• the profession
• theorizing

As readers of this blog know, I've been concerned for some time about the relationship between speech and action, and the legal implications of that distinction (as in the spirited discussion of Brown v. EMA we've had this week).

• Jim Aune's blog
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• poetic
• the profession

Here's a compelling, long-ish poem by Daisy Fried about a poetry teacher at Princeton sharing a train ride back from Manhattan with several students who interviewed at Wall Street firms at the same time she interviewed for adjunct teaching positions. And, much older, W.D. Snodgrass's "April Inventory." I'm trying to think of other poems about college teaching. Any ideas?

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• the profession

• Jim Aune's blog
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• the profession

And now even Salon gives space to the new journalistic genre of beat-up-the-liberal-arts. My immediate reaction is that this woman's UVA English education failed to equip with tools of social and political analysis. The steady abandonment of the Humphrey-Hawkins commitment to full employment over the last 30 years might have a teensy relationship to the perceived current crisis.

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• peer review
• the profession

A couple of weeks ago, during the Computers and Writing Conference in Ann Arbor (as an aside, this was a superbly run conference by the folks in Ann Arbor), I was part of a Town Hall discussion entitled "The Future(s) of Computers and Writing."

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• the profession

My department at Texas A&M has always started fall semester by having a 2 hour (or so) meeting of everyone in the department--staff, graduate students, faculty. Everyone gets introduced, and, in recent years, we have had presentations by each of the four areas of our department (Health, Org, Media Studies, Rhetoric & Public Affairs) about the focus of their research. It's a largely epideictic moment, as it should be. What I'm curious about is how other departments (especially large doctoral programs like ours) do for this sort of ceremonial introduction. Thoughts?

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• the profession

Our own Nate Kreuter has a nifty column in IHE today on the issue of what to call one's professors. My 2 cents is this:

1. I don't normally let undergraduates call me by my first name--this practice was more common in the Midwestern over-priced private colleges I ran away from in 1996. Boundaries are useful things, although they should not be fetishized.

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• the profession

As asked on Facebook: Is there any rhyme or reason to whether or not an honorarium is offered for participating in the tenure process as an external reviewer?

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• the profession

The NEA salary survey is out. At UMD, the average full prof makes $93K, Assoc $74K, Assist $57K, and adjunct $49K. Clearly this is not the average for my field (for an associate-to-be, I will be a highly paid assistant), but includes business and engineering, who destroy curves. It also includes fine arts and education, whom (I'm told) are the part of the curve below College of Liber Arts faculty. We get, on average across the categories, $25K in benefits. Duluth is the lowest-paying campus among the 7 in its category (that is, MA-granting with very limited doctoral participation).

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• disciplinarity
• Minnesota
• the profession

From http://www.mndaily.com/2011/04/21/cla-begins-planning-program-mergers

"A planning document obtained by the Minnesota Daily was presented last month by CLA Dean James Parente to chairs of departments in that college, spokeswoman Kelly O’Brien said, and is intended to “get the ball rolling” in a process the dean hopes will yield specific plans for integration of departments.... Among dozens of other proposals, the CLA report called for “multidisciplinary collaborations and academic synergies.”

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