Dear Applicant
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed on May 22, 2012
Just when you thought it was over, rejection letter season kicks back into high gear. Or in this case, rejection emails. For those of you who have been on the Academic job market at least once, you know exactly what I am talking about. Those mysterious letters or emails from schools you applied to over six months ago that inform you of your rejection for a job that you long gave up on.
My favorite so far came in yesterday. I’ve pasted the text here with the school and position ID information deleted:
Dear Applicant,
Thank you for your recent application for the Assistant Professor of English with the University of [Blank].
Your application has been carefully examined to evaluate your combination of education and experience in relationship to the specific requirements of this position. After a thorough review of all the applications we have selected another candidate who we feel best meets the needs of both this position and our department.
We appreciate your interest in finding employment with [Blank], and we wish you success in your efforts to find a rewarding position.
Sincerely,
English
Do not reply to this email. This is an automated email account which is not checked. Questions should be directed to the hiring official of English.
Is it just me or does this letter sound like it was generated by a spambot? Come on people. If you’re going to require a writing sample from me, the least you can do is craft a well-written rejection letter. One will do. Then you can cut and paste my name and yours into the template.
Have a good rejection story to share? Feel free to post it as a reply.
Civil War Prison Camp Discovered in Georgia
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Civil War on May 21, 2012
The archaeological remains of an Annex to the notorious Confederate prison camp Andersonville have been discovered in Millen, Georgia. You can hear an overview of the discovery in this CNN news clip.
More in depth information on the project is available through this Georgia Southern University website.
The Shrinking Middle–A Review of From Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed on April 19, 2012
The “crisis in Higher Education” has had so many studies written on it that its books alone could easily fill an entire library. Adding to this number is Richard DeMillo, a former Dean of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Chief Technology Officer for Hewlett Packard. In his 2011 book From Abelard to Apple, he makes a case that due to changes in both technology and educational cost those colleges and universities who reside “in the middle” of the Higher Education rankings should hasten to assess their current mission if they plan to survive.
Most of the schools in the middle addressed by DeMillo are state colleges and universities that flourished under the land grant act and the expansion of the pool of undergraduate students made possible by the G.I. Bill. Caught between the high prestige schools such as Harvard and M.I.T. and the for profit schools that have emerged in the latter half of the 20th century such as DeVry and the University of Phoenix, these schools in the middle are torn between “prestige envy” and a desire to be relevant to their prospective students.
DeMillo (as Jennifer Washburn before him in her book University Inc.) clearly illustrates that this push-pull between wanting to live up to the Germanic ideal of a University, a place where knowledge is studied and created for its own sake, and a desire to train students for specific careers has long dominated discussions of Higher Education. If nothing else, DeMillo’s book is useful for reminding us that the “end times” we feel that we face in 21st century Higher Ed are part of a much larger trajectory that is as much circular as it is a straight line. We are reliving many of the debates (DeMillo shows) that once dominated American discussions on the role of a college education in the early 20th century.
His book is non-linear in nature and provides a series of loosely interlocking vignettes that each provide a different piece of the puzzle necessary to prove his argument. It is not until the last chapter that DeMillo offers something of a blueprint for those leaders of colleges and universities in the middle who want to survive the coming extinction of the land grant institution.
The most pertinent suggestions he offers are to: Focus on what differentiates you from other institutions and establish your own brand. Then create a new balance between faculty interests and student interests using technology as well as locally created assessment tools to maintain it.
Although there isn’t much to argue with in DeMillo’s assessment of the problem, his solutions are problematic. Their heavy reliance upon the language of business enterprise makes me wonder if he believes there is any hope for the 19th model of the college and university imagined by Thomas Jefferson, Justin Morrill, and John Dewey. The ending of his book leaves one thinking that a “market correction” awaits in Higher Ed and that when the dust settles only the prestige institutions will be left with for profit online schools picking up most of the students once taught by the land grant school and community college.
From Abelard to Apple offers one more facet to our understanding of the problems in Higher Education that face the United States in the 21st century but it remains unable (as most of the books that preceded it) to offer a roadmap out of our current difficulties. This is not DeMillo’s fault but reflects a larger tendency in Higher Ed to overcomplicate the problem to hide its source. If everyone is to blame, than no one is to blame. We are all at fault and can therefore sit on our hands and feel bad for ourselves while sipping an over-priced latte.
Read DeMillo if you want to see another side of the problem but don’t bother if you want to find a way out.
Quality Over Quantity–Computer Assisted Grading Revisited
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed on April 3, 2012
A Reuter’s report describes recent efforts to create computer software that could scan and grade common errors in student essays. Mark Shermis, Dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, is supervising a contest created by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that would award $100,000 to the programmer who creates an effective automated grading software.
Shermis argues that if teachers weren’t swamped by so many student papers in need of grading, they would assign more writing and student’s would greatly improve their written communication skills. He sees this new technology as an aide to the overworked writing teacher rather than a potential replacement.
Steve Graham, a Professor at Vanderbilt who has conducted research on essay grading techniques, argues, in contrast, that the replacement of writing teachers by grading software is not only “inevitable” but also desirable as “the reality is humans aren’t very good at doing this.”
As the writer of the Reuter’s article notes, talk about paper grading software is not new. It began in the 1960s. Now, however, technology has reached a level where such grading is not only possible but also probable. But the question still remains: Is it a good idea?
Leaving aside for a moment the question of faculty employment, machine grading sidesteps a more important question than how to get students to write more and grade that writing effectively. Namely–what is writing and who is responsible for teaching it.
In too many schools writing is viewed as the “problem” of the English department. Students are sent to writing classes to learn essay structure, research techniques, and grammar. Only the last of these is universal. The other two skill sets are discipline specific. I guess that explains why to my students everything they read is a novel and every paper a literary analysis. They’ve been taught after all that writing equals English.
If we really want students to learn not just writing but effective communication, parents, teachers, and administrators need to spread the responsibility for this instruction across the curriculum. Some schools already do this but most are content to leave communication training to literary scholars. Machines won’t change this. They will be programmed to evaluate whatever curriculum is currently in place. Until the curriculum is changed, the machine will not only replicate the error but multiply it.
Moving on to the issue of employment, part of my unease with a machine that grades papers is it would most likely put me out of a job. I have 48 student essays in need of grading that are staring at me right now as I pen this post. Of course, the curricular changes I suggest would more than likely have the same effect, with or without machine assistance. The way to counter this, however, is to lower class sizes.
This is the other aspect of the issue that is completely ignored by most research. If class sizes are lessened, not only will more teachers have employment but writing will become a less onerous task to teach and evaluate. It could also then be meaningfully integrated into the entire curriculum and not remain the purview of the English Department.
Would such changes cost a lot of money? Yes. But it is a good investment. Far better than the money we’ve wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan and the even larger sums of money we spend incarcerating drug offenders. It’s even better, dare I say, than the cost of a certain software currently being designed to solve all my problems.
Knowledge Is Power
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed on February 11, 2012
Somewhere in the top drawer of my dresser is a metal insignia that reads Savoir C’est Pouvoir–Knowledge Is Power. That insignia was given to me by my uncle years ago when he left the 82nd airborne to return to civilian life. He had served for several years as an intelligence officer with his unit and that service was reflected on the insignia he wore on his maroon beret.
What is true for the armed forces is often equally true in other areas of life. In this case the quest to reform the conditions of teaching and learning in higher education. To achieve any kind of victory, it is first necessary to understand what exactly you are up against. Good data can save lives on the battlefield and it can shape for the better (or worse) the future of students and teachers in the college classroom.
The task to gather accurate intelligence on Adjunct labor conditions began with a vengeance last week as Josh Boldt, an Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Georgia and fellow attendee of the New Faculty Majority summit, created a Google docs spreadsheet where Adjunct faculty can list their salaries, benefits, and working conditions. Here for the first time the general public can see in one place how much Adjunct faculty make at institutions throughout the United States and (in some cases) the world. I’ve added my information to the spreadsheet. I’d encourage you to do so as well.
Reading through all the information on the spreadsheet is a bit daunting and at some point it will need analysis and visualization to work as an organizing tool, but I anticipate some great coalition building campaigns emerging from out of this data. Administrator’s can easily dismiss claims based on ethos and pathos but they can’t dismiss the logic of numbers. A quick scan of the data on this sheet shows that the median salary for Adjunct faculty is well below the suggested MLA guidelines and is far lower than the amount needed to sustain oneself let alone a family.
In a recent post to her Inside Higher Education Blog, College Ready Writing, Lee Bessette extols the benefits of this “crowdsourced” project on behalf of Adjuncts everywhere and I am inclined to agree with her. My only quibble is with her use of the word “hero.”
At the New Faculty Majority summit I was frequently the annoying pragmatist who pointed out the need for data and clear talking points not simply to push our adversaries back on their heels but also to energize the people we hope to form into a coalition to change higher education. Call it lamenting, kvetching, carping, whatever you like–the fact remains, I have been witness to and participant in ALOT of failed organizing campaigns. I’d like to think that I have learned something from those experiences and what I was saying came from that perspective.
We don’t need heroes in the quest to reform higher education. Instead we need patience, perseverance, and clarity of vision. These are the qualities that inspired Srdja Popovic in his campaign to topple Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and later guided uprisings in places such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The status quo works for the people in power. If it didn’t, contingent labor wouldn’t be expanding and it wouldn’t be invisible to the general public. To make it stop working will require thousands of micro-strikes against it rather than one dramatic lunge. We are small but mighty. Non-violent guerilla war against corporate higher education has begun.
Booth Family Drama
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Civil War on January 22, 2012
Nora Titone’s My Thoughts Be Bloody (2010) provides an interesting new perspective on the Lincoln assassination. Unlike most books on the topic, Nora begins with the colorful exodus of the Booth family patriarch, Junius Brutus Booth, from England in 1821. Fleeing his first wife and a three-year old son back in London, Junius Brutus Booth sought to begin a new life in the United States with his mistress Mary Anne Holmes. He would eventually sire ten children with Mary Anne, including Edwin and John Wilkes Booth.
The first portion of the book is largely devoted to the life of Junius Brutus Booth who was not only a Romantic in every sense of the word, he considered himself a pantheist and was fiercely vegetarian, but also a drunkard. By doing so, Nora strives to illustrate the environment from which the president’s assassin emerged.
John Wilkes Booth was forced to live as a boy with great economic privation and shame as his father’s first wife found out about Mary Anne and moved to Baltimore expressly to taunt and expose her through the courts as an adulteress. The first Mrs. Booth would follow the family around the city’s streets screaming “whore” at the family as they went about their daily chores.
Nora also exposes a Oedipal struggle of sorts between the father and his two most famous sons, Edwin and John Wilkes, which later metamorphosizes into a struggle between the two brothers. Edwin was by all accounts the son who inherited his father’s theatrical talents while John Wilkes merely obtained his old clothing and stage props. Yet John Wilkes refused to concede that he would forever be outshone by his older sibling.
By the time that Nora reaches the last chapter of the book and the fateful night of Lincoln’s death at Ford’s Theater, we are already prepared to see this horrendous tragedy as in fact another dramatic play in the struggle for ownership of the Booth name. Through killing the president, she implies, John Wilkes did not so much seek to influence the southern cause as he did to win the struggle that began between him and his father and then continued with his older brother Edwin.
Hindsight suggests that John Wilkes won the contest that Nora outlines as his name remains far better known than that of his brother Edwin or his father. The great tragedy, however, that becomes apparent in this book is that John Wilkes could no longer distinguish between life and life on stage. The two had merged towards the end of his days into one tragicomic stream.
My only complaint with the work is how long it takes the narrative to begin. In her quest for proper contextualization, Nora runs the risk of losing the reader in the early sections of the book. Nonetheless it is refreshing to see that “well-researched” popular history is alive and well as a genre. Here is a work that is both authoritative as well as fun to read once you get past the first 30 pages. Who would have imagined that in killing the president John Wilkes was actually killing the image of his brother?
Passing the Buck–Higher Ed Style
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed on December 2, 2011
The first lesson you learn upon entering the realm of Academia is that “it” is always someone else’s problem. What constitutes “it” depends on the specific setting of your conversation, but this ethos remains surprisingly consistent. If we are talking about a conference or journal article, “it” is the hegemonic forces that are “hiding,” “masking,” “distorting,” or otherwise oppressing someone or something. If we are talking about a department meeting, “it” is the College Administration (i.e. the Provost, Dean, President, or Chancellor) who just doesn’t understand the value of what we do. If we are talking about meetings at the upper echelons of Academia, “it” becomes the legislatures or broad social forces that hamper the leaders of colleges and universities from making much-needed changes. Everywhere in the Higher Education the message seems to be–Our hands are tied. We’re waiting for Godot to come and untie them.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Pozzo and Lucky. I’d invite them to dinner if I could and, of course, make them wait an insufferably long time for their food. But too much is at stake to continue the hand wringing and finger-pointing that has thus far passed for action on the problems in Higher Education. While we wait for Godot, our professions are increasingly marginalized. Many schools have already consolidated individual language departments into one massive campus unit and it is only a matter of time before those mega-departments are deemed “too costly.” Then work can be outsourced to private contractors to tutor students in foreign languages. Much maligned First Year Composition programs, quite frankly, are the only reason most English departments have remained intact. However, in some schools English is now part of a new department of Media and Communications or is blended with History or Language study. Seismic changes are coming soon to a humanities program near you and yet not many in the professions are agitating to be at the helm of these changes. Or, if they are, they have been shut out due to their marginalized place in the academy. As I’ve said before, the most active and engaged members of the profession right now are the non-tenured who are easily fired for making waves.
And so, at the risk of sounding monotonous, I ask again: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? My recent tiff with the MLA shows that their idea of action is a committee report. We don’t need any more data. There are probably giant warehouses along the Potomac filled with statistics and studies that no one has ever read let alone used. Picture the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The problems we face in Higher Education have not changed that much since I entered school as an undergraduate fifteen years ago. They have merely intensified.
When it comes to taking action, HASTAC and THAT Camp are among the few groups who seem to be getting it right. Embracing technology rather than fearing it or treating it as a fad, they are looking at how that aspect of Higher Education is changing the ways in which we understand grad school in the humanities and the nature of the profession as a whole. Also, unlike legacy organizations such as the MLA, they are doing something to make sure that students (both undergrad and grad) are learning the knowledge they need for the 21st century. If you haven’t been following these two groups, you should. HASTAC is holding a conference in Ann Arbor, MI as I write this post and I’m sure that more learning will take place there than at the MLA in Seattle this January.
Despite my frustrations with the current system in Higher Education, it would be foolish to deny all that I have gained from my experience as a student and a teacher. Among the lessons learned are two key truths. The first is how little I actually know and that I am dependent upon others to help me fill in the complete picture. This is something that Cathy Davidson addresses in her own way through examining attention blindness. The second is that keeping silent is not an option for intellectuals. The state paid a lot of money to educate me and I have a duty to society to share what I have learned. That is what I try to do both in the classroom and out. Scholarship is either vital, active in the world around us, or it dies in a sub-basement somewhere. What I do is of value to the non-academic community and I am proactive in asserting this.
In my next post, I’m going to address a specific set of solutions in Higher Education that affect me directly, listing some suggestions that I have for changing work conditions for Adjuncts. Until then I encourage you all to think about solutions rather than problems, changes that might be applied to whatever you do in the academy. And yes, I am looking squarely at you Occupy MLA. Your heart is in the right place, but some of your tweets make me want to scream. If you have any solutions specifically relating to Adjuncts that you’d like to see in my next post, send them along. We’re all in this boat together. We can either collaborate to fix the leak and survive or drown alone.
“Go Big or Go Home.”
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed on November 28, 2011
The words quoted in my subject line are taken from a tweet by a participant at Occupy Cal events this Monday and they express a sense of frustration with the faculty in the University of California system for doing so little in response to the beating and pepper spraying of peaceful protestors at Berkeley and UC-Davis. Aside from a few courageous souls such as former poet laureate and Berkeley Professor of English Robert Hass, most have been content to passively serve the machine. Then, as if to add insult to injury, they pass resolutions or statements of condemnation.
One of the more recent entrants in this growing circus of bad faith is the Modern Language Association (MLA), whose President just issued a statement today condemning the actions of police on the UC campuses and calling for greater vigilance in the protection of free speech. As another member of the Twitterverse notes, “Search all your parks in all your cities / You’ll find no statues to committees.” You also won’t find great historical changes effected by words alone. Without the Union army, what good would have the Emancipation Proclamation done the slaves? Faculty are either blind to their power to effect change on campus or choose not to use it. Either way, they are letting students down during their hour of need.
Here in Chicago, somewhat ironically, violence has not been a problem on our campuses as much as crushing student debt and cutbacks to services. But again, faculty inaction has proved a plague to meaningful change. The only members of the faculty who seem willing to agitate are also the most vulnerable members of the institution–the Adjuncts. When I go out to Occupy Chicago and Occupy Colleges related events, I see hardly any tenured or tenure track faculty amongst the ranks. Instead they seem content to live in a bubble, writing and teaching on issues of social justice and freedom without actually participating in their defense. What are they so afraid of? Tenured faculty in particular have a job security of which I can only dream. Yet I put my livelihood on the line because I am scared for the future of my country as education becomes a scarce resource available only to the superrich. What will it take to stimulate them to action? Does their job have to be outsourced too?
Sometimes it seems like the majority of those in academia are indeed sitting in an Ivory Tower, looking down upon the current dysfunction in the land. I refuse to be one of those who simply shakes his head and waits for Godot because he’s not coming. We are Godot. The time to act is now while there is still something left to save.
The Civil War In the Era of Civil Rights
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Civil War on November 24, 2011
Yale historian David Blight in his most recent book American Oracle continues to examine the tension between the reconciliationist and emancipationist narratives of the Civil War, which he began in his seminal 2001 work Race and Reunion. Here he brings that narrative forward from the Gilded Age and outlines for the reader how the United States chose to remember the war during its centennial, a time period that also coincided with the nation’s growing struggle over civil rights. Rather than offer a broad sweep, Blight chooses to focus on four major writers who made the Civil War their theme during this period: Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. Mixing biography with textual analysis, he attempts to expose how these writers resisted the tendency during the centennial to highlight the clichéd interpretations of the war as a myth of heroism or national unity (both of which were desirable at the height of the Cold War). Instead these four authors, Blight asserts, strove to expose the tragic elements of the war. What we had learned and what the nation still failed to recognize.
Warren, according to Blight, focused mainly on the need for soul-searching in the postwar South and how it had largely been avoided. Catton, in contrast, created a mythology of the Union soldier that highlighted the hardships they had endured for cause and country. Wilson exposed the hypocrisy surrounding the war’s ideals and hoped to shake American’s from their sense of smug uniqueness as a nation. Baldwin, in Blight’s view, held the most tragic vision of the war as it remained part of his day-to-day experience as a Black man.
I wanted to like Blight’s book more than I did, but it really comes across as a rushed job. Perhaps this might have worked as a series of lectures. The best portions of the book are in the middle where Blight examines the source of Catton’s fascination with the war and attempts to rescue him from charges of mindless hagiography of the Boys in Blue. His reading of the eclectic scholar Edmund Wilson is also quite cogent. Yet despite these bright spots, the author proves himself to be better at description and cultural analysis than he is as a close reader of literary figures and texts. In this respect the book underscores the limits of interdisciplinarity. Blight tried to write a work of literary criticism and in the process ends up reminding us that he is a historian.
If nothing else, this book has succeeded in making me want to reread Robert Penn Warren and I will definitely pick up a copy of Catton’s memoir Waiting for the Morning Train. American Oracle serves as a reminder that the primary source, full of life and meaning, is the point for writing secondary texts such as Blight’s in the first place. So that what we have loved you may love as well. Thanks David for sharing these texts you love with me.
Denizens in the Realm–A Response to Rosemary Feal
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed on November 24, 2011
Director Feal:
Our main point of disagreement is not concerning the solutions to the problems we face in Higher Education but in how we interpret the nature and purpose of a “scholarly/professional organization.” Both in your remarks as well as those of First Vice President Michael Berube it is evident that the MLA leadership understands the organization as above the mundane concerns of daily life in the disciplines that it represents. These problems are apparently best left to the university and the individual members of the organization who should talk directly to their supervisors. Should the problem prove particularly intractable, you suggest, it should be taken to another organization whose job it is to deal with such problems: the AFT, COCAL, or AAUP.
Let’s pause for a moment to consider the logic of this position and its implications.
First, it is a self-congratulatory stance that evades the ways in which the MLA has itself helped to create the problems in Higher Education today. While tenured faculty slept, the ranks of those tenured shrunk to historic lows. While tenured faculty slept, Higher Education became a business rather than a duty owed to society. While tenured faculty slept, privatization found the university and outsourcing became the new norm. Why were they sleeping? Because their professional organization was convinced that scholarship was limited to the dissemination of works among friends. A few tried to shape themselves into public intellectuals and activists, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Most were content to let someone else take care of the problems in Higher Education or conduct a study telling others how to fix the problem. And we wonder why the phrase “it’s academic” has entered the idiom of United States English as a pejorative. Inaction is not the same thing as innocence. In fact, in my opinion, it is worse than the actions of those committing misdeeds.
Second, it places undue pressure upon the individual member to fix these problems on their own. The MLA asserts that it has provided a roadmap or “guidelines” for its members with which several MLA leaders were more than happy to supply me. They then tell me–“Find your way out of the problem. If that doesn’t work, go to your department head or supervisor. Go to your Provost or Dean. Show them the MLA roadmap and pressure them to help you out of the problem.” With all due respect, I’m a part-time worker without even a yearly contract. I’m hired by the course or by the semester. As an intellectual immigrant who is perhaps best understood as the academic equivalent of a day laborer, I somehow doubt that those in the university administration are all that interested in what I have to say and more than likely would fire me for making waves. In fact, I’ll be surprised if this series of letters to you, Director Feal, doesn’t lead to me losing my job. Yet another inequity of power that you seem content to overlook.
To this, you more than likely would retort, “Go to COCAL or the AFT. They will solve your problem and protect you from recrimination.” I’ve worked with Unions and grass roots labor ogranizations in the past such as Jobs With Justice. They would more than likely help me to retain my job as they are interested primarily in issues of labor law and workplace regulations. They are not, however, interested in issues specifically relating to deep rooted problems in the profession of English and Foreign Languages. Nor should they be. That is the job of the MLA. I am not asking the MLA to become a pseudo-Union or labor organization. I am asking the MLA to become an activist professional organization that backs its words with deeds. How many of these Deans, Provosts, and Department Heads that would never listen to my concerns about the steady decline of the profession are fellow members of the MLA? If the organization leadership can’t effectively speak to them on my behalf as an adjunct, then the MLA is not a true professional organization but an erudite book club.
This brings me to my final point about the membership of the organization. Just as every book has a target audience, every organization has an ideal member. Based on the responses I’ve received from the MLA that ideal member has the following characteristics. They are tenured or tenure track, work at a major state university or well-known private school, have held their position for three years or more, have published multiple books and/or articles with high visibility presses, and are more interested in research (per se) than issues of pedagogy.
So where does that leave the rest of us who do not fit the mold of the ideal MLA member? In my case, I seem to fit the “cranky graduate student” stereotype who will assuredly (the satraps believe) grow out of his awkward phase once he gets a tenure track job. Should that not happen then I will be politely asked to move to the back of the bus, joining one of the committees or discussion groups meant to address my “condition” of contingency. For what is the Committee on Contingent Labor if not a back seat on the bus. Those of us who do not fit the MLA ideal, regardless of how we are pigeonholed, are the Denizens of the realm. We are subject to the will and pleasure of the reigning aristocrats and apparently should be quiet and simply bask in the glory of being amongst the cognoscenti at annual conventions while they discuss issues relating to oppression in literature and culture. Does no one else see the irony here?
I can’t say that I am all that surprised by the elitism and willful blindness of the MLA. Legacy institutions tend to suffocate under the weight of their own bureaucracy and inertia which are born of outmoded traditions. I was, however, hopeful (for at least a moment) that my words would matter. Now I see that I was mistaken. My membership dues are good until the end of this coming year. After that date, I intend to let my membership lapse and use the money to join a professional organization that not only shares my ideas but allows me space to nurture my talents as a scholar-teacher. To all my true colleagues, those who have read this post and found yourself in essential agreement, I encourage you to do the same. Vote with your feet. Leave the MLA and join an organization that better meets your needs.
Should my words have caused offense, I can only remind you Director Feal that you wanted to know what was on my mind. Now I have told you. The secret’s out and we are right back to where I left our conversation on Twitter so many days ago. We will have to agree to disagree. The one rhetorical advance we seem to have made in this verbal figure eight is in exposing the exact nature of our disagreement. In doing so, my point has been deftly illustrated that we hold the same degree but live in different worlds. The ground upon which you stand is very different from mine and it affects your point of view. Perhaps if you came down into the valley, you’d see the village is on fire and would grab a bucket to help put out the flames. I’d like to believe that of you as you seem from your words a well-meaning person.
Sincerely,
John Casey, PhD
Adjunct Professor of English
University of Illinois at Chicago
and
Columbia College Chicago
John A Casey Jr 