response to stanley fish September 2, 2009
Posted by KC in academia, education, teaching, writing.add a comment
The following is a comment I made on Stanley Fish’s recent New York Times blog posts, which can be found here and here. This won’t make much sense if you haven’t read both his posts first.
Okay, here’s my exercise, Dr. Fish: Neither this sentence nor the next one will be particularly meaningful, because they aren’t situated in any kind of context. See?
But seriously, I thank you for clarifying (or perhaps backpedaling on) your position. I agreed with one of the premises of the first post, which was that writing courses ought not be literature or cultural studies courses in disguise, with a thin veneer of writing instruction layered over the top. I, too, have seen too many courses like that, and I think it comes from the fact that many composition instructors are/were literature grad students who didn’t find jobs teaching literature, so they use comp. courses as a surrogate. I think this does a disservice to students. Actual writing instruction is a good thing.
However, I’m not sure I agree with you about what actual writing instruction involves. Your neither/nor exercise gets at style, but does little in terms of other canons of rhetoric, like invention or arrangement. Students cannot practice discovering the available means of persuasion if they don’t a) have some topic they are treating (we might call this “content”) or b) have some audience they are aiming to persuade. Learning how to write shouldn’t be disconnected from having something to say.
I teach freshman composition as a course in ethnographic writing, not because I think learning how to do fieldwork is all that important (although observing and interviewing are useful skills), but because it provides a definable context for learning how to describe and analyze cultural behaviors and artifacts. That is, it gives students a motive to write. Even a literature-based composition course could use a poem or a novel as an occasion to write. I think it is not a question of either/or — either content or form, literature (or cultural studies) or writing. Instead, it is a matter of foregrounding the appropriate activities, which in the case of a composition course would be the writing.
doctor, doctor February 2, 2009
Posted by KC in academia, language, politics, teaching.4 comments
There’s an obnoxious piece in today’s LA Times about Jill Biden’s use of the honorific “doctor,” and it’s gotten me thinking about what the term means, and when it can legitimately be applied. The article is obnoxious, in my opinion, because it trades in both misogyny and anti-intellectualism, implying that it’s somehow worthy of ridicule for the nation’s “second lady” to call herself “doctor,” since she’s not a physician. There’s even a quote from an “authority” on the issue:
“My feeling is if you can’t heal the sick, we don’t call you doctor,” said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post’s A section and the author of two language books.
Wow. A copy desk chief. For a newspaper. (You know, that thing you don’t read any more.) Well, the truth is that Jill Biden isn’t a physician; she has a PhD in Education from the University of Maryland. And in my book, if she wants to be called “doctor,” then that’s what we should call her.
This idea that “doctor” refers only to medical professionals is a relatively new development in the history of our language. The word itself derives from the Latin docere, meaning “to teach,” and therefore “doctor” essentially means “teacher.” Its first applications were to the “church fathers,” such as Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory, but also spread in the Middle Ages to refer to scholars more generally. Physicians also came be referred to as “doctor” (Chaucer calls one of his pilgrims a “Doctur of Phesike”), but I would hazard to guess that the use of “doctor” in such cases was meant to index a physician’s advanced learning, and not the practice of healing. You have to get fairly deep into the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition to find this meaning:
6. a. spec. A doctor of medicine; in popular current use, applied to any medical practitioner. Also, a wizard or medicine-man in a primitive tribe.
I have to admit, that second sentence makes me smile. Jill Biden’s use of “doctor,” I imagine, derives from the fourth definition listed in the OED:
4. a. One who, in any faculty or branch of learning, has attained to the highest degree conferred by a University; a title originally implying competency to teach such subject or subjects, but now merely regarded as a certificate of the highest proficiency therein.
That “highest degree” in our educational system is the PhD, and we’ve already established that Dr. Biden has one.
With that all said, I have to admit that I’ve got one, too. A PhD, that is. However, I’m not all that interested in having anybody call me “doctor,” but I consider this a personal choice. For starters, I’m a Quaker, and we’ve historically eschewed honorifics that imply superiority/inferiority in human interaction (the practice of removing hats in certain company has likewise been rejected). I also associate the use of “doctor” for PhDs with certain regions, like the east coast or the south, neither of which is where I’m from.* I used to ask students to just call me “Kory,” but I’ve come to appreciate how uncomfortable some students are with addressing teachers by first name. So now I just ask students to use whatever seems appropriate to them: “Kory” or “Professor Ching” or just “Professor.” (I prefer “professor” to “doctor,” I guess, because that refers to my job, and not to my educational status.)
But Dr. Biden is in a very different situation. She’s married to the VPOTUS, and appears to be the first “second lady” to continue her own career while her spouse is in office. She’s also associated with an administration that promises to undo much of the denigration of knowledge and expertise wrought over the last eight years. As Obama said in his inaugural speech, “we will restore science to its rightful place.” It may be only symbolic, but I think having the spouse of the Vice President admit to being knowledgable and accomplished is a good thing.
* I also don’t want people in restaurants or airplanes looking to me if someone has a heart attack, just because I used the “doctor” title while making my reservation.
illinois ethics and politics October 3, 2008
Posted by KC in academia, politics.add a comment
As you might have already heard, the University of Illinois recently told its faculty that they are not permitted to engage in political activity on campus, such as wearing candidate buttons, sporting bumper stickers, or attending rallies. As you can imagine, this hasn’t gone over well.
When I was an instructor at Illinois, I was forced every year to complete what was called an “ethics module,” or an on-line training course designed to make sure we state employees were being careful stewards of taxpayer money. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but the topics covered by the module tended to focus on the awarding of state contracts or the taking of bribes. A significant portion of the module also focused on forbidding us from using state property to engage in political activity.
I always understood this module as attempting to create the appearance of ethical behavior, rather than actually encouraging good conduct. Moreover, the scenarios presented in the module had little to do with the real ethical issues of university work, such as academic dishonesty, capricious grading, sexual harassment, or accommodating disabled students. Instead, the module focused on the sorts of violations with which Illinois politicians have had a long and illustrious history — corruption, graft, and using state resources for political gain.
loyalty oath June 7, 2008
Posted by KC in academia.Tags: academia, quaker, teaching
3 comments
Speaking of weirdly retrograde discourse, did you know that the state of California requires public university employees (including faculty) to sign a “loyalty oath?” Among the personnel paperwork I got from SFSU was a form asking me to put my John Hancock to this:
“I, ____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”
This, of course, is a hold over from the days of McCarthyism, a back-handed attempt to ferret out communists (“back-handed” because it doesn’t take the more direct route of asking you to say “I am not a communist”). I actually agonized for a while about whether to sign the thing, for a number of reasons:
- I’m a Quaker, and Quakers have historically objected to the taking of oaths. Our thinking is that there shouldn’t be two standards of truth–one for everyday discourse, and one for oath-taking. That is, you ought to tell the truth whether your hand is on a bible or not.
- Quakers also don’t believe in war. I’m not willing to sign on to “support and defend” one, let alone two constitutions if it involves violence against others.
- There’s something awfully absurd (and funny) about the idea of university faculty taking up arms to defend the constitution. Does that tweed sportcoat come in camouflage?
- Whoever wrote this oath probably didn’t really have armed professors in mind, but it’s likely that they imagined using it to force “loyal” faculty to name names. I’ve got a problem with that, too.
- Who decides who these “enemies” are? My sense is that the constitution could use some defending against some of the people currently occupying the White House.
- It’s essentially unenforceable.
This last, in my book, isn’t really a knock against it. In fact, it’s pretty much why I went ahead and signed the thing, despite these objections. That, and that parenthetical “affirm” (as opposed to “swear”) made me feel like I could sign my name without compromising too much. I also didn’t want to make a big fuss about it.
However, I learned just this week that the Cal State system has begun allowing employees to attach an addendum to the loyalty oath that registers these sorts of objections. A lecturer at CSUF, who had lost her job because she refused to sign (she was a Quaker, by the way), recently got her job back because of this. There’s an article in Inside Higher Ed about the case. So, even though I already signed mine, I’m going to try to get an addendum added to my personnel file, just so everyone’s clear about what I’m agreeing to.
Just to be clear: I do not object to the oath because I’ve got a problem with loyalty as such. At the end of the day, I’m comfortable saying (but not swearing) that I would support and defend (nonviolently) this country and its form of government, however imperfect. In the larger scheme of things, the fact that we’ve got such a process for negotiating the needs of conscience (however belated, in this case) suggests that this is a place worth preserving.
