GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

Posts Tagged ‘Higher Education’


Planting a Garden

In Lee's Posts on 2012/05/01 at 05:10

Lee Skallerup Bessette, writing from Morehead, Kentucky in the US

I have suddenly realized that my children will have a fundamentally different childhood experience than the ones my husband and I had growing up. Before you say, duh, realize that I’m not talking about social media and texting and cell phones and Khan Academy (not to mention that we’re living in a different country). I am talking about my children growing up in a small, rural town, versus the big-city childhood my husband and I both had.

I grew up riding public transit to get anywhere and everywhere. My first real date was to see a Major League Baseball game (which we took public transit to get to). I saw my first concert when I was twelve (it was 1989; try and guess who I went to see). If I became interested in any sort of activity or hobby, there were always classes being offered somewhere that my parents could sign me up for. There were huge libraries, important museums, big (and small) cultural events, and major sports teams. And, of course, a mall.

And while I was a teenager before the Internet was everywhere, I did come into young adulthood in a world where you could find anything and everything online, while living in places where you could do just about anything. The places where I wanted to go and the things that I wanted to do were all just a Google search away for dates, directions, prices, and schedules. In certain regards, I’m as bad as my students insofar as if I can’t find an activity or business or organization online, then I have no idea how to find them at all.

As my kids get older and I get to know the community and my students, I realize just how different my kids’ experiences growing up will be and just how useless I am at helping them explore and navigate the world we currently live in. My students talk extensively about their experiences hunting, growing food, raising animals, building boxcar racers, foraging, quilting (it’s really big here in Kentucky), and fishing when they were kids. Certainly, they also played in high school bands, played football/baseball/soccer, and other “common” childhood activities, but they were coupled with experiences that are so foreign to me that I don’t even know how to begin introducing my
kids to them.

Added to that, I live in a place where word-of-mouth is the social network of choice. People just know what activities are available and how and when to sign up for them. But a lot of the activities rely on local, community or familial knowledge, skills that have been passed down between generations. Instructional videos on YouTube can only take my kids (especially at this age) so far. And they can only take me so far, too. My kids want to go fishing and camping and have small farm animals and plant their own garden. I have almost zero interest in or knowledge about any of those activities.

But gardening, you say, is easy. Sure, if you don’t have a black thumb like I do. And, if you knew enough about gardening ahead of time not to buy a house with a yard that is entirely shaded; I was thinking like an urban dweller who treasures shade. My kids want nothing more than sunlight to grow plants under. Plus, if we want to grow food, we also have to learn how to build a fence as well as a sort of roof for the garden, as we have deer and other animals that will come and eat our “crop.” Again, these are all things I don’t know how to do, or really have the time, energy, or patience to learn.

Don’t take this to mean that I think these things aren’t worth learning or that I think that my childhood is superior to the childhood my kids are currently experiencing. I am just completely and utterly out of my depth. I understood that I would have to learn new and unexpected things because of my kids’ interests (my mother knew nothing about competitive swimming before my brother and I devoted our lives, and thus her life, to the sport for 15+ years). But mentally I was prepared for more “suburban” or even electronic interests (like cheerleading or World of Warcraft, which could still happen). I wasn’t ready for gun safety and large animal care.

Recently here at Uvenus, Emily Isaacson wrote about finding yourself where you are.  My kids, at least for the foreseeable future, will never know anything other than growing up where we are. I’m really hoping in the coming years, as they grow older and make their own connections in the community, that they will teach me about this place we now call home. As an academic, I have to be curious and want to continue learning. But, right now, I’m even more lost and overwhelmed than my kids are (which is, quite honestly, not at all) by the possibilities of the place we live.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Who Gives a Tweet? Who is to Decide?

In Ernesto's Posts on 2012/04/28 at 00:36

Ernesto Priego, writing from London, England in the UK

Recently, there’s been considerable interest in how academics can evaluate the impact of social media outputs. A recent article, titled “Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value” [PDF] and signed by Paul André, Michael S. Bernstein and Kurt Luther, shares the results of a study which involved the creation of an online tool, titled “Who Gives ATweet?” (WGAT). This online tool encouraged and enabled users to voluntarily rate the “value” of tweets. Using a corpus of approximately 43,000 ratings, the authors asked: “What content do Twitter users value? For example, do users value personal updates while disliking opinions?” and “Why are some tweets valued more than others?”

Though the tool was developed by academic researchers within higher education institutions (WGAT is hosted at the MIT), the study involved general users (not only academics) and therefore discusses all types of tweets, not only what could be called “academic tweets” (as stated on the title of this post). I am interested in making this distinction because in order to discuss how to evaluate (or “measure”) the impact of academic content shared on social media (or academic activity on social media), we would need to focus specifically on how academics make sense of social media content. My gut feeling is that as academics we evaluate the quality of academic social media content through the same set of basic interpretive skills we employ to evaluate anything else we read.

Not everyone agrees on what an academic tweet is, but I would like to suggest it means something more specific than a tweet posted by someone who happens to work in an educational institution. Academics have all types of conversations online and offline; even those conversations that could be labeled as “academic” take place under different contexts; they have different themes and approaches, nuances, agendas, etc. These different types of conversation fulfill different functions and interpreters evaluate them accordingly. Though it could be said some of these functions are essentially social, they do contribute as catalysts of academic work (phatic communication, if you will). Therefore, it would be difficult to agree on what could or should be considered of strict academic value, but we might need to say that words, conversations or data should be evaluated in specific contexts, and therefore qualitatively. WGAT focuses on individual tweets as decontextualised units, asks users to categorise them according to pre-established value judgements, and makes generalisations from these individual qualifications. I find this troublesome for the academic evaluation of social media content, and I will try to explain why.

Twitter is a public and asynchronous medium. Because it is non-linear and distributed, pieces of information are received by very different people in very different times and places. Twitter de facto decontextualises information in the shape of the individual tweet, and though the individual tweet is Twitter’s most basic technical unit, meaning and interpretation, and indeed Twitter’s full capabilities, are only actualised when connections are made between these single units (a tweet is always part of a bigger conversation a specific user may or may not be aware of). A the same time, Twitter enables re-contextualisation by encouraging further research so users can get the complete picture. This means that when taken on themselves, tweets as isolated units offer a particular “value” that often (if not always) require recontextualisation in order to be fully appreciated. I consider this distinction important, not the least because academics, when in “strictly professional mode”, often appreciate very different types of information (or appreciate differently) what the general public would generally prefer, or what the general public version of their academic selves would publicly accept preferring.

I am unavoidably attracted to tools developed using the Twitter API, and I am convinced that very interesting conclusions can be drawn from their development, use and data they provide. Nevertheless I have serious doubts that we would need, as the authors write, “technological intervention: design implications to make the most of what is valued, or reduce or repurpose what is not”, especially when the judgement criteria is so inherently subjective and context-specific. When is critique “whining”? When is geolocation data useful, and when is it “boring”? Maybe millions of users have already read that link, but what about the other potential timelines with users who are not connected all the time?

The concern I have with these “approaches [with] the potential to address issues of value and audience reaction” (here we can include Topsy, the service used by the altmetrics tool) is that they resemble too much what is done in market sentiment research. When I worked on the market sentiment research sector, I discovered that the ways to classify audience reaction avoided the complex qualitative analysis one expects from university research. In my experience, the categories used to classify reactions to content did not always enable nuance, and aimed for pragmatic, market-driven graphic presentation, rather than the reasoned argumentation traditionally used in academic field studies or literature review.

Sentiment research might be well-suited to survey public opinions about, say, a new soda, but if we are interested in discussing academic or scholarly uses of social media, a similar conceptual framework, based on the surveying and generalisation of public opinion, seems to me constraining and even counter-productive. A given user (or millions of them if you will) may think a certain tweet is boring or devoid of value, but that same tweet may be of great interest for a different type of user: one who cares precisely about that which others find uninteresting.

Social media services like Twitter and Facebook tend to have a way of self-regulating. Eventually, most semi-capable users can become fluent in new social networking platforms and can even learn good practices by mere trial and error. Without a doubt, there is at the same time a real need to discuss and establish guidelines and policies for institutional social media good practice, and for the inclusion of social media literacy education in school curricula.

And yet I am troubled by the suggestion that an automated crowdsourced rating system would be necessary to perform a basic interpretive task. What kind of collections would academic libraries have if only those books the crowd thinks to be the most popular were considered of any value? I love technology, but I also want to believe academics are still perfectly prepared to decide, without the need of “technological intervention”, who gives a tweet about what, and, most importantly, why.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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The Death of the Lecture

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/04/27 at 04:50
 Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden. 
Recently, I had a conversation around the lunch table with several of my colleagues. The discussion turned to the requirement to take pedagogical courses, now part of the criteria for getting an academic job at my university. Were these courses useful or just necessary? Do they teach something relevant for improving one’s teaching? As good scientists, we stopped discussing the courses and focused thereon on the definition of “teaching” or, more specifically, on what “good teaching” should stand for. Of the many things we discussed during that lunch, the idea of the outdated lecture stayed with me, I decided to dedicate this post to a critique of this method of teaching.

Lectures are a very common (I could safely generalize and say even the most common) method of teaching at the university level. This does not mean that there are no labs, seminars, discussion sessions, group projects etc. It only means that if we look at the academic schedule of most disciplines, the majority of the booked times are under the heading “lecture”. During these lectures, the teacher imparts information on a specific topic to a group of students. What  happens is known as “information transfer”: the teacher shares her knowledge with the students, who take notes and can ask questions whenever something is not clear. At the end of the session, the teacher and the students are in possession of the same amount and quality of information about the specific topic – the transfer of information has been completed.

But is the transfer of information mediated by a teacher the same thing as learning? Learning is about the long-lasting acquisition of information, it is about remembering the information and being able to retrieve it and apply it at the appropriate time in the appropriate circumstances. Lectures can ensure the short-term memorization of information, as teachers who give quizzes at the end of their presentations have certainly proven. However, it is highly questionable if lectures can deliver this kind of long-lasting knowledge. Others have demonstrated the need to complement lectures with other didactic exercises. This is where terms such as peer instruction, or (inter)active learning come from: from the need to make students engage with the information received from the teacher, to make it their own, and to apply it.

In this kind of learning, the teacher spends much less time talking to a quiet classroom (sometimes the lecture is entirely virtual, like in audio or video broadcasts that are available before the physical meeting in the classroom). Instead, the teacher’s task is to provide personalized and qualified feedback for the learning activities of the students. The students, armed with the lecture and the associated readings, discuss and respond to various hands-on exercises. The teacher assists the discussions, monitors them, and gives responses to the quality of the debates and of the results of the exercises.

Nothing of what I write here is revolutionary. Almost all of this has been common knowledge for many decades. Lectures are not the most effective way of learning. Instead more participatory forms of pedagogy give better results both in national tests and in professional life after studies. So why do we still have the lecture as the number one teaching tool?

I single out here two reasons: inertia and money. Academia is an environment well-known for its slowness in embracing change. The lecture has been around practically since the Middle Ages. It is the way to teach, and both students and teachers expect it. In order to change the teaching format from lecture-based to more hands-on student-focused learning, one needs to change the infrastructure of the university (everything, from the way to count worked hours to the classroom design). This change is met with resistance because of inertia but also because of the high material costs. And it is not just the costs of change that deter the dethroning of the lecture. One should count here also the higher amount of contact hours, since the student discussions/labs/seminars can only be carried out by few students at a time. The teacher would have to work more hours to attend these meetings and to give specific, customized feedback to every group, instead of delivering a finished product to many students at the same time.

Further readings:

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Occasionally the Awkward Has its Perks

In Graduate Studies & Students on 2012/04/25 at 01:05

Deanna England, writing from Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada

I have now completed the last actual class of my degree. I have one Special Studies course to complete this Spring (Jane Austen and Adaptation, woo!) and then I graduate. And while I’m not yet breathing a sigh of relief and soliciting congratulations, I feel that I’m now in a position to reflect back over the course of this program a little, particularly at how I’ve experienced the dual-role I currently straddle.

I’ve worked at the University for four years, and spent half of that time enrolled in this degree.  When I first began, I had oh-so-many pre-conceived notions of how my program would look and function based on the myriad of planning discussions I had previously participated in. A bit of a laughable expectation in retrospect really, as when does the theory ever truly represent the practice?  Like most of us, a large part of my job requires sitting in on meetings, and many of them focused around the construction of graduate programs: curriculum, policies, student issues, scholarships, promotion, recruitment…

One of the topics I always found the most interesting in those committee meetings were the discussions around the construction of courses.  I find it fascinating that at this level of study, a faculty member has the opportunity to take their area of research and construct an entire syllabus around it. Not only does it allow them the chance to share their passion, but it also grants them the occasion to explore the area further, and learn new perspectives on the topic as a result of student engagement.

On the other hand, wearing my student hat grants me the opportunity to experience those same courses from the other side. However, it’s an odd experience, and I find it impossible to simply flip a switch from one identity (Graduate Studies Officer) to the other (graduate student).  For example, I try to patiently listen when my fellow students informally complain (to me or around me) about the program, faculty, administrative details, fees and so many other frustrating facets of the student experience. Often I feel genuine sympathy and understanding of where they are coming from, but occasionally it’s challenging. I know just how much work goes into the running of these programs and how many hours of debate go into every decision. However, I have to admit: being a student has actually been quite beneficial to understanding just how it feels to be a recipient of those decisions. Because I know, if something doesn’t make sense to me, then there’s certainly no way that the average student will have much more clarity.

Now the two particular courses I’ve taken this year have been masters-honours splits. This is a phenomenon I’d been hearing about since I started at the University, but had yet to experience. And of course I was totally unprepared for what that would be like. I had  (arrogantly) assumed that the undergraduate students would be so much less knowledgeable and articulate than the graduate students in those courses that I was completely taken aback when I realized the exact opposite was true.

Cultural Studies is a multi-disciplinary program and these two courses were taught out of the Women and Gender Studies department.  Now, I have some background in feminist discourse, but it’s only one area of critical theory amongst many others I’ve been exposed to in this degree. But these honours students? It’s what they’ve been living for the past several years – their knowledge of the vocabulary and concepts around what we’re learning far surpasses that of the graduate students. I found myself so utterly humbled by those honours students for their patient guidance, particularly regarding how to handle some of the sensitive issues that the class was discussing. One student’s declaration that “this is a safe space,” reassuring us that we didn’t have to be so concerned about saying the “wrong” thing was absolutely invaluable.

This was something that never came up in committee meetings – the actual dynamic between the two levels of students. I had heard many discussions around the necessity for an increased number of pure master’s classes, countered with the practical use of resources in the split classes. Once again, the theory did not adequately describe the practice. I cannot explain just how valuable both perspectives have been to me in both roles. I think the only thing left for me to do now is to get my PhD and start teaching in these programs – the University really doesn’t have enough classes on porn!

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Sex, Stars, and Stripes

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/04/24 at 02:25

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

The Big Bang Theory and the Republican Primary have more in common than one might think. The comedy follows a Caltech particle physicist’s pathetic attempts to deal with the irrational world around him. The fictional physicist, Sheldon Cooper, is pure. He wishes only to understand the physical order of the universe without the messy passions that pollute other people’s lives. In Sheldon’s atheistic ideology, disorder replaces sin. Thus, disorderly passions prove repugnant rejections of the good life.

While I adore the program, I struggle with its depiction of academic women.  The men are laughable stereotypes too, but the women bother me more.  Rick Santorum’s opposition to contraception and a group of Republican governors’ affection for trans-vaginal ultrasounds has a lot to do with it.

Sheldon, the academic superstar, surpasses pure.  Pure implies that he has never sullied himself with sin, which is true.  However, Sheldon never suffered temptation in the first place.  His friends’ interest in “coitus” confounds him. Sheldon, like Santorum, wears a uniform.  Rather than sweater vests, Sheldon goes in for graphic tees.  Like Santorum, Sheldon rose from working class roots and loathes the educational institutions that make his rise possible.  Like Santorum, he fails to grasp why people reject him.  Santorum lost his Senate seat.  Naturally, he should dream bigger and run for president.  Sheldon got fired from his postdoc.  Surely, he will win over the Nobel Prize committee.

Not so the woman with whom he would like to create a subsequent generation if immaculate conception were possible.  Poor Amy Farrah Fowler, brilliant neuroscientist, lusts after Sheldon and the buxom blond across the hall.  Her boyfriend is asexual; she suffers acutely as an unsatisfied bisexual.  The joke is at her expense.  She wants to have sex with everyone, but no one finds her physically attractive.  They all respect her brain, but give her half the chance — say with government-subsidized contraception — and she might just live out every insane fantasy Rush Limbaugh harbors about the whorish inner desires of educated women.

Sheldon’s roommate, Leonard Hofstadter, suffers the enduring damage of his “Tiger Mother.” For this high-flying harridan, a postdoc at Caltech seems humdrum.  This female Ph.D. resents the children she bore.  Her insult-ridden mothering leaves him with low expectations when looking for affection among female physicists.  One wishes to use him for “coitus” on a semiannual basis.  The series begins when the uneducated but pneumatic Nebraskan, Penny, moves in across the hall.  She has a sexual past Sheldon and Santorum scorn, but the aspiring actress offers unconditional friendship.  Dr. Hofstadter falls head over high-energy in love.

Why does this make me think of trans-vaginal ultrasounds?  Because their premise assumes that if only the cute but dim, knocked-up girl understood what grew inside her, she would never want an abortion.  She would either get married or give her offspring to another woman with a wedding band safely on her hand.

This, I suppose, is what Calista Gingrich would have done had she not had access to contraception during her extramarital fling with Newt.  Oh wait.  Maybe she had the other problem.  She was a smart woman with access to contraception, which meant her unbridled libido lead men astray.

When I contemplate television’s or the Republican party’s fictional women, my own sense of reality becomes blurred.  I know that before the Victorian era portrayed women as revolted by “coitus” à la Dr. Cooper, centuries of Catholic clerics envisioned every woman as a dangerous Eve poised to drag her man and the world away from Eden.  Perhaps Santorum absorbed a bit too much medieval dogma when he moved toJustice Scalia’s parish.  His highly-educated wife, who bore him eight children, doesn’t seem that dangerous to me.  Then again, neither does Amy Farrah Fowler.  At least we can agree that Sheldon Cooper would make a marvelous monk.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

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Eight Years Later

In Liana's Posts on 2012/04/15 at 21:28

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Kansas in the US.

As I work on the last revisions to my dissertation (by the time this post goes live I will have mailed my dissertation draft to my committee), I oftentimes find myself thinking back to the long road that brought me to this moment. Eight years ago, around this time of year, I was accepted at an upstate New York university for my Master’s degree, and I knew this move would change me forever. In the summer of 2004, I would leave my little island, move to a town a few hours away from New York City, and spend the next five years reading, writing, and thinking deep thoughts in hopes of achieving a PhD in English.

One of the moments that remains vivid to me is one very cold Upstate New York day, over three years ago. I was writing my final PhD exam, on Cultural Studies. In my department we have 72 hours to write between 25 and 35 pages on a topic stemming from a list of readings. I had done all the reading, assembled all of my notes on my desktop, and spent that weekend typing feverishly for hours on end. I woke up early Saturday morning, day two of my exam weekend; it was cold outside but the strong wind made the temperature drop further, and our apartment was poorly heated. The corner where my desk was located was the coldest in the house, so I relocated to the living room couch to be closer to the radiator. My boyfriend was not up yet, so I had the couch all to myself. I propped my feet up on the ottoman, pulled a blanket onto my lap, and turned on my laptop. Still not fully awake, I wrote feverishly, and in between thoughts I stuck my hands under my blanket to warm them up. I wrote page after page after page that weekend. On Sunday evening, I exclaimed to my boyfriend that I had finished my draft (12 hours before it was due).

That weekend stands out in my mind as a good example of what my experience as a graduate student had been up until that point. I had been a full-time graduate student with no other obligations other than going to class, writing, and teaching one semester per academic year. I had dedicated almost five years of my life to formulating (and complicating) questions. I read, I thought, I talked, I wrote. I had the privilege of devoting my days to nothing but studying literature and culture. Once I received, months later, the official notification that I was ABD (All But Dissertation), I was elated to know I had made it to the last stage of my graduate education.

The three years after I became ABD have not been easy; for one, I no longer have a fellowship that allows me to just read and write every day. I live in a different location from my home campus. I balance a lot more obligations than I did when I was solely studying. Distance and time have provided me with some much-needed perspective on my experience as a Latina first-generation graduate student. (I have touched upon this in the cross-blog conversation that U Venus contributor Janni Aragon and I have had at each other’s blogs titled “Academics on Academia.”) However, I am certain that this is where I wanted to be. Even though it took me a little longer than I wanted to, and even though there were moments I was unsure I would make it to the other side, I am happy that I stayed the course and made it this far.

Even though graduate school may be problematic, graduate school nurtured my intellectual curiosity, and introduced me to great minds. Is it the only place where I could have done this? No, it is not. However, I felt at home in graduate school. Grad school and I were a nice fit. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to read and write at my leisure and share my thoughts with others. My experience as a humanities PhD has affected how I approach and think about the world around me.

Achieving this hard-fought goal means so much on an intellectual and emotional level, and as such moving on will be a tough transition. The well-worn question stands true: where do we go from here? I, for one, am looking forward to it.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Publishing Through the Pain: Personal Trauma and the Ph.D.

In Guest Blogger on 2012/04/14 at 23:04

Gwendolyn Beetham, writing from Brooklyn, New York in the US.

‘You really should publish something from your Ph.D.’ The refrain is one with which all doctoral students are well-aware. In the past year, I’ve heard the words often: from mentors, my Ph.D. supervisor, colleagues, friends, even mentees. What they don’t know is that even looking across the room at the thick, bound copy of my Ph.D. fills me with dread. To go back to my Ph.D. is to return to a very painful period in my life.

While the completion of a Ph.D. brings relief, even excitement, to many, for me it is a marker of deep personal trauma. At the beginning of last year, a month from my Ph.D. submission date, my partner with whom I thought I would spend my life told me that she wanted to end our relationship. The decision was one-sided and unexpected, and it left me in shock. Over the next month we spent an hour a week in couple’s therapy and the rest of my time was spent desperately trying to focus long enough to revise my final chapters and write my conclusion.  One week after I submitted, my partner officially decided to leave the relationship.

Instead of excitement and sense of accomplishment at the completion of my Ph.D., I felt ashamed of my tenacity – how could I possibly have finished this piece of work while the future that I had imagined was crumbling around me? Although friends, colleagues, and my supervisor continually proclaimed their admiration that I was able to complete my Ph.D. and pass my defense under such conditions, I couldn’t reconcile this ‘success’ with the ‘failure’ of my relationship. The combination of the timing of the separation and the fact that my partner, also a doctoral student, had been perpetually stalled with her Ph.D., bolstered the feeling that I was being penalized. The quality that I had previously valued in myself – my ambitious work ethic (a quality which makes the completion of a Ph.D. possible, as articulated in this recent University of Venus article ) – was something which I now felt to be a source of pain. Since then, any attempt at going back to my Ph.D. has taken me back to those emotions; at first even thinking about the Ph.D. brought traumatic flash-backs.

It’s not that I haven’t published anything in the past year – in fact, I’ve kept busy writing book reviews, chapters for books, and articles for blogs; though none have been directly related to my Ph.D. topic.  I’ve removed myself far away from the PhD in other ways, completing a yoga teacher’s training course, traveling, taking a lesbian history class for fun. Yoga, particularly the core concept of simultaneously experiencing strength and softness, has been especially useful to my healing process.

While talking through this trauma and its ramifications with my therapist (I’m a New Yorker after all!), she proposed that I take my first stab at publishing work from my Ph.D. by writing through the pain that surrounded its completion. She suggested that the relationship between what is happening in our lives and our work is more complex than many academics might admit. Like one of my mentors, she also mentioned that separations during particularly poignant times in our lives – not only Ph.D. completion, but after one partner achieves tenure, a family member dies, or terminal illness – are not uncommon; if this was true, perhaps my story would resonate with others’ experiences.

Writing about my resistance to publish has helped me to remember a few things – including why I started working on a Ph.D. in the first place. As a feminist activist and scholar, I’ve always valued the connection between academia and the ‘real world,’ and I never wanted my work to be stuck in an ivory tower; I do think that I managed to make some potentially useful insights! While I don’t think that I will ever look back on the completion of my Ph.D. with a sense of happy accomplishment, I do know that, eventually, I will publish. In the meantime I’ll continue to heal, write, and, of course, practice yoga.

Gwendolyn Beetham received her Ph.D. from the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. She lives in Brooklyn, where she does freelance work for gender justice organizations, edits the column, The Academic Feminist, at Feministing.com, and participates in feminist, queer, and food justice activism. Contact her at gbeetham@gmail.com or on twitter @gwendolynb.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Talking Back to Academic Stereotypes

In Conversations on 2012/04/11 at 22:00

Each month, the writers at University of Venus share their answers to a question we pose for the higher education sector.

This month’s question comes to us from Melonie Fullick: What is your least favourite stereotype about academic work?

Melonie’s question for March is prompted partly in response to a recent controversial piece in the Washington Post - Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?. Also see Kaustuv Basu’s response at Inside Higher Ed.

Bonnie Stewart (Canada)

Perhaps the stereotype of academia that frustrates me most on a daily basis – other than the notion that ideas are inherently impractical – is the binary stereotype of faculty vs. administration. I know it gets enacted and perpetuated on both sides, and it has roots in very real differences in perspective on what we are doing in the complicated institutions that are universities. But. But. The more the stereotype gets thrown around and taken up in media, the simpler it becomes, somehow: the more “real.” And then we players take up our various roles and the show goes on. I’ve sat on both sides of the fence; I’ve played my part in reinforcing the walls. And there are real critiques to be made, don’t get me wrong. But this binary opposition? Gives the impression not only of camps but of two equally legitimate yet irreconcilable positions. And I don’t believe that’s true on any count.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe (US)

The assumption that all ‘teaching’ happens either in a lecture hall or a laboratory raises my ire.  Some of our students’ most profitable pedagogical moments happen in conversations apart from the structured curriculum.  Faculty and staff presence – mental, physical, and emotional at department parties, dorm events, or just stopping to chat in the hall – transforms the student experience as powerfully as any lecture, lab demonstration, or seminar discussion, but these hours rarely count as valuable and thus billable.

Sarah Emily Duff (South Africa)

I am annoyed by the stereotype that those of us in the humanities and the social sciences don’t work as hard, or produce work as ‘important’ (whatever we may mean by that), as those in engineering, maths, or the natural sciences. This is an irritant on a kind of mundane level – on the level of snide comments from scientist colleagues – but it trickles down to the way in which we’re funded. At a recent meeting about postdoctoral funding provided by the state, I commented that the money available to humanities scholars was considerably less than that for natural scientists. Not only was my annoyance greeted with amusement, but neither the university nor the funding body were willing to engage with my views.

Melonie Fullick (Canada)

The idea that learning and teaching can be rationalised, managed, quantified and controlled. The more governments, students and families “invest” in education, the more we see pressure for accountability about “results”. But as Elizabeth mentions (above) teaching and learning don’t just happen in the classroom during scheduled hours, which is why it’s so hard to “pin down” how much time it takes to learn and exactly how it happens. We also haven’t found a way to measure learning, so attempts at “quality control” in education often do as much harm as good. We’re trying to standardize something that’s pretty idiosyncratic, and when we impose measures on the un-measurable we’re also creating false expectations. So to see these assumptions reinforced on a regular basis in the media is incredibly frustrating.

Afshan Jafar (US)

The idea that the total number of hours we work can be quantified by simply adding our time in the classroom and office hours per week, drives me crazy! That’s simply show time…there’s a lot of work that needs to be done backstage and offstage which most people don’t think about. And that’s just the teaching aspect of our jobs! Don’t get me started about research and service…

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten (Sweden)

I find the idea of the academic as  a nerd to be quite unfair and irritating. I think the iconic photo of Albert Einstein has had a contagious effect and now the quintessential image of the academic/researcher is something between a madman with a bad hair day and a misunderstood genius (and most often a man, as well). Most of these stereotypical academics also wear thick glasses, spend most of their time in a lab, have problems expressing themselves in a common language and feel uneasy in the real world. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. We Generation X women have, among other things, the mission to dispel these false notions about academics and let the world see us as we are, beautiful people engaged in and with our societies, who can talk to both the grocer and to the President.

Janni Aragon (Canada)

My least favorite stereotype about academic work is the idea that I don’t work a 40 hour work week. I have kept track and I work between 55-70 hours. I more than earn my salary. Most weeks I work for a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday.

Lee Skallerup Bessette (US)

I can’t stand that people think that I  have no idea what the “real world” is like because academia is so unlike the real world. Like getting fired or no job security or low pay or “expecting results” (anyone remember this scene in Ghostbusters?). Certainly we run on a different schedule, but we deal with all of the same job-related stresses as most professionals (as tenure-track professors) and, let’s be honest, low-wage workers (on the adjunct side). It’s different, but no different than being a doctor, versus being a middle-manager, versus being in sales, versus running your own business.

And that we get 2-4 months off for summer.

Ana Dinescu (Germany)

I cannot stand the dream that academic work is purely academic work. I am keeping myself as far as possible from the image of the academic spending hours and days in the libraries, writing amazing and outstanding books and articles. I wish this is true, but I know that the reality is rather different. Sometimes, you should spend more time writing financial reports than sharing your research and, last but not least, you should take more jobs to enable you to save at least two or three months for independent writing and research.

What about you? Which stereotype pushes you over the edge?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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The University Diploma: Is it Enough for a Young Woman? Or Man?

In Under the Rain With No Umbrella on 2012/04/10 at 02:33

Itir Toksoz, writing from Istanbul, Turkey.

I am writing this blog piece on March 8th, Women’s Day.  I started the day by a very meaningful message which was sent by the President of my University. In her message, Prof. Dr. Elif Çepni of Doğuş University stated how proud she was to be at a University where the majority of high administrative positions were held by women: The President of the University is a woman, there are 5 faculties and 4 of them are led by Deans that are women. There are also 4 women Vice Deans in the University, since in 4 of the 5 Faculties, one of the 2 Vice Deans is also a woman. Moreover, the Dean of Students is also a woman. The head of the Foreign Languages School, the Secretary General, the Director of Student Affairs, the Director of the IT department and the Director of Purchasing department are also all women. There is a considerable number of Department Chairs or Academic Unit Heads who are female as well. In my faculty, which is the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, 62% of all faculty members are women.

This is an exceptional performance even in the Turkish higher education system where women are considered to be well represented with a figure of 38.7% of all academic personnel. Unfortunately one cannot say the same for higher positions: only 5.2% of University Presidents and 15.3% of Faculty Deans are women across the country.[1]

In the young Turkish Republic, established in 1923, women were granted their political rights between 1924-1934, earlier than in many Western democracies. Inclusion of women in all aspects of life was an important part of the modernization project of the country and the high overall percentage of women in academia in Turkey is a result of the efforts sown during the early Republican period. Since then, women have been active members of professional life, although considerable improvement is needed in the number of women members of the Parliament. So the same pattern exists here, women are everywhere but hardly in high positions.

On the domestic level, it is another story. From one side, during recent years there has been some considerable reform for bringing the Turkish Civil Code in line with the internationally accepted women’s rights. Since 1985 Turkey is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).  Both the CEDAW and the Turkey’s candidate status to the EU may have helped the legislators in Turkey to do the necessary reforms in that area.

Yet the improvements seem to be only on paper when one looks at the newspaper every day; the news is filled left and right with violations of women’s rights. From honor killings to domestic violence, from lack of education to lack of access to a professional life, women are discriminated against, mostly by a patriarchal culture and a societal structure which cannot fully grasp the significance of women’s rights for a healthy society.

One way towards women’s emancipation is through higher education.  The rationale goes that when women are educated, they can earn a livelihood and do not have to depend on a father or a husband to sustain their lives. As an academic today, I find myself in a position to ask if giving a diploma to young women is enough to consider them ready for the life ahead of them. Some women use their education to land a good husband and that is not a very bright prospect from a social point of view. Moreover when the society in which the educated young women live does not know how to handle them, one needs to ask what skills we need to provide to our female students other than a diploma.

Yet the emancipation of women cannot be only fostered through the education of women, education of men is also crucial. Then I find myself with a second question of asking if giving a diploma to young men is enough to consider them ready for life which they will need to share with emancipated women in a country like mine, between the East and the West.

Today is Women’s Day and I am wondering what I should be teaching to my students beyond International Relations…

[1]For figures see Status of Women in Turkey Report published by the Prime Ministry Women’s Status General Directorate in July 2011, accessible online in Turkish at http://www.kadininstatusu.gov.tr/upload/mce/eski_site/Pdf/tr_de_kadinin_durumu/trde_kadinin_durumu_2011_temmuz.pdf

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed


Finding Yourself Where You Are

In Guest Blogger on 2012/04/07 at 00:36

Emily Isaacson, writing from Murfreesboro, North Carolina in the US. 

My husband and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary this past January; we have been together another two years. In the early days of our dating, my husband was game enough to seek out the odd and strange things that surrounded us in central Missouri. We have seen the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, the largest salt lick in the Western Hemisphere, the world’s largest concrete goose, one of the purported world’s largest pecans, the room where Jesse James was shot and killed, and a “castle” in the Ozarks called Ha Ha Tonka. Since we have moved together – and traveled together – we’ve expanded the list.  We’ve climbed to the top of the lighthouse in Key West (despite my near-debilitating fear of heights); stopped to photograph the world’s largest concrete peanut in Georgia; checked out the antiques mall at South of the Border in South Carolina; seen dinosaur tracks in Texas; seen the Hollywood sign; come near enough to alligators in the Everglades, thank you very much; and traveled the boardwalk through the Great Dismal Swamp.  Because of where we currently live, we’ve been able to take advantage of weekend trips to Washington, DC and day trips to Raleigh and Richmond.

In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Jig asks the American, “That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?”  While the timbre of the story suggests that this attitude might be one to leave behind (they are, after all, trying to figure out whether or not they want to continue with this pregnancy), there’s always been something particularly alluring in that statement for me.  Part of it, I think, is that my husband and I do more than simply “look at things and try new drinks,” but we still also think that there’s some wonder in exploring and trying new things.  That’s part of what brings us together.

This gets me thinking about my life as an academic because academic careers mean moving – and sometimes moving frequently.  They also mean finding yourself in locations far from our stereotypes of college towns.  I currently live in a small town in the coastal plain of North Carolina (a euphemism for the extremely rural and swampy area in the northeastern part of the state).  While here, we’ve done many of the things that we’ve always done: we’ve explored the small and unusual locations, we’ve found friends with similar interests, and we’ve figured out ways to participate in the life of this community.  It’s been a series of discoveries, including the distinction in North Carolina Barbeques that I learned about at our local “PorkFest.” The joy of discovery and exploration in my life is the same thing that guides my research as an academic: it’s all about being curious about the world – how it is and how it was.

And the acceptance of interesting things in small towns has cropped up in my teaching.  To take advantage of what we actually have locally – and because our resources are limited – I decided that to teach my students about cultural materialism, we’d take a trip to our local nineteenth century cemetery.  Each student found a gravestone, photographed it and gave a presentation reading the stone against an Emily Dickinson poem, explaining attitudes about death.  A slightly imperfect project, but the students had the experience of actual research outside of the classroom.  A little bit of creativity, though, and the students got to move beyond the classroom.

I’m not saying there are things that I don’t miss living here (sushi and bookstores spring immediately to mind), but I am saying that there’s a point at which it’s important to acknowledge our surroundings and to appreciate them.  Curiosity and openness to the new goes a long way in creating satisfaction and fulfillment in life.  That openness doesn’t mean stagnation or forgetting about the larger academic community, either.  While I work hard at my life in my small town, I’m also working very hard at keeping up with my field outside of my town: I always keep in mind the larger picture of my career.

I don’t know what the future holds.  I don’t know if I’ll stay in the small town for my entire career, or whether a different small town beckons.  What I do know is that it is all part of the academic journey, and it’s one where I’m glad to look at things and try new drinks.

Emily Isaacson currently serves at Chowan University (Murfreesboro, North Carolina) as an assistant professor of English and the coordinator of the Chowan Critical Thinking Program.  She blogs about teaching introduction to literature at Bedford/St. Martin’s LitBits blog, and about everything else at The Seacoast of Bohemia.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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