Best overheard conversation in light of current trends in higher ed

Yesterday in the hallways of Michel Foucault Memorial Panopticon, I heard the following conversation as two student passed a classroom labeled "Distance Learning Classroom."


Student #1: What's a Distance Learning Classroom?

Student #2: It's where they broadcast a video of a professor's lecture from a remote location.*

Student #1: They do that?!





*Well, actually, it's where they film such lectures -- in front of a live audience! -- to broadcast later to students *not* in classrooms. But as I used to say in the fifth grade, "same diff."

Welcome to our panopticon

Things are quiet in our new building right now -- classes won't be in there until next semester -- so I took the opportunity to take a few pictures.

The following are pictures of the "town square" (or some other dumb name for the center of the building) of our new digs at RBU, including a close up view of one of the classrooms with the lights on:






I've got a suggestion for a new name:


And here's a picture of my office from outside its bars, er, window:


On the inside I've hung curtains on a tension rod, which I can close when I'm working and not having office hours, and open when I am having office hours:


Actually, I don't entirely mind the window, since it means when it gets noisy around me and I need the door closed, but I'm still meeting with a student, the window still leaves things open to view.

But the classrooms, I imagine, are going to take some getting used to.

See the professors teach! Watch the students learn! Discover the fascinating habits of scholars at their desks!

When I was in graduate school, the building that then housed the English department had a room we all called "The Fishbowl" because of its window overlooking a busy corridor. As if that weren't bad enough, many a comprehensive exam and dissertation defense was held in that room.

The Rust Belt U English department will soon be a department full of Fishbowls. Beginning Tuesday, we're moving into a brand new classroom and office building that has been constructed inside the edifice of one of the original WPA-constructed buildings on campus. I'm excited to be getting an office that's about 125% larger than the one I have now, and I'm psyched to have carpet that doesn't have a quarter century of god-knows-what embedded in it, as my current carpet does.

But I'm a little concerned about the fishbowl effect. You see, every single room in this building, including our individual offices, has windows that look out onto the hallways. There's some reason for this: because of the kind of building that's been re-purposed, many of these rooms are on interior hallways, without windows to the outside, so windows onto hallways will prevent us from feeling like we're in closets. But they also mean that we're constantly on display. I'll be putting up curtains across my window (thank god for tension rods) and only opening them when I have office hours. But when any of us teaches in that building, which we'll be doing most of the time, in many of the rooms we'll be facing not only our students, but also a big glass wall that looks out onto major corridors and places where people might congregate. It's going to take some getting used to, especially for those of us (me!) who are easily distracted.

Maybe I should change the pseudonym of our university to Rust Belt *Zoo*.

Crankiness

First, the kind of crankiness you might expect: I am vexed, terribly vexed by continued craziness at my institution and by a certain electronic output by some of my colleagues, which has devolved into something from the bad old days of the UseNet. It's embarrassing. I wash my hands of it. I will no longer read or comment on it (in my lame attempts to raise the level of conversation to, uh, actual conversation about the subject of the posts). Oh, and some of you may remember that I held a last minute workshop for the parties involved to help them make it better -- more readable, more useful for their message, more interesting to a wider audience. ONE person showed up. And that person thought that only the registered bloggers could see it, so you can imagine the learning curve I was facing there.

Oy.

Can I just say, for those of you who know what I'm talking about, that there are a lot of fantastic people at my institution among the students, faculty, and staff -- fantastic thinkers and creative artists and teachers and scholars (from students to faculty) and researchers and visionaries and organized minds who keep it all going. But it's always the squeaky wheels who get heard.

In other cranky news, but not my *own* crankiness...

Did you know there are *two* Cranky Professors? Seriously, there's the medieval art historian, The Cranky Professor, whom I already knew. And then there's one in English, too! But she goes by the shortened nom-de-blog of Cranky Prof and blogs at Cranky Epistles. Who knew? Did you?

Why are we all so cranky?

Btw, the word "cranky" has now become completely weird to me. Does that ever happen to you -- that is, you say or write a word over and over and it becomes alien in the process?

Local color

This weekend is the big festival weekend for my old neighborhood, Rust Belt Historic District. Weirdly, I don't think I've blogged about it, even though I lived in the midst of it three years in a row and have gone back for festival every year since.

Anyway, I love festival weekend. There are home tours of the Victorian and Arts and Crafts homes of the neighborhood; fantastic street fair food at both the official vendors and the many unofficial church and individual barbecues around the neighborhood (and some of those guys have the most enormous semi-portable smoker-barbecue set-ups you've ever seen); and a crafts fair that seems to be getting disappointingly smaller every year but always features a booth with gorgeous fabric purses to which I'm utterly addicted (I now own three of the same small but functional size: one in various shades of eye-popping green polka dots, one with an autumnal pattern of nearly-abstract flowers with a bubblegum pink lining, and now one with a black/gray/neon orange/electric blue striped pattern and an electric blue lining).

There's also a parade, which I missed this year, that's the trippiest, most homemade, bizarro parade you've ever seen. One the "decorated" cars that's in the parade every year is this doozy (picture from last year):


Click on the picture to "embiggen" it and get a closer look at the bizarre doll heads glued all over the thing. We saw it at a gas station on the way to the festival this year and the doll heads have multiplied.

The home tours are a little less bizarre (though one house one year had a basement room dedicated to the guy's Star Wars toy collection) and tend to be all about the owners' loving refurbishment of their old homes, either to restore original characteristics or to adapt it to modern living. Some of the home owners take Victorian or Arts and Crafts "authenticity" a little too far and their homes look like museums. I don't like Victorian style myself, so the Victoriana-obsessed homes don't do it for me, but even the shrine-like Arts and Crafts ones are a little sterile to me, and I *like* that style. Who wants to live in a museum? But Bullock and I like home tours for getting design ideas or just oohing and ahing over the exquisite details of original woodwork or molding or what have you. And this year we saw the Most. Awesome. House. Ever. It was a 3500 square foot 1912 Arts and Crafts style stucco house with an English country/Tudor-ish exterior, and it had been beautifully and expensively re-done in all sorts of good ways without messing up its original details.

Here's the outside (the tile roof is original):


There was some painted woodwork inside, but only the door jambs on the second floor. Everything else looked like the oak it was made of, including the center hall staircase, the window seats throughout the house, and the door jambs and other oak on the first floor. And the improvements and additions they did were to die for -- a Florida room with a heated tile floor, and a wall removed between the den and the formal living room to make one great room, plus bumped-out "green house" windows in the kitchen and the "studio," which used to be an attached garage.

Here's the Florida room, which was the owner's addition in place of a side porch, I think (note wet bar in the far right corner):


And *oh* that kitchen! The guy who currently owns it is the head designer of a famous kitchen-ware company -- the kind that serious foodies buy from -- and his kitchen was full of professional and industrial quality stuff. It was also a *helluva* lot bigger than the original kitchen, the walls between old cold porches (for the iceman) and breakfast nooks having been removed, and more heated tile floors put in in parts of it (not the parts showing in the picture).

Here's one shot of the fabulous kitchen:


Add 5 bedrooms, all of decent size (unlike the older Victorians), plus two full baths -- one of the first floor and one still with the original pedestal sink and gigantic tub, as well as original subway tile (and an impressive size, too) -- and the most gorgeously landscaped, private, fenced-in 1/3 acre backyard, complete with an amazing outdoor kitchen, herb and vegetable garden (cleverly hidden from the more decorative parts of the garden and yard), and intimate nooks and crannies, and this house is the most fabulous thing I've ever seen, especially in Rust Belt.

Here are the bathroom with the original fixtures, one part of the park-like backyard (they must have hired a professional landscaper), and the outdoor kitchen (the table was made from re-claimed floor boards from a warehouse, with legs made of re-claimed porch columns!):




And get this: it's for sale. And since this is Rust Belt, it's under $300,000. I kid you not.

I heart the Historic District Festival. I heart Rust Belt.

The quirky kindness of my colleagues

After the crankiness of the last post, I thought I should write something nice about my colleagues. One of the benefits of being somewhere relatively small in size, at least in faculty terms (smaller than we should be given our 20,000+ students), is that faculty in other departments and colleges notice what you're up to. And then they send congratulatory notes and little tokens of appreciation. This is totally weird to me, but it's kind of nice. I feel a bit like Liz Lemon when she visited Cleveland on 30 Rock -- people are being nice! Strangers make eye contact! I'm *pretty* in the midwest! Etc.

Anyway, here's what I mean. As you'll recall, I won one of the university-wide teaching awards this year. This a big deal at our university; despite our status as a metropolitan research university, the faculty take teaching seriously, and a teaching award is not the kiss of death that it might be at an R1. The whole award series -- for teaching, research, advising, and outreach -- is taken seriously, and a big spread is done in the news that comes out of the public relations office. And the rest of the faculty read that thing religiously, it seems. I'm still getting congratulatory e-mails and comments and so forth.

But what I want to especially comment upon are two congratulatory notes I got from faculty in other colleges, both professional schools. One of them sent me a hand-written note on his personal stationery. Inside was taped a piece of paper on which was written "Open and see greatness!" Inside that was a print-out of my profile and picture from the spread in the online edition of the above-mentioned spread. Too funny! And then more recently I got another card from the dean of one our science-related professional schools, and inside was a *laminated* version of my picture and profile from the print edition of the news spread, made into a bookmark! This is totally not the kind of thing that would have happened at the big R1s where I went to college and graduate school, so it's a little bit of a culture schock, but ultimately I find this all kind of charming. And it gives me some hope for the future of this university, that the kind of work that I do matters in some way to my colleagues, and that they see it as valuable and worthwhile.

Blogging-related bleg for advice

OK, so I've volunteered to teach my colleagues how to make their blog into something that people outside of RBU will want to read, but that also discusses what's going on here. I also plan on showing them ways of getting it wider attention and readers. Obviously, nothing's guaranteed, but I have some ideas.

On the writing front, they should talk about the specifics here but with the framework of the larger problems for higher education in general -- especially public education. They won't get readers and links -- especially not from Inside Higher Ed -- unless what they write speaks to a larger audience. And they should mix posts that speak to fellow academics and general audience readers.

On the marketing front, these are the ideas I have: register with technorati; read other blogs and comment on them; send an e-mail to the "Around the Web" editor at IHE when there's a post they might be interested in; register with SiteMeter to see what traffic you are (or aren't) getting; register with a local blog who collects Rust Belt blog links and categorizes them; create a blogroll (which may get the attention of those bloggers checking their links); and....um, what am I missing?

Does anyone have any other ideas?

It's hard to grow a blog audience overnight, I know, but it's worth a try getting some wider audience, I think. And also, once the trustees sign off on my tenure and it's a done deal, I'll link my colleagues' blog here, so eventually they'll have at least one link!

PS -- I've told my colleagues that I have a blog, but I haven't told them which one.

Finally.

The Provost has finally approved my tenure and promotion. Since said Provost was hired by Pres. Newfangledess, I'm assuming the decision isn't anything he wouldn't approve of as well, and that from here on out things will proceed smoothly, swiftly, and positively in my favor.

Knock wood.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K*

*Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

As Bill and Ted would say, things are most bogus and non-triumphant at Rust Belt U these days, my friends. There is chaos at the top and it's pretty much unbloggable, especially since my tenure file still sits in the Provost's office, now weeks overdue for a decision. I'm actually thinking of alternative careers because the atmosphere here is so demoralizing.

This is partly why you haven't had a substantive post from me in awhile. The other reason is Pippi, who is utterly time-consuming in the most wonderful ways. I could write more, but I'm pretty sure you don't want more "why my dog rocks" posts, unless it's Friday dog blogging. But I will say that those alternative careers I've been thinking about include animal-related ones, though I had thoughts about such things long before Pippi. Once upon a time I wanted to be a zoologist, but I got frustrated with basic level science, even though I was good at it, because I wanted to move on to the Big Questions, but you don't really get to do that at the undergrad level very much in the sciences. And I wouldn't even get to the zoology part until graduate school. But now I'm day-dreaming about doing those basic science classes so I can get into Vet school. The one in our state has a joint DVM-PhD program, and I'm thinking about the areas I was once interested in in zoology -- animal behavior, in particular -- but now in more pragmatic terms of the behavior and well-being of domestic and/or zoo animals. The joint program would allow me to be a practitioner-researcher, and open faculty positions as an option, too. Imagine having options! Imagine having a range of possible careers! I could even teach a class on medieval bestiaries and animal fables to DVM students -- and I'd bring Karl in as a guest lecturer! (Well, I suppose I could do that now, except we don't have a Vet school at RBU.)

But that's all a daydream at the moment. And really, do I want many more years of school on top of the ones I've already spent? Really? (Though if I did it, I might start a new blog called Doctor Doctor Doctor Virago. Hee!)

But back to our most bogus adventures at RBU...I'm trying to work out ways to talk about it, because I want to do so in response to Tenured Radical's call to replace tenure with unionization. The long and short of it is, at our university at the moment, if we had only 5-year contracts and a union, instead of having a tenure system *and* a union, we'd be totally screwed. Well, those of us not in the applied sciences and professional schools would, anyway, and I'd already be working on my pre-vet pre-reqs because I probably wouldn't have a job for next year. Seriously.




(Btw, Pippi proofread this post. She tried to get in my lap, stared intently at the screen, and then got down.)