Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Student Expectations

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An article in the New York Times this week reported on a study of student expectations that claimed they were a significant factor in grade complaints.  Students, it seems, have different expectations about what they should have to do to earn good grades. Some of the students quoted, for example, seemed to think that they should receive good grades based on their effort. One student said, "I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade…. What else is there really than the effort that you put in?” Truly an illuminating comment, I’m sure you’ll agree. To most of us the answer is obvious.

The article mentioned various efforts around the country to deal with these unwarranted expectations about grades. Apparently, at Wisconsin the professors tell students they need to  “read for knowledge and write with the goal of exploring ideas.” They have seminars to reinforce this idea and teach students what education is supposed to be about.

This last quote gets at a much more fundamental question about student expectations than whether they should be graded for effort. Namely, what is education for in the first place? What value does it have? What is college for? Many students value education only instrumentally. They think rightly or wrongly that a college education is a means to getting a job. Education in itself is valued only insofar as it leads to gainful employment. As a student once said to me years ago, "I’m going to be a farmer. Why do I need to take classes like this?" (The class in question was introductory rhetoric, in which the student was faring poorly.) Any response I could have given would have been lost on this particular student, because the student had such a drastically different understanding of what the purpose of college is than I did. He was going to get some practical agricultural training and maybe enough accounting skills to run the family farm. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it meant that he denigrated anything that didn’t lead to his instrumental purpose. For him, the purpose of a college "education" was to help him be a farmer.

Students like this must be truly bewildered when they enter almost any traditional college and they’re taught by people for whom knowledge is valued for itself and not for any instrumental purpose. This is true even in fields with practical applications, and not just in the liberal arts. Professors are professors because they like to learn. They are the types Aristotle was talking about when he said that man by nature desires to know. Philosophers by nature desire to know. Farmers desire to know how to run a farm. This is a huge and crucial difference. Students who seek only instrumental learning can’t even understand the love of liberal learning that motivates their teachers. Learning is valued for its own sake, and not for the sake of some practical goal.

This difference appears even more starkly in the humanities, which tend to have no instrumental value. If we study seventeenth-century Dutch trading patterns or ancient philosophy or French poetry, we don’t do so for pragmatic results. The result is understanding or knowledge, but not understanding or knowledge that we can apply to getting a job. Why study rhetoric or poetry or history or philosophy? Ultimately, the only reason can be the desire to know, and in this knowing to participate in a larger culture than we encounter in our daily lives. We may understand more about our world, we may even become more fully human in certain ways, but rarely are we going to be able to take this knowledge and go run a business.

One irony is that such a disinterested pursuit of knowledge can lead to practical results. Consider the study of philosophy. Studying philosophy developed my analytical skills in ways that other study wouldn’t have, and these skills have been useful for many things, including my job, but I wouldn’t have pursued the study and thus developed the skills were I not interested in the subject for itself. Studying history can develop in us an understanding of other people and other cultures and perhaps lead to sympathy with those unlike ourselves which might reduce tensions and increase world peace, but it doesn’t necessarily do this. This would be an unrealistic reason to read a history book.

Another irony is that the mis-expectation of the student quoted above, who believed he should get an ‘A’ for effort, is one expectation that has little to do with learning for its own sake or the non-instrumental value of humanistic study, but is instead an expectation completely at odds with the practical world he will encounter when leaving school. Imagine a performance appraisal for any job where it would be appropriate to ask, "what is there other than the effort you put in?" One of the most realistic and practical portions of higher education is the ultimate expectation of results–just like in the real world. Whether you’re repairing an automobile or preparing a sales presentation, no one cares about the effort you put in. People care about the finished product. The one way in which higher education indisputibly prepares one for the demands of the workaday world is the one this student finds the least understandable.

Still They Persist

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Last spring I wrote about the ethics of fake reference in a series of posts. About a year ago, a student in a library school course at an unnamed library school at a large state university in New Jersey popped up during my Sunday night chat reference shift lying to me and asking me fake questions.

Skip to one year later, almost to the day. I’m still doing Sunday night chat reference shifts. Reference students at the large unnamed library school in New Jersey are still lying to me. Apparently they didn’t read my posts from last year, so if you know the professor handing out this particular assignment – go lie to reference librarians at private universities and ask them fake questions – please pass this post on to them.

My first question is, what exactly do you think the students are supposed to learn from this? I really can’t figure out what it is. It can’t be how librarians at my institution (a private university, by the way) respond to genuine questions by our clientele or to honest researchers, because that’s not what happens when these students encounter me. Are they supposed to find out what happens when duplicitous library school students lie to experienced reference librarians and try to deceive them? If so, then keep up the good work, because that’s what the students learn when they get me on the line.

A friend of mine currently teaching reference says I don’t like to be "secretly shopped." That’s not the problem. If the shopping was secret, it might be okay. The problem is, I can tell from the very moment the first question is asked what is going on. (I’d detail how I can tell, but that would just give the deceivers more ammunition. Experienced reference librarians can probably figure it out.) From the very first question tonight, I knew. It was obviously a fake question, and, frankly, a particularly stupid and improbable one. I answered politely, then referred the query to the patron’s own librarians. I was trying to be kind. Once upon a time I was a library school student myself, though a considerably more honest one.

The lies continued. The person claimed to be a student at a particular college. Uh huh. Fine. I refrained from saying, "you really have no scruples whatsoever, do you?" Instead I merely asked, "you’re in a library school reference course, aren’t you?" Finally, the person admitted the truth, but then had the further gall to say, "I just wanted to know what librarians would recommend for X topic." Uh huh. Sure. If that’s all you’d wanted to know, you could have asked.

I’m not sure why I get so miffed about this, but I do. It seems to me a violation of professional ethics. Do the teachers of reference not see it this way? Am I not a professional with a job to do? Is my time not valuable? Do I deserve to be lied to by duplicitous students? As many around the country can attest, if I’m contacted directly, I’m more than happy to help students. Why lie to me?

I’m not sure what I can do but write about it here. Someday perhaps I’ll try to teach reference myself, to show how it can be done without asking students to lie to busy librarians.

Until then, I offer some advice to duplicitous library school students at the unnamed library school. Please don’t pester the chat service at my library. Your own library has a chat service. Bother those librarians. They are very good, and I’m sure they will resent your lies as well, but then again they work for your institution. If you absolutely have to chat up my institution. try telling the truth. It will get you further. You might not realize this, but the librarians where I work are pretty smart and very experienced. We do this for a living, and we can tell when you’re lying to us.

Reports of My Demise

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I’ll tell you now I have nothing to say, but last weekend someone asked me if this blog was dead, and I realized it’s been a while since I’ve written. I took three weeks off for Christmas, then I was behind at work, then preparing for ALA, then being at ALA, then catching up afterward. Also, I’ve been asked to present and write more than I usually do, and free time is taken up with these extracurricular projects. Then suddenly people are asking if I’ve given up blogging. I don’t think I have. I don’t consider this blog dead, nor even dormant. It’s just resting.

Oddly enough, I even have some stuff to write about, but haven’t had the time. Over Christmas break I was reading Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment and enjoyed the chapter on libraries and the Enlightenment. Through that I got to Gabriel Naude’s 17th century book on establishing a library. I thought it might be interesting to compare the nascent days of research libraries to today, but that would require that I actually read the book, which I haven’t had time to do yet despite its brevity. The great thing about a blog is that it issues no demands or deadlines. At least I’ve proved I’m not addicted to blogging, which no one probably ever suspected about me.

To fill the space, I considered posting the "25 Random Things" thing, which I’ve been tagged on in Facebook a couple of times. So far I can’t think of 25 random things that I’d want the world to know about me, but for the especially curious among you I’ll give you half a dozen from my list. For the not especially curious, just ignore these.

  1. I’m big for my age.
  2. I play guitar. In high school I wanted to be Eric Clapton. After that I wanted to be Bob Dylan.
  3. I grew up in the south, but have no trace of a southern accent. When people say, "you don’t sound like you’re from Louisiana," I tell them everyone in Louisiana sounds like me.
  4. I’m built for comfort, not for speed.
  5. Dogs and children tend to love me.
  6. I’ve studied both karate and aikido. Not a lot, but enough to hurt you if you attack me. So don’t attack me.

 Oh, and according to the Typealyzer, this blog is INTP.

"INTP – The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."

Personally, I prefer the description of INTP I got when I took the Facebook quiz ( though this one isn’t too bad, either):

"Logical, original, creative thinkers. Can become very excited about theories and ideas. Exceptionally capable and driven to turn theories into clear understandings. Highly value knowledge, competence and logic. Quiet and reserved, hard to get to know well. Individualistic, having no interest in leading or following others."

The Evolution of a Teaching Persona

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Every year as I’m finishing up another year and recovering from the pressure of teaching I read around in a handful of books on the subject that have been influential for my thinking, looking for inspiration or reassurance or something. This year I’ve been rereading portions of Banner and Cannon’s The Elements of Teaching, which I always find calming and thoughtful. I was just browsing the chapter on Character, which gives several tips: a teaching character must be authentic and consistent, distinct and individual; it means showing humanity by acknowledging lapses and errors and requires sociability; and it should mature with age.

Banner and Cannon note that "a trap young teachers often fall into is that of assuming ‘teaching personalities’ that are not their own. Such teachers are like unconscious actors; they are playing roles based, often unknowingly, on the favorite school teachers or college mentors of their own youth" (108). My only disagreement with this is to always consider it a trap. They remark that when 23-year-olds face 18-year-olds, they can’t play the graybeard. I started teaching freshman when I was 23, and this is certainly true. I could no more have been myself in front of those 18-year-olds than I could have plausibly played the graybeard. Still, based upon readings at the time on teaching persona, I did deliberately fashion one for the class, and it was indeed based upon a specific professor I’d had in college, which is not to say that it wasn’t also me.

My last year in college I took a two-semester sequence on critical theory from an English professor. We read in the history of critical theory from Plato to Derrida, and the lectures and discussions were engaging. The professor was very intense and treated whatever we were reading as well worth the intellectual effort it took to get through it. Everything was important. You knew this from the intensity of his lectures and comments. I’m thumbing now through one of the textbooks that year, David Richter’s The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Assuming what I marked up was what we read (this was seventeen years ago, after all), we read Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Dante, Philip Sidney, Hume, Kant, Hegel, T.S. Eliot, Kenneth Burke, Marx, Georg Lukacs, Benjamin, Freud, Frye, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, de Man, Edward Said, Gilbert and Gubar, and Cixous among others. I’ve read few of these for years, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be reading the post-structuralists ever again, but this was the intellectual meat of my youth and much of it I first ate at this professor’s table.

Though I had a number of good professors over the years, he still remains my touchstone, and I still recall my months working with him. He still remains the most intellectually serious and engaging professor in the classroom I’ve ever encountered. From him I learned not just to read or think intensely, but to try to communicate that intensity, that passion for ideas, to my own students. He showed me in his own teaching what it was like to live with ideas. I went to grad school in English thinking I would encounter this same intellectual rigor and passion. C’est la vie.

I entered the classroom with the same intense demeanor, and I always try to convey the intellectual worth of whatever I teach, but I’m sure I looked ridiculous as a baby-faced twenty-something talking about whatever fluff was in our rhetoric readers as if it were Kant or Hegel. Other young teachers played the hipster or the clown, but I couldn’t do it. Playing the graybeard, I wanted gravitas, and the only way to achieve it was, I thought, with the serious demeanor.  I was serious about my ideas and the intellectual life, but there are other ways to achieve that. Seriousness doesn’t make up for inexperience, ignorance, and bad teaching, all of which were my lot when I began.

"Character should mature with age." I read that line and laughed at my earlier self in a way that my earlier self probably wouldn’t have appreciated. When I started teaching, speaking in public terrified me. It literally made me sick; my stomach would ache before every class began. Combine shyness with inexperience and only a passing familiarity with the material, and you have a good recipe for my first year. I pity those poor students I had that year, and I used to hope later that if I encountered them again they wouldn’t remember me. I grew my hair long and grew a beard so they wouldn’t recognize me.

As I’ve gotten better at teaching, my teaching persona has edged ever closer to whatever might pass for my "real" persona. After enough years, I’ve started to grow more comfortble with myself in the classroom, more comfortable tolerating a certain amount of levity and personal disclosure I couldn’t have mustered seventeen years ago. Because I know how to maintain control, I don’t fear mutiny. Because I’m confident in my abilities, I’m more willing to admit my weaknesses or my lapses. Because I’m not trying to persuade my students that I’m not a fraud, I also tend to be more open and even to like the students more. An actor sees an audience, but I see individuals and personalities, and, I think, come across as more of a real person to them in consequence. And, ironically, now that I have a beard and it is in fact going gray, I never feel the need to play the graybeard.

Humor in the Classroom, or Wherever

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The other day I was chatting with a friend and fellow librarian about using humor in presentations and in the classroom. Whenever we’re working on presentations, we’ll run ideas by each other, and she has to endure comments from me like, “I have the basic outline, but I can’t figure out where to put in any jokes.” This may sound unnecessary, but I’m a firm believer in using humor in presentations as well as in the classroom. Humor engages listeners and reduces their anxiety.

Though I said “jokes,” I don’t really mean jokes in the general sense. I’m not very good at telling jokes, mostly because I can never remember any. Humor (or if it’s extemporaneous, wit) is more what I’m talking about. I know a few jokes of the “guy walks into a bar” variety, but I can’t imagine they would be very useful in a presentation to librarians or to a group of students in a class. Possibly I could develop some “guy walks into a library” jokes, but they probably wouldn’t be funny and wouldn’t blend into the material being presented. (I’ve appended my attempt at a “guy walks into a library” joke below, based on another joke I know.)

Sometimes I can actually plan a joke. I gave a talk on Google this summer, and was briefly comparing the now defunct Lively to Second Life. I’ve always been skeptical about Second Life, which seems to be losing its buzz (pace the claims of the SL people). In my presentation I said: “I haven’t seen any reason to use Second Life yet. Every time I’m there, I just end up naked and bumping into walls.” So far, so good. There were several head nods and a couple of titters, because anyone who’s used or read about SL knows this stuff happens. Then I followed with, “Since that’s how I spend a lot of my time in real life, I don’t see much point in going online.” I thought the joke went well. It highlighted my sketicism about SL as a useful tool while keeping the audience’s attention.

Usually whatever jokes I make are spontaneous. Recently, I was talking to a group of librarians about my theories and experiences weeding the collection for offsite storage. If anything cries out for levity, it’s this subject, which can manage to be boring and contentious at the same time. I was speaking off the cuff, but in discussing what kinds of little used materials I might send offsite, I remembered that I’d once discovered in a tight area of the stacks a whole shelf of books about Albert Schweitzer that hadn’t circulated since the 1960s. They were easy to send offsite. “So Albert Schweitzer, years after his death, was still performing good works by creating space in my stacks.” This joke might not work with college students, because it assumes at least a minimal familiarity with Schweitzer.

Audience is important. At another recent talk I was recalling a discussion I’d once had with one of my superiors about the way philosophy students work. I was being pressured to perform some library-related activities for which there was no need. For some reason, the Marshall McLuhan scene from Annie Hall popped into my head, and I did an impersonation of him in that scene. “You know nothing of my work.” I was just playing around, but a lot of the audience had obviously seen Annie Hall, which wouldn’t have been the case with most college students, especially freshmen.

In general, librarians are an easy crowd, though. Freshmen writing classes are another story. For those, I have almost no canned humor, but look for spaces to insert a witty comment. I’m not looking for belly-laughs, but simply want to hold their attention so they’ll listen to what I’m trying to communicate. Sometimes this is a joke about a book or article title we find. Or sometimes I tell them that while they might wait until the night before to write their research papers, they sure don’t want to wait until the night before to research them. I think it shocks them a bit that I say this, and it allows for a game instructor to jump in and reinforce lessons about time planning.

I’ve never set out to try to be funny in presentations, and I’ve tended to use humor more as I feel more comfortable being myself in front of groups of people, which has been a long time coming. I like joking around with friends, but for much of my life found it difficult to allow myself levity in public performances. Some people think funny can’t be taught, and to some extent I suppose this is true. Plenty of people have senses of humor without being funny themeselves. Some funniness possibly can be taught, though.

There are a lot of instructional materials to learn to be funnier, but it turns out that there’s a bit of library literature on the topic of using humor for library instruction as well. I found the recent Walker article in Library Lit, and that led me to the Trefts/Blakeslee article, which in turn led me to the Booth-Butterfield article in the communications literature (citations below, all available through ProQuest). Walker discusses the benefits to using humor in the classroom, like keeping students’ attention, increasing their retention of material, and reducing their information anxiety. She also summarizes someone’s suggestions of how to cultivate humor in the classroom (p. 120):

  • Smile/ be light-hearted.
  • Be spontaneous/natural.
  • Foster an informal climate/be conversations and loose.
  • Begin class with an ice-breaker, a short anecdote, or a humorous climate.
  • Encourage a give-and-take between yourself and students. Play off their comments.

These all seemed good recommendations to me, and in line with my experience.

Trefts and Blakeslee enrolled in a comedy course to see if they could become funnier. Their instructor divided people into two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. No, I’m kidding. He divided them into Fog People and Comedy People.

He says that the Fog People are people who “just don’t get It” (humor), and Comedy People are the ones who “reveal It” to the Fog People. From Greg Dean’s comedy tapes we learned that there is a distinct difference between having a sense of humor and being funny, or, as he describes it, having a “sense of funny”. Many of us probably feel we have a pretty good sense of humor, but that we are not particularly funny. Being funny, or having a sense of funny, is having the ability to make other people laugh; knowing what is funny in certain situations; and being able to look at the world, to observe, and to find humor in everything – even libraries! Therefore, Comedy People, the ones that can make people laugh, have both a sense of funny and a sense of humor. The Fog People only have a sense of humor.

To use humor in the classroom, the goal is to move from being a Fog Person to being a Comedy Person, the person who sees what is funny in a given situation. They have several tips tips to pass on:

  1. Do not give up after one try.
  2. Practice, practice, practice.
  3. Be yourself.
  4. Think about your audience.
  5. Keep a comedy journal.

They discuss each of these in turn. For me, 3 and 4 have been the most useful. They also do a good job of enumerating and discussing various practical ways to introduce humor: jokes, icebreakers, audio, questionaires, videos, cartoons, the unexpected, spontaneous wit, planned wit, and active learning.

The Booth-Butterfield article is much more abstract and less specifically applicable to library instruction. It does have a Humor Orientation (HO) scale that Trefts and Blakeslee use, though. It uses a Lickert scale to see if you agree or disagree with seventeen statements such as “1. I regularly tell jokes or funny stories when I am with a group” or “10. Even funny jokes seem flat when I tell them” (207). They also have an impressive taxonmy of types of humor with many examples. The types include Low Humor, Nonverbal, Impersonation, Language, Other Orientation, and Expressiveness, and gives examples of when these types are in play (212). Like most discussions of humor, the article itself isn’t very funny, but it does tell us a lot about funny people, or high-HO people. Unsurprisingly, they see potential for humor in more situations than low-HO people, and communicate more specifically what that potential is.

A large cognitive difference exists between a description which states “I’d tell a joke,” versus “Did you hear the one about…” It is the difference between “I’d give a great speech” and “Fourscore and seven years ago…” People who report high humor use know more exactly what they can say and do to elicit the laughter response, while low humor use people must describe that behavior in general and abstract terms. (215)

It’s also the difference between “I’d tell a joke about Second Life,” and “I’d talk about being naked and bumping into walls.”

Based on my own experience and the studies I’ve cited, the use of humor in the classroom or in presentations has many benefits, though it can’t be taken too far. There are some caveats in the articles I’ve been discussing, such as that the use of ethnic humor, culturally specific humor, or sarcasm can be problematic. One must also avoid the shift from being funny to just being a clown. This is well captured in a vignette from The Elements of Teaching (which I highly recommend as a thoughtful analysis and discussion of said elements). The book has chapters discussing Learning, Authority, Ethics, etc. Each chapter ends with a case study of a fictional, but plausible teacher. The chapter on Character finishes with a professor who conveyed no content and engaged no learning, but who was very popular with students because his class demanded little and had the nature of a vaudeville routine (115-19) which always left the students laughing, but not learning. I don’t think there’s any danger of that happening with librarians in instruction sessions, but it still is something to look out for if you want to use humor in the classroom.

Addendum: A guy walks into a library wearing a duck on his head and wants to use a computer. The librarian says, “We don’t allow pigs near our computers.” The guy says, “That’s not a pig. That’s a duck.” The librarian says, “I was talking to the duck!”

Banner, Jr., James M., and Harold C. Cannon. The Elements of Teaching. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Booth-Butterfield, S., and M. Booth-Butterfield. “Individual Differences in the Communication of Humorous Messages.” Southern Communication Journal 56, no. 3 (1991): 205-18.

Trefts, Kristin, and Sarah Blakeslee. “Did You Hear the One About the Boolean Operators? Incorporating Comedy into Library Instruction.” Reference Services Review  28, no. 4 (2000): 369-377.

Walker., B.E. “Using humor in Library Instruction.” Reference Services Review  34, no. 1 (2006): 117-28.

 

Problems of Part Timers

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Another study (found via KUAL) has highlighted the many problems with a heavy reliance on adjunct instructors in higher education. This has been a controversial issue for a generation at least, and where I went to grad school it was discussed ad nauseum by the graduate students who were doing the bulk of the teaching in the lower level classes. They eventually unionized, though I’m not sure they’ve ever gotten much of a benefit from that.

What impresses me about the more recent entries in the debate over part time adjuncts is the emphasis on the problems caused to the students, not just the teachers. Rhetorically, I’ve always thought arguments that teachers were being manipulated had little effect on the public. If someone wants to earn a PhD in a field with few jobs and refuses to do any other kind of work, how sympathetic is anyone supposed to be that the person has to teach six classes at three different universities to make ends meet? Other adjuncts sympathize. The rest of us just think, why don’t you go do something else then? Or, stop being such a sucker.

The average parent paying for college probably doesn’t care about the status of the college instructors, but they should care if the reliance upon and poor treatment of adjuncts means their children are less likely to graduate. The part timers and faculty unions should have been pushing this agenda all along instead of complaining that part timers don’t have tenure or academic freedom. Most workers don’t have tenure or academic freedom, so why should that bother them.

I was looking back through books like Will Teach for Food and related tomes and couldn’t help but notice the sense of entitlement driving the eventual turn to bitterness regarding the unavailability of tenure track positions. I’ve run across this a lot over the years. It’s the idea that just because you finished a PhD in some field, the world owes you a job as a professor. As long as the arguments were based upon resentment that highly educated people didn’t get the jobs that the seem to think they were owed, it’s no wonder nobody was paying attention. The success of books like Tenured Radicals and others and the inability of the professoriate to make their case to the public has in practice meant that nobody really cares about the part timer problem in academia.

Some previous arguments I’ve read have tried to paint people like me as a problem, arguing that it’s terribly important for freshman writing teachers to have tenure track jobs and PhDs in any field whatsoever. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that that’s really the problem. The subject of a writing class is writing, and having a PhD in a field other than writing studies guarantees nothing.

It’s also that the shift in emphasis is no longer trying to make me out a villian for being a part-time writing instructor that I find attractive. The problem isn’t inherently that someone is part-time, or not tenured, or whatever. The problem for student development, according to some of these newer studies, is that the relationships with students that benefit their retention and graduation can’t be built when teachers are shuffling around between two or three universities to make ends meet. While I teach writing only part time, I’m fully a member of the university community, and in fact have more permanence than the full time writing instructors here, who are ineligible for tenure and have a maximum contract of five years. I’m not contributing to the exploitation of part-time instructors – even though I am one – because the university fully supports me and I have the time to devote to my students.

So for personal and rhetorical reasons, I’m glad for the recent shift away from complaining about the poor treatment of adjuncts – which in general is shameful, and the university administrators who treat them so badly should be publicly shamed – to showing how that poor treatment affects student learning. The problem isn’t part timers. The problem isn’t a lack of tenure. The problem isn’t that people resent not getting the kinds of jobs they think they’re owed. The problem is that the way higher education treats its part-time instructors destroys the community necessary for learning.

Some people these days seem obsessed with online univeristies and distance education. These education institutions seem more appropriate for dispensing facts and credentialing people cheaply. However, they can never replace the community that comes with student life on campus or engaging others in discussion in a seminar room. There is a level of education that requires more than the presentation of some facts and some online quizzes, and that more is lost when colleges and universities become like businesses and the instructors become like day laborers. Nobody outside of academia cares that some PhD can’t get a cushy job. They might care when the complete lack of cushy jobs means that their children aren’t graduating.

The End of the Research Process

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I’ve been reading and commenting upon drafts of research essays the past couple of days. It’s the time of the semester when I get to see what I usually don’t get to see as a librarian: the end of the research process. Recently I heard a talk about embedded librarians. All the writing seminars have a librarian assigned to them, but since I act as my own librarian I’m about as embedded as it gets. Unfortunately, I don’t have anyone to blame when something goes wrong.

Fortunately, nothing serious has gone wrong, and the results aren’t at all unpleasing. Obviously a lot of the students understood the research process, and it was very easy to see who took shortcuts that generally didn’t work.

All those rules of thumb we have about research seem to work. For example, I usually warn students in library instruction sessions that they’ll have to read (or at least skim) more sources than they actually use, not just enough but more than enough. They can’t just do a search, take the first five items that come up, and write a research paper. Before they can figure out what there might be to say, they’ve got to do a lot of exploration. In the end result, I can tell who ignored this advice. It’s easy to spot the problem just by glancing at a bibliography.

Then there’s the variety of resources that librarians sometimes mention and instructors often require. Books, journal articles, newspaper articles, websites, etc. It’s good to have a range. Why, we don’t always explain, which is why it’s more a rule of thumb. But the answer is clear when research essays depend too heavily on one particular format. Lots of books in the bibliography are typically a problem, for example, because it means that students haven’t explored the article literature, which is often richer for specific topics. Just glancing at a bibliography shows a heavy reliance upon books, but reading the essay shows why this can be a problem.

I’ve written a couple of times about the improbable source, but finding the improbable source is just as problematic. The improbable source would do the intellectual work for the students. But students—and this is completely understandable—also have trouble resisting sources that do the work for them. It seems especially difficult for students to interrogate sources critically when they’re reasonably well written and in peer-reviewed journals.

This makes perfect sense, because students are new to the conversation, and other than providing the criticism myself I’m not sure how this skill can be developed without more reading and practice. In my class, it’s often a secondary source interpreting John Rawls in some applied way. The description of one of them seemed so bizarre I assumed the student had it wrong so I followed up and read the article. Nope. The student had done an excellent analysis. It’s just that the article based an entire philosophical argument on a dubious metaphor. Anything for tenure, I suppose. Just telling students to challenge authority doesn’t help, because they don’t have the tools yet, though I do try to explain why “peer-reviewed” doesn’t mean “right.”

However, this is another case where more than enough of a variety of sources helps. They need to get the sources arguing with each other. As librarians, we can’t always know which sources are best and don’t always see the end result of the research, but the rules of thumb help out, I suppose. I can certainly glance at what students have found and say, not more than enough and not enough variety. The great thing as a writing teacher is that I get to explain why in detail. Or maybe that’s the tedious thing. I’ll be able to tell after my brain unfries.

Meditations Upon My Lack of Fame

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I’m pretty sure I’ll never be famous, and by famous, I mean “famous” in that librarian kind of way: well known throughout the profession, popular speaker, etc.

This isn’t something that bothers me much, but I was thinking about it last week. Last Friday I gave a talk at a small regional conference. I don’t speak often and almost never seek the opportunity out, but when I can manage to get myself up in front of an audience things seem to go well. One person even said she found my talk inspiring, but I have a feeling she was being overly kind. Nevertheless, when I compare my speaking abilities to other librarians, including some of them who seem to be everywhere at once, I think I could hold my own when it came to style. Though I always feel sick before speaking, once I start everything seems fine, and I get a performance high by the end. Teaching affects me in much the same way if a discussion has gone particularly well. I craft my talks, engage my audience, get some laughs, just like the big boys and girls do. So style doesn’t explain why I’ll probably never be famous.

It’s most likely not substance, either. Most of the presentations I see librarians doing are based upon things they do in their job or as a hobby. Most of these topics aren’t things that require years of intensive study before presenting on them. Some of the hot topics of years past—like Library 2.0 or virtual reference or some others—I already know quite a bit about, both theoretically and practically, and sometimes when I’m watching a presentation or reading something on a library topic, I do think to myself that I could probably do just as good a job with it. As with my talk last Friday (on building librarian-faculty relations), I could probably come up with a hour of material on just about anything related to my work and at least keep the audience from being bored.

Besides my general lack of ambition to be famous, I think the problem might be one of the hedgehog and the fox. Isaiah Berlin notes in his essay of that title that, “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’” (The Proper Study of Mankind, 436). In his essay Turgenev is the fox, Tolstoy the hedgehog. It seems to me that the most famous librarians, especially the most sought after speakers, are hedgehogs, whereas for better or worse, I’m more like a fox.

This may sound critical or even dismissive, but that’s far from my intention. The famous librarians often have a shtick or a brand they push: that’s the One Big Thing they know. It’s not that they don’t know other things, it’s just that for the sake of public consumption everyone associates them with the one big thing. When people want them to speak, it’s because they know the person can speak well about that One Big Thing, whatever it is. “You’re planning a panel on X? I heard so-and-so speak on X and she was fabulous!” I don’t think I even have to name names. Everyone can probably associate a few One Big Things with particular people. I’m almost positive some readers of this blog are themselves associated in the librarian hive-mind with one big thing.

I wouldn’t necessarily mind being associated with One Big Thing, but I have no idea what that thing would be. This presents a problem if I wanted to be famous. I know about a lot of topics, but I’m not sure there’s any library topic I know more about than any number of other librarians. Plus, I’m not very focused; just consider this blog. That has always my problem as an academic as well, which is partly why I’m now a librarian. I had too many intellectual interests to spend five years focusing on one of them long enough to get through exams and a dissertation, and I couldn’t find any way to reconcile them. Thus, I’m an intellectual dilettante who prefers the more neutral term of generalist.

About the only thing I do that other librarians don’t is think about certain library issues in unusual, irrelevant (and some might even say inappropriate) philosophical ways: for example, classical teleology and library missions, Rawlsian political philosophy and collection development, Aristotelian virtue ethics and reference work, Hayekian social theory and the Wikipedia (as well as, coming to you from a webcast at ACRL next spring, organizational development). While I may be able to cobble together a book one day, this is hardly the sort of approach that becomes a Big Thing.  “Oh, you’re planning a conference on esoteric and impractical ruminations about librarianship? I saw Wayne speak on that at ACRL and he was fabulous!”

I’m definitely not envious, but I do admire the technique. I’m not envious because first, I don’t think being a famous librarian means that someone is any smarter or more capable or a better librarian or even any happier than me, and second, I would definitely rather stay home with the fam than do as much traveling as I know some librarians do. I have a good friend who has done library-related jaunts in China and Nigeria and other places, and while I admire her drive I don’t think I would like that life at all. Even with domestic travel, if it requires me to jam my long legs into an airplane seat, I’d usually  rather stay home. However, there is something admirable about the ability to seize the day that some librarians have, to exploit the coincidence of the moment and their One Big Thing. Regardless of whatever abilities I might have, it’s clear I don’t have that particular ability. Whatever it is—the drive, the desire, the knack, the energy, the focus—I obviously don’t have, but definitely notice it in others and wonder if they feed on it and grow stronger, or if it all just seems old after a while. I suppose I’ll never know.

 

Notes on Sources and Library Instruction

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I wanted this post to be about "the space between the sources," but after writing it I see I’ve meandered. Maybe I’m groggy from overwork this week, which would also explain why I keep looking at the word meander and think how silly it sounds. Still, I’m putting out the notes, because I’m trying to think through the issue to perhaps write something more substantial later. Please forgive the meandering. In fact, you might want to just stop while you’re ahead.

I’ve been encountering more students who seem to be disappointed that when doing research for an essay can’t find secondary sources that already do their work for them. Or, as they put it to me, "I want to write on this topic but can’t find any sources!" So, for example, if a student wants to write an ideological analysis of a cultural object, they want sources that already ideologically analyze that cultural object, or at least one pretty close to it. It’s a version of the improbable source I keep being asked for, and it’s endemic to a certain kind of course, typically those involving some kind of contemporary cultural studies.

Even after discussion, it doesn’t always seem to be clear to the student what sorts of sources might inform their research if no one has written on this exact topic before, and to get them to understand that in many ways it’s a good thing that no one has already written their essay. Perhaps they want an authoritative source to have already done what they’re doing so they know they’re doing it right. But they want to ride on the sources rather than inserting themselves into the space between the sources.

We had a class today where we did some sample searching around a specific painting and modeled the way one can build a topic out of many different pieces: an exibition catalog, a work of history, a study of an art movement, etc., but it still wasn’t apparent to everyone. It comes up enough in the library instruction I do that I’d like to create some kind of guide, but I’m not sure what the best way to present the information. Perhaps some sort of map.

In some ways, this is the appropriate role of the writing instructors, and I know they already address the issue in class, but I meet with enough students who still want me to find them the source that does their work for them that my research sessions sometimes go back and forth between discussing library research and writing strategy.

I’m curious if this happens with other librarians. I do a lot of work with our freshman writing students, and I’ve been teaching freshman writing for longer than I’ve been a librarian. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell when I’m responding as a librarian and when as a writing teacher. (The distinction even blurs for the students sometimes, as I discovered when someone else’s student was asking me for permission write on X topic.)

Based on the many library research guides I’ve looked at over the years, this doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing librarians address much. Though not written by librarians, books such as The Modern Researcher or The Craft of Research address the use of sources somewhat, but most library guides naturally focus strictly on the finding of sources rather than how they’ll be used. This makes sense, as technique and an understanding of the geography of information are necessary and complicated in themselves. Yet it seems natural to think about how the sources will be used  or the types of sources one needs before one even knows what to look for.

Type of source might even be the wrong terminology, because I’m not thinking about books, articles, or encyclopedia entries. Perhaps the role of sources is better. What are they doing for the essay, or what do the students need them to do? These seem essential questions when teaching students about research, but they’re more complex questions beyond the "Find Background Information – Search for Books – Search for Articles" approach that is the necessary but perhaps too easy road we’re often forced to take because of time constraints.

Politics and Academics

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Since I went to bed before the big decision last night, my celebration, such that it is, consists of the glass of Macallan 12 I’m currently sipping. I say "such that it is," because though I did vote for the winning Presidential candidate and for the first time since 1992 cast a vote for president and didn’t feel soiled by it, everything is still in the same mess it was yesterday, and being somewhat cynical (friends reading this will probably say "only somewhat?") I’m not sure how much one person, no matter how extraordinary, can really accomplish with the Presidency. It seems to me that presidents can much more easily do a lot of damage than cause a lot of improvement. However, just having a president who will avoid doing more damage will be an improvement. I’m trying to feel hopeful, but my political awareness began in the mid-1980s, and my experience of politics hasn’t exactly fostered hopefulness. The thing I find most hopeful in some ways is what the fact that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could win the Presidency says about America and how some things have undeniably changed for the better in the past forty years. As for the job itself, considering the mess he’s inheriting, I can’t help but think there’s a bit of truth in this article.

For higher education, elections seem to bring a fresh resurgence of the criticism that college faculty are too "liberal." My university newspaper has published a list of Princeton professors who gave maximum contributions to presidential candidates. The only surprising thing is that there was actually a professor who gave the maximum to McCain. However, he also gave the maximum in both the primary and the general election to Obama, and in this article explained that he donated to McCain in the primary because he was the least disliked Republican candidate. Some students complained about how this shows how overwhelmingly "liberal" Princeton is. If the research reported in this article is right, at least no one can complain about being indoctrinated with liberal dogma, whatever that is. I know the students don’t care what the librarians think, since librarians aren’t teaching them, but the Republican students at Princeton and elsewhere might be surprised that there might be even fewer Republicans among librarians than among professors. If we’re not careful, David Horowitz will be coming at us with an Academic Collection Development Bill of Rights, or something like that, arguing that for every scholarly book we buy written by a Democrat, we have to buy a book written by a Republican. Imagine how that would change the scope of library collections!

The Republican students who arrive on campus probably do feel alienated, as I’m sure do the Republican professors and librarians. The students, and indeed most critics, think it has something to to with liberal and conservative, but I’m not so sure. You might have noticed that I’ve been putting scare quotes around liberal. It’s not because I don’t think most professors and librarians are liberals of some sort. It’s just that I’m not sure the issue is just about liberal or conservative politics, but has a lot to do with Democratic or Republican politics. Liberal and conservative are shifty terms and most people don’t seem to use them in any consistent way. People seem to pick one they like for themselves, then use the other term to abuse whatever they don’t like. The paucity of political discourse in America means we don’t have many other choices.

One can argue that, for example, George W. Bush isn’t a conservative at all, and that Obama is in many ways a conservative candidate, as former long-time National Review editor Jeffrey Hart recently argued. Conservatives schooled on Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, or a number of other conservative intellectuals from an earlier generation would be horrified that a president started an aggressive war to promote democracy. People who admire the virtues of caution, tradition, and skepticism about grand rational plans one finds in Edmund Burke’s work have little use for the current Republican Party, and for a lot of traditionalist conservatives, Burke’s work formed the foundation of the conservative intellectual tradition. They would argue that the Republicans have become the radical party wanting to make the most drastic changes, sometimes against the will of the people.

There was a time when conservatives wanted to discover and develop an intellectual tradition, so they could rebel against John Stuart Mill’s description of conservatives as the "stupid party." Conservatives were alienated, but they cared about ideas and culture. That’s changed, though. In his article "The Decline of American Intellectual Conservatism," Claes Ryn argues that the conservative movement’s disdain for philosophy and the arts and a pseudo-pragmatism that led to the decline of any intellectual content in conservatism.

But had it not been for the misguided pragmatism and the related problems of conservatism here described, the chronic weaknesses of human nature would not so easily have broken through the defenses of civilization. American conservatism would have been better prepared to resist intellectual shoddiness, corrupt imagination, and a false moral virtue. It would not have had to accept so much of the blame for damage inflicted upon America and the world by self-described conservatives. (Modern Age, Fall 2007, p549)

It might be conservatism, but it might just be the Republican Party, so long considered the conservative party that anyone who votes Republican is seen as a conservative and anyone who votes against it is seen as a liberal. As Jeffrey Hart, Christopher Buckley, and others have shown this year, though, that’s just not the case. It’s the Republican Party that has changed.

As David Brooks put it recently in the New York Times, "What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole." In Brooks’ reading, it’s the Republican Party and its class warfare that has gone out of its way to alienate whole groups of Americans, including many of the brightest and best educated among them. Students and some other critics complain about the "liberalism" of the American academy, but they usually cite the overwhelming majority of Democrats among professors as evidence of that. If they knew and cared, they’d probably throw in the librarians. However, the explanation of why academics tend to support Democrats or liberals could be that except for a brief flowering of conservative intellectuals from 1955-1975 (or so), so called conservatives have tended to find people who devote their lives to ideas and scholarship contemptible. And the Republican Party in the last twenty years or so has become absolutely hostile to academics and intellectuals of all stripes. People who spend their lives doing intellectual work are unlikely to vote for candidates who publicly malign and mock their social group. Thus, it could be not that academia is overwhelming "liberal" so much as that it’s overwhelmingly populated with intelligent, educated people who resent the populism that considers them lesser Americans because of that intelligence and education. Maybe in the end, we all feel the same way. Regardless of how you might feel about some individual political issues, it’s hard to vote for politicians who show nothing but disrepect for your way of life, whether you’re Joe the Plumber or Jane the Professor.