Barely promoted

Getting defensive

Upon observing several pieces discussing the departure of the Invisible Adjunct from both her blog and academia entirely, Erin O'Connor has been thinking about

... the politics of lamentation about the state of the academy.

There is something a bit, ummm, noisome in the spectacle of established, tenured academics clucking their virtual tongues and beating their virtual breasts about the terrible lot that has befallen the Invisible Adjunct and all those other adjuncts for whom she has so invisibly stood. What besides clucking are these folks doing to reform the abusive system that chewed IA up and spat her out?

[...]

You can say that this is a fine case of the pot calling the kettle black. After all, what have I been doing on Critical Mass since March 2002 besides lamenting the state of academe, and devoting considerable space to the corruption of the academic humanities? I've clucked about the exploitation of adjunct labor more than once on this blog, and I've done it from a tenured position whose shape is structurally dependent on all the non-tenure-track lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students that my department regularly employs to round out its course offerings. So where do I get off?

I'll know the exact answer to that question next week, when I decide which of several job offers teaching high school English to accept.

[...]

There is one market, though, that is WIDE OPEN for humanities M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s, and that is the independent school market. "Independent" is mostly a contemporary code word for "private," though it can also mean "charter." Your Ph.D.--or, if you are ABD, your M.A.--is a very attractive qualification in this market. In contrast to the public school system, it counts as a teaching qualification (thus preventing you from going back to school to get a highly redundant ed school teaching certificate). Independent schools are eager to add people with advanced degrees to their faculty--in part, this raises the profile of the school and looks good to parents and donors, but far more importantly, these schools recognize that refugees from academe can make marvelous high school teachers. They know this to be true because their faculties are already full of them.

The Village Voice piece linked above tells the story of one such refugee, who is happily earning twice what he would have made as an adjunct teaching at a private high school in New Jersey.

I should say: I love Erin's blog. I check there before Crooked Timber even; her posts are always comprehensive and her voice is so clear. But, I was left defensive on several fronts—perhaps because one of the articles that set Erin off linked (for no terribly apparent reason) to me. In no particular order:

ITEM. What makes independent schools any morally better? I believe that they'll value Ph.D.'s. I even believe that private ones will pay better than many lousy faculty positions. But: my biggest big-picture problem with my job is that I'm a cog in the perpetuation of the class system—not within the academic framework, but in the broader society. We mostly teach rich kids. Yes, Granolan gives out lots of financial aid, and I'm sure well-endowed high schools do too. But, whether in grades 9-12 or 13-16, it's still teaching primarily kids who have already had lots of advantages and whose parents are paying many thousands of dollars to make sure they get more. And at the pre-college levels, it will be families who have enough saved for college that they can start paying big bucks even earlier. Sure it's fun. Sure they're smart. But is it really any different?

(I've so far spared this blog my rant on the subject of faculty families here sending their kids to private schools and/or homeschooling and my horror at what it's doing to the local public schools. I suppose it seems a bit premature. But: go Laura!)

And I doubt that the charter schools are going to be paying all that well.

CONTINUATION OF ITEM. Don't independent schools already have their own exploitative labor practice: hiring recent graduates of snooty schools (right accent, took the right drugs, etc.) to live in the dorms, teach a few classes, and coach a sport they'd never heard of before they got to campus? I don't think these jobs are meant to be anything but a stopgap for confused kids. (I admit, I doubt that they do long-term damage to the people who take them; well, unless you count that it's a common path to grad school.) But I bet that the low pay given to wildly underqualified employees (aside from age and experience, it's often not the kids with high GPAs who end up taking thse jobs) makes it easier to pay other employees, well, more.

ITEM. I work at an atypical institution. We are small, geographically isolated, and, in some sense, we try to care. We hire very few, perhaps no adjuncts in the abusive sense. We do hire people for one- or two-year replacement positions when we need to. They teach the same load as the rest of us, they get full benefits, and they're not paid badly. They attend department meetings (often vociferously). In my department at least, we sometimes have trouble filling temp positions. When we hire people for two-year temp positions, they often leave after one year for tenure-track jobs—saying nasty things about tiny little Granolaton over their shoulders as they leave town.

ITEM. Although Anya Kamenetz e-mailed me, I declined to be interviewed. I don't have a lot to say directly on the issue of academic underemployment and/or structural changes to the profession, and I know full well how lucky I am to be employed in such an anachronistic little bubble. This blog is about, well, very different things. (Perhaps it's just as well that the Voice got their link wrong!)

Earlier grandiosity

In 1997, when my mother was first hospitalized, she was in a big urban public hospital. Very few of the patients had private insurance; very few of the doctors were American. The psych ward had recently released a schizophrenic who immediately proceeded to commit one of the more notorious stranger-on-stranger murders of the decade.

Annajane was very, very manic. For example: why was she missing so many teeth? Oh, those parties where Grace Kelly asked her to open champagne bottles with her teeth, and, well, you can't say no to Grace, can you?

One of her doctors took me aside as I arrived to visit. "Your mother has been claiming—she says that, that you're..." He trailed off, then managed to continue: "That you're studying for your doctorate, in ergonomics, at [lengthy pause, voice drops] Impressive University."

Deflation, part II: my students

"Professor Maple? I was wondering if I could talk about the exams?"

[Why the plural? She did fine on the first one.] "Come in! Sit down!"

"Well, I just wanted to give you some feedback, not in any way meant as criticism, but just some feedback on what I was thinking about them."

She feels that it's inappropriate that they're timed, see. She and many others in the class would be able to answer many more questions if they weren't being cut off after an hour. Have I considered whether take-homes might be more appropriate for the material we're covering, at the level we're covering it?

This is a perfectly reasonable issue to raise. What got me riled was the attitude: she made her suggestions as if she expected that take-homes had never occurred to me, that the only reason that the exams were in-class was because I'd been too dense to consider the obviously superior option she was presenting.

I wonder if one or both of her parents has a Ph.D. in education?

This isn't as bad as, yet still is reminiscent, of a student I had during my second year at Granolan, who was annoyed that I wasn't putting out answers for homeworks before the homework was due. See, she liked to have the answers alongside her as she worked, so that she could get "immediate feedback." She felt that my stubborness about this issue was a sign that my "teaching style" was incompatible with her "learning style."

Deflation, part I: my colleagues

My main question, after sitting through two meetings with members of several Granolan departments and a small group of outside evaluators: are we all just pretending to be scholars?

I know, I know, it's a cheap shot. But it was deeply discouraging to hear people from a spectrum of areas talk about how they believe it's simply not possible for them to conduct high-quality research here, and that institutional expectations should therefore be relaxed.

It was even more discouraging when one evaluator asked whether we'd considered switching to pedagogical scholarship. Yes, we're a school that's very good at teaching—perhaps because we conform closely (perhaps more so than the author would believe possible) to this framework for Taking Teaching Seriously. But pedagogy literature is so... so... marginal. (Ooooh, it felt good to let that word out.) Watch our reputation slide even further!

Meanwhile, I know I'm pretending to be a scholar. How can I tell? I still haven't finished even reading that damn review paper from a month ago. It fell off my desk yesterday (literally).

Lit review: Buying Dad

Harlyn Aizley's Buying Dad: One Woman's Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor is fab. I'm usually wary of small-press memoirs, but the writing is sharp and funny. The author is terrific at grabbing a momentary image or an emotion and tracking it through all the contexts of her life. And I love the way she twines her getting-pregnant story with the stories of her mother's cancer treatment and her relationships with her partner, her sister, and her friends.

Why did I end up empathizing more with a couple of Jewish lesbians who work in the arts than with most of what I've seen written by infertile women? Three big reasons:

The author and her partner, after several years together, went through a sharp transition from "baby impossible" to "working on baby," where the latter didn't just mean going off the pill. They had to choose to start trying, and those efforts were necessarily expensive, medically complex, and logistically complex from day one.

[Compare: missing vas deferens, straight to IVF.]

When they started trying, the author's mother was going through chemo again, after a couple of years of remission. The memoir tracks the inseminations and the recurring ovarian cancer side by side. The author can't sharply separate her reactions to the medical establishment that's trying to keep her mother alive and her reactions to the doctors who are helping, or hindering, her own efforts, and she doesn't try to. She doesn't want to do injectables, or even Clomid, because of her fears of developing ovarian cancer herself, and it's hard to argue with that.

[Compare: Beaker himself. Oh, and my mother.]

Despite living in a liberal academic community, where they are surrounded by other couples making the same choices (there's a wonderful riff on women they know trying to get them to compare sperm donors: "I try to explain that one of the perks of being Lesbitarian is that we don't have to scratch each other's eyes out for a man"), the author worries whether she's doing the right thing for her future child.

[Compare: hmmm.]

Plus, did I mention how funny the book is?

ADDENDUM: It's been a broadening few days around here. Thanks, Brad, for letting me play at being a straight man, too!

This week's phone calls

Tuesday: Dorothy, my mother's social worker at hospital three, returns my call from Friday. Annajane is in dreadful condition. She's been rapidly cycling between "pressured anxiety" and "hostile grandiosity," with a couple of days of apparent dementia (up to and including needing diapers) scattered in. She's upsetting to the other patients, so they've been keeping her in the "quiet area." Even there, Dorothy's seen her pretending to hit people: standing behind them, aiming blows at their heads but not connecting.

Current medication: Haldol, Lithium, Cogentin, Benadryl. At first they had inject most of it, but now she's willing to swallow liquids. Most of the time she's been eating; they know to keep an eye on that, and on her fluid intake.

She hated the nursing home and says she wants to go back to hospital zero, the big state hospital across the river. Her doctor agrees that it's probably appropriate for her to go there, since they haven't been able to stabilize her at all—she's been at hospital three for a month now. Plus the nursing home doesn't want her back. Dorothy has started the referral process, but she says it'll take a month or two to happen.

I'm surprised to hear that Annajane wants to go back to hospital zero, and ask whether she remembers that the dog shelter that was on the grounds of the state hospital (the campus is spooky, with many empty buildings) has been closed. Dorothy has no idea what I'm talking about, so this leads to a more general discussion of the traumas of last fall: her favorite dog at the shelter getting adopted, the announcement that the shelter was closing, and the sudden death of her fiance. (Yes, I just pulled that last out of nowhere, yes, it's true, and yes, it was the least emotionally significant of the three events, even though she was the one who found his body.) In retrospect, it seems clear that she was getting hypomanic before Christmas. But she really hasn't been well since, except maybe for the few calm days that got her out of hospital two and into the nursing home.

Dorothy says they don't think that the dementia-like episodes are actually dementia, but rather "profound psychotic decompensation."

Thursday: Dorothy calls again. What's the name of my mother's dead fiance? The doctor wants to see if she remembers the entire episode, as some sort of cognitive check. Daniel, I tell them, but she called him Den.

Saturday: I call the nurses' station. They warn me that my mother might wander off, but they go and get her from the quiet area. She is wildly manic. One sure sign: she thinks the hospital food is wonderful. And then:

"We're not sure yet if it will be Tuesday or Saturday, but I'm going to be leaving this place."

Where will you be going?

"Back—back to 446 Central Avenue. My old place. And the rent's still the same."

[You would recognize the name of Central Avenue if I revealed it; she did live there for several years, but in a tiny studio at the ratty end. She lost the apartment in '97 after Nanna had run through my grandfather's savings; from there she went to a tinier nastier apartment in an actively bad neighborhood, and from there to her first breakdown in 20 years.]

[Strangely, she did once re-rent an apartment in Metropolis, the one she'd taken me to in 1977 and where she had her last breakdown for 20 years. Somehow she ended up in it again in the early 90's for a little while. I don't think I visited—we weren't really speaking at the time. In some sense, though, that previous coincidence makes the unchanged rent the least plausible of her claims.]

How did you manage that?

"I've been calling lots of people. And I know where everyone's buried the money."

[...]

"You know, Emmy, I'm really a very important patient here. Just think how many times I've been in this hospital! But they've been so sloppy this time. Do you know how long it took for either of the doctors assigned to me to actually meet me face to face? A week and a half, that's how long!"

[Actually, I spoke with one of them the day after she'd been admitted.]

Annajane's speech is fluent, although there are many word subsitutions (that she notices and corrects). Her tone is arrogant, but not especially hostile; today she is gracefully accepting the incompetence of the rest of the world. She remembers that Nanna is mad at her on my behalf. She asked about the coat and shoes I ordered to be sent to the nursing home; she'll try to get her case manager Tom to pick them up.

"Emmy, I know you have this number. I'll call you when I'm out of here, of course. But just in case, you can call here next Sunday. Don't be surprised if they can't find me here, though."

The blind leading the blind

I occasionally help teach an interdisciplinary course that touches on some of the work of Tversky and Kahneman. The reading this time around includes a Scientific American article, "The Psychology of Preferences," from January 1982. (Sadly, much of it is too difficult for the students.) Here are a couple of excerpts:

Some properties of decision weights can be explored by the following informal experiment. Imagine that you can improve your chances to win a very desirable prize. Would you pay as much to raise your chance of winning from 30 to 40 percent as you would to raise your chance from 90 percent to certainty? it is generally agreed that the former offer is less valuable than the latter. it is also agreed that an increase from impossibility to a probability of 10 percent is more significant than an increase from 30 to 40 percent. Thus the difference between certainty and possibility and the difference between possibility and impossibility loom larger than comparable differences in the intermediate range of probability.

My first reaction: Hey, can I buy certainty? No, wait, I mean, can I buy possibility? How much should I be willing to pay in time and money for the increase in DIUI success probability from injectables? Dr. Brash says it's 15-18 percent, vs. 12-15 percent with just Clomid, although I don't know if those are his numbers for DIUI or for all IUIs (scroll down for the relevant graphs at a clinic on another continent). I've seen references to papers that claim 23 percent success for DIUI with injectables. But it's both more money and more monitoring. Oh: we could also spend more, lots more, on IVF elsewhere. But would it help?

My second reaction: who are all those people staring at me? Are they listening? Am I lecturing? Whoops. Let's move on.

The winning number in a lottery was 865304. Three individuals compare the ticket they hold to the winning number. John holds 361204; Mary holds 965304; Peter holds 865305. How upset are they respectively?

There is general agreement that the experience is devastating for Peter, quite severe for Mary and very mild for John. Here again the ranking corresponds to the degree to which the individuals can be described as having "come close" to winning the prize.

An individual's exerience of pleasure or frustration may therefore depend on an act of imagination that determines the reference level to which reality is compared [...] Imagination appears to be governed by rules, and the rules of imagination affect our experience of reality by controlling the alternatives to which it is compared.

What runs through my brain:

• John and Mary learn from a testicular biopsy that John is truly azoospermatic. Whoops!

• Alice stims so poorly that the cycle is cancelled before retrieval.

• Lucy manages three eggs, but none fertilize, even with ICSI.

• Only two of Susan's eggs fertilize, and the embryos stall before day 3.

• Carol's lovely embryos make it to day 3, but her first beta is negative.

• Jean has a chemical pregnancy; the second beta is lower that the first.

• Et cetera. (I probably shouldn't try too hard to make this list comprehensive.)

So: just who is coming closer to that prize, hmm? Hmm? What does the imagination provide as a basis for comparison? And won't someone sell us certainty? Or possibility? Or something, someday? (After class is over, of course.)

A REQUEST: if anyone reading this entry can recommend an accessible account of choice theory, or prospect theory, or whatever the heck it's called—behavioral economics, maybe?— I'd be extremely grateful. I'd like to understand why people care a little deeper than the engaging-anecdote, let's-make-fun-of-really-naive-rational-choice-theory level where reading this, and a couple of similar articles, has left me.

The professorette used to worry about grandmothers

That is, the students' grandmothers, around the times of exams. Dreadful things could happen to out-of-town relatives as tests approached. Generally the excuses ended up too well documented to really question. (Of course sample bias is key here: if a student's grandmother ended up in the hospital in July, why would they tell me about it?)

Nowadays, students' relationships seem to merit just as much concern. This morning I had desperate e-mails from two students too distraught to take an afternoon exam. The first told me baldly that he'd been dumped by his boyfriend ("in EMAIL!"). For the second, I had to listen closely to the pauses in the following conversation with an assistant dean, but I think she got dumped by a boyfriend, too. (The same guy?! I have no idea, sadly.)

Why was I talking with the dean? Because, in both cases, administrators have recommended that I allow them to take the exam later. I'll acquiesce, and not ungracefully.

[But: insert generic when-I-was-a-student rant here; follow by discussion of increasingly consumerist orientation of increasingly expensive private colleges, even selective ones, and conclude with whine about resulting extra work for me.]

Rat reality TV

The Observer notes (belatedly) a study of lab rats released to a wilder environment:

[...] far from witnessing a Lord of the Flies -style reversion to a violent, cruel society, the rats formed more of a hierarchical order based on age, showing respect for the older animals and better organisational skills.

Dr Manuel Berdoy, a zoologist at Oxford University Veterinary Services, who put 75 rats into a farmyard and watched and filmed their reactions over six months, said that the results threw light on how our innate instincts work.

'The released rats quickly showed the ghost of their wild ancestors still lies beneath the wild coat of the lab rat, even after so many years of selective breeding [to favour more docile animals],' he said.

'Our rats found water, food and bolt holes almost immediately; within days they had started to establish social hierarchies, and within weeks they had a wide-ranging pattern of runs criss-crossing the colony.'

[...]

The white and Lister-hooded rats in the experiment had been bred and kept in labs since such testing began in 1908 - which, given that rats can breed every three months, makes them at least the 200th generation.

The conclusions are obvious, according to Berdoy. 'We have taken the animal from the wild, but we have not taken all the wild from the animal.'

To watch the movie, click on the rat.

If you want analogies with eager undergrads arriving at Ph.D. programs, or disillusioned recent Ph.D.'s arriving at their first jobs, or people leaving academia altogether—well, need more be said? Maybe. Especially about boltholes. And (if you go watch the clips, you'll see what I'm talking about) figuring out that dead birds are edible, too.

Thunder past the horizon

These last two weeks I've almost fallen out of touch with Weatherwood.

About a week ago, uncle Ricky called to ask if I knew whether Annajane was still in hospital three. I haven't heard anything more from them since she got admitted. Apparently Ricky and Nanna haven't been visiting her because there was some awful blowup on the phone. Nanna has always coped with Annajane's problems via denial when Annajane's sort of okay, and anger when she isn't. Sample from the current rant (I got to hear a preview the last time I spoke with Nanna): "How could you let this happen, after Emmy came out here and did so much for you?" But Annajane was angry too; at that time, hostility was a major symptom. So they're not speaking to each other.

Ricky also said that Nanna hadn't been feeling well. She has pancreas flareups occasionally. I couldn't tell if this was one or not. Nanna was napping, so she didn't come to the phone. Ricky says Marina, currently unemployed but much occupied with immigration lawyers, has been helping Nanna in the bath and so on. I bet Nanna's pissed about that, too. My worry is that, with too much help, she'll become less able. For instance, Ricky has been driving her to the supermarket. How could he not? She's 88! But, before he was living in Weatherwood, she walked into town herself twice a week. I don't think she could walk that far now. Perhaps the decline would have happened anyway. We can't know.

Friday I tried calling the ward payphone. An urgent yet affectless man picked up on the second ring. "Annajane?... She's... in the back. She can't... come to the phone." It seemed like he wouldn't be able to take it if I asked more questions. So I thanked him, hung up, and called her social worker's voice mail.