digital digs

what percentage of English doctoral students ever write a scholarly monograph?

I don't know why my morning started out with this somewhat idle question. I suppose I was headed into some department meetings to discuss the assessment of our graduate programs and that started me thinking about this issue. I posted the question to Twitter and got some interesting feedback. Thanks to @noctambulate, @briancroxall, @joncgoodwin, @jtheibault and others who helped me out. 

Here are some things I can tell you. According to the National Center for Education Stats, 1332 phds in English were awarded in 09-10, and according to the National Council of Graduate Schools, 51.9% of English doctoral students complete their degrees within 10 years. I'm guessing that means around 2500 students are admitted into doctoral programs each year. So how many of these 2500 ever end up writing that monograph? 

But first, a digression: why ask this question? I suppose my answer is that so much of doctoral education is focused on preparing students to write a monograph with the dissertation as some kind of proto-monograph. In part, too, the question carries with it the realization that academic presses are in crisis and that the traditional monograph is increasingly a troubled genre: from an economic/market perspective, from a technological perspective, and perhaps, slowly, from an intellectual one as well. I would imaginge that a significant majority of those doctoral students who do not complete their degrees stall out at the ABD level. Those that do finish, tend to spend, on average, 4-5 years writing their dissertations. In other words, more than half the time in graduate school is spent specifically on the dissertation project. It is obviously the most important project in a doctoral program. 

Returning to my question. The best way to look at this would be to figure out how many authors publish their first scholarly monograph in English Studies each year. I had some conversations on Twitter about this, but I don't think I have a good answer about this. Here's a different way to look at this though. MLA job statistics indicate around 700 tenure-line assist prof jobs each year over the last 8 years. Some percentage of these jobs are book-for-tenure jobs. Others might require a book to get to full. At this point though I am starting to estimate. And, of course, some folks will right a book even though it isn't required (and some won't get tenured because they don't get the book done). 

Apparently there are 297 research/doctoral universities in the Carnegie Classification system. I would guess these are all book-for-tenure type institutions for English. These institutions represent 6.3% of all colleges. There are another 730 masters granting institutions, comprising another 15% or so of all post-secondary schools. I was on the tenure line at two such institutions before coming the UB. At neither was a book required for tenure, but some of these might. There are another 800 or so four-year schools (and the rest of speciality or 2-year schools). Dealing with these 1800 or so institutions, I'm going to guess no more than 1/3 are book for tenure schools. These can't tell us how many people actually publish monographs but it might tell us that of the 700 assistant professor jobs, only some fraction will be at institutions that require a book. So let's say 250 jobs are book-for-tenure. If that were the case, though we couldn't tell how many doctoral students will write a book, of the 2500 entering programs each year, only 10% will need to write a book to get tenure. Obviously don't quote me on that! That's purely hypothetical. 

The real interesting question about this would operate on the institutional/department level. On that level it doesn't matter much what happens as a national average. What one needs to know is how many of one's own graduate students go to jobs that are book-for-tenure type jobs. Let's say hypothetically (and let me be clear these numbers are in no way reflective of my own department) that one admitted 100 students over a decade: 50 completed the program, 20 got tenure-track jobs, and 3 got jobs that require a book for tenure. So maybe 5 of your grads go on to publish a book and maybe publishes multiple books. If a program had numbers like that, would that suggest anything about building a doctoral program around the premise of preparing students to produce book-length research projects? Looking back at my alma mater, which lists dissertations and current employment for the last decade, my estimation is less than 10% of those folks are in book-for-tenure jobs. I imagine that many, many non-Ivy phd programs would be similarly situated. Now, again, that's not to say those other people don't go on to publish books. I didn't need a book for tenure, but I published one anyway. 

I don't really know what I am suggesting here. Maybe nothing. I just think it is a little strange to put so much effort into a task that is not really that essential to the work so many of our students will do.

What a first-year writing MOOC would teach

The other day in our Teaching Practicum we were discussing Kathy Yancey's 2004 CCCC address, republished in CCC, "Made Not Only in Words." In it Yancey observes

it seems to me that in all our efforts to improve the teaching of composition- to reduce class size, for instance, to conference with students, to respond vociferously to each student paper, and to understand that in our students' eyes we are the respondent who matters-we seek to approximate the one-to-one tutorial model. Quite apart from the fact that such an effort is doomed-about a hundred years ago, Edwin Hopkins asked if we could teach composition under the current conditions, which conditions then are the same conditions we work in today, and immediately answered, "NO"-I have to wonder why we want to work this way, wonder why this is the neo-Platonic mode to which we continuously aspire.

The general, negative reaction to the idea of MOOCs for writing instruction is based on this premise: that writing instruction must occur through some approximation of the tutorial model. (And of course fears about what a MOOC would do to the economics of composition instruction, but that's a different matter.) This post isn't an argument for or against MOOC-based writing instruction, but rather a consideration of how the MOOC challenges this value.

As such I want to begin with two points. First, as I have argued here before, it is an error to approach online instruction of any kind with the question "how to can I import my traditional classroom activities into an online environment?" Asking this question generally ends up with the worst of both worlds: only those things that can be done in both contexts. Second, following on that, the appropriate question is not to ask how (or if) MOOCs can teach us what physical classrooms teach us, but rather, more neutrally, what kinds of learning happens via a MOOC? If the traditional classroom was/is modelled on the industrial model and prepared students for work on an assembly line, then it is fair to wonder if the MOOC is/will be modelled on a postindustrial model and prepare students for work in a distributed network.

What kinds of literacies, rhetorics, and cognitive processes (the art formerly known as critical thinking) will be appropriate in the emerging model? Perhaps the answer, somewhat tautologically, is those that are taught via networks (i.e. some future version of the MOOC). Industrial-print literacies are clearly linear in nature. And even though we assert the recursive nature of writing processes, they still smack of the assembly line in a way that is very different from the experience of thousands of particpants composing media in a collective, real time fashion (which is what massive, open online composing would be... a different MOOC). Change the process of composing and change what is meant by communicating. Change what is meant by communicating and change what is meant by learning. Change learning and change pedagogy and evaluation. Or in thise case, try to make that system go backward by changing pedagogy and evaluation first. 

The most obvious model for a composition MOOC would be freemium. At the free level there is a textbook. lectures, online discussion, and perhaps some kind of automated activity. There would be crowdsourced evaluation of writing and maybe some collective writing project along the lines of a wiki. In other words much like you have now. Then one could purchase tutorial sessions where one would get professional feedback on one's writing. Finally one could submit a portfolio and pay for some evaluation. Undoubtedly cheating would be possible, but in my view cheating is always possible. Since I call this the "obvious" model, I'm not offering it up with much endorsement. It is a model that still tries to reassert the tutorial approach to writing instruction. Another technocratic model might imagine some kind of artificial intelligence that would serve as tutor (and evalutor). These models still presume that we want to create individual writers in a traditional humanistic sense. However my argument would be that those writers never existed (at least no in the way we described them) and so we clearly never taught students to become them.

Instead, in sci-fi speak, in a MOOCC (the two Cs are "composition course"), students are the wetware nodes in a writing network, participating in a larger, emergent, rhetorical-decision-making structure. On a "massive" enough scale, those decision become statistical. Indeed even in the traditional writing seminar (and certainly on the level of program assesssment) the statiscial nature of student writing choices become apparent. The same rhetorical variables are recognized by the students, a predictable set of student responses can be identified, common errors (rhetorical and grammatical if you like) are visible, writing behaviors are largely consistent across the population. This is not unlike the way the Kindle identifies commonly highlighted passages. In other words, when one starts to think about 2000 or more individuals composing essays in response to a curriculum, one inevitably starts to see trends: common quotations, common theses, common organizational structures, etc. Arguably, the purpose of FYC is to normalize student writing in a particular way, to produce predictable outcomes with certain generic features. One could almost see this happening in real time with the right technical affordances as a kind of cybernetic feedback loop. This would be the post-industrial equivalent of assembly line composing.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that as desirable, as something I would want my kids to experience. However, I do think that there is likely some future MOOCC in store for us, and it will require us to recognize a few things:

1. That symbolic behavior involves nonhumans (e.g. technologies) in a networked environment that is increasingly digital in character.
2. That rhetoric and composing, which have always been collective activities, will be more palpably collective due to the speed of networks and the accessiblity of data. This intensification is reaching a point where some becoming is emerging (i.e. we're not just hot water anymore, we are coming to a boil).
3. That the tutorial model of writing instruction is not necessarily the best model (let alone the only one).

As I always tell my practicum students, teaching writing implicitly assumes an ontology. It begins with some assumption about how thinking and composing arise. It assumes something about the agency of students, about the choices that are available to them and the practices that they are free to adopt. Millions of people can collaborate to compose Wikipedia or the archive of YouTube or the Web for that matter. Generally all composition classes do is say that that stuff shouldn't be trusted. To be honest, what FYC (and academic writing in general) really must say is that the web isn't possible, because it violates many of its assumptions about how writing takes place. 

We ask scholars to produce scholarly writing because that writing is supposedly evidence of their capacity to think and to know their subject. We ask students to write academically for the same reason. But what if thinking and knowing didn't work that way? What if thinking and knowing were more distributed activities and what we were measuring with composing was not some inhered characteristic of individuals but rather their capacity to participate in certain networks? Networks that shift over time. In that case, rhetoric and composition would be about learning to participate, to relate, to particular networks in ways that are productive of thinking and knowing in certain paradigmatic ways. That's what a MOOCC would have to teach,, I think.

Latour's moderns and correlationism's gift

I've been trying to think through the relationship between Latour's critique of modernity and the now-familiar issue of correlationism. While I am certainly not trained as a philosopher, I can count, so it's clear that Kant's arguments, which Meillassoux identifies as the inauguration of correlationist thinking, develop in the 1780s, while Latour focuses on Hobbes and Boyle (more than a century earlier) as a start point for the modern division of nature from culture. Latour clearly states that it is Kant who fully realizes the division that Hobbes and Boyle begin (in We Have Never Been Modern), so at least from Latour's perspective there is merit for seeing correlationism as a product of modernity. In Latour's view, Kant's Copernican revolution is one step in an increasingly attenuated line between the poles of nature/object and society/subject. In the modern world, there are always quasi-objects that serve the role of linking these two poles. For moderns these objects are mute intermediaries where for Latour they are mediators with an active role. This is a crucial difference.

I often hear from readers of speculative realism I encounter that philosophers in this school want to solve the problem of correlationism. Some do, perhaps, but as I see it, establishing correlationism as a problem to be solved might be misleading at best. That is, it is misleading if one imagines that the goal here is to establish a means by which modern subjects of the type Latour describes can encounter the natural world without mediation, without the drifting/withdrawal that makes our knowledge of the world always knowledge for us. That's not what's happening here. However, if solving the correlationist problem means offering a better explanation for the ontological/epistemelogical problem Kant identifies, then yes I think that makes sense. 

At the same time, I think it is important to recognize that the disconnection between subject and object in correlationism (and the general withdrawal among all objects in OOO) is the foundation of life. Without this disconnection, things would happen instantaneously via pure translation of cause. I'd have to think it through but perhaps one would even want to argue that there could be no events or time. Relations would be always already decided; they would be pure and total. Instead, because there are gaps, there is thinking. Because relations are not complete and translation is not overdeterminingly causational, there is agency. These are not solvable conditions, except through total destruction. I am not even sure why such a thing would be desirable. It seems that part of what one can learn from Latour is that our efforts to imagine the natural world in these terms have contributed to our destructive ecological condition. Who would want to extend such "solutions" further?

The "problem" of correlationism might, in Latourian terms, be understood as the problem of hybridity. If one extends this in a way Latour hasn't to not only object-subject but object-object (a kind of OOO move), then one begins to investigate how objects mediate one another through relation, developing capacities for thought and agency. Whether object or relation is primary can be a debate for another day. I am willing to say that an object need not be in relation in order to exist, as long as all objects are already made up of objects in relation. (In other words, there can be objects that have no relations but no objects can exist without relations also existing because every object has to be made up of other objects that are relating to form that object... make sense? he asked breathlessly) In any case, my particular interests are in objects that happen to be in relation to one another anyway (rhetorical relations). This problem of relation is not be solved (in the pursuit of substituting pure connection for relation). Instead, in the Deleuzian sense, it is the problem that forms the assemblage from which thought and action develop.

 

 

media mobilities event at UB

If you're in the Buffalo area, this looks like a great event being put on by our new Techne Institute on November 10th. It's free and open to the public, but you need to email to register: [email protected]

what an object-oriented rhetoric has to offer

I'm going to be answering a question like this in video format for the new journal Itneration (maybe I'll get my haircut first), but in the meantime I thought I'd visit the question here. I am in the midst of a book project on this matter and it is useful to get big picture/back-to-basics as part of that. 

To start with a generalization: the discipline of rhetoric studies human symbolic action. Does anyone want to dispute that or offer up the exceptions that prove the rule?  If you are unsure of that claim, go to any rhetoric conference or rhetoric journal and count the number of presentations/articles that do not deal with humans and/or do not deal with symbolic action (e.g. language, gestures, media, visual communication, etc.). What is it that we study about human symbolic action? The "means of persuasion" is the first answer, but clearly the contemporary discipline is about more than persuasion. We examine rhetoric's ideological effects in the formation of subjectivity and the shaping of knowledge in public-civic spaces, workplaces, in relation to technology, as informed by cultural, gendered, ethnic differences, etc. Obviously we also study compositional processes. But again, it is all human and symbolic. 

That said, there has been a growing interest in various nonhuman theories in rhet/comp. Latour might be the most prominent example, though one could also consider various Deleuzianisms, new materialistfeminisms and others (not trying to create a comprehensive list) that have appeared everywhere from computers and writing to animal studies in rhetoric. These are all fellow travelers with speculative realism, and if what speculative realists share is an acknowledgement of Meillassoux's correlationism (while differing on how to respond), many might even be called speculative realists themselves. The primary difference between an object-oriented view and these other nonhuman views is the nonrelational ontology of the former. That is, as those familiar with OOO know, objects always exceed their relations; as such, the processes/relations in which objects might be involved do not define those objects (even though they can destroy/consume them). This means that I see two, nested questions here.

1. What does a nonhuman rhetoric have to offer?
2. What does an object-oriented rhetoric (as a kind of nonhuman rhetoric) have to offer?

In the last paragraph I elided mention of "symbolic action," but that will have to come back in as part of the answers to these questions. The answer to question #1 begins with recognizing the limits of "human rhetoric:" that is, one that asserts only humans are rhetorical. First, historically we can see how the category of humans has not always included all humans. As such, the definition of rhetoric has always been mixed up with the definition of humanness in ways that have had obvious political implications. Part of the political project of rhetoric then has been getting all humans equally into the human-rhetorical club. On a different day, I might go into various speculative-realist views on the ontological status of biological concepts like species, but for now I'll just leave that. A nonhuman rhetoric does not discount the political or ethical importance of human equality for humans, though it might offer a different description of the problem. What it does argue though is that objects do not need to be human (or human-directed) in order to be rhetorical. This would offer a different (and I think better) description of how the rhetorical forces that shape cultural definitions of humans operate. 

Second, and I think more importantly, a nonhuman rhetoric addresses the problem of human exceptionalism that pervades our discipline (and the humanities). Obviously it is understandable that humans are more important to humans than other objects. However it is a different matter to imagine that humans are exceptional on an ontological basis (the fight to get into the human club is a reflection of this belief in our exceptionalism). Rhetoric/symbolic action has long been a hallmark of a secular human exceptionalism. There are many reasons, beyond the immediate concerns of rhetoric, that one might be concerned with this exceptionalist belief: for example, it's impact on how we address climate change. However, in terms of rhetoric, the belief that rhetoric/symbolic action is an exceptional human characteristic establishes every other object in the world as a potential threat to our inherent rhetoricity. We see this with technologies from Plato and writing up through digital media, but really any object that might impart nonrational effects on humans is part of the "problem." This shapes our understanding of human-rhetorical deficiencies (e.g. "students can't write") and the general problem of miscommunication or misinterpretation. In short, a human-exceptionalist view of rhetoric imagines symbolic action is primarily hermeneutic: as communicative, informational, and interpretable. While clearly these words all describe phenomena that are associated with human-rhetorical acts, they all describe things we try to make symbolic action do, from a nonhuman perspective these are not what rhetoric/symbolic action is. Rhetoric is not human.

Let me shift now specifically to an object-oriented view. Here we can begin by saying that even though humans use rhetoric/symbolic action to communicate, inform, persuade etc., rhetoric cannot be exhausted by these relations. While it might be possible to consider rhetoric as an object (e.g. as a discipline or a book), I am interested in rhetoric as a way of describing relations among objects. In OOO, an object is made from other objects that are in relation to one another (in the formation of that object), even though the created object exceeds its parts. An object can also enter into a relation with a second object without forming a third (e.g. the cup is on the table.). There are many ways to describe these relations, though the descriptions always face the correlationist problem. For example, there are all the typically physical kinds of relations: chemical, gravitational, electro-magnetic, mechanical, etc. There are biological relations that emerge from these others. And then we typically say there are symbolic relations which are all the cultural- and language-based relations, plus the psychological effects of the unconscious, which again I believe we only attributed to humans as exceptional, symbol-using beings. An object-oriented view would not deny that humans enter into singular relations via language; it would just also say that all objects enter into singular relations and that humans are not ontologically exceptional in this way. In other words we can also talk about specific kinds of relations among objects as long as we understand that 1) objects are not exhausted by this relations, 2) objects cannot be made ontologically exceptional by the relations into which they enter, and 3) our descriptions of relations always confront the correlationist limit (though we can speculate about "alien phenomenology" as Bogost puts it).

Though there are likely many ways to approach this, right now, I am conceiving of rhetoric as a general, nonhuman, relational force that any object might possibly enter into to the same extent as any object might have psychic/cognitive experiences. For Harman, psychic experiences result from relations, so all objects have at least a dormant capacity for some minimal psychism on an ontological basis. I would say the same thing for rhetoric. Following upon our classical link between rhetoric and persuasion, rhetoric might then be understood as the agentive force of psychic relationality. That is, an object enters into a relation with a second object (such relations need not be bi-directional). This relations produces a psychic experience (we can call it thought but that might be too anthropomorphizing). That experience may not have a symbolic component, but it will be informational on an autopoietic basis. I.e., the object "senses" something. However that sense-information is not neutral in terms of its force. Instead that sense-information generates some reaction. The object being sensed cannot determine that reaction, though if it has entered into a bi-directional relationship (each object relating to the other), some feedback loop can develop. At the same time, the sensing object is not fully in control of the relation either: on some level it is subject to what it senses. So how does this psychic-informational relation generate some possible agency by opening up possible actions and perhaps influencing one course of action over others? Good question. One for specific study: rhetorical study I would say, at least on a minimal rhetorical basis. 

Now if one wants to shift back to more familiar rhetorical territory, what would such an approach mean for understanding our efforts to create a digitally-mediated democracy and civic space? Or how would such an understanding inform the way we teach rhetoric for a digital-literate culture? Again, good questions (I hope, since I have been/will be writing about them). But basically it begins with understanding the rhetorical role of these objects differently and recognizing that even though we may be hopelessly anthropocentric that the digital-rhetorical networks in which we participate are not "for us" or "by us" but rather nonhumans with which we relate. If we fail to see that, then I think we fail to see how these networks are operating on an ontological level, and we will struggle to develop good rhetorical strategies in relation to them.

 

object-oriented literary criticism and incorporeal transformations

I have been giving a lot of thought to Levi Bryant's recent post on writing and incorporeal machines. Obviously (at least from my perspective), understanding symbolic action's (e.g. writing) ontology is central to my work, and I have been trying to work through the implications of the Deleuzian notion of incorporeal transformation (and the broader, non-symbolic concept of expression) as it may (or may not) relate to an object-oriented rhetoric. 

Here is a key point for me in Levi's post: 

There are two considerations that lead me to resist the move of reducing incorporeal machines to corporeal machines:  Iterability and identity.  Unlike corporeal machines that are singular and always exist at a particular time and place (while also having a duration), incorporeal machines have the curious feature of being iterable, while remaining identical.  As an incorporeal machine, a novel, scientific theory, mathematical equation, grammatical rule, recipe, political ideology, perhaps genetic codes, etc., can exist in countless corporeal machines (books, newspapers, magazines, symphony performances, brains, computer data banks, conversations, etc.), while nonetheless remaining that incorporeal machine.  Every copy or iteration of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the paper of a book or in a computer program is still Hamlet, just as every execution of the operation of the Pythagorean theorem is still the Pythagorean theorem, and every performance of Beethoven’s Ninth is Beethoven’s Ninth.

So here Levi is explaining why he believes incorporeality is necessary. I'd like to expand on this and make some modifications. First, I'd like to differentiate between copies and iterations. If I copy a poem or Hamlet is Levi's example, then that's one kind of relation. That is, the 30 copies of a particular book I order for a course are each withdrawn objects from one another but bear a relation to one another that is strengthened by their position within a network. An industrial printing system operates to maintain similarities among these objects as they are produced. Are there differences? Yes, of course, but the deployment of the books within a system of reading makes these differences unimportant for us. In a slightly different example, the student who buys a copy of my book versus one who finds a free pdf somewhere is reading the same text. However readers may have different experience due to the affordances of different media, and from a legal-copyright perspective these things are quite different. Nevertheless we can see the impact of some shift from copy to iteration here. In my final example, if you read through various introductions to OOO in books, blogs, articles, and published talks, you will find a great deal of surface variety and yet all make reference to Harman. We might consider some more or less accurate or more or less helpful/clear. To me this last example is significantly different as we are no longer talking about copies/iterations of a text but of the ideas that exist in some relation to that text.

Now a slight detour. For Deleuze and Guattari I don't believe there are any "incorporeal machines." They do speak of incorporeal transformations that are the product of collective assemblages of enunciation. In the plateau on linguistics they write a great deal about incorporeal transformations, but they are clearly indicating that such transformations are specifically the product of symoblic action. E.g., when one turns 18 (in the US) one is transformed into an adult: that's an incorporeal transformation. When one is pronouced married or guilty in a courtroom that's an incorporeal transformation. It doesn't have to be strictly a legal matter though. For Deleuze and Guattari "there is no individual enunciation" (ATP 79). Though from an OOO perspective, each book, each word in a book, each letter is a withdrawn object, there is also another object in which those objects participate (partially always, without exhausting themselves). We can call that object a "language," which makes it possible for me to write and read. How does this work? For D&G, "Rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words" (76). What D&G say here is key for what Levi is investigating. They note that language's power lies in it's capacity for transmission and even translation. They use the example of bees. A bee who has discovered a food location can communicate that location to a second bee, but the second bee cannot pass along the information. This is not language for D&G. Anyway, I could go on for a while on this, but I think that's sufficient for now.

Returning to Levi's investigation now. In D&G terms, I think one might say that language has a special power to transmit order-words through incorporeal transformations: that would be what is happening in Levi's examples. However I think it is important to note that it is the transformations, not the machines, that are incorporeal. The collective assemblages of enunciation are not themselves incorporeal. So what one might see in language is a particular kind of relationality, and I am interested in considering what the ontological basis for that relational capacity might be. D&G make clear they do not believe it is metaphor or metonymy, so that is perhaps a difference (one of many) from Harman or Morton. That is, language is not in a metaphorical relation to its supposed referent. Instead language is always indirect discourse. Language withdraws from other objects in the world and withdraws from our "direct discourse," our intersections with language through speaking/writing. Language though, relates to itself. Again, there's more to go through here (a book's worth, I hope). 

I do think though that there are interesting implications for an object-oriented literary criticism in this line of investigation that would suggest a method clearly different from the cultural-sociological methods that presume first that language is communicational. What is it about Hamlet or any literary object that allows it to be transmitted from saying to saying? Is it strictly the technosocial apparatus I described above or is there a deeper ontological explanation, an indirect discourse, a collective assemblage of enuciation enacting incorporeal transformations? If such an indirect discourse exists, can one find an ontological basis for it that creates the capacity for language to do what it does? Then finally, how might one investigate "literariness" as an aesthetic-stylistic intervention/investigation into that capacity?

college reform, the universal instrument, and incorporeal transformations

Time magazine has college reform as its cover page story (again). The magazine polls a few experts about the problem, specifically the rising cost of higher education, but the issues are familiar by now:

• the importance of public funds for public universities
• the national, commerical and social value of university research
• the ROI for students who want degrees to mean better salaries
• the possibility of reducing costs through online learning.

The lead article focuses on undergraduate education comparing the MOOC experience of physics with physics classes at Georgetown and the University of DC. Diplomatically, each was seen as having its value. Georgetown is great (a "science spa"), for those who can afford to go. The Udacity physics course was innovative, and the DC course provided the attention those students needed. As the author, Amanda Ripley, writes of the professor, "he was helping them with many skills beyond physics. He was cultivating discipline and focus, rebuilding confidence and nuturing motivation." 

What interests me most however is the instrumental view we have of higher education. In a way this is hardly new but this economic ROI lens is a new twist on the general premise that an education can prepare you for a career. As I see it, there are two kinds of entry-level careers: those that require specific professional-technical knowledge and those that don't. In the former category we typically think of STEM careers but there are really many jobs like this from arts management to technical editing. However tehre are also many jobs that are fairly generic in terms of the skills/knowledge they require. These are your basic entry-level office work jobs in corporate and government spaces. However, I think for many of these jobs, even in STEM, the time we spend on specific skil-training is fairly low. We are mostly providing a baseline knowledge and creating a common profesional culture. This is the universal instrumentality of higher education. It is also a kind of incorporeal transformation. When the degree is conferred, a person is transformed, much in the same way as a couple is declared married in a wedding ceremony. In the university though, the incorporeal transformation occurs through multiple steps, with each grade and each credit. The student becomes a different person, employable as an entry-level professional, in part because s/he has acquired specific knowledge but mostly because they have been transformed into a certain kind of subject appropriate for such employment.

So this is the fundamental disconnect in this conversation. In a Time survey, 40% of the general population said the main reason to go to college as to learn career skills. We can't really give you those. In a few careers we can, such a nursing, accounting, or teaching where there are certificates we can award. Even in disciplines like engineering or computer science what we have is more of an articulation between curriculum and job, facilitated by internships. That's why internships are so important in those fields (and others). A college education can be applicable to a career and there are some specific skills that one can acquire in college but not nearly enough to amount to a degree. On the flip side, 36% of "college leaders" in the same survey said "critical thinking" was the most important thing. I am loathe to go down this path again, but when college leaders say critical thinking, I don't think they mean specifically the courses offered in a philosophy department but rather some generic kind of cognitive capacity that is accessible in any major one might pursue. I would argue that critical thinking in this context is another term for this incorporeal transformation. 

It is hard to speak in an open way about this subjective, incorporeal transformation, even though nearly everyone who has a 4-yr degree has experienced it. In part it is just growing up, but it is growing up in a particular way. This is part of why MOOCs are nowhere near serving the purpose of college. As Ripley noted in her article, the physics professor is dealing with more than physics. What she doesn't note, but should be apparent, is that Georgetown's "science spa" is doing the same thing: creating a different culture that transforms student-subjects. So yes, higher education is instrumental, but not in the way we typically think. If one imagines college as a series of bureaucratic hoops and discrete skills then one is seeing only a tiny part of the picture. The instrumentality of college is really about becoming immersed in and transformed by college as a form of life. 

I am sure that some would object to the picture of college I am describing as elitist. Working parents, non-traditional students, and many others are really looking for a credential to get a better-paying, more secure job; they should have a way to do that without being obligated to this immersion in college life (though it should be available to them if they want it). I agree, and I would agree that college is elitist, if by elitist we can mean something that 30% of the population acquire. I do think it means we need two clearly different paths. Maybe that would help to address the problem of students not finishing college. Right now that non-college path is dominated by for-profit institutions. 

On the other hand, if we want more people to undergo this subjective transformation, then I think we need to be more transparent about what we are doing. A significant part of our problem in the US is that we don't really value this subjective transformation. We want to see skills and career as separate from how we think and feel about the world. For someone who has been through an extensive educational process (like myself0, it is impossible to imagine that my training as a professor has not fundamentally altered the way I think and feel about the world, my political views, my social interactions, my ethics, and so on. I wouldn't say that the process is deterministic (i.e. it isn't "get this degree and think this way") but there is a feedback loop so that as one is affected in certain ways by education one makes further choices that reinforce those changes. As such, engineers end up being different from educators as cultural groups. 

This speaks to college reform in a few ways. 1) There is a significant problem with students not completing their degrees. Part of this is students running out of money for various reasons but I also think many students just get lost because they don't really understand what college is about. They think it is job skills when it is something else. We need to make this more clear and to make the connection between academic and professional cultures more apparent. 2) Governments and the private sector maybe also misunderstand what we do and so they fund and measure us in the wrong ways. If we want to take on this incorporeal transformation as a grand socio-economic project and strategy then we need to recognize that the students will need greater incentive and support, much as they do to get through K-12. 3) We need to recognize that ongoing research is an integral part of this culture. It may or may not be instrumental in its specific application, but it is instrumental in the creation of the academic culture that enacts the incorporeal transformation we desire.

 

from rhetorical theory to composition classroom

It should go without saying that the pedagogy and curriculum of our composition classrooms should bear some relationship to the theories, methods, and research that drive the discipline. It "should go" but probably doesn't. And this is particularly a problem for first-year composition where the instructors on the ground are often disconnected from the discipline. Largely they aren't rhetoricians and have had little contact with the field beyond maybe some introductory course that they took at some point in their academic careers. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of support for professional development for writing instructors. The closest one gets to professional development in most instances are composition textbooks, which hypothetically could do the job of translating contemporary research to the classroom. Unfortunately, textbook production and sales is not an effective system for accomplishing this task in part because the economic imperative of publishers is to meet their consumer demand (i.e. the demand of the instructors who order the books) rather than the intellectual demands of the discipline (which are a consideration but are clearly secondary). Even a cursory examination of textbook content will reveal that many are fairly outdated in the disciplinary paradigms they promote (e.g. modes). 

I don't believe it is necessary to be an active scholar/researcher in a field in order to teach an introductory course, but I do think it is necessary to be aware of contemporary research as it might inform the course. And in the case of composition the link between research and introductory course is more significant than in other fields. That is, from history to chemistry, I doubt that research very often has a large impact upon the content of an introductory course. In composition this is not the case for two reasons. First, and most obviously to those in the field, composition studies takes that introductory course as a primary object of study. As a result, much of the research produced is specifically about that course. Second, composition studies is a relatively new field. Sure, rhetoric goes back millennia, but the active, disciplinary study of college composition is only a few decades old. I am among the first or second generation of rhet/comp scholars that were trained in rhet/comp graduate programs on a national scale. As a result many of the legacy notions of teaching writing in K-12 and universities, which remain heavily in effect, are reflective of non-disciplinary values. So, for example, when one is preparing a new group of graduate students to teach composition, they will have had little or no contact with the disciplinary paradigms of teaching composition but they will have extensive experiences and ideas about writing and even the teaching of writing. In fact, one could say that if a first-year composition class works to undo many of the received ideas and attitudes students have about writing practice, then a teaching practicum has an analogous task in relation to new instructors. Indeed one might argue that consistently failing at the latter task means having little opportunity of succeeding at the former on a programmatic level. 

Of course it's not that simple (what is?). Research isn't prescriptive of practice nor intended to be. Scholars disagree (surprise, surprise). One cannot simply read the research and act on it; one requires a larger paradigmatic/discourse-community understanding of the field to evaluate and situate research properly. To put it simply, while one doesn't need to be an active rhet/comp scholar to design and teach an introductory composition course, it's very difficult to do so if one is not trained in the field. Can anyone name any other discipline where it would be controversial to state that one needed to be a professional in the field in order to teach in it, even at the introductory level? The short answer is that this has always been acceptable for composition because of historical and institutional reasons rather than scholarly ones. The composition class was invented before composition studies and emerged from English departments at a time before those departments split with rhetoric and became so specialized in the modern version of literary studies.

For decades, expertise to teach composition was evidenced by demonstrating that one had the practical knowledge to succeed as an academic writer (i.e. by demonstrating one had an English degree). This remains the de facto criteria. This criteria makes a degree of sense, and it is also the basis for a WAC/WID curriculum (e.g. if you are a biologist then you are qualified to teach students to write as biologists). There is no doubt that literary scholars are best positioned to teach students about the discursive features of literary scholarship. So following that logic, composition, as the teaching of a general writing practice, should be eliminated and replaced with discipline-specific writing courses, which would at least eliminate the problem of instructors teaching outside their field. However, just because students can benefit from learning about the discursive practices of their chosen major/profession from faculty in those fields does not that composition is a course devoid of valuable content, content that is valuable enough to remain a requirement of general education. Rhetoric offers methods for investigating a wide range of communication (personal, civic, professional, etc.) as well as understanding compositional practices (as they emerge differently in different contexts) that can support writing practices in a general way (just as having a general education, introductory understanding of science, art, or history can be beneficial). 

So this brings one back to the original problem. To teach an introductory composition course, one needs an expert-level understanding of how rhetoric and composition operate. This understanding informs both the content of the course (i.e. what one would define as introductory and foundational that students should learn) and the pedagogy of the course (i.e. one's understanding of how rhetoric/writing operate would inform how one would go about teaching these things). Again, the relationship is not prescriptive: theory and disciplinary understanding do not provide a roadmap to pedagogy. Furthermore, pedagogy demands flexibility to the singular conditions of each group of students. Such flexibility only further exacerbates the need for expertise. 

Given the situation at many universities, including my own, where composition is largely taught by TAs with limited experience who will go on to become experts in literary studies and likely never develop expertise in rhetoric and composition, how does one create intelligent expert systems that can provide the support that would benefit instructors without muting the strengths the instructors do have? In my view simply providing a universal set curriculum is a blunt instrument answer to this question. On the other hand abdicating the responsibility for curriculum design to individuals who have not been provided adequate resources or training to make those decisions (the opposite end of the spectrum) is not a better option.

As a WPA with 65 literary studies TAs, figuring out how to strike this balance is continually on my mind. When I took this job, the practice at UB was very near the total freedom approach. Seeing that, I tried to take on the task of providing the general expertise that would be necessary to support that. I don't really see that working, which I don't believe is anyone's fault. It is unreasonable to imagine such a thing would be possible in a single semester of a teaching practicum. Anyway, this blog post has gone on far too long. Ultimately the point becomes identifying where strength and expertise exists and/or can be reasonably developed (which then become the spaces where instructors focus their activity) and then providing a network of expert systems and support to undertake the rest of the work. In some respects all teaching operates this way. No one is out there teaching naked without a network or context. My concern is becoming more strategic about the composition of that network as it addresses the need to support disciplinary expertise in the classroom.

 

Noise, (ir)rationality, and debate

By now, no one really imagines that presidential debates are really, well, debates. Instead, we want a line going up and down measuring "undecided" voters. Are we measuring galvanic skin response? The raw, exposed nerve of collective unconscious? In our fantasies about debating, rational arguments are provided, suppositions are considered, evidence is evaluated, and conclusions are reached through the commonplaces of argument (deduction, induction, etc.). In a purely rational argument it should be possible to reach a conclusion that both sides would be forced to agree was correct. Or at least, the sides could pinpoint their disagreement over a particular piece of evidence or supposition that could, in time, be resolved. We realize that many disagreements stem from beliefs: suppositions that cannot be dis/proven. I think that most supporters of one political party over another act out of such beliefs, including myself. That is, there is absolutely no argument the opponent could offer that would change my vote. In rhetorical terms, we might view this as a matter of ethos, but even ethos is supposed to be rationally adjudicated. 

But what about the undecided voters? Are they meant to make a rational choice from the fodder of debates, campaign ads, and partisan analysis? No, not really. Rational debate can be composed, under sterile laboratory conditions. As with a scientific experiment, a rational debate requires the near elimination of external variables, and more importantly it requires the willing participation of everyone involved. In other words, debate requires that noise and irrationality be eliminated and the debaters must play a role in that. Of course a presidential debate isn't a lab experiment. It's an opportunity to incite people to vote. Maybe after the fact, we can retrospectively rationalize our choices and we can discover rational points and tropes in a debate. 

This is not just about political debate though. As an academic, I don't think I've ever seen a colleague change his/her position on a matter of importance. Perhaps, over time, from one book to the next, positions are modified. But, for example, when one engages in a disagreement on or between blogs (or at a conference panel), no one imagines that minds will be changed. One might learn about a new method or hear an interesting interpretation. These things might change our views over time. One could read over the posts on this blog on object-oriented rhetoric to see how my views have shifted through the consideration of new theories. But that is a span of years, and just as importantly, it is not a shift that I would describe as rational so much as intuitive. That is, my decision to pursue OOO is/was primarily a result of a feeling that something interesting/productive would result. And over the years I have come to trust those intuitions. I have also come to realize that the best decisions I have made, the ones that have made me successful (to the extent that I am), have been intuitive ones AND that they are decisions I do not think I could have made by rational, deliberative means. Starting this blog a decade ago is a prime example: a totally irrational decision.

I have these thoughts in mind when I watch (or don't watch) presidential debates or follow the arguments surrounding OOO: none of this is about changing people's minds by rational means. However, what pushed me to write this post was teaching Victor Vitanza's "Three Countertheses" essay in my teaching practicum. I imagine that Vitanza doesn't show up on many practicum syllabi because his work is theoretical and challenging and doesn't offer the kinds of nuts and bolts advice that are the typical staple of such courses. I suppose the focus of my practicum is different. To me, the key goal of a practicum is for TAs to understand that a writing pedagogy rests upon theories of writing, communication, and cognition. To teach writing well, one has to be reflective of the ways in which theory and practice relate here. Part of Vitanza's argument is about the resistance of theory to application. Another is the critique of our faith in rationality to explain how writing works. Before reading Vitanza, we have read Bartholomae and Berlin, who I think still represent the mainstream thinking about academic discourse, empowerment, and critical thinking (though they also differ from one another). We've also read Russell and Wardle as I think that CHAT and the issues of transfer and writing-about-writing represent significant (and relatively new) views in the field. However, all of those positions ultimately rely upon rationality as the foundation of writing, communication, and cognition. They are all asymmetrical in their identification of the human (and the rational mind) as the controlling force in a writing system.

So what happens when one takes up a flat ontological, symmetrical view of writing? Vitanza writes about the third sophistic position, the role of the other and noise, that both the speaker and listener (in a more conventional rhetoric) conspire to erase, even when they are supposed opponents in a rational debate. What about the nonhuman objects, including language, at work in any network of writing activity? Returning to the presidential debate, this is how I see Latour's object-oriented democracy functioning. The extended network of objects participating in the debate from flag pins, cameras, and teeth whiteners to Twitter, drinking games and real-time polling: there is no ontological boundary between rationality and otherness, between noise and message. 

 

Full-Stop Interview with Gregory Ulmer

Full Stop has a new interview with Gregory Ulmer here that is part of a new series on experimental pedagogy.