?

Answer for the Ages: It's right here, in a WaPo story on how hard University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, a leader with a "relationship-based, relationship-centered presidency," worked in those two years to win hearts and minds in Charlottesville. You should go read the whole story, but here's the money quote:

From the start, Sullivan outlined what she called “Sullivan’s laws”: Never surprise an administrator. Never punish the messenger. Don’t hide bad news; meet it head-on. People and time are our greatest resources; don’t waste them. When dealing with a difficult matter, don’t leave anyone out, or else be prepared for fallout.

We'll pause here briefly while you all swoon over such inspiring common sense from an academic administrator who gets that strong, effective leadership is first and foremost about listening. And honesty. Crazy! No wonder they wanted to dump her!

Also, however, I'm thinking someone should take that sentence about dealing with difficult matters and needlepoint it onto a pillow for Rector Helen Dragas, who could definitely use a lesson or two in fallout avoidance. Don't leave anyone out, especially if the person you are thinking of leaving out is, like, a rockstar/goddess among the group of people who will be most affected by the decision you are secretly engineering! Why? Because inclusivity is cheaper than paying Hill & Knowlton to clean up your mess!

AnyHoos, UVA's Board of Visitors meets at 3 this afternoon to vote on Sullivan's possible reinstatement. (WaPo games out how the voting is likely to go here.) Paws and fingers in Roxie's World are crossed that cool heads and common sense will prevail as the Board goes for its big do-over. We recommend that you follow the action on Twitter, which has been an amazing source of real-time information throughout the crisis at UVA. Even if you are not among the Twitterati, you can search on the hashtag #UVA for the latest tweets. By the way, WaPo has done a swell job on this story. You'd almost think they were still a serious newspaper, with actual reporters and everything. Srsly. Props to higher education reporters Daniel de Vise, Jenna Johnson, Anita Kumar, and Donna St. George for thorough, thoughtful coverage.

Peace out, Jeffersonians, and if there's any doubt as to where this blog stands on the matter of The People v. Helen Dragas, let us dispel it now:

In Praise of Incrementalism

At some point in grad school, Moose acquired a postcard that has been on a bulletin board in one of her offices or another ever since. It must capture a popular sentiment, because thirty-ish years later the card is still available on the interwebs. Here 'tis:

Moose has shown this image to generations of students slogging their way through the often torturously slow process of researching and writing a dissertation. It's an image that pops into her head every time she hears some pin-headed administrator shriek about the urgency of reducing time to degree, as if doctoral programs were assembly lines that could crank out PhDs as efficiently as Detroit once cranked out cars. It's an image that also seems relevant to the story that has rocked public higher education over the past couple of weeks, the ouster of Teresa A. Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia just two years after being unanimously elected to the post by the university's Board of Visitors. Though details of what led to Sullivan's forced resignation remain murky, Board Rector Helen Dragas and (now former) Vice Rector Mark Kington, who spearheaded the move to dump Sullivan, clearly felt the new president wasn't moving quickly enough to make changes they felt were needed, particularly with regard to online education. When Sullivan addressed the Board eight days after her resignation was announced, she offered a full-throated defense of her record and leadership style:

I have been described as an incrementalist. It is true. Sweeping action may be gratifying and may create the aura of strong leadership, but its unintended consequences may lead to costs that are too high to bear. There has been substantial change on Grounds in the past two years, and this change is laying the groundwork for greater change. But it has all been carefully planned and executed in collaboration with Vice Presidents and Deans and representatives of the faculty. This is the best, most constructive, most long lasting, and beneficial way to change a university.  Until the last ten days, the change at UVA has not been disruptive change, and it has not been high-risk change. 

Corporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a great university. Sustained change with buy-in does work. UVA is one of the world's greatest universities. 

Being an incrementalist does not mean that I lack vision. My vision was clearly outlined in my strategic vision statement. It encompasses the thoughts developed by me and my team as to what UVA can become in the 21st century and parts of it were incorporated into the budget narrative that you adopted last month.

Sullivan may yet end up retaining her position, which, in our humble opinion, would be about the coolest thing to happen in higher ed since the invention of the three-ring binder (in 1886).  However it resolves, this kerfuffle is well worth the amount of time, attention, and brilliant. satirical. energy it has taken up lately. (The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent archive of coverage of Sullivan's ouster and the aftermath, just in case you've been under a rock and need to get caught up. To its credit, UVA also has an archive of official university responses and news coverage.)

The intensity of the reaction on Grounds, as they snootily quaintly say in Charlottesville, and the fury directed at the BOV's lack of transparency (not to mention decency) have been encouraging and inspiring to those of us who have been chafing for years under the yoke of the "corporate-style, top-down leadership" that has come to dominate so many campuses. Sullivan's direct assault on that model in her statement to the BOV is surprising only because most high-level campus administrators are sufficiently drunk on corporate Kool-Aid that they rarely speak unvarnished truth in public. We're accustomed to hearing such critiques from cranky bloggers and other malcontents, but university presidents these days are cheerleaders whose relentless happy talk in the face of budget cuts and declining wages for faculty and staff demonstrates that they are far more interested in protecting the brand than in telling the truth. Sullivan's defense of incremental change, achieved through deliberate, consultative, and collaborative processes, is a slap in the face to a board that operated largely in secret and seemingly on impulse in reaching one of the most consequential decisions within its power to make. It is also, however, a stirring reminder of how, ideally, universities operate. Presidents, though they are hired and fired by corporate boards, are faculty members, too. They may be perched atop their campus's administrative hierarchy, but the principles and mechanisms of shared governance mean that they are also accountable to those they lead. They can't succeed without buy-in from those further down the chain of command.

Our blog boyfriend Chris Newfield argues, in an otherwise flawless analysis of the UVA debacle, that Sullivan erred in "describing her collaborative method as incremental and conservative. This kind of rhetoric allows the Board to define her as slow and inadequate in a time of rapid change, and to justify executive authority as that which is bold and decisive." Newfield is right that we "cannot afford any longer to allow academic work and administration to fall into the innovation trap, which casts as anti-innovation anyone who appears to oppose innovation as defined largely by information technology corporations in their equally turbulent and oligarchic markets." He's also right that we should "concede nothing" to management twits and should make the case that "forms of reciprocal and relatively egalitarian collaboration generate richer, deeper knowledge and more creative and robust solutions than does the thin knowledge and compulsive changes of tack of externally-focused managers who respond to the influence that seems most powerful at a given moment."

All true, but there is still joy in Roxie's World over Sullivan's unapologetic embrace of the term incrementalist. Our own campus is filled these days with ear-piercing calls for innovation and entrepreneurship. We've had a number of conversations recently about the importance of laying claim to those terms and making sure that the work we do and the values we cherish don't get lost in the race to prove that universities are all about what is new and cool and innovative and revenue-generating. In our view, the tougher yet deeply important challenge is to insist that incrementalism and innovation are not necessarily opposing terms. We need both on campus, and we shouldn't be shy about saying so. Universities are and always have been engines of innovation. All that hoo-ha about what goes on in our laboratories, hospitals, and performance studios isn't just hoo-ha. It's an accurate description of the incredibly bold, original, world-transforming work that goes on at research universities every day. At the same time, incrementalism is a deeply ingrained aspect of academic culture, perhaps because it is a deeply ingrained habit of the academic mind. We may be innovators, but we are also scholars. We tend to be deliberate and studious, not reluctant to change but not impulsive about it either. We are accustomed to working through mechanisms of review that can take months and even years to conclude.

Yes, we are tempted at times to echo the impatient Miranda Priestly's sardonic, "By all means move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me," because the wheels of university bureaucracies do grind slowly and can be an impediment to needed change. On balance, though, incrementalism works, both to subject ideas to rigorous examination and to include more rather than fewer voices in a collaborative process of change. Such processes may move relatively slowly, but they reduce the risk of an outcome as devastating to morale and reputation as, for example, the impetuous move engineered and approved by too few members of UVA's Board of Visitors a couple of weeks ago. Rector Helen Dragas's declaration that "the days of incremental decision-making in higher education are over, or should be" sounds hollow, self-interested, and just plain wrong-headed in light of the damage done to the institution by her callous, hasty judgment and corner-cutting maneuvering. Whatever happens to President Sullivan or Rector Dragas, Mr. Jefferson's university will be years recovering from the wholly avoidable catastrophe of the past two weeks.

In some sense, supporters of public higher education should be grateful for what has transpired in Charlottesville in recent days. It has been extraordinary to watch as faculty, students, alumni, and the campus senate rose in defense of their leader, their institution, and a "community of trust" that they see as having been violated. We can all learn from these powerful examples of passionate yet mostly respectful dissent. It has also been fascinating to watch the various players make their claims to UVA's illustrious founder as the drama has unfolded. Few institutions are as vitally connected to a founder and his legacy as UVA is. You believe it when a news story gushes that "students refer to . . . Thomas Jefferson as if the third U.S. president were a close friend." You feel a pang of envy and try to imagine who, in a similar crisis, members of your own campus community might turn to for inspiration and advice. The segregationist football coach/president for whom the stadium in the middle of campus is named? Probably not. The famous alum whose most significant recent accomplishment appears to be having served as a judge for the Miss Universe pageant? Tempting, but no. Then it hits you: If you need a defender of incrementalism, then you're lucky to be on a campus covered with turtles. Slow but steady wins the race, dudes.

Paws up to all our pals in Charlottesville, who have worked so hard and righteously to marshall support for the cause and share the local angle on the story. Your teachable moment has taught all of us who care about higher ed a lot about how to organize and communicate in the midst of totally unexpected turmoil. We stand with you and wish you well in your struggle. Peace out.

(From WaPo: 6/18/12. University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan makes her way up the steps of the Rotunda to address the Board of Visitors closed meeting. Norm Shafer, Washington Post)

Feel the Burn(out)

If Jane Fonda were an academic blogger, she'd be feeling the burn(out) right now. The signs of it are everywhere -- and here, in this little blog, which has sounded a lot like this lately:

 
am crickets 03 hpx

The few proffie types who are blogging are blogging about how hard it is to blog right now, and comment threads are exploding with confessions and doubts and explanations and exhortations -- all signs of a veritable virtual existential crisis. Who are we? Why are we doing this? Why don't we stop? How can we keep going? Is it a seasonal affective disorder that temporarily has us in a funk? The school year is winding down, after all, and we are all overwhelmed with the madness of the academic spring. Or is something deeper going on? Are we coming to a fork in a road or -- perish the thought -- to the end of some line we've all been riding -- writing -- individually and collectively? Sorry to go all blog-apocalyptic on you, but you know something serious is going on when you see our dear (though unmet) friend Historiann casually declaring in a comment over at Undine's that she is "out of ideas."

Srsly, girlfriend? You? Matron saint of academic blog sass and savvy? Who for nearly five years has posted so regularly that we figured you were knocking back some secret blogger's equivalent of Metamucil out there in the high desert? Out of ideas? Cowgirl, that's like saying the ocean has run out of water. Or, to choose a metaphor more appropriate to your style and sensibility, that's like saying there ain't no ponies left in the corral worth saddling up and riding out. There's plenty of fine ponies left, Historiann, and we bet you'll get your giddyup back just as soon as the dust settles on the semester and  you have a chance to take a good look at the corral again.

For the record, here's part of what I had to say over at Undine's on the subject of whatever kind of crisis might be going on in the blogging community of which we are a part:

I think blogs (and bloggers) go through energy crises as well as identity crises. My blog has wrestled some with identity issues ever since I complicated our narrative set up by dying. (Hey, I say to my typist, you think it sucks for YOU? Being dead is no fun for me, ya know!) Recently, the energy crisis has been more relevant. My typist has had an insanely busy academic year. Her commitment to Lifestyle Adjustment also means that she's less willing to sit in a chair trolling the interwebs for pretty pictures or stuff to get pissed off about. If forced to choose -- and she often is these days -- she'll sometimes choose to go for a run rather than work on a post. As a result, posts at my place have gotten shorter and less frequent in recent months. 

Like Crazy, we're not thinking of shutting down, though the thought has crossed our minds. Still, our small but devoted band of readers sticks with us and we enjoy their company. We'll keep keeping on, one way or another.

We have noted before that blogs have life cycles. They come and go as bloggers' lives and interests change. We try not to get too caught up in the temptation to make Grand Proclamations about Technology, Communication, and the Future of Civilization every time some new social media toy comes along that is so much cooler, funner, faster, and easier than blogging. The question for us remains what it has always been: What is the best tool for any particular communicative/strategic goal? How can we say what needs saying and maybe throw in some eye candy and a joke or two?

Still, if we were prone to speculate, we might say that academic blogging that is not strictly speaking academic -- i.e., not directly related to developing or promoting a scholar's research -- may be under unusual pressure these days from at least two sources. One is the stress all workers in higher education feel from the labor conditions endemic to the regime of Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises LLC): stagnating or declining wages, increased work loads, rising insecurity due to the erosion of tenure. A lot of academic blogging that isn't strictly speaking academic arose in response to such conditions. It has served as a valuable means of sharing knowledge and building alliances across institutions, but those who produce it must do so during their incredible shrinking "leisure" time. We began blogging because it was fun and fascinating -- and when I say "we" I mean my typist, who has tenure in a Research 1 school and has been splitting her time between teaching and directing a small (i.e., resource-starved), interdisciplinary program for the past ten years. As mobile technologies have blurred the lines between work and leisure time and administrative demands proliferate in the age of No Dean Life Behind, few academics ever feel that they are not in some sense at work. How do you blog when the tool you would use to do it also holds all those reports you ought to be writing, all those e-mails someone thinks you should be answering?

Another source of pressure on bloggers arises from the fact that even as academic standards are slowly shifting to acknowledge the realities of a post-print culture that is producing "new venues for research, communication, and the creation of networked academic communities" (yay, MLA!), blogging is still devalued as a non-serious product of the non-peer reviewed internets. Bloggers aren't "builders" and so rank low on the hierarchy of values Stephen Ramsay constructed for the field of digital humanities early in 2011. Stanley Fish is so contemptuous of blogging that he makes a public spectacle of his resistance to acknowledging he himself is doing it, even from the lofty perch of The New York Times rather than down here with the riffraff of Wordpress and -- horrors! -- Blogger:

This is a blog. There, I’ve said it. I have been resisting saying it — I have always referred to this space as a “column” — not only because “blog” is an ugly word (as are clog, smog and slog), but because blogs are provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last; whereas in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine.

Oh, it sucks to be you, doesn't it, Mr. Fish? Denied monumentality, stuck in this icky, ephemeral, interactive space filled with ugly words and pajama-clad wiseacres with the audacity to disagree with you. Yeah, you're just one low-rent cat video away from realizing that you, too, are free to go yet immobile in the realm of the provisional. Deal with it, Stan.

Everybody hates blogging, it would appear. Fish hates it for lacking "authority" and "disciplinary power." Ramsay turns up his nose because blogging isn't "making anything." Really? "Build, therefore, your own world," Emerson urges in Nature. Moose says that's what she set out to do in establishing this quirky little outpost in the blogosphere. Haters gonna hate, of course, but she still thinks it's one of the coolest things she's ever built, and she doesn't much care if it fits into anybody's system of rewards.

Burned out? Maybe a little. Fading away? Never, darlings. We're here for you, in bits and pieces and in the moments we manage to steal away from all the things we are supposed to be doing. How deep is our love? It's 12:57 on a Tuesday morning, and we are about to press "Publish." For you, my pretties. Because we belong to you and me, don't we? Of course we do. Peace out.

Excellence Without Money: Jersey Style

Today is my typist's birthday, so we've given her the day off and offer for your edification a very special guest post from someone we'll call Old Jersey Professor. S/he's got the scoop on some higher educational news of interest and import from the Moms' old stomping grounds, the Garden State. There's a storm raging on the Turnpike over a proposal to break up Rutgers University and merge the Camden campus with Rowan University. How controversial is the proposal? The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg is calling for a federal investigation into whether the deal "had been 'crafted to benefit powerful political interests without regard for the impact on students.'" We're grateful for this eyewitness report straight from the heart of Jersey. Pay attention, kids -- Your school could be next.

Take it away, "Old Jersey Professor!"

* * *

Excellence without money? That’s so 2011. In 2012 in New Jersey we have a new slogan: “To save education you have to destroy it.” That is the goal of Governor Chris Christie. In January his hand-picked commission came up with a proposal to hand over Rutgers Camden, part of Rutgers, one of 61 AAU universities in North America, to Rowan University, a comprehensive university over 20 miles away from the Camden campus. Why? Well, it has nothing to do with education and everything to do with, yep, money.

Rowan University, at the behest of New Jersey political boss George Norcross, absorbed Cooper Medical School and turned it from a 2-year part of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey into a 4-year medical school starting in the fall of 2012. (For more about George Norcross watch our former governor explain him to some Girl Scouts.) There is a reason some folks refer to New Jersey as Swamp Land.

And guess what? Cooper is broke. It relies on the state for funding and has bonds one step above junk grade.

The solution, according to the political bosses, is to take over Rutgers Camden so that Rowan-Cooper can use its cash flow to borrow money at better rates. And yes, of course, the governor and his political cronies are covering up this naked cash grab with talk of creating a bigger and better university in southern New Jersey. When politicians talk about improving education, lock up your wallet, and your children.

When folks object to us calling this move a “hostile takeover” we just switch to Anschluss. And when our friends say, "Well, that’s just New Jersey," we say, “Have you been paying attention to what is happening to public education in this country?” Your bond rating or your endowment just might be bait for some of your own political “leaders.” On March 22 Rowan released what it called a plan and we call a fantasy. It is “take the money and run” and not of the Woody Allen variety. The proposal is to grab the money (all of Rutgers Camden and its assets) fourteen months after a legislated takeover and then it promises to figure out how to create a research university -- there are no details, there is no budget, it is the land of hope and dreams . . . and not of the Bruce variety.

And hey, speaking of “the Boss,” yes, he’s a Jersey guy and the students have reached out to him with this wonderful video:

We are organized! Our wonderful students created an online petition and a fabulous website. The alumni are raising money and running advertisements, and our union Rutgers AAUP/AFT helped everyone get organized and on message and provided funds for the leaflets and the lawn signs. We’ve got faculty from four schools -- business, law, nursing, and arts and sciences -- on the job, writing briefs, digging into budgets, organizing the community, and putting out statements to the press. Our administration stood up and said “No,” hosting two town hall meetings preceded by demonstrations. The media gave us good coverage, and everyone spoke up at meetings of the Rutgers Board of Governors and Board of Trustees. Two Facebook support groups keep everyone informed. Our information page is updated several times a day (though it has been hacked, so you might not get there), and we’ve created our own not-for-profit group to raise money for our ad buys, lobbying, and, if need be, litigation.

All this has helped to bridge a bit of a generation gap. Turning to a younger colleague, I said, “This is so much easier than sixties organizing when we didn’t have cell phones or computers.” He replied, “I was born in 1970!” Wow -- where did the time go? A student asked me about my Twitter feed and I had to confess that no, I don’t tweet. Younger folks are all over social media, but everyone can give interviews, write press releases, lobby, share hugs, raise money and attend legislative hearings. Damn we are good!

But will we prevail? I think so. We don’t have lawyers, guns, and money, as the late Warren Zevon put it, but we do have lawyers, smarts, and damn good fundraising skills. Roxie -- I’ll update you on this. In the meantime, please go sign our petition. We hope to hit 13,000 signatures soon!

* * *

(Image Credit: Via)

Thanks again, Old Jersey Prof. And remember, kids, as the Boss says, "Nobody wins unless everybody wins."  This fight is our fight, too. Hang in there, Jersey boys, girls, and critters. We are with you!

Image Doctoring, Without Photoshop

Screen Caps of Actual University of California, Davis websites on the morning of November 22, 2011:

(The university's home page)

(The English department's home page)

The image mavens of Roxie's World have a healthy respect for the work of universities' marketing and communications divisions. For all our snarking about doublespeak and gutlessness on campus, we appreciate the challenges of creating identities for institutions of higher education and promoting them like crazy in the marketplace. (Seriously, kids -- The Moms have drawers full of QTU tee-shirts, and Moose has a Queer the Turtle sticker on her laptop. She came up with that slogan and fought hard for the right to use it. Don Draper's got nothing on Moose.)

Truth be told, we even respect the need to protect the brand/reputation of an institution during a moment of crisis -- which explains why my typist was frantically screen-capping these images of UC Davis websites this morning before they disappear. They strike us as particularly compelling examples of institutional communication in a context of crisis. A click on that "I'm Here to Apologize" bubble superimposed on the photo of Davis Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi speaking yesterday at an assembly on the Quad takes you to an information-rich page that includes a gallery of high-quality photos from the rally as well as links to reports on the latest developments in the unfolding story (e.g., reaction from UC President Mark Yudof, announcement that campus police chief Annette Spicuzza has been placed on administrative leave while the pepper-spraying incident is being investigated). Sure, it's all butt-covering and strategery, but to our eyes the whole package does a decent job of reporting on events in a fairly neutral fashion. We give Davis credit for giving such prominence on the home page to Katehi's apology with a strong image that bumps all the happy talk off the screen. We're not sure the effort will save Katehi's job -- but then again that's probably not the goal. The aim here is to show that the institution is making a sincere effort to make amends for an outrageously over-the-top response to student protest. Katehi is, for the moment, the face of that institutional response. It seems appropriate to feature her in this fashion.

The English profs, dog love them, take a different tack, using the home page of the department's website to echo demands for Katehi's resignation and the disbanding of the campus police department. It's astonishing, really, in the age of top-down message management, to see such a powerful example of off-the-reservation communication. Paws up to you, lit critters, for using your website to go all righteous and truth-to-power-y in the midst of crisis. We appreciate your candor, and we wish we had time to go trolling around to see what other Davis departments are doing with their websites. But we don't, alas.

We also sincerely regret that we didn't screen cap Penn State's home page at the height of the Jerry Sandusky/Joe Pa nightmare, but if you look at that (badly designed) site now you'll see a lot of tepid gobbledygook about "moving forward." It may be harder to talk about allegations of child sex abuse than a rogue cop with a spray can, but we think Davis kicks Penn State's a$$ communications-wise in this instance. What do you think, darlings?

Oh, and if you still haven't gotten your fill of Photoshopped images of the Man With the Can, go here, where you will find things like this to brighten up your day:

Don't say we never gave you nothin', my pretties. Peace out.

UC Davis Link Farm

Offered Without an Iota of Schadenfreude. Not Even a Whiff. OK, Maybe the Tiniest Scintilla, From the Department of There But for the Grace of Photoshop Goes You:

(Image via.)

November 2011 seems on track to be the Worst Month Evah for higher ed administrators in the age of Excellence Without Money -- Or Decency. Or, It Appears, a Lick of Sense. First we had the catastrophic failure of leadership in the Penn State intergenerational "horseplay" in the shower scandal. Now the interwebs are on fire with video and commentary on an incident Friday at the University of California, Davis in which campus police in riot gear used pepper spray on students who were peacefully demonstrating in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. The police were there on orders from Chancellor Linda Katehi, an engineer with impressive hair and, it seems, a bias against tents. No, wait, she has a bias against really bad publicity. Wevs, kids, she does have great hair. We're hoping she also has an up to date CV and a moving van on speed dial, just in case the chorus of calls for her resignation doesn't subside with news of investigations of the incident and suspensions of the spray-happy cops.

As a public service to our readers, we've collected some awesome bits of instant analysis by folks who are much better than we are at figuring things out while they are happening. We consider all of these must-reads for anyone who is wondering if Occupy Education has a serious shot at challenging the profoundly destructive set of values and management principles that have dominated campus administrations in recent years. And isn't that, like, everybody? Click away, dears, and get ready for the revolution. Here's hoping your campus is next -- and that your administrators will rise to rather than fall down upon the occasion.

• Nathan Brown, "Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi" (an untenured English prof calls on the chancellor of his campus to resign)
• Michael Chorost, "The Turning Point: The Moral Example of UC Davis Students, and Occupy Wall Street" (a powerful reading of the video of the students being pepper sprayed and what it shows about "contempt from those in power and the wanton use of force against the powerless")
• Cathy Davidson, "Why This is a Gettysburg Address Moment for Higher Education" (a passionate call upon university administrators to find the moral high ground and side with students fighting for their future and the future of higher ed)
• Angus Johnston, "Ten Things You Should Know About Friday’s UC Davis Police Violence" (from a historian of American student activism)
• Chris Newfield, "Links -- Special Sunday Edition" (fallout from the pepper spraying incident)
• Bob Ostertag, "Militarization of Campus Police" (from another member of the Davis faculty)
• Comment passed along but not authored by Gayatri Spivak, "On the UC Davis Mobilizations" (a brilliant reading of Chancellor Katehi's "Walk of Shame" after Saturday's news conference)
• Kristin Stoneking, "Why I Walked Chancellor Katehi Out of Surge II Tonight" (a beautiful reflection from a campus minister who was called in to mediate between the students and the chancellor and who escorted Katehi from the building to her car [link is to a Facebook note -- not sure if non-FB folk will be able to access])

Below is the video of that long, silent walk, which is as powerful, eerie, and inspiring as others have said it is. Watching it, it's hard not to feel that something truly extraordinary is happening. Young people, who have such cause to lash out in anger, choose instead to summon the righteous power of nonviolence and silence. Katehi walks slowly past them with her elegant coif and her perfectly arranged scarf, her hands gracefully interlocked in front of her, giving her walk of shame something of the look of a perp walk. To her credit, Katehi does not avoid the gazes of the students seated along the edges of the sidewalk. She looks at them. You can imagine them, in the darkness, looking back at her. And in the mutuality of those gazes, you may dare to suppose that something decent might be born: the chance for genuine dialogue, collaboration, and transformation.

At least, that's the way it looks to us, from a few thousand miles away, on the Sunday night before Chancellor Katehi and all those students meet again, in the different light of Monday. Watch the vid and tell us what you see and think and imagine, my darlings. As always, we long to know.

(Here is a longer version of the vid that shows the couple of minutes before Katehi exited the building. The students use the human microphone to arrange the scene and clarify the plan. As the comment passed along by Spivak notes, this version "shows how deliberate and well orchestrated the silence was.")

[Post corrected to reflect that Gayatri Spivak was not the author of a letter previously attributed to her and published on trinketization.]

Penn State Link Farm

(NB: If catching up on the Penn State scandal is part of your weekend plans, WaPo has a handy tick-tock story in today's paper that summarizes events since the release of the grand jury's indictments last Friday afternoon. The grand jury's report is here, but it is not for the faint of heart. Trigger warning for graphic details of child sexual abuse and men in positions of authority behaving badly.)

What can a humble dog blog say that hasn't already been said about the sordid news out of Penn State University this week about an alleged sexual predator protected and enabled for years by an athletics department and a university administration in thrall to a legendary coach and the economic power of big-time football? What do we see when we gaze at the seal of the neighboring school a few hours to the north and take American culture's latest Rorschach test?

Mostly, we see what others have seen:

Disturbing evidence that universities do a terrible job of handling sexual violence and harassment by responding to them as private, internal matters, as Tenured Radical points out in her excellent post on the scandal. Lesboprof also focuses on the administration's failure to notify police of what was obviously a criminal matter in a post that every college administrator on earth ought to read. Historiann weighs in briefly but generates a long and lively discussion thread full of thoughtful comments and good links in response to her point that the administrative failure in this case was gendered male, as all of the coaches, directors, university lawyers, and presidents whose actions protected the alleged predator rather than his young victims were men. Jennifer Doyle points out that laws that require universities to investigate and act upon allegations of sexual abuse or harassment have done little to change "the culture of silence" that serves to shame victims and enable perpetrators on campus.

Possible evidence, particularly in the pro-Paterno riots that occurred on the Penn State campus Wednesday night, of uniquely American forms of idiocy having to do with sports, idol worship, and other vulgar things. For that perspective, see Eric Wilbur, Jon Stewart, and Margaret Soltan, who focuses not on the riots but on the "stupidity" that overtakes a campus dominated by football. Of course, QTU is a school where "rioting" is as commonplace as plagiarism, so the Moms are a little less horrified by this particular behavior than others are. Gather a bunch of kids stirred up about something, bring in a few cops decked out in their Darth Vader costumes, get a couple of cameras rolling, and -- presto! -- you've got a riot on your hands. Still, we doubled over laughing at Andy Borowitz's somber announcement that the board of trustees at Penn State had responded to the rioting by replacing the entire 40,000-member student body with an interim student body: “After careful consideration, we decided we had to make a change,” said trustee Harley Manvers. “Hopefully, these interim students won’t be such jackasses.”

Y'all know we are fans of college sports here in Roxie's World. (Indeed, the Moms are washing tee-shirts and polishing up the pom-poms in preparation for the season's first trip to the Comcastle tomorrow, where they'll see if their beloved [and 11th-ranked!] Lady Terps can avenge last year's NCAA Tournament loss to Georgetown.) Nonetheless, we've grown increasingly concerned in recent years by the sense that the athletics sides of the campus in Division I schools are worlds unto themselves, operating by a different set of rules than the rest of us and not really accountable to anyone. To us, one of the most telling details in the Penn State saga is that President Graham Spanier and some members of the board had tried to get Joe Paterno to retire at the end of the 2004 season, and he refused. Joe Pa maintained a similarly arrogant "You are not the boss of me" attitude until the bitter end, as he announced Wednesday that he would retire at the end of this season and appeared to order the board of trustees not to spend "a single minute discussing my status." That seems to have been the last straw for the board, which announced his firing late that night.

Penn State's difficulty breaking up with Paterno reminded Moose of the Sturm und Drang that arose at her undergrad alma mater back in 2000 when the late Myles Brand, then president of Indiana University, fired the school's legendary basketball coach, Bob Knight. Sports Illustrated columnist Stewart Mandel noted that parallel in a post on the dangers of turning coaches into idols who answer to no one. Mandel argues that fans are partly to blame for what happened at Penn State, their worship encouraging Paterno's arrogance and his bosses' diffidence. Richard Vedder, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, considers possible solutions for the lack of accountability, including the radical yet intriguing idea that universities might "get out of the commercial intercollegiate business, perhaps by spinning off their athletic operations to separate for-profit companies (which could be sold to the public), largely erasing the fiction of the 'student athlete' that exists in the more commercial sports such as football and basketball."

We don't see big schools getting out of the sports business anytime soon, because, of course, the revenue and the brand buzz generated by athletics are desperately needed in the age of Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC). In the end, for us, the many facets of this tragedy -- sexual coercion, catastrophic failures in oversight, rioting fans -- come together in a phrase that kept running through Moose's mind as she contemplated the events of this sad week. That phrase might be taken as the unspoken motto of the neoliberal university: Live by the brand, die by the brand. Jerry Sandusky was protected by his close, nearly forty-year association with Joe Paterno, who was not just a legend but the public face and foundation of the Penn State brand. Tarnish the brand, and the whole shaky financial edifice might come tumbling down. Such thinking encourages the diffidence and denial that appears to have been rampant among administrators in State College, including, it pains us to say, Graham Spanier, who has been one of the good guys of American higher ed for many years. We are sorry to see his tenure as president end on such a negative note.

Live by the brand, die by the brand: Bloomberg is reporting that Moody's Investors Service will look into downgrading Penn State's revenue-bond rating in view of the likelihood of "lawsuits, weaker student demand, decreased philanthropic support, changes in its relationship with the state, and management moves" in the wake of the scandal. Sometimes, it would appear, the most strenuous efforts to avoid reputational and financial risk end up producing precisely what they intended to avoid. That's worth keeping in mind, as we all seek to learn "the lessons of Penn State."

The Care and Feeding of Adjuncts

Another Episode in the Unfolding Academic Melodrama We Call Excellence Without Money: Hard Times in Higher Ed

QTU has been in the throes of one of those periodic policy tizzies brought about when a butt-covering well-intentioned board of regents seeks to appear to address a problem by coming up with a one-size-fits-all solution and imposing it on a complex system of institutions of varying sizes and missions. (Let's call it the University System of Turtle Country.) The policy, as you might have guessed from the title of this post, has to do with the employment of adjunct faculty. The BOR approved a system-wide policy in December 2010 and charged institutions to come up with implementation plans by November 1, 2011, which explains the recent tizzy on the campus of QTU. (Oh, and the policy defines "adjunct" as a non-salaried, non-tenure-track member of the instructional faculty hired to teach specific courses and compensated on a course-by-course basis.)

Before we go any further, we will pause to remind you that this blog has a long history of opposing what our epic animated short feature, Excellence Without Money: The Movie, eloquently describes as "the wage slavery of adjunctification." We consider the slow but steady erosion of tenured and tenure-track positions and the accompanying rise of non-tenure-track and part-time positions to be one of the more disastrous results of the defunding of higher education that has occurred in recent decades. Our pal Tenured Radical describes wage stagnation and the shrinking of the tenure-eligible faculty as evidence of "the casualization of academic labor." In our view, students and institutions were better served by a system in which most of the instructional workload was shouldered by full-time, tenured or tenure-eligible faculty who had strong incentives to work hard and creatively in order to achieve job security and to be loyal to the department and school that offered it.

Nonetheless, that happy world is largely gone. (For the Modern Language Association's latest report on its disappearance, go here.) Adjunctification is not a temporary aberration but a permanent and defining feature of the brutish neoliberal university. Given that troubling yet inescapable fact, one would think that any serious effort to examine and address employment conditions for non-tenure-track faculty would be applauded by the bleeding heart tenured radicals of Roxie's World. For far too long, after all, avoidance and denial about what was happening to the academic workforce have kept us from acknowledging the explosive growth in a class of workers that are treated as the pack mules of academe. We largely ignored them, and we ignored the harsh and often humiliating conditions in which they worked.

In that respect, then, yes, the regents deserve credit for breaking an unconscionable silence and trying to set a baseline to assure that adjuncts throughout the system are treated with a modicum of professional respect. Many requirements of the new policy are laudable and, you know, humane, if you think access to a university e-mail account can be considered humane. Beyond the no-brainers (e.g., access to telephones, office supplies, and "appropriate space" for meeting with students during office hours), the policy mandates what are basically kill fees for classes that are canceled less than 30 days before the start of the semester if the adjunct contracted to teach the course can't be reassigned to a comparable course. The fee is just 10% of the contracted payment amount for the course, but that's enough to make departments think twice before canceling a class. Managing schedules and seats is a departmental responsibility, after all. Adjuncts shouldn't have to pay for someone else's poor planning.

So far, so bueno, right? How is it, then, you may be wondering, that this new policy ends up being tarred by this humble blog as an example of Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC)? Easy peasy, my pretties. Aside from the kill fees, the policy delicately sidesteps the issue that makes the life of an adjunct so uniquely hellish: the shockingly low levels of compensation for work that institutions of higher education claim to value so highly. The policy's major statement on compensation is 100% weaselly: "Every effort should be made to make adjunct faculty compensation professionally appropriate and competitive to the extent allowed by available fiscal resources (emphasis added).

Curiously, the policy establishes a new class system among adjuncts, creating categories of "Adjunct Faculty I" and "Adjunct Faculty II" that sound a lot to us like the old plantation system's distinction between field slaves and house slaves. Adjunct II's (who become eligible for that category by establishing a consistent record of high-quality instruction over multiple semesters) would get priority consideration in teaching assignments (OK, so maybe it's more like a frequent flyer program than a plantation) and would be assured of making at least 10% more than the minimum per-course compensation rate at the institution. That sounds pretty decent, but, as it turns out, the Adjunct II designation would be available to almost no one on the QTU campus because of the way loads are calculated. (It's one of those boring, opaque questions of FTEs and other bureaucratic mysteries. Take our word for it, will you?)

But guess what would apply to all adjuncts, both field and house, and the units that employ them. Say it with us, darlings: PERFORMANCE EVALUATION! Yes, it's true. The new policy, in the interest, of course, of supporting professional development for adjunct faculty, requires units to develop procedures for evaluating adjunct faculty performance on a regular schedule. As QTU has moved toward implementation of the policy, the regents' somewhat vague call for procedures has been interpreted to require, not just class visits and student evaluations, but what amounts to a full-on teaching portfolio for every single adjunct. Individual instructors will be largely responsible for developing those portfolios, though the employing units will have lots of new work to do in terms of collecting documents and data and conducting/reporting on class visits. Moose is really looking forward to implementing this policy in her itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie queer studies program, in which the turnover rate among adjuncts is so high that she fully expects to be conducting performance reviews for instructors who will likely have disappeared before she's even had a chance to read their heartfelt statement of teaching philosophy. Oh, the fun just never stops, does it?

Here's the thing, kids: We are not opposed to evaluation or professionalization of the adjunct workforce. We are, however, violently opposed to increasing the burden of work on adjuncts and the understaffed units that tend to employ them without meaningful increases in compensation or resources. New policies that create new work under the guise of assuring high quality and continuous improvement while blithely ignoring the not insignificant problem of available fiscal resources are, sadly, exactly what you would expect in the age of Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC). Such policies can only add to the stress and demoralization of everyone who has to hold up or jump through the new hoops established by them.

Tenured Radical recently called on her comrades in the academic blogosphere to "find a way to Occupy Education." We offer this post in support of that worthy cause. Write back and let us know what's happening on your campus with regard to the wage slavery of adjunctification. One step toward changing the world is acknowledging what's happening in your particular corner of it. So tell us what's happening on your plantation in your neck of the woods. We are eager, as always, to hear from you.

Mammaries of Irene

Cruising the academic interwebs looking for back-to-school wisdom? Forgetaboutit, sweet peas. Click elsewhere, immediately if not sooner. We had us, like, a triple-dip disaster here in Roxie's World in the past week: Earthquake on Tuesday, hurricane on Saturday, power outage stretching from 4 a.m. Sunday to 4 a.m. Monday (and we got off easy compared to a lot of our neighbors!). Classes start tomorrow at QTU, and my typist is in her usual state of Holy crap, where did the summer go and do I really need a syllabus and why the heck can't I just keep thinking about peaches? and yoga? and other happy things?

Yeah, it's like that, so in lieu of a post, we offer a picture, taken by our dear Candy Man, to show the weird havoc wreaked by Hurricane Irene on one Baltimore row house. (Point of clarification: We are not making light of Ms. Irene. It was a scary, destructive storm, and we're glad it had lost some of its power by the time it smacked into lower Manhattan. We exercise the privilege of mocking something that we lived through because, well, because we think this picture is hilarious, and we want to share it with you. It will appeal to your inner 11-year-old. It will make you think up punny captions while you are standing in line waiting to copy your syllabus. [You could go paper-free on that, you know. Give trees a chance, why don't you?])

Anyhoo, here's Candy Man's pic of the damage to his home and his ingenious way of dealing with it. We call this photo The Mother of Invention:

Moose is going to remember this photo the next time she is doing battle against ice dams. Geoffrey has already left a witty, Irene, thanks for the mammaries! comment up on Facebook. The picture also brings to mind the revised version of "The Way We Were" Moose's late father was prone to sing after a few beers: Mammaries light the corners of my mind, misty watercolor mammaries of the way we were . . . .

Top that, PhysioProf. And have at it, lit critters. Ten points if your response combines a pun, a literary allusion, and an esoteric reference to whatever fountain in, probably, Rome Moose thinks of but can't quite recall when she looks at this picture.

G'night, lovelies. And may all the disasters that befall you -- and us! -- this week be small, unnatural, and not likely to lead the evening news.

Spotted in San Fran

In Which It is Learned that One of the World's Great Cities is Even Greater When There Aren't Ten Thousand English Profs Roaming Its Streets Searching for Free Drinks and Cheap Food Fabulous Enough to Merit a Facebook Status Gloat

Spot #1: On the top of Nob Hill, the last elegant woman in America sits on a park bench not worrying that something she posted on Twitter is going to get her in a boat load of trouble:

Spot #2: When dogs start running around the park unleashed and soaking wet, the last elegant woman in America makes a dignified exit and leans gently against a lamp post while waiting for a light to change. Perhaps she fondly recalls the (less elegant?) days when she worked this corner:

Spot #3: Why, look -- Someone has gotten the crazy idea that if you want support for public higher education you have to ask for it! Who'd a thunk it? Way to go, SFSU:

Spot #4: Oh, look, off in the distance, a pretty bridge! Neat, let's have dinner:

(Photo Credits: Moose, 6/5-7/11)

Sorry for the lack of commentary, kids, but the typist has a plane to catch. See you on the other side, darlings!

"Please Don't Settle for Happiness"

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison said in her remarks to graduates this past Saturday at Rutgers University (graduate alma mater of both the English profs of Roxie's World, btw). “Of course you deserve it," she went on to explain, "but if that’s all you have in mind -- happiness -- I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice -- that’s more than a barren life. It’s a trivial one.”

Commencement will finally be held tomorrow at QTU. We have no idea who the speaker is (oh, this guy -- are you fricking kidding me?), but we pass along Morrison's words, so much wiser than the usual graduation folderol, especially for those among our less aged readers who are about to be unleashed upon the world with their undergraduate degrees. Bless you, darlings. Go forth and do good. We are so very sorry that the world awaiting you is such an utter mess and that your prospects for gainful employment in it are so disturbingly remote, but Morrison is right: The journey will go better for you if see it as a pursuit of meaningfulness -- or of integrity or truth, the other alternatives Morrison suggests to Jefferson's emphasis on happiness -- rather than as the pursuit of something as banal and self-centered as happiness. (Morrison's critique of Jefferson's inclusion of the "pursuit of happiness" among the inalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence begins at 4:28 in the video of her address at Rutgers.)

Think about it. Do you think the waves of pro-democracy activism that have swept across the Arab world in recent months were sparked by a desire for happiness? Similarly, do you think the brave Freedom Riders who put their lives on the line fifty years ago this spring to integrate buses and trains deep in the American south did so to support the cause of happiness? (Follow that Freedom Riders link and watch that new PBS doc. It's riveting.)

We are by no means opposed to happiness, and we are pretty sure Toni Morrison isn't either. Still, we've got a hunch that happiness should be a by-product or a consequence of the pursuit of those other, loftier ideals and not the object of the pursuit itself. If you are searching for meaningfulness -- in your work, your relationships, your way of moving through the world -- then we suspect you will end up feeling happy, at least most days, if by happiness you mean feeling satisfied with the general direction of your life and energies. However, if you focus on happiness primarily and lose sight of those larger-than-self aspirations, we worry that you'll wake up some morning twenty or thirty years from now and go, "Geez, man, is this all there is?"

Don't mind us, kids. We're just grouchy old broads who get a little high-minded and tender-hearted this time of year. Here ends the sermon on the speech. We now return to our regularly scheduled grading so that all those Happy Turtles strolling across all those stages over the next couple of days can have their accomplishments certified as legit, official, and diploma-ready. Peace out, and srsly: Congratulations, graduates. Dogspeed to each and every one of you.

(Image credits: Morrison picked up here; Peanuts here.)

End of Spring Break Link & Photo Farm

Or, Notes on Stuff We'd Be Blogging About If We Had Time to Blog, Which We Don't Because My Typist Actually Took Something of a Break This Week and Now Has to Spend the Day Doing Everything She Was Pretending She'd Get Done Over "Break"

(Photo Credit: Moose, with Hipstamatic, 3/26/11. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.)

Big Love: Series Finale. It's been a week since (spoiler alert!) the queerest show on television ended its five-year run on HBO not with a whimper but a bang that liberated the three sister-wives of Bill Henrickson to fulfill the dreams of non-Mormon Sapphists from sea to shining sea. You know the burly girls of Roxie's World were pleased with the show's Thelma & Louise & Nicki denouement. Beyond that, we have little to say, except that we will miss a show that stayed so true to its characters and was so deeply intelligent about complex intimacies and, you know, one of the wackier religions ever to have gotten hatched on American soil. There's a lot of great stuff out there on the winding down of the show. Take a listen to Terry Gross's conversation with Big Love's creators, Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer, or check out Allyssa Lee's interview with them in the LA Times. It's kind of cute to see the show's two (gay, male, married [to each other]) chief architects seeming wounded and perplexed that the audience pretty much wanted Bill to die to get him out of the wives' way, while they saw his death as a way to preserve his vision without having to figure out how he would support his large family once he had lost Home Plus. Vision, schmision, the audience seemed to say. Kill Bill, and the sister-wives will figure it all out. Which the final scene, eleven months after Bill's death, makes clear is exactly what happened. You go, Barb, priest-holder you. Whatever the heck a priest-holder is. Margene Without Borders, we heart you. And Nicki, we're pleased to see you found the milk of human kindness we always hoped was flowing somewhere beneath your sociopathic surface.

Anyway, for commentary on Big Love's big ending, click over to Undine, Troy Williams, and, again, Allyssa Lee.

College Basketball: Oh, kids, we have nothing to say but "Go, Butler" (in the non-ladies' tournament) and "Please, Stanford?" (in the women's). We were looking forward to having a big blog trash talk smackdown with UConn-loving Tenured Radical, but our beloved Lady Terps got spanked bad Tuesday night by Georgetown, thus denying the little Turtles their chance to go up against the big bad Huskies in the Sweet 16. See ya next year, TR, when Maya Moore will have finally graduated and gone on to a better place (the WNBA? ESPN? grad school?) and our tender Turtles will, we hope, have toughened up a bit on the defensive end of the court. Also, good thoughts go out to Terps forward Diandra Tchatchouang, who tore her ACL in the Georgetown game. The official French speaker of Roxie's World offers a hearty bon rétablissement to Diandra, who hails from La Courneuve, France, as she recovers from her injury.

Death: Death had another big week in the world. What with new revolutions and civil wars breaking out on a daily basis and the toll from Japan's triple-dip disaster still rising, one feels sheepish even mentioning that the nation's supply of Feisty Old Broads took a couple of significant hits this week with the deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Geraldine Ferraro, but, well, that's the way it is. We raise paws in honor of these gutsy women, pioneers in their different ways and worlds, and thank them for their courage and tenacity. Gina Barreca's got a nice feminist tribute to Taylor up on the Chronicle (H/T Goose) focused on her early, unsung role as Helen Burns in the 1943 version of Jane Eyre. Moose and Goose fondly recall going door-to-door for the Mondale-Ferraro campaign in a small, conservative town on the Jersey Shore back in '84. It was the first but by no means the last time they passionately committed themselves to a losing cause. Twenty-seven years later, they have no regrets.

Who's Reading Your E-Mail? Moose was experiencing fear and loathing of her in-box long before she read the story of University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon being harassed by the state's Republican party, which is using open records laws to gain access to his e-mails since Cronon started writing blog posts and a New York Times op-ed piece focused on the GOP's recent activities in the Badger state. Now, her fear has turned to panic, as she worries that she could get canned for using state resources to mock her state's governor as a fauxgressive pretty boy. Or for her stubborn refusal to use her several different e-mail accounts to separate her professional life from her personal life, her political life, her blog life, and her online shopping life. Historiann has proposed that academics at public universities forward all of their e-mails to Governor Scott Walker and other Republicans in the state. Tenured Radical has a great post up that includes Walker's e-mail address (govgeneral@wisconsin.gov) and lots of terrifying reminders about how e-mail is never private and nothing can ever really be deleted and your university computer can be searched anytime. Moose read that post and has been sitting quietly in a chair ever since. Just staring. And deleting lots and lots of e-mails. See previous paragraph about her fondness for lost causes.

So, kids, how are your brackets holding up? And how did you waste your spring break? Here's another pretty glimpse of how time slipped away in Roxie's World. Peace out, lovelies.

(Photo Credit: JK, Sister of the Goosians, 3/25/11. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC.)

Rainy Thursday (Mostly About) Work Rant

(Photo Credit: Via)

Being the Secret Archive of Messages Moose

Absolutely Did Not Write or Send Today

To My Darling Students (43% of Whom Were Absent Today): "Rain" is not a short way of saying "attendance optional." Your teachers think of it as a short way of saying "in-class writing." Just saying.

To the Dunder-Headed Hack No Doubt Well-Intentioned Administrator Who Thought Employees Would Feel Motivated to Complete the Useless and Insulting Convenient and Illuminating Annual Activity Report by Sending Out a Mass E-Mail Publicly Identifying Those Who Had Not Yet Accessed the Online System Six Days Before the Filing Deadline: Srsly, dude. Three years with furloughs and no pay raises, and you think public shaming and calling attention to the mechanisms of surveillance that now characterize every aspect of our work lives will inspire us to get the job done? Dream on, pal. If the freakin' system crashes on deadline day, I will carve my report on a stone tablet and deposit it on your desk by hurling it through your window.

To the Senders of the 956 Other Messages Currently Languishing in My In-Box: Don't hold your breath, darlings. I have become so overwhelmed by the crush of e-mail in the past couple of months that I have basically given up, waved the white flag of e-mail bankruptcy. Is it really important? Call me. Dear Computer Overlords: Please come up with a better way for the slaves of techno-culture to communicate and easier ways for us to store and retrieve information. Thank you.

To the Members of the Maryland House of Delegates Who Are Hemming and Hawing About How They Will Vote on the Marriage Equality Bill on Friday: The feisty old broads of Roxie's World have a message for you (that ran on the front page of the QTU student newspaper this morning!). Read it here, and shame on you if you don't have the guts to get on the right side of history. And shame on you, Gov. Martin "You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy" O'Malley if this bill passes and you sign it into law and then stand back and let it go to a referendum in order to "let the people decide." Because, you know, it always works out so well when we subject minority rights to popular votes. Yep, you're a regular Profile in Courage, Gov. Looks to us as if the lesser O'Malley is running our state.

Yours Sincerely,
Moose

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Bloggery

A Note from Moose to a Sister in Pseudonymity

Dear Dr. Crazy,

Could I borrow your pseudonym for awhile? I mean, I like mine just fine, despite the obvious challenges of trying to be taken seriously while impersonating a dead dog. Still, I'm not complaining. The old sweater really does feel pretty comfy, if you know what I mean -- and I know you do. Anyhoo, I was hoping we could come up with some kind of barter arrangement whereby I might borrow your moniker from time to time in exchange for, well, maybe delicious low-fat recipes, since I have followed your fine example and embraced a healthy new Lifestyle Adjustment Program. (It's going great, thanks, but do you think there is any correlation between blogging and the need for such adjustments? I have found myself wondering about that a lot recently, while pedaling away on the stationary bike in the basement and not blogging.)

Here's the thing, Dr. C.: Life feels pretty fricking Crazy right now, which is why I'm thinking your pseudonym might be right at home here in our quirky little corner of the blogosphere. If we can't have your name, maybe we'll just borrow a mode you use from time to time of ticking off a list of things you have to do. Your lists both impress and exhaust us, but I'm realizing that my own calendar lately has been jam-packed with meetings, tasks, and Super-Important Things to Do. For instance, in the last week, I have:

• Attended a meeting of the Committee That, Despite Its Best Intentions, Will Probably Not Resist the Temptation to Micro-Manage Syllabi in the Process of Restructuring the University's General Education Program.
• Attended a meeting of the Committee to Assure That All Incoming Students Read At Least One Fracking Book in Their First Year of College.
• Met with two fundraisers to talk about a range of things I did not learn about in grad school.
• Met with dean to discuss ways to make my program more better and excellenter, despite recent news of still more budget cuts.
• Planned for upcoming meeting with new super high-level administrator on campus, whose positions on Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC) and diversity have yet to be ascertained.

This is all in addition to the usual spring tasks of teaching, gearing up for the (fabulous!) lecture series and symposium my program annually organizes, and watching basketball. Lots and lots of basketball. Hey, a girl can't work all the time, and there's stuff worth watching in the Comcastle these days.

It's the Crazy-ness of spring, I guess, exacerbated in my case by bio-familial matters that are currently absorbing a certain amount of time and a great deal of emotional energy. For now, I am finding it impossible to blog about those matters, even from behind the protective shield of my -- or your! -- pseudonym. You might have noticed that I held back in the. recent. conversation. about. pseudonymity in the academic blogosphere, sparked, in part, by the Journal of Women's History roundtable on feminist blogging to which I and the real people behind Tenured Radical and Historiann contributed. I stayed out of the fray in part because I felt I had addressed the matter in the piece I contributed to the roundtable, "The Madwoman With a Laptop: Notes Toward a Literary Prehistory of Academic Fem Blogging." In explaining the significance of my title's allusion to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's monumental reassessment of 19th-century women's literature, I argued for the enduring attraction of pseudonymity, even for those of us who have published books under our real names: 

[T]he Madwoman With a Laptop has discovered the lure of publishing outside the usual channels as someone other than her (public, official, professional) self. Her words are, by design, un-authorized, disowned, but it is from this self imposed otherness, this cultivated marginality that they derive their subversive force. Her speech echoes the ravings of the hidden hysteric, the whispers of the churchwomen after the service, the gossip of friends from girlhood, the raunchy wisdom of middle-aged women talking sex, pleasure, menopause. There is a lot of Emily Dickinson in this postmodern Madwoman, playing fast and loose with identity, reveling in the space opened up by declaring oneself a delighted “Nobody” rather than a dreary “Somebody.”

Here is my bottom line on the matters of trust and truth that always seem to come up in these discussions of pseudonymity: A liar will lie even if his real name is attached to the words he speaks. (See, for example, Reagan, Ronald W., who once accidentally declared that "Facts are stupid things," the only true thing he ever said.) A truth-teller, on the other hand, will tell you the truth no matter what he calls himself. (See, for example, the searingly honest books published under the fake name of Mark Twain.) When it comes to evaluating the veracity of what you read in the blogosphere, you'd be well advised, as D. H. Lawrence might have said if he had lived to surf the Interwebs, to trust the blog, not the blogger. ("Never trust the artist, trust the tale," Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature. "The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.") Truth is more than mere facts, and a slanted telling of the truth may be the most effective means of conveying it. What's in a name? A lot, but nothing close to the whole truth.

And yet: The comfort of my assumed name is not enough to permit me to speak freely of those bio-familial matters to which I alluded earlier. Not yet anyway, not even here in a world called into being nearly five years ago by love and the threat of loss.  Bear with me, darlings. I don't mean to be cryptic or coy. I am trying to explain why posting has been light around here lately. I am edging my way forward on what feels like new terrain, trying to figure out how much I can or should reveal in this space of public/private intimacy. It isn't easy. In fact, it's a little Crazy-making.

For now, I will let a picture stand in for all the words I am not prepared to write. It's borrowed from a 2007 piece called  "The Impossibility of February," from artist Maira Kalman's gorgeous illustrated blog on the New York Times website. I offer it with love for a woman who, alas, does not have a little dog to be her faithful companion in illness. We got your back, Mom. I swear to dog.

Yours sincerely,
Moose