Turducken

There's good news and there's bad news

2010-03-15T16:33:00.002-06:00

I found out this morning I was waitlisted for a writing workshop I had applied for. That's the good news and the bad news.

I nearly didn't apply, and I had no expectations going in. The competition was pretty tough this year - at least 145 applicants for 18 spots. Many of the applicants are already published or are regular participants in workshops and critique groups. To be considered one of the top 30 out of this pool is, for me, a huge honor. Don't get me wrong, a waitlist isn't as exciting as a "yes," but it told me what I needed to know - I'm not wasting my time. And think of the money I'm saving!

Technically, I have over two months to continue to wait - but realistically, I figure it's over now. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for bad things to happen to the folks who are going!

Thanks Ricky!

2010-03-13T13:35:00.001-06:00

New Manduka mat
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

So last weekend I went to a yoga workshop with Ricky Tran. It was pretty awesome, although I was very, very tired by the end.

RIcky is sponsored by Manduka, and at the end of the weekend he gave away the Manduka mat he had used for the workshop. He decided to give it to the person with the sorriest mat - which was me! I had been wanting to buy a new mat, but was trying to wait until I could afford a decent one. So thank you!

Job updates

2010-03-11T13:33:00.004-06:00

No, I don't have a job. Yes, things are happening. But this post is about other people.

Several of my friends at Vanderbilt (or formerly at Vanderbilt) are on the market, and congratulations to them for getting jobs at the University of Southern California, Cumberland University, and the University of Tennessee!

I was chatting with a friend in K-12 about opportunities this year. He interviewed at some pretty darn good schools. By contrast, there were no top ten higher ed programs with assistant professor positions this year, and I think that there were no top twenty jobs available, either. (Just to reiterate: At the assistant professor level, which is what I am eligible for.) This is just an illustration of how the first faculty job someone takes is only partially influenced by the opportunities available, which are somewhat random.

When I grow up

2010-03-05T14:45:00.004-06:00

I'm at Vanderbilt's central library, trying to get some writing done, but I got distracted by the pencil sharpener. It's the kind of sharpener that was in every classroom growing up. It bolts securely to the wall, has a dial of holes to accommodate pencils of every size, and is hand-cranked.

I love those things. They're so much more satisfying to use than electric sharpeners*. I have something of a fetish for devices that are mechanical rather than electronic. That's why I have a Zassenhaus burr coffee grinder and a French press, for example. That's one reason I'm better prepared for the apocalypse than you. Never mind that I'll only last as long as my glasses do. (The moment they break, I won't even see the alien overlord preparing to idly stomp me underfoot.)

A serious pencil sharpener is definitely on my list of Things To Put in My Faculty Office. Number one, of course, is bookshelves. Yes, they rank higher than a desk, because I can sit on the floor with a laptop - not that I don't want a desk, too. Also, an enormous bulletin board for right over my desk, and unnecessarily expensive and arty pushpins. But no simply decorative tchotchkes, thank you.

Hm, do you think anyone makes hand-cranked paper shredders? Because if they do, I'm going to run out and get one and start shredding for the thrill of it. (ETA: OMG, I want one of these. Please, please, someone crafty, make me one for graduation, pretty please?)

* Unless, perhaps, you have to sharpen 100 pencils at one go, and you end up with dreadful hand cramps. But how often does that happen?

Picture find

2010-03-02T23:12:00.002-06:00

More deer
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Sorry for the quiet around here. I've been busy with the dissertation, especially with traveling. As an indicator of how busy, here's a photo from hiking on Sunday - what is noteworthy is that it was the first hike I had done in a month and a half. So, to keep you busy ...

... Kids! Can you find the six deer in this photo?

OK, it's a trick. Three are to the left, out of the frame. But can you find the other three?

Linkdump

2010-02-28T08:53:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the radio silence; I've been out of town collecting data.

The "THERE ARE NO MENS, WHAT WILL WE DO" panic.

There are tribal colleges in Canada and the U.S., but universities, not so much - and now there is one fewer.

One response to the Dodge Super Bowl commercial.

I love chicken-crossing-the-road jokes. And here are more.

I've been disheartened by how much of the commentary around the Amy Bishop case has suggested that tenure, or race, or something, drove her to kill her colleagues. No. Being unhinged is what leads someone to do that kind of thing; triggers aren't causes. Here is a good take on it.

White supremacists more tolerant of homosexuality than you might think; also, funny picture.

Dissertation update

2010-02-18T16:31:00.001-06:00

Wondering how my dissertation is coming along? Wonder no more!

This Saturday I will be attending a workshop at the Vanderbilt Writing Studio on revising the dissertation.
I leave town Sunday to do data collection at one of my three sites. I should be back some time Thursday.
Last week, I submitted an article based on my quantitative analysis to a journal.

Tax time

2010-02-14T17:19:00.001-06:00

I was prepared to begin my taxes, I thought, and was looking forward to an easy time of it - all I did in 2009 was work for Vanderbilt, and I keep my Bolivian tin mine investing under the table.* Then a form 1099-MISC came in the mail for some income I had forgotten. (Hey, I was paid in early 2009 - for work done in mid 2008. Was it any wonder it had receded into the mists of time?)

The form itself fascinates me. Some of the categories on it are straightforward, such as "1 Rents" and "4 Federal income tax withheld." Others are much more interesting: "5 Fishing boat proceeds" - "10 Crop insurance proceeds" - and (my favorite) "13 Excess golden parachute payments." Alas, I have nothing in any of these categories.

*Dear IRS: I don't actually invest in Bolivian tin mines. Please don't audit me.

AERA scheduling

2010-02-13T13:00:00.000-06:00

The AERA conference schedule is finally up, and am I disappointed!

One thing you need to know about AERA is that it is huge, because it covers every aspect of education - financing public universities, teaching reading to autistic children, improving principal education, the state of access to education for girls in Uganda. So even though 13,000 people attend, there still aren't that many sessions in any one area.

In my area of higher education philanthropy, in fact, there is one session. (It's being put on by my colleague Noah Drezner.) Naturally, this would be at the top of my must-attend list.

Except, really it's second. The number-one session for me is, of course, the session I'm presenting in (it's a poster session and thus a pretty mixed bag). Guess what time it is? Hint: I won't be attending Noah's symposium.

But, you say, surely it's not the ONLY session you are interested in. Well, no. There's a paper about boards of trustees being presented at a roundtable which sounds quite interesting. I could go to that, surely ... if it weren't at the very same time. Then my colleague David Weerts is doing a roundtable, and there's a paper on the effect of prestige on alumni giving.

So out of four sessions (excluding mine) I'd like to attend, there are only two I can make, through no fault of my own. This also means that the people who are interested in my poster aren't likely to make it to my session - they're going to be at Noah's symposium.

Yes, there are a lot of sessions to organize. But most people tend to stick within one division, and the number of presentations for Division J (higher education) this year looks something like this*: 20 symposia; 230 papers in sessions of 4 each, or 56 paper sessions; 70 roundtables; and 134 posters. They run a lot of posters and roundtables at the same time, so let's say there are 2 sessions of each. That's 80 sessions overall, out of about 25 time slots. So there's three Division J sessions at any given time - it shouldn't be hard to avoid topic overlap.

Except, if you're astute, you'll notice that of my three overlapping sessions, one is a poster session and one is a roundtable. Problem: these sessions cover so many topics, there is bound to be overlap. For example, at 10:35 on May 1, there are 19 roundtable sessions of about five thematically-grouped papers each (not all are higher education). But this is fixable, too, with one of two solutions: 1) Run posters (and possibly roundtables) at their own time, like ASHE does. 2) Instead of running 19 roundtables at once, get a smaller freaking room and run only a few at a time, but ensure their topics don't overlap with paper sessions in the same division at the same time.

I know, I've never been in the no-doubt difficult position of having to arrange sessions, so there are undoubtedly subtleties I am missing. But this is one of the reasons I find attending AERA so frustrating, and one reason I'm likely to stop attending once I'm out of graduate school.

*based on accepted proposals. If there's something wrong with my math, correct me.

Job news

2010-02-12T18:50:00.003-06:00

I just got my first of these letters for the job season:

"Thank you for your interest in the higher education position in [Department X]. I regret to inform you that funding for position has been withdrawn because of the continuing budgetary restraints encountered by [our fair state]. Please be assured that withdrawal of funding for this position in no way reflects on the quality of your application."

I'm actually surprised this is the first letter I've seen like this; last year there were quite a few more. But it's good to know they don't want me to feel responsible for the recession.

Link potpourri

2010-02-05T17:43:00.000-06:00

For everyone freaking out about the name of the latest Apple product. Really, people? Menstrual products were the only thing you thought of when you heard the name?

"Humilitiation (the game) and J.D. Salinger." That is, elitist pride that comes with not having read a classic.

One of those "duh" papers that it's good someone actually did: Students who get FAFSA help are more likely to attend college. (Seriously, have you filled one out lately? Not easy.)

On the off chance you're interested, here's info on the quantitative seminar our department runs.

This novella is one of the most brutal stories I've ever read. It's also amazing and brilliant. You should read it.

Blizzard 2010, Take Two

2010-01-30T11:07:00.000-06:00

We're snowed in, and it's fun to watch Nashville try and cope. Now, I fully understand that it snows here so infrequently that it doesn't make economic sense to keep a full set of plows on hand. I also understand that driving in the snow is a skill that takes practice, and most people here haven't had much opportunity to practice it. So I'm not laughing at the drivers. Nor am I laughing at those seriously impacted by the snow; there aren't enough beds for the homeless now, because some of the places have had to temporarily close since their volunteers can't get there.

But some of the choices people make leave me baffled. There was a woman crossing the street, glaring at the dirty piles of mush as she gingerly tried to avoid them. What, I wonder, made her think clogs were the right choice in footwear for today?

Then there were the parents who were letting their kids sled in the street. "It's OK, I'm watching the traffic," said the dad. This was said only a few blocks from Shelby Golf Course, where I anticipate most of East Nashville's children are at this moment.

I would have wondered at the mailman wearing shorts, except given my friends who have worked for the post office (N=1), this doesn't surprise me at all.

Flirt FAIL

2010-01-29T22:49:00.003-06:00

IMG_7446
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

So, apparently the secret to a good online dating site photo is kissy face.

Now, I don't have any photos of myself that would qualify. Nor do I have any photos of my friends in which they are making said face. And I started to wonder, is this a generational thing? The data for the article went up to age 31, and it doesn't report what percent of women are doing it at what ages. I went back to college photos, to sorority events, and none of us were doing it. Back in my day, we didn't have digital cameras, and we didn't take as many photos or show them to as many people. We didn't have any of this online social networking nonsense. We also had to walk uphill both ways to class, barefoot, in the snow. But I digress ... We settled for doing the basic sorority pose most of the time. You know .... slight turn to the side, slight bend forward, hands just above your knees or on the girl in front of you, and biiiiiiigggg smile!

So, in the name of scientific research, I decided to see if I could do it. If millions of teenagers on MySpace can do it, how hard can it be? I forewent the recommended cleavage, not having time for an augmentation tonight.

Results? First, I should not take up acting or modeling, although I may be able to play Derek Zoolander in a community theater production if they're hard up. Second, I don't know what I was expecting. I can't take a good self-portrait, even though I can take good photos and pose well for others. (I will also blame this on my generation.) Third - no. I can't do it. At all. You can see the awful results here. I look ... afflicted may be the word I am looking for, although I also considered mentally subnormal.

I guess Teh Menz of Teh Intertubes will never know what they are missing. And without cleavage or kissyface, I will be SINGLE FOREVER!

Excuse me, I have to go adopt several cats.

Publishing a book

2010-01-29T11:10:00.000-06:00

Here, go depress yourself.

Pseudonyms

2010-01-26T15:17:00.003-06:00

One little detail about my dissertation I've been working on is pseudonyms for the colleges I'm studying. It shouldn't be this difficult, but I had to reject any number of schema. Numbers or letters implied hierarchy among the three. Colors carry too many connotations. It's hard to find common last names that aren't in use already (Smith, Jones, Brown - all taken). First names don't sound dignified ("Fred College"). Many things were just too whimsical.

So I've finally settled on tree names. Common trees sound rather dignified, have positive associations, and can't be readily rank-ordered. There are a few schools with "Elm" or "Oak" in their names, so I'm excluding those. Pine College, Maple College, and Birch College - I think I'm set.

Outline

2010-01-25T22:33:00.002-06:00

Outline
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

I was never a fan of outlining. It was something we were made to do in school, and I know I wasn't alone in going back and creating ex post facto outlines when we were required to turn them in.

This changed a little bit in graduate school. No one demanded to see outlines at this point, but I tended to start off a paper by opening up a document, inserting page numbers (tip from John Braxton: Do this first thing so you don't forget), and then writing the following headers: Introduction, Theoretical Framework, Literature Review, Data, Methods, Results, Discussion - or some variation thereof. Conceptually, it wasn't particularly useful; it simply reflected the required components of a research article. If I was feeling particularly frisky, I might divide the lit review into something like "Historical sources" and "Case studies."

However, in the last few months, I've discovered that I love outlining and it makes writing so much easier for me. The thing is, by the time you sit down to write a journal article, there is not a lot of mystery about what you'll say. You know what your results are, and the conventions around scholarly articles demand compliance with a formula. So it's not as if I'm stifling creativity. This isn't Finnegans Wake.

(The photo here, by the way, is of my outlining breakthrough. An paper needed serious revision, and I was going through and editing when I realized it needed more than that. The outline on the left was the result.)

I tend to outline fractally; I start off high-level, and iteratively fill in more detail. At some point, when the outline runs several pages, I just fill in paragraphs to match the outline. There's practically no sitting there thinking, hm, what goes next? Because I already know. My writing has become so much more efficient.

Weekend update

2010-01-24T12:58:00.000-06:00

I went out Friday night, but other than that my weekend has been quiet. Saturday I went to the Center for Teaching's GradStep workshop and then spent the rest of the day hibernating - I watched the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica. The show is so awesome, it would be hard for the final episode to be totally satisfactory. And they were OK (don't worry, no real spoilers here), except there was a little too much cheesy expository wrap-up. I think the problem is, the show is at its best when the episodes are character-driven, and the finale had to be plot-driven to wrap up loose ends.

This morning I did a bunch of boring administrative tasks at home that have a high drudge/reward ratio. Like punching holes in a 200-page document, six pages at a time, to put in a binder. But that suited my mood; sometimes it just feels good to get something unambiguously done (and have a clean desk).

Dissertating

2010-01-20T18:17:00.002-06:00

You've seen those cartoons where something starts rolling down a snowy hill, right? It starts off slowly, then as it picks up snow it move faster and faster.

That's what my dissertation experience is like. For a long time, things were moving slowly. Selecting dissertation sites took a long time, because I had to contact very busy people. Then the IRB process went reasonably quickly - well, quickly given that I was doing it around the holidays. This week I began contacting my research sites to set up interviews, and all of a sudden I've gained a great deal of speed. One interview has been tentatively set for Jan. 29, although it looks like we may move it back a little.

I'm actually contemplating graduating in May, which is a little aggressive. At Vanderbilt, in order to participate in the ceremony, everything must be turned in and done by the end of March. My impression is that at most schools, you have a longer window, and you might be able to walk if everything was turned in but you technically have a later graduation date. Anyway, May might not be doable, but August certainly is.*

I just hope that when I come to a sudden stop at the bottom of the hill, the snowball doesn't fall apart.

* Barring the unforeseen. I could be beamed up by aliens or fall into a coma, you never know. I don't want to get over-confident and anger our alien overlords.

Hidden Passage backpacking trip

2010-01-19T22:56:00.002-06:00

Our weekend backpacking trip was to Pickett State Park to hike Hidden Passage. This hike is about ten miles total, and our plan was to do it over three days. (Day two was going to be mostly hiking on side trails, which would have added to our total mileage.) As I indicated already, we scaled back to two days due to the steady rain the first night and second day. The hike itself is only moderate in difficulty; the most strenuous part is the side trail to Double Falls.
Hidden Passage is pretty in the distinctive Big South Fork way - lots of sandstone overhangs and little waterfalls. Apparently, however, there was a fire at the park fairly recently, leading to burnt-over sections that were more interesting than pretty. I suspect that it might be a little too hot in mid-summer because of the resulting lack of shade, but it was beautiful in winter, with ice. I imagine that spring waterfalls and fall colors are equally scenic.
We spent the night at the campsite near Double Falls. We had hoped to see the falls, but in order to do that one has to cross the creek. Supposedly it is sometimes dry, and generally wadeable, but on our visit it was several feet deep and iced over. You can see the crossing in the photo at left. Nevertheless, the campsite was quite nice, and we had it all to ourselves.
Despite the rain, we had a good time. While it made a nice, easy backpacking trip, it is eminently doable as a day hike - you won't find many hikes of this length that offer a better effort/reward ratio.

Updates

2010-01-18T20:41:00.003-06:00

I went backpacking this weekend. It was supposed to be two nights, but we scaled it back to one because of the rain. I'll blog more about the trip later.

Today I went to a job talk and then to a MLK day event with Rita Bender and Bob Moses. Nope, it's not a holiday for classes at Vanderbilt, which it should be.

I got IRB approval today for the final portion of my dissertation - hooray!

A long and winding road

2010-01-15T11:02:00.001-06:00

For those of you not in academia, I thought it might be interesting to see what a job interview for a faculty member is like. It's a long process. This following is a distillation of a schedule for one of the searches our department is running this semester:

Day 1: Dinner with the search committee.
Day 2: Breakfast with two faculty members. Four half-hour meetings with four different faculty members. Lunch with three more faculty members. Four more half-hour meetings, three with faculty and one with the dean. Late afternoon, the job talk. Dinner with two more faculty members.
Day 3: Breakfast with yet another faculty member. Lunch with students. Meeting with department chair.

Except for a three-hour gap the last morning, there aren't any real breaks in the schedule - there are a few 15-minute gaps between meetings. Long enough, if things are running on time, to use the restroom, but not enough to clear your head or stop being "on." This schedule is pretty typical, although sometimes the first-night dinner is dispensed with.

"Effectiveness"

2010-01-14T21:41:00.000-06:00

Part of my dissertation hinges on the notion of board effectiveness, and I am struggling to define it. There is an habit of defining board effectiveness by process rather than outcomes, since the latter are hard to observe, but let's set that issue aside for a moment - nontrivial as it is - and just talk about outcomes. But the question is, are we talking about board or institutional outcomes, and how can we separate them at top management levels?

This isn't just an education problem. Imagine a widget factory. Someone who works on the assembly line can easily be evaluated. More widgets = better performance, given a few caveats (ie, not sabotaging other workers). What about the manager of the assembly line? Once again number of widgets (produced by subordinates) is surely a part of it, but other things matter, too. A slightly lower production level may be worth it if turnover among workers is lower, depending on the company's cost structure, or a lower level of injuries or grievances. Higher up, another manager is deciding whether the widgets should be made with or without dongles and whether the plant should be retrofitted for efficiency or closed altogether. This manager's output is decisions and paperwork, which are hard to directly evaluate - do we compare them to the counterfactual, which is unknowable, or to the competition, which may perform better or worse based on unpredictable and unknowable factors?

By the time you get up to the president, there is almost nothing directly measurable (except for his or her treatment of employees, such as not sexually harassing them), and so the big cheese is measured on company performance. But we know that the performance isn't all about the president. Maybe the economy tanked, for example. Presidents are about as hard to evaluate as board members, except that most of their work is a group effort, not individual, so you ... what, take the company performance and divide it by 30?

Back to higher education boards: The specific, measurable components of their job are arguably only a small portion of what they ought to be evaluated on. If they're all donating generously, but the dropout rate is increasing and the campus restrooms are disgusting, are they doing a good job?

I'm sure there is a literature on this subject, not in specific reference to non-profits, but in terms of workplace evaluation. I don't know this literature, though, and it's not being used in any of the work I've seen on boards. Any suggestions or thoughts would be welcome.

Links

2010-01-14T21:20:00.000-06:00

A provocative post about how changing the value of response sets in a survey results in different results. The gist is that if you are offered five choices, you assume the middle one is "average" and shape your response to that.

You've probably seen claims that the oldest entities around are nonprofits - colleges and churches. Here's a look at the oldest for-profit corporations, which are no spring chickens.

The tagline says it all: "How school lunch programs manage to promote obesity and hunger at the same time."

A rousing call for org theorists to study education.

Jobs

2010-01-11T09:23:00.001-06:00

Appalachian State: Assistant Professor in Higher Education, Adult and Developmental education.

Professional development

2010-01-09T22:33:00.001-06:00

I've been reading the serieses (um, what's the plural of series?) of a particular novelist in reverse chronological order as of late, purely by happenstance - I was introduced to her through her latest series, and then happened to find two older ones at a used bookstore. It offered me an interesting perspective on her development as a writer, one I wouldn't have seen if I read in the other direction. For one thing, I wouldn't have made it this far.

The newest series is really quite good, and the characters and setting stay with you afterwards. The previous series is the equivalent of beach reading for the sword-and-sorcery set. I enjoy them when I'm reading them but forget about them not long after I put them down. This may sound like a criticism, although it isn't intended as such; I find most of Tolkein's offspring utterly undigestable, so mindless fun is a huge step up. The series before that - well, it isn't bad. I wouldn't say it's good, either. If I had read it first, I doubt I would have picked up anything else by this author - although if it had been a choice between her next book and the usual airport selection, she might not have lost.

What's particularly interesting is to see writing issues in this earlier book that have been eliminated from her writing by now. One I kept tripping over in the early stuff is changes in the scale of time. You know, two characters are having a conversation, so the action is occurring almost in real time, and then suddenly 15 minutes have passed and the heroine is fixing the ship's engine, or something. These transitions were handled awkwardly in the early book; I kept finding myself going back a few sentences to figure out what I had missed. This isn't a problem in her later books. It's nice to see this kind of development on the author's part, because it sometimes seems as if literary figures spring up fully formed; their later books get deeper and richer, although not necessarily better.*

*Or, unfortunately, they get worse, as every napkin they doodle on gets snapped up by a publisher.