(Fashion) Excellence With Less Money

From the Department of Hey, This is Way Better Than Apples: Our favorite clothing retailer for sensible gals of a certain age is offering discounts to teachers:

Why, it's as though they've read a fabulous series of blog posts on the subject of Excellence Without Money in higher education! Where could they have stumbled upon such a thing? Here? Here? Here? Perhaps they heard we were giving out advice on how to dress for your furlough and figured there was some vast under-served and under-paid market of women whose favorite colors are charcoal and gray. (That's a joke, actually, and it is not intended to suggest that there are currently 947 pairs of black pants hanging somewhere in the closets of Roxie's World. Moose is pretty sure there are at most 891 pairs of black pants in the house, but she is refusing to count sweatpants and is overlooking the 44 pairs in the giveaway pile in the hall closet.)

Thank you, J. Jill. The teachers of the world appreciate your shrewd marketing. Don't know if you'll be able to get Historiann into the store, though. She has been indulging in a shoe and clothing fantasy far afield of anything we've ever seen in your catalogs.

While we are on the subject of Excellence Without Money, Non-Fashion Division, here are a couple of pieces you really must go read. (We've been remiss about keeping you up to speed on this topic, but my typist has discovered that teaching a course on blogging cuts significantly into the time a girl has available for blogging. Sorry, darlings, but she is dancing -- and typing -- as fast as she can!) Anyhoo, there's an excellent interview with our blog boyfriend Chris Newfield that was published on AlterNet a few weeks back. It's a great distillation of his thinking about what he has termed "the war on public universities," which he argues has been going on for several decades now, and its relationship to the recent devastating budget cuts in the University of California system and elsewhere. Meanwhile, back on Chris's indispensable Remaking the University blog, there's a guest post by Gerald Barnett of the University of Washington on the funding "free-fall" shaping up in Seattle. The piece is brilliant on what we consider to be the crux of the problem we named Excellence Without Money: Campus administrators who publicly pretend that budget cuts, while damaging, don't undermine the quality of institutions. It's a long piece that takes up a number of topics, including how the press covers these issues and how universities hurt themselves by carrying on a charade. Here's a passage that will give you a good sense of what Barnett is up to, but you should click over and read the whole thing:

The problem for universities, and for the reporters, is that university administrators are not coming clean on why there are university budget problems. It is not just that the states are no longer supplementing the budgets as they used to. Yes, that is a bad thing, a bad thing in the context of other bad things. Rather, it is the priorities that university leaders place on the spending of the money they do have. It is not reported that there are huge cuts to student instruction. The university issues no press releases or even brusque reports about this. These cuts, like cuts to department staff, happen in silence. There will be no departure notices in the local paper, like the notices when the university hires another senior administrator.  Every student knows (and I have a daughter at UW) that there are fewer courses offered, these are harder to get into, with less information about them, with less and poorer quality instructional support—and all this at substantially greater cost. This is not within the definition of “excellence."

He ends by saying that university administrators are well-intentioned but intellectually dishonest in these situations. Often, we reluctantly acknowledge, that term is justified. Though never on our campus, of course.

Which for some strange reason makes us want to end by passing along a post Margaret Soltan put up earlier today that got our attention because it conjoined the terms "University of Illinois" and "Manure Central." We clicked straight over, concerned that our once furloughed friends out in Shampoo-Banana had been visited by yet another crisis or scandal, given Soltan's knack for being first on the scene at any academic Augean stable in need of sweeping. Alas, the meaning in this instance was literal, but that link is amusing nonetheless -- and offers some very fetching animal photos, too, I might add. Props to the designer who had the nerve to use a rich poo-brown background on the website for the extension service's manure management program. Nice touch!

Still, Manure Central -- Don't you think that would be a swell name for an academic admin blog? We'll have to see if we can get Moose to bring that up in class tomorrow. She and her students have recently been discussing the all-important matter of blog names, so who knows? Peace out, darlings, and sweet, manure-free dreams to you.

Excellence Without Money

Hard Times in Higher Ed

A Roxie's World Series

(Credit for Fake Yet Fabulous Seal: Words by Moose, image by Historiann.)

We use the occasion of Labor Day weekend to return to a meme we launched late last year as the Humongous Recession threatened to become the Second Great Depression and the first wave of furloughs hit Queer the Turtle U. (We launched the meme [and the slogan "Excellence Without Money"] here. Blog pal Historiann picked up on it in the post linked to above. We returned to it here and here.)

The school year is off to a rocky yet interesting start on college campuses this year, as public institutions come to grips with devastating cuts to budgets that were already lean due to decades of eroding levels of state support. Evidence is emerging that faculty across the country are shifting into activist mode and taking positions at odds with campus administrators who for years have engaged in a lot of public happy talk about how everything was just fine, really, despite cuts, cuts, and more cuts. You can't blame the administrators, much, for trying to protect the brand, when it was clear states weren't going to reverse the tide of declining support and public schools were desperately searching for alternative sources of revenue. You can't blame faculty either for being true to their schools and mostly acquiescing to significant changes in their work lives (larger classes, more classes, new "accountability" measures, etc.) that few truly supported and many truly, deeply, legitimately deplored. (Can you say Learning Outcomes Assessment, without barfing?) Given the incredible shrinking academic job market, most faculty felt grateful just to be employed and didn't seem much inclined to rock the boat.

Suddenly, however, an old dog with her ear to the ground begins to sense that the times may be a-changin'. The signs are everywhere:

• Faculty at Michigan's Oakland University have gone out on strike, forcing the 18,000-student school to cancel classes indefinitely, over contract talks that are stuck on issues of workload, benefits, and salary.
• Trustees of Montgomery College in Maryland voted last night to remove the college's president, Brian K. Johnson, from his post amid allegations of mismanagement and overspending. The action followed a vote of no-confidence by the school's faculty, which had issued a 9-page "investigative report" documenting Johnson's record of missed meetings, unexplained absences from work, intimidating staff, and misuse of a corporate credit card.
• Faculty in the University of California system, faced with salary cuts and 26 furlough days, are calling for a walkout because its president overruled decisions by faculty senates on ten of the system's campuses that some (6) of the furlough days should be taken on instructional days. The walkout, scheduled for September 24, protests both the president's attack on shared governance and the administration's effort to conceal the impact of the cuts from the public. (Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk / Talk about things you'd like to do . . . .) The faculty argue that taking furloughs on instructional days will make the impact of the cuts more broadly visible and pressure the state's legislature to cease defunding the system.
  

The California situation bears watching because . . . it's California. The system is large, some of its schools are highly prestigious, and the letter announcing the walkout bears the signatures of academic superstars like Berkeley's Judith Butler and Santa Cruz's Donna Haraway. If the walkout takes hold throughout the system, it has the potential to make a big media splash and call some serious attention to the issue of funding for higher education -- though, of course, it might also result in idiotic coverage depicting faculty as selfish, out-of-touch, hippie freak tenured radicals looking for any excuse to protest instead of doing their cushy jobs.

Another reason to keep an eye on the Golden State is that faculty are using the tools of social networking to organize and publicize their efforts. The revolution, it seems, will be blogged. Remaking the University is a blog run by UC Santa Barbara's Chris Newfield. It is an indispensable resource for information on what's happening in California, but it's also got an awesome collection of links to related news from elsewhere. The Berkeley Solitary Alliance is a newly established coalition of students, faculty, and staff formed to protests the cuts and the restructuring of the UC system. Its Web site posts an open letter to students from Berkeley prof Catherine Cole that explains the rationale for the walkout in great detail. UCLA seems to be getting into the act with a new Web site called Saving UCLA that is also aimed at promoting the walkout. Facebook has been crackling this week with links about what's going on in California. Watching the whole thing unfold, one can't help but wonder:

Are we witnessing the beginning of a movement, the emergence of a serious challenge to the conditions of work in American higher education, or is it merely the wish for such a movement, a longing that will fade when the first set of papers comes in or, more likely, when the first set of bills comes due and faculty simply hunker down to figure out how to pay them on their reduced salaries?

Hard to say, but the ornery, soon-to-be-paid-less bitches of Roxie's World plan to keep an eye on the situation and do our best to keep you in the loop of the latest developments. We encourage our academic blog buds to write their own Excellence Without Money posts and to send them our way. Yes, Historiann and Clio Bluestocking, we mean you and you. You, too, Dr. Crazy, and, heck yes, you, too, Tenured Radical! Perhaps we'll get ambitious enough to do something along the lines of Historiann's most excellent Lessons for Girls series. Perhaps we'll help launch a walkout of our own as soon as QTU officially announces that faculty won't be allowed to take furlough days on teaching days, as was the case this past spring. No one made a peep then, but the situation unfolded rather quickly and took everyone more or less by surprise. That won't be the case this year.

Or perhaps we'll just post a series of recipes for elegant yet affordable meals that we'll bundle into a package called Mastering the Art of Cheap Cooking and then sit back and wait for Nora Ephron to call and offer us a movie deal. Wevs, kids, we are on the case. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Excellence Without Money. And in the meantime, enjoy your Labor Day. You've earned it.

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.

Excellence Without Money

(Image Credit: Words by Moose; fabulously clever seal by Historiann, with help from the Official Seal Generator at Says-it.com.)

Game on, kids! Roxie's World and Historiann have joined forces to launch a movement aimed at saving higher education from the forces of evil and economic decline. Following up on Moose's reflections here the other day on the perilous budgetary situation facing public institutions, Historiann took our ball and ran with it, designing this eye-catching seal aimed at spreading the gospel of Excellence Without Money throughout our cash-starved land. We are humbled by her creative appropriation and invite all of you to join with us as we try to figure out how to survive in a period of plunging revenues and soaring workloads. Go read Historiann's excellent post on this subject, which is full of brilliant ideas for how institutions can go on pretending that the most severe budget cuts imaginable will have no impact whatsoever on the quality of the educational product. (Wouldn't want to give shoppers any reason to suspect they had wandered into an academic Target when they thought were going to Bloomingdale's, would we?) Make sure you check out the comments, too -- Historiann has a very smarty-pants group of readers, all of whom are welcome in Roxie's World any time.

So, we've got a slogan and we've got a symbol. By the logic of 21st-century capitalism, most of our work is done. All we need now is a marketing plan, but, really, what does that involve -- a Café Press account, a tech-savvy grad student with time on his hands and a homosexual's flair for design (qta -- Mama has a job for you!), and maybe a bored intern at The Chronicle of Higher Ed who stumbles across this crazy meme and decides to put it on The Chronicle's daily blog list?

Help us out, though, kids. Tell us what your schools are doing to advance the cause of Excellence Without Money. What are the rumors flying around your campus and the grim new realities that have already taken hold? Larger classes? Layoffs? Libraries Without Books, as Dog-Eared Book suggested here in comments the other day? What's the scariest thing you've seen or heard, and what is the most inspiring example you can offer of an administrator determined to maintain both integrity and true excellence in the face of enormous challenges? You know we're a glass half full kind of crowd around here. We laugh in the face of adversity, and we honor those who act creatively in the face of it. What can we say? It's a way we have of driving off the spleen. We're firm believers in hanging together rather than hanging separately, so come hang with us and we'll all muddle through somehow.

Special Note to Our Grad-Student Readers: We realize your anxieties right now are particularly acute. Let Roxie's World be your warm fuzzy friend in a time of trouble. Tell us what's on your minds, and we will look back at you with that gaze of total recognition and acceptance that only a dog can offer. I'm telling you, it's better than an on-campus interview at 5-Courses a Term/No Sabbaticals Ever College. Love you. Mean it!

Excellence Without Money: The Movie

Raise your hand if you had figured Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC) would be the title of our second contribution to the Disgruntled Academic Animated Short Film Festival that has been going on in the blogosphere lately. Good for you, darlings. You know us well, and you have been paying very close attention, as always.

Well, here it is, just in time for your weekend movie-watching pleasure. In this followup to our debut flick, "I Want to be Promoted," Professor Louise Sawyer (who, as we told you before, is entirely fictional) sits down with her (also 100% imaginary) dean to discuss the budget for the (nonexistent) program Professor Sawyer directs. Sparks fly as the two women debate the relationship between resources and (insert groaning sound here) excellence.

Moose is so fond of our latest cinematic masterpiece that she is considering taking it to La La Land for the MLA Convention in January, where she will be presenting on a roundtable (that will include our blog boyfriend Chris Newfield and MLA Exec Direc Rosemary Feal!) called "New Tools, Hard Times: Social Networking and the Academic Crisis." The session is part of a series of panels and workshops on the timely theme of "The Academy in Hard Times." What do you think, kids: PowerPoint or snarky cartoon? Snarky cartoon or PowerPoint? Leave your votes in comments, please.

Oh, and lest there be any confusion: Our film is in no way intended as a response to this peculiar little video that was flying around the campus of QTU this week at the behest of an extremely high-ranking administrator. Nope, not no way, not no how. Far be it from us to try to figure out whether building a car is anything at all like running a university or whether the color beige is the universal signifier of the opposite of excellence. No, my darlings, such conundrums are way beyond our (furlough-depressed) pay grade. Just watch the movie. Send it to your favorite adjunct or, if you dare, your favorite dean. Feel free to pass it along with our motto: Serious times call for unserious responses. Or, pass it along with this handy little phrase, Excellentia sine pecunia. That's "Excellence Without Money" in Latin, of course. Big wigs just love fancy-sounding foreign phrases, especially in dead languages!

Have a lovely weekend, my pretties, and enjoy the show. The soundtrack for this one? I'm thinking it's gotta be R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." That sound about right to you? Yeah, I thought so. 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!"

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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!

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(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!

Big Wigs, Hard Times

Another Item in the Roxie's World series, Excellence Without Money: Hard Times in Higher Ed

Notes on Administrative Communication During the Budget Crisis

Kathryn Masterson has an interesting new article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed on how university presidents have been handling the challenge of communicating to their campuses during Great Depression 2.0. Masterson examines presidential rhetoric and talks to several presidents, including Penn State’s Graham Spanier, Emory’s James W. Wagner, and Arizona State’s Michael M. Crow. She culls from her study a list of 12 tips or strategies for communication aimed at preserving administrative credibility, sustaining morale, and avoiding the spread of misinformation in a period of anxiety and uncertainty. Some of the tips seem contradictory – “Avoid doom and gloom” in your communication is followed closely by “Don’t soft-pedal the circumstances” – but different situations and institutions call for different strategies, of course.

Unfortunately, Masterson’s article is only available to subscribers of the Chronicle, so for the benefit of the many starving grad students and furloughed faculty who can no longer afford such luxuries, Roxie’s World has generated its own list of communications tips for the top dogs on campus – and it’s totally free! Print out a few copies. Laminate ‘em and give one to your favorite beleaguered big wig as a holiday gift, even if all the holiday parties have been canceled this year to prove how serious we are about cutting costs on campus. (What? Moose shrieked. No holiday party! That means no crab dip, dammit! I don’t want to live in a world without crab dip!)

Most importantly, add to the list in comments, kids. We are counting on your snarky wisdom, good sense, and free labor to help get us up to a full dozen – or more! What’s your advice? What should administrators say and how should they say it as they endeavor to guide their campuses through the budget calamities of fiscal 2010 and toward the predicted apocalypses of fiscal 2011?

Here’s what we came up with:

1. Don’t get caught in a big fat whopper of a public lie. Don’t say, “The budget made me do this,” when it’s clear you are making personnel and administrative changes that are largely unrelated to money. You’re in charge. You are paid to make tough decisions. Lying about why you are making them will cost you credibility and poison the air of your institution.

2. If you are going to “lean on” your institution’s strategic plan, as Masterson suggests many presidents are in their public statements, make sure you are not eviscerating key parts of it in your actions or proposals. If, for example, your strategic plan declares that your university’s rise to greatness has gone hand-in-hand with and been accelerated by the increasing diversity of its community and its intellectual work, then it’s probably not a good idea to start chopping away at offices and programs most visibly associated with promoting diversity. Just sayin’. Some people actually read those plans, you know. (NB: This example is absolutely, 100% hypothetical. My typist made it up out of her extremely limited imagination. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to any real situation in any actual university anywhere near Roxie's World. Swear to dog, peeps. Srsly.)

3. Try not to sound just flat-out delusional. Faculty and students have had it with the happy talk they incessantly hear from high-level administrators. Excellence without money is a joke, people, not a vision statement!

4. Don’t tell heartwarming stories about your housekeeper’s daughter struggling to become the first member of her family to graduate from college as a way to demonstrate your profound sensitivity to the economic struggles of the humbler members of the university community. Such gestures only underscore your class privilege and remind people that you probably make more than anyone on campus who isn’t coaching a sports team.

5. Do not, under any circumstances, get all misty-eyed talking about how the university is a “family” and we all have to stick together and take care of each other in order to get through the crisis. Sure, we’d like to encourage compassion and a sense of shared suffering and common purpose, but bear in mind that families, unlike universities, don’t charge tuition, pay salaries, or, you know, furlough people when times are tough. It’s a flawed, even specious, analogy, and you should avoid it at all costs, especially if you are white, male, heterosexual, and over the age of 50. You are not the pater universitatis, and we are not your docile, dependent children. Deal with it.

6. Same goes for the hackneyed metaphor of “storms,” perfect or otherwise. The crisis in public higher education is not an act of god or nature. It is the result of decades of underfunding connected to the neoliberal shrinking of the state and the disappearance of a rhetoric and a politics based on the notion of public goods and values in the United States. To call it a storm is to deflect attention from the actors and the actions, individual and collective, that have brought us to this place. You are, or ought to be, an educator first and foremost. If every crisis is a teachable moment, you should seize upon this one to do some teaching on the history and origins of the funding crisis rather than mouthing mindless clichés that only obscure what is really going on.

7. When you get challenged – and you will, because times have changed, people are scared, and a lot of folks on campus see administrators as the enemy these days – don’t go all hard-a$$ on everybody or box yourself into a position you can’t easily adjust when circumstances require it. It appears, for example, that the strike by graduate employees at the University of Illinois a couple of weeks ago occurred because administrators foolishly dug in their heels and refused to put assurances that there would be no change in the policy on tuition waivers into writing. The graduate assistants rightly insisted that the guarantee be put on paper and won after a well-organized one-day strike that a more flexible administration would have sensibly and easily avoided.

8. Before you open your mouth, try to imagine what UC system president Mark Yudof would say – and then say exactly the opposite. No, really. Especially if you are the president of a Carnegie I institution, it’s probably good to try to avoid sounding aggressively anti-intellectual, brutally insensitive, and brazenly cynical all at the same time. Unless you happen to like the idea of buildings throughout your university system being occupied by angry students calling for your head. In which case, here are some fine examples (via) of Leadership à la Yudof. Good luck to you, dude -- and to those whom you, um, lead.

(Photo Credit: Jason Madara, New York Times)

(Excellence Without Money: One, two, three, four, five, six.)

Out of Status

There's still serious blogging going on in the world, kids. If that's what you're in the market for, head on over to Historiann's place. She's got a great post up today on how race does -- and does not -- explain the resistance to Obama's policy proposals. This is an insightful intersectional analysis, much more satisfying than the silly all (Herbert) or nothing (Brooks) garbage that has been in the press of late. Ditto Anglachel, who rarely posts these days but has a good one up on how Dems, such as former President Jimmy Carter, keep the Southern strategy alive by focusing on race and racism as the source of all opposition and refusing to engage substantively and politically with resistance to what they (Dems) see as their more enlightened policies.

In another corner of the blogosphere, GayProf offers a dazzling contribution to our series (even though he doesn't, technically, know us), Excellence Without Money: Hard Times in Higher Ed. He's got a long, brilliant list of suggestions for how to cope with the increased scrutiny faculty are facing over class size as universities look to increase their economies of scale, as someone said to Moose in a meeting shortly before she fled the Eastern seaboard. Among our favorite ideas for making sure that students enroll in your classes and stay in them? We're keen on the idea of bar service in classes that start after 1 p.m., as long as the bar is open to instructors, too, but we are especially impressed with GayProf's efforts to exploit the tools of social networking in order to appeal to today's students. He'll consider an updated Facebook status line as the equivalent of attending class, for example, and, instead of final papers, he's going to let students Tweet their ideas about U.S. history. Now, that is some serious pedagogical innovation for these troubled times of ours, my friends! We'll mark that post with the official Excellence Without Money seal of approval.

Meantime, here in Roxie's World, my typist is still in a state of loopy bliss that makes it difficult for her to concentrate on the serious topics that typically absorb our attention around here. We don't know if it's the altitude or the sabbatical, but she's refusing to type anything that has to do with health care or the official QTU furlough policy, which was just announced today. Heck, we couldn't even get her to weigh in on how well Marissa "Shoulders" Coleman played in the Mystics' playoff loss to the Indiana Fever the other night! (Newsflash: Mystics just lost again to the Fever, in overtime, 81-74, to be eliminated from the playoffs. Boohoo.) All we get from her is a lot of hooey about how amazing it is to breathe a different air, see a different sky, walk a different path. What's wrong with the old path, I wonder? I like our trail just fine!

To try to get a clearer sense of what's going on with our prodigal typist and to pass that sense along to you, our passionately curious readers, we've enlisted the aid of a special team of (non)digital forensic experts to dig into the hard drive of Moose's brain and see what's in there right now. They're a bunch of high-level geeks, armed with what we might call, in homage to a pal and colleague, Kirschenbats, ready to flush out the truth. So far, their most intriguing find is a series of rejected Facebook status lines Moose came up with during her journey across the country and in the first few days of her stay at her undisclosed location. Here they are, in no particular order. Take a look at them. Let us know if you think we need to send the guys in white coats out to her undisclosed location to pick her up. Frankly, I am a little concerned.

Moose on the Loose:
Rejected Facebook Status Lines

Moose has settled the debate: If the universe had been intelligently designed, Oklahoma would have been much, much smaller. Think about it.

Moose cannot decide if, at the moment, she is Thelma without Louise, Lucy without Ricky, Lucy without Ethel, Bogey without Bacall, Gertrude without Alice, Hepburn without Tracy -- or vice versa. In her darkest moments, she fears she may be Fred without Ethel.

Moose has become that weird woman, dining alone, trying discreetly to take photographs of her food. You know, like this:

(Photo Credit: Moose, on her iPhone, undisclosed location, 9/19/09. What's the dish, which she neglected to photograph before she dove into it [which explains the jalapeno with the end bitten off]? Molcajete al pastor, which Moose loosely translates to, why Dog invented pork. Click here for a review of the restaurant and a description of this delicious dish, but only if you are not deeply invested in the fantasy of Moose's undisclosed location. You have been warned.)

Moose wonders if that is what coyote poop looks like.

Moose has looked at clouds from both sides now. Rather than illusions, she sees what appears to be a map of Africa, sliding slowly toward her from the mountains. It is one of the most sublimely beautiful things she has ever seen.

Moose is getting desert nose. 'Nuf said.

Moose now realizes that Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You'll Never Walk Alone," from Carousel (1945), is in fact a brilliant prolepsis of the existential condition of the iPhone user.

Moose moves quietly in her borrowed home, trying to intuit the rhythms and the ways of life there, slowly getting the feel of an unfamiliar space, full of gratitude for the generosity of friends.

Moose takes pretty good food pictures but feels defeated by the sky. She cannot capture it. Paging Ansel Adams! Ansel Adams, come in, please! Or Kate Flint. ;-)

* * *

So, what do you think, kids? Is it time to call in the mental-health professionals? Time to cut off her access to the internets? Time to tell her to get a grip, grab a pen, and start drafting the Big Whoop-de-doo Book on Blogging That Will Save the Humanities, Get Her Promoted, and Perhaps Attract the Attention of Nora Ephron? Like I said, we report, you decide. A gold-plated Kirschenbat (trademark RW Enterprises, LLC) to anyone who can make any sense at all of Moose's rejected status lines. Get out your secret decoder rings, and start crackin'!

Ma Vie en Robe

Or, Being and Furlough-ness

Another item in the Roxie's World series, Excellence Without Money: Hard Times in Higher Ed

My typist is grappling with a complex existential dilemma, a dilemma exacerbated by her close following of the situation unfolding in the University of California system, where faculty are organizing a walkout to protest an order by system administration that none of the 26 furlough days faculty will have to take this year may be taken on instructional (i.e., teaching) days. (For blow-by-blow coverage of the California crisis, go here.) As we noted here a couple of weeks ago, faculty at Queer the Turtle U are also going to have furlough days this year. Procedures for this second round of unpaid days "off" haven't yet been announced, but the expectation on campus is that QTU faculty will also (and again -- as they were last spring) be ordered to take their (up to 10, depending on salary) furlough days on non-teaching days. Because, of course, we wouldn't want "the public" to get the idea that draconian cuts have any effect whatsoever on the quality of the educational product. Because, you know, we wouldn't want to do anything to upset the applecart of belief in the wholly delusional notion that a civilized society can function without adequate levels of taxation.

Wevs, kids, here is the problem for my typist: She is on sabbatical this semester (actually, she is on leave for the whole year, but don't hate her -- she hasn't had time off in a decade) and is having a heckuva time deciding a) what to do on her furlough days and b) how to register her strenuous objection to the idea that students shouldn't have to see that it takes money to staff classes. If you cut faculty pay, you cut back on all that they are able and expected to do. Period. It is insane to demand that faculty take furlough days on non-teaching days when it's perfectly obvious that they will perform non-teaching duties (i.e., research and service) on those unpaid days, knowing full well that there will be no decrease in the expectation for productivity in those areas when performance reviews are conducted next spring. How beautiful is that, darlings? I mean it's some crazy academic version of money for nothing and your chicks for free, ain't it?

By the way, tenured and un-tenured worker bees, here's a little furlough fun fact for you: Do you realize that you should not even be on campus on furlough days, because you aren't covered for workplace accidents on those days? (Sorry we don't have a link on this point, but a colleague in the sciences told Goose it had been discussed in her department. Here's a link to the state of Maryland's fun-filled furlough page, though.) Which means, of course, that last spring, when Moose paid no attention whatsoever to when her five furlough days actually occurred, she was at risk of injuring herself -- perhaps boinking herself on the head with some hefty, madness-inducing report on Learning Outcomes! -- and she would have had no recourse against her employer for exposing her to such grave dangers.

This year, Moose will be more prudent. This year, she vows to stay off campus and perform absolutely no work on furlough days. This year, she won't even get out of her bathrobe on furlough days! She will sit in her red chair and eat bonbons and help me blog about the idiocies of a "progressive" political leadership so bereft of courage that it will trot out specious conservative analogies suggesting that states, like families, must tighten their belts in challenging economic times -- as if states, unlike families, did not have recourse to measures such as, you know, tax increases to distribute the pain of economic sacrifice broadly and equally among citizens. She will exhort her colleagues who are teaching this semester to challenge the administration to reconsider the policy precluding taking furloughs on teaching days. She will urge them to join with their brave compatriots on the opposite coast in the effort to show the public that the last drop of blood has been squeezed from the academic turnip. Sing it with me, comrades: You get what you pay for, and you ought to pay for what you get!

Yeah, maybe she'll do that -- Or, well, um, maybe she'll take off the bathrobe, pull on some jeans, pack up the car, and get the hell out of Dodge for awhile to put some salubrious distance between herself and her beloved, troubled Turtle. She's got work to do, the clock is ticking, and in her heart of hearts she doesn't care whether she gets paid for it or not.

Stay tuned, kids, for the unfolding adventure of a Moose on the Loose. Someone is about to bust out of Roxie's World!

(Excellence Without Money: One, two, three, four, five.)

Excellence WITH Money?!?

(Image Credit: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, 12/16/08)

OMG, kids! It's just Day Two of the Excellence Without Money campaign launched by Roxie's World and blog pal Historiann, and we already have a major victory to report! (To read up on our joint effort to save public higher ed from the forces of evil and economic contraction, go here, here, and here.) What happened? The Carnegie Corporation of New York spent buckets and buckets of money to place two-page ads in Wa Po and the New York Times this morning calling upon the incoming Obama administration to intervene in the crisis of underfunding that is imperiling the nation's public higher educational system. Moose nearly spat her coffee across the breakfast nook as she looked at the letter, signed by more than 40 leaders in higher education (including William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the Queer the Turtle U system).

(Wanna know if your prez or chancellor signed the letter? To see a pdf of the ad, go here.)

The letter calls on the Obama administration to commit 5 percent of the economic stimulus package "-- in the range of $40 to $45 billion -- toward higher education" in order to "provide the stimulus that will propel the nation forward in resolving its current economic crisis" and to "lay the groundwork for competitiveness and the well-being of American families into the future." The proposal calls for the creation of block grants to states that would be administered by governors and focused on construction and renovation projects to help campuses upgrade their infrastructures and meet the rising costs of building high-tech facilities. The emphasis on construction is clearly aimed at heightening the appeal of the proposal, because such projects would generate jobs and other forms of economic activity in the communities surrounding the campuses. That's all well and good, but here's the quote that brought a tear to Moose's under-caffeinated eyes this morning:

The present economic crisis requires an investment in human capital, and graduates of public universities historically have provided most of the workforce to meet the nation's needs. After all, their innovative researchers have often invented the technologies that have fueled economic progress and enhanced America's economic competitiveness and ability to deliver high-quality health care. At the same time, public universities must remain accessible to all families, thereby providing opportunity and hope to families from all social and economic strata.

Shorter version: No money? No excellence, people! No money? No access!

Does the Carnegie letter lay the groundwork for the bailout of higher ed Moose was fantasizing about the other day? We'll leave it to the experts to make that determination, but the good news here is that higher ed is making a bold move to lobby on its own behalf during a moment of national economic crisis that could have catastrophic repercussions for institutions whose budgets were strained years before the bottom started falling out of everything. Some may quibble with a grant-making foundation spending a sizable amount of money on what are basically advertisements, but we think the urgency of the situation and the rare political opportunity afforded by a new president committed to making big changes justify the grandness of the gesture. Being published as they were on the very day that Obama's pick for education secretary was announced, the ads help to assure that higher ed will be on the radar screen as opinion-makers consider both the economic crisis and the incoming administration. (For brief reports on the ads, see Wa Po and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

Roxie's World gives the Carnegie Corporation a hopeful PAWS UP for seeing smoke and yelling "FIRE" rather than convening a meeting to decide whether to call it a "FIRE" or "a non-threatening heat-related event that will in no way impede normal operations on campus." It's gettin' awfully hot in here, kids. I say let's call it a FIRE and bring in the big trucks with a whole bunch of water! Peace out.

MLA 2011: New Tools, Hard Times

Greetings from La La Land, kids. Yes, it's warmer here than where you are and prettier, too. Moose took a swim yesterday in the lovely pool at the Millennium Biltmore, while Goose stumbled into the shooting of an episode of CSI. It's not all fun and fabulousness here in sunny SoCal, of course. Moose had her big session Thursday evening, "New Tools, Hard Times: Social Networking and the Academic Crisis," which was part of the convention's special focus on "The Academy in Hard Times." The session featured MLA exec direc Rosemary Feal and an impressive roster of speakers with a range of experiences with social media and higher ed, including Marc Bousquet, Brian Croxall, Chris Newfield, and Moose, speaking, for some strange reason, under her real name. Session moderator Meredith McGill posted a link-rich introduction to the panel and the speakers here. Newfield has posted a summary of the session and of his presentation on another related session here. The session even had its own Twitter hashtag, which you can check out even if you are not among the Twitterati. Just go here.

Thanks to everybody who attended and participated in the session. It was great to be a part of this vital series of conversations the MLA has launched on the grim state of affairs in higher education. We are big believers in the idea that you have to acknowledge the problem before you can begin to remedy it, and these sessions have given us hope that a bunch of smart, committed people have begun to acknowledge the problem. Yep -- Glasses are half full again in Roxie's World!

Anyway, as a special treat, we've decided to post the text of Moose's remarks at the session. Enjoy, darlings, and feel free to pass 'em along -- Just tell folks where you got 'em. Take it away, Moose!

* * *

These are brief remarks but I’ve given them a rather grand-sounding title that I hope you will understand is totally tongue in cheek. “Excellence Without Money” is a phrase I came up with a couple of years ago on my blog to describe the impossible bind of universities forced to pretend that even the most drastic budget cuts have no impact whatsoever on the quality of the educational product. The phrase got taken up by some fellow bloggers, including Historiann, who kindly came up with an attractive official-looking seal to help promote the cause. Someone else even translated it into Latin for me -- Excellentia sine pecunia. Anyway, most of my writing on higher education focuses on the hypocrisy and the political paralysis arising from the commitment to the delusion of Excellence Without Money.

My focus here is on what social media tools enable us to do that we can’t do otherwise, on how they can build support and community across professional and geographic boundaries, and how we can use them to cultivate new publics for our work and actually to do our work in different, more creative ways. I’m particularly interested in how humor, particularly parody and satire, can be used to communicate both internally – e.g., to academic audiences – and externally – e.g., to non-academic or general audiences.

First, though, since assessment is all the rage on campuses these days, let me toss out some questions aimed at gauging the effectiveness to date of these tools, particularly as a means of ameliorating higher education’s current hard times. So:

• Have academic users of social media turned back the tide of corporate neoliberalism on campus? Uh, no.

• Have we built a groundswell of renewed support for higher education or the humanities off campus? Well, since the voters of Maryland just overwhelmingly re-elected a governor who imposed four years of tuition freezes and three years of employee furloughs on the state’s university system, despite my blog’s relentless mocking of him as a fauxgressive Democrat I habitually referred to as Gov. Martin “You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy” O’Malley, regrettably, I have to give us a failing grade on this question as well.

• Does that mean that academic users of social media are deluded “slacktivists” or, worse, that we are confirming what Feisal G. Mohamed described in Dissent the other day as “the casual undergraduate presupposition. . . that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe[?]” Rather than “training thoughtful citizens,” are we instead, as Mohamed asserts, “training the next generation to become an ignorant herd easily led through a cultural landscape shaped by the corporate interests dropping shiny techno-apples in its path[?]” Lord, I hope not, though I can’t guarantee it.

• Will academic uses of social media ultimately prove to be as ineffective as all the other means of communicating our mission and value have been over the years? I think it’s too soon to tell. Blogs have been around for barely a decade. Facebook and YouTube aren’t yet 6 years old, and Twitter isn’t yet 5. The MLA, founded in 1883, is 128 years old. The old organization and its members are learning to use the new tools, but that use is in a very early stage. I think there are grounds for optimism on this question, as I will explain below, but any assessment at this point would be premature.

I don’t consider myself a digital evangelist, as Malcolm Gladwell, in a well-known New Yorker article, scornfully describes those whom he believes have oversold the world-transforming potential of online activism. Gladwell is not, in my judgment, entirely fair in his judgments, especially of Clay Shirky, but I agree that it’s important to avoid high-tech boosterism and to be realistic about what can be accomplished with a blog post, a tweet, a video, or a lolcats cartoon.

(Image Credit: mlaconvention)

At their best, social media are tools of outreach and education. Using them is not the same thing as organizing a movement in support of the humanities or higher education, but that doesn’t mean using them is unimportant. (For more on the distinction between outreach and organizing a social movement, see Mark Engler.) Used strategically, in concert with more traditional means of person-to-person organizing and in furtherance of, say, a specific plan for a saner, more egalitarian funding structure for higher education, these tools might be highly effective in eventually helping to make the times a little less hard.

Why do I say that? Because during the 2009-10 academic year, when we saw a significant resurgence of campus activism in response to budget cuts and increases in tuition and fees, what Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody as “the power of organizing without organization” was much in evidence and helped to mobilize faculty, students, and staff across the country. YouTube proved to be an essential tool for documenting actions and events, from building occupations to teach-ins. Twitter helped enable mass, real-time communication about actions as they were unfolding, while Facebook facilitated the formation of networks and alliances across campuses. Blogs – such as Chris’s Remaking the University and Angus Johnston’s Student Activism -- helped to document and analyze a story that even educational media, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, were underplaying. Further, archiving and searchability gave these events and materials, so often ephemeral, an enduring afterlife. Wendy Brown’s speech at the teach-in at Berkeley in September 2009 has been viewed more than 13,500 times on YouTube. The ready access and the permanence of such materials greatly enhance their political value.

I want to shift gears and focus specifically on blogs, particularly on those like Historiann, Tenured Radical, and to a degree my own, Roxie’s World, that are academic and feminist or queer and that focus consistently on workplace issues. My reading and writing in the blogosphere over the past five years have persuaded me that such blogs are quite useful tools for mitigating some of the damaging effects of our hard times. They are very effective at facilitating lateral communication among academic knowledge workers. They are good at building intellectual and/or professional communities, at creating spaces for conversations about work conditions, at collectively sharing or formulating strategies for surviving or transforming those conditions, at exposing administrative failures and hypocrisies, at breaking silences, at talking back, at encouraging critique, resistance, and subversion of top-down policies that don't work and encroach on academic freedom. The institutional diversity of commenters on academic blogs sparks remarkable exchanges on a daily basis from colleagues who are geographically remote from one another and operating in radically different work environments. Click into Historiann on any given day, and you’ll see a lively mix of faculty, grad students, and adjuncts from R-1 schools, small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and mid-size regional universities talking about the conditions of their work lives.

Finally, I’d like to say a word or two about humor. In my piece in the Journal of Women’s History roundtable on feminist blogging, I talk about the multiple, complex purposes served by humor in the academic feminist blogosphere. I discuss humor as a survival tool, a way of negotiating the challenges and sometimes the dullness of academic life. Those who use it demonstrate their resilience, even their perverse optimism. Humor may serve as a powerful means of disarming one’s opponents or bringing the high and mighty down a notch or two. It can be a way of acknowledging and reckoning with differences, of reclaiming and revaluing terms that have been used to demean women, queers, and other less privileged groups.

I don’t talk in that piece about the great potential humor has as a way to communicate and de-mystify the world of higher education to non-academic audiences, but I think that’s a point worth considering as we grapple with the perennial problem of how to advocate more effectively for the humanities and higher education. You might have stumbled across some of those Xtranormal text-to-film cartoons that were making the rounds on blogs and Facebook a couple of months ago. So many were produced by higher ed professionals that I predicted there would soon be a new category of awards added to the Oscars, “Animated Short Films by Disgruntled Academics.” I offered two modest contributions to the genre, “I Want to be Promoted,” in which an indignant associate professor sits down with an uptight department chair to discuss her chances for promotion to full (in part on the basis of her blog), and “Excellence Without Money: The Movie,” in which the director of a small program meets with her dean to discuss budget matters. I created a YouTube channel for the cartoons, and they’ve now been viewed more than 3300 times – Yeah, I know, not much compared to the 32.5 million views Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair” video has gotten over the past two months, but still. I have no clear sense of who has seen them or what the reaction has been, but I was struck when I showed them to members of my own family (mostly Republicans, all middle-class, Midwestern, business types) not only that they were amused but that they also seemed to take in the serious issues I was trying to address about funding for higher education and issues of work and evaluation in the academy. I’ve been trying to explain such matters to my family for decades, but the cartoons seemed to convey the point in a clear, succinct, and, I hope, memorable way.

Humor is a good teacher. We all know this. We use it in our classrooms all the time. Why not use it more as a way of explaining what we do and why it matters to audiences beyond the classroom? For that kind of communications work, we have been talking in the modes of crisis or denial for thirty years. I say we might consider giving the comic mode a try for a while. What have we got to lose?

Hard Times

Times are hard, you may have heard. Here in Roxie's World, where the primary wage-earners are state employees facing the prospect of furloughs in the next six months, we've had a series of increasingly frantic messages from our accounting firm (a now sad pair of number crunchers that we will call, let's see, not Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, but, um, TIAA & CREF) urging us to cut costs, increase efficiencies, and seize upon any available opportunity to make money. Right, guys -- Money-making is what we're all about here in the ad-free zone of Roxie's World.

Anyway, like other academics who got their holiday buzz killed by bad budget news this week, both moms sat in on a grim departmental committee meeting devoted to going over a list of cuts that might have to be made once the state lets Queer the Turtle U know how much of a hit it's going to have to take to get through fiscal 2009. And, please, don't even think about 2010.

Folks, we're real sorry to hear that the bailout for the auto industry has apparently fallen apart, but have you noticed that no one is even talking about a bailout for higher education? For years, public institutions like Queer the Turtle U have been stuck between the rock and the hard place of declining levels of state support and mounting pressure to keep tuition affordable. Caught in that vise, schools have fought to do more with less while scrambling to catch up to private institutions in the game of fundraising. That strategy worked reasonably well when times were good and the bubbles in stocks or real estate had a lot people feeling rich. Now? The party's over, public and private revenues have dried up, and schools are desperately trying to figure out how to cut costs without compromising the value of their brand (the ne plus ultra of higher ed under the consumer model).

Moose, who has a healthy respect for academic entrepreneurship, has a slogan for public institutions eager to prove that larger classes, smaller operating budgets, and reductions in advising and other forms of academic support are no threat whatsoever to the quality of education. She's been using the slogan informally all over campus at Queer the Turtle U this fall, but it hasn't been officially adopted yet, so, in the spirit of academic capitalism she has decided to auction it off here to one of my legions of loyal fans who works at some other cash-strapped public school. Listen up, Historiann! How 'bout it, Dog-Eared Book? the Shy One? Get in on the action, because this won't last long. Bidding opens now. Name your price in comments. All marketing suggestions (tee-shirts? coffee cups? backpacks?) welcome. Are you ready? Here is Moose's slogan for hard times in higher ed:

Excellence Without Money

Brilliant, don't you agree? Can't you just see it festooned on banners all over your campus, inspiring the young to scale the heights of pretending that everything is really just fine, no matter how many staff are laid off or how many searches are canceled or how many lines are cannibalized? Imagine the cool video your marketing department could produce, featuring a racially and ethnically mixed chorus line of smiling students dancing as fast as they can to a happy tune played by your school's marching band. Cue the tubas, kids! Let's show 'em what we're made of!

Meantime, here on the home front, we're considering a broad range of revenue enhancers to try to weather the storm of Great Depression 2.0. We realize we've been remiss in not seeking to capitalize on Roxie's World's strategic location near the epicenter of Obama Nation as the date of the coronation of the Precious approaches. That, I assure you, is about to change. Having no senate seat to auction off, we've decided to jump on the bandwagon and rent out space to the thundering hordes of Hopers and Changers preparing to converge on the national capital area around January 20. Why the heck not? Apparently, everybody else is doing it. We've already promised beds to three friends who will be in town for the occasion and actually plan to go, while we stay home and watch the festivities on teevee, having recently decided that inaugurations are like football: You see more of the action and are a whole lot more comfortable curled up on your couch than freezing your tush off in the not so great outdoors.

So, here's the deal. We figure we can sleep six more people in the house and maybe a hundred or so out in the ridiculously large back yard. We hadn't planned on renting out space there, but with word yesterday that camping will not be allowed on the national mall, we decided to make a play for the cash-poor granola-eating set insane enough to sleep outside in January. Take a look at our packages, and let us know what you'd like. Make your reservations in comments or by e-mailing me at roxieblog@gmail.com.

Bed Only:

Bed (shared) indoors, with bath privileges: $1500 @ night
Couch (shared) indoors, no bath privileges: $1200 @ night
Lawn space (no fires allowed), 1/2 bath: $800 @ night

Board Packages:

Pre-inaugural scrambled egg breakfast: $250
Eggs with Kraft cheese slices: $299
Eggs with Kraft cheese slices, coffee, and glass of Cold Duck: $499
Post-inaugural dance party and cold buffet: $899
Post-inaugural dance party and hot buffet, with Cold Duck: $1799

Transportation Packages:

Pickup/dropoff at National (no, we don't call it Reagan) Airport: $399
Pickup/dropoff at Takoma Metro (extra for early a.m. or late p.m. rides): $299

Discounts:

Students: none
Seniors: none
Disaffected Clintonistas: free drinks and an "Old Bitches for Hillary" tee-shirt, slightly worn

Yes, times are tough, kids, but if we all stick together, if we share the sacrifices and embrace the opportunities, we will get through our current challenges with our souls -- and, if we are lucky, our senses of humor -- in tact. Roxie's World is here for you, but as the bleeping governor of Illinois says, you've got to pay to play. So pay up, beloveds, and let's play on.

(Image credits: Seat for sale, via NYT; Rooms for rent, via PB)