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Who says you need to wear a Doctor Who costume to a Doctor Who convention? I have reached that level of geekdom where I will cosplay a character from a podcast whose appearance is never described. The costume is based entirely on fanart. Luckily, fandom's love for Welcome to Night Vale is so large that I got recognized by oodles of people.
Unfortunately the only picture I got of myself in my Cecil costume was this mirror selfie, which had terrible lighting that I could only partially fix during editing.
Note to my mother and anyone else curious: the tattoos are temporary.
#091/366 March 31, 2008
New York University Press sent me a complimentary copy of Marc Bousqet's How the University Works. (My copy is in the picture above.) I agreed to provide my review of the book. First of all, I have to admit my guilt for taking so long to review it! I received it quite some time ago. I had time to finish reading it, and now I have time to review it, since it's my spring break.
Since this is a personal blog, I am not going to write the sort of review you might find in an academic publication. I'll focus directly on the book for a portion of this post, but I will connect to the book by sharing the personal experiences and memories that reading the book evoked in me. It seems more appropriate for this blog to take that approach.
My first reaction is that the book was both interesting and difficult for me to read all at once. The difficulty I experienced reveals more about me as a reader than about the book itself, though.
The book advocates for the rights of adjuncts, graduate students, and undergraduates, all of whom provide cheap labor to sustain the university machine. Evidence is presented to show that adjuncts make only a fraction of what full time faculty make, plus they don't receive benefits, have to pay quite a lot in both time and gas to work at multiple institutions to make ends meet. (At some level, we knew all of this. We don't have to look far for examples in the blogosphere to find cases of poorly paid flex time faculty. StyleyGeek posted about this very topic recently.) What is more interesting are the explanations, including discussion of how institutions -- from the administration to faculty unions -- maintain this situation for their benefit. I hadn't thought about how unions, when fighting for the rights of their members, do not consider the rights for all of those in the system.
Many of the examples were provided with respect to the field of Bnglish and the MLA and the job market for those in English. This is a particularly useful field for supporting the author's argument; fields that require a lot of sections of service courses employ more adjuncts. To what degree is the problem of too many adjuncts, more graduate students than possible jobs, etc., a field specific problem? I imagine that there are other fields in the humanities with similar issues... However, I work in a field where this is less of a problem, although it's not perfect in my field, either.
Also, the author took care to discuss that the types of universities and colleges discussed in the book included more than the top 100 research universities. I have to admit that my experiences as a student and as a professor are limited to research universities. I took this to mean that it was important to attend to the content of this book, because my doctoral students may be taking jobs at universities other than research schools, and if I am aware of labor issues at a range of types of universities, I can help them make sense of their future roles in their school's structure, particularly when they're considering job options (during the application process and among those schools that offer jobs to them).
I would recommend this book to anyone who works at a university, in any role, as you will learn a great deal about labor structure of universities. I wanted to send copies of this book to the members of my university administration!
So, here are some stories that help you understand the discomfort I had reading the book...
(1) My resistance to the graduate students' unionization efforts. Graduate students at my university were starting a union when I was in graduate school. I completely did not understand why this union needed to exist. I mean, I had plenty of funding (notice how I made it about me?). I had fellowship money to work on my own research. I had my choice of research and teaching opportunities due to the range of options where I went to school.
Also, I viewed graduate school as a luxury. I am the only one in my family to get a Ph.D. I felt like I chose to go back to school; I didn't have to go to graduate school. I could have stayed working in my job prior to graduate school. I also thought that if I didn't want to work for the university, I could have taken out a student loan, so if I felt like I was being overworked, I still had some options.
I can see, after reading this book, that I didn't really think the situation through at the time. Even though I did not feel overworked and underpaid in graduate school, it is possible that graduate students in other departments had legitimate complaints. I guess I still think about graduate school as a luxury, however. Am I wrong in thinking that?
(2) The job market in my field is wide open. My field is weird. We are not producing enough Ph.D.s per year to fill the open faculty positions -- about 40% go unfilled each year. Sometimes this is due to unqualified candidates, but it's mostly due to more positions than candidates. (There have been small research projects and articles published about the weirdness of the job market in my field.) We have relatively higher paying fellowships to recruit doctoral students to our field. I have to acknowledge that my experience is skewed.
However, even with my field as it is, I can see how it's possible to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Where I work, I feel like we depend on recruiting enough doctoral students each year to staff our undergraduate courses. We keep the sections to a lower student to instructor ratio by bringing in a certain number of graduate students. I bring this up as a problem every semester to my colleagues when we chose our courses (my colleagues and I in my field decide among ourselves as a group who gets to teach which course each semester).
Even though we do need our doctoral students to staff all of our sections of undergraduate courses, it's not the worst situation. There are multiple sections of the same courses, and faculty and graduate students who teach sections of the same course collaborate extensively. On the one hand, the graduate student instructors get extensive support for teaching and on the other hand this requires extra meetings. Also, there are research opportunities related to their teaching experiences, which is a nice way to develop as a scholar along with opportunities to become a better instructor.
However, it still doesn't sit right to me that we can't staff all of our courses without relying on graduate student instructors. I don't like feeling like we're barely making ends meet. I would like to provide graduate students with professional opportunities that are meeting their needs rather than ours.
So, I would say read this book to think about how you can be part of the solution to bring more equitable labor practices to university and college settings.
A couple geeks dressed up as LEGO versions of Darth Maul and Princess Leia at San Diego Comic-Con 2007.
I have officially leapt over the precipice into the yawning chasm of geekdom -- I joined an adult kickball league. I'll be playing in the Washington Monument division of the DC chapter of the World Adult Kickball Association. We play our games near the Washington Monument (duh) on Sundays starting the first week of next month. My friend Adriana and I signed up together so we could get placed on the same team. That way neither of us had to be the 'new kid' on our own.
It should be fun. I figure it will get me outdoors and get me some exercise if nothing else, plus I'll get to meet new people to drink beer with. Every division has a designated after-game bar to hang out in. Ours is the Exchange over by the White House. Given that I haven't played kickball since I was in the sixth grade it's a near certainty I'll be terrible at it, so hopefully my teammates won't take kickball uber-seriously. I mean, it is kickball after all.
The woman in charge of our division said there are still plenty of openings, so if you've ever considered making a fool of yourself in front of a bunch of tourists now is the time to sign up. And we've even got one spot still left on my team if you're interested!
(March 24, 2009)
Struthio camelus australis
Taken at the Okavango Delta section of the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk.
Visit my blog at ideonexus.com for a daily dose of geekdom.
Strat-o-Matic Baseball: some say it is just a game, but those that play it, say it's a passion. For those unfamiliar, I tell them it is the Dungeons & Dragons version of baseball. My geekdom and sports side are perfect for this.
Published in New England Journal of Baseball on page 41.
March 2008 ~ 16. strategy
Yesterday I worked with Robert Seacord [seated] to talk with him about his work on CERT's Secure Coding Initiative. We recorded a three-part video podcast series that will be available in a few weeks.
To make up for the lackluster shot of previous.
I love when geekdoms collide.
On a random side note my Ipod touch is named after this character. (Bruce Banner not Hogwarts)
Wanted: More Startups With One Foot In The U.S. And One In Mexico
www.forbes.com/sites/jessicastillman/2014/02/04/wanted-mo...