$$ for Thought

Something to crunch on as I aid my team in preparing a grant proposal.

"How Your Grant Proposal Compares." The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://tinyurl.com/ntond5

HAHAHAHAHA not.

What all these emails we get from our university presidents sound like:

"Dear Colleagues (for the moment):

"The good news is the university is stable. The bad news is you are not.

"The economic downturn has quite suddenly transformed our Superman endowment into Mr. Peepers. Thus the University is required to freeze all salaries beginning July 1 for the rest of the fiscal century. We also must downsize the staff by 200 percent in the next 10 minutes. This means dismissing a number of people who have never worked here. We hope this measure will serve to boost the morale of those of you who were fortunate enough to work for the University. Certain auxiliary services will be cut as well in order to protect the academic mission. In addition to the closure of the library last week, all staff and faculty members should arrange to pick up their children at the University day care by noon, after which they will be sold to the highest bidders.

"Have a great day, and Go Warthogs!"

WOULD be funny if I hadn't gotten this exact email in my inbox last night at 5:15pm.

"We're all in this together." (Robert A. Weisbuch, The Chronicle of Higher Education.) http://tinyurl.com/m8xaol

overwhelmed by internets

My blog has become an organization tool of late. As I prepped for my interview last week, I had written my questions and posted them here. When I arrived at Georgetown and realized I had forgotten everything, I popped into the library, came here, and remembered. Whew.

Now I want to save this search on the NSF webpage because I'm working on putting together a proposal. Clearly, it is helpful to look at successful proposals that have been funded.

Mrs. Obama

How have I missed so many great MObama looks??!? "She walks in beauty" - and confidence and awesomeness and a million other qualities I admire.

Enjoy!

The Michelle Obama Look Book (via NY Mag)

digital paradigm shift

2nd comp question is discussing the impact of the digital paradigm shift on oral history. I'm moving away from "Isn't it great, we can post our stuff online" to "how will this impact our conceptions of self, memory, history?"

Thinking about a couple of different items that may help the thought processes although I need to track them down - recent articles on Facebook and how it has impacted adolescents and their conceptions of self, an article on how the internet has ruined our ability to remember anything (ok, exaggeration, obvi but you get the point), and... well, the fact that my colleague has done a lot of research on the internet and may have come across some research on behavior that may have resonance with what I'm doing. Clearly I have links to none of this. Forthcoming. Hopefully (I wish I could make that short like "obvi." "Hopefi?" Ugh.)

Binghampton Understatement

In my last post, zealous to discredit the Diploma Mill (ugh, title) blog, I understated the Binghampton case. Obviously this is an inappropriate way to raise funds. However, I stand by my point that the analysis is facile. The problem with raising money for colleges is not that we pimp out our development officers. I mean, I don't think this is an epidemic. The real questions lie in the realm of, in our endless chase for dollars, what are we giving up? Academic freedom? Objectivity as researchers? How much money are we spending in order to raise this money (as I think about yet another drive to Baltimore that I will make today to raise a few grand)? Is it worth it?

Being that my own job lies in this realm, these are questions that possibly threaten my livelihood. But we can't be afraid to question the system.

Grr.

If I used inappropriate language more often in my blog instead of focusing on the proper way to cite conference proceedings using Chicago style, then maybe I too could be syndicated and quit my day job.

Former Wonkette intern, apparently. Wonkette is pretty funny, but I'm not sure this guy knows enough about higher ed to really sustain a blog.

The Diploma Mill. (Also I find the title annoying.)

UPDATE: The author is actually in college (Wheaton College). From the entry on development in higher ed, it didn't seem as if that's the perspective he's writing from. Does he realize that even though he might pay around $43,000 for comprehensive costs, it actually costs $55,600 educate one Wheaton College student (Sallie Mae notwithstanding)? (Thanks Google - from a Wheaton College fin aid primer) He cites one instance of a sexual harassment complaint in a development office to illustrate why development is evil. Those people help make sure you're not in more debt when you finish, bud. There are problems with development but this particular perspective on it is facile.

Also, he's just not that funny.

Slow and steady

Either wins the race or is tedious and boring. Or both. At 2:15pm I said, OK, I'm going to go through my big stack of stuff for 45 minutes and make a crack in the database of resources I'm compiling. At 3pm I had read about 5 pages of 1 source, having done actual work work instead (don't you love that I prefer work?). Now at 4:15pm I've gone through one source. Well, I guess that's one more than I had gone through before.

The upshot is that I now have some actual, fact-based questions for Thursday's interview. The two important, educational leadership questions I saw emerge as I was reading dealt with 1) academic freedom and the establishment of NDEA Language/Area Studies Centers (the report was careful to state that because the universities needed to provide matching funds, this kept federal hands out of the mix because it was encouraging the growth of activities in which the universities were already interested); and 2) the need for area studies to "root" themselves in the established university structure. Because the programs were/are multidisciplinary, receiving a major or a PhD in a non-departmental program dooms one to failure in the current academic structure. Thus the centers need to align people from various disciplines.

I could spend a year writing about how that may or may not be the case... I won't.. suffice to say that what if we were to shake it up and make a language/area studies program that was a department? What if all departments were multidisciplinary? The real world is multidisciplinary... maybe it would provide a better link to industry, gov't etc for academia.

Anyway. Back to whatever it is I'm doing.

Today's interview questions

We've focused a lot on your early life and education through your time working in Greece as a Fulbright scholar. I want to focus today on your time at the Office of Education. I was reviewing your curriculum vitae and pairing it up with important language policies, and I wanted to talk a bit about what the Office of Education was like when you began in 1961, which was three-four years after the passage of the NDEA. What was the relationship of the Office of Education, and specifically your division, to the NDEA?

Now, I noticed that you became chief of the Language Research Section in 1965, the same year that the Higher Education Act was passed in Congress. Did your office and you have any involvement with the formation of the legislation for the HEA?

In 1966 you moved on to Georgetown and TESOL. In 1968 Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act. Did TESOL provide any expertise in writing the legislation, influence through lobbying members of Congress, etc?

(Tie this into educational leadership - listening to the trends of the day, sometimes being ahead of the curve. How did he do that? How did he pay attention to the breadth of information and stay current?)

Thanks to JNCL-NCLIS for providing some background for this reasearch!

National Language Policies: Pragmatism, Process and Products. (pdf)
Dr. James E. Alatis Curriculum Vitae.

Evaluation in Higher Education

I've noticed that although we are crazy about evaluation at the K-12 level, there seems to be little to none done on evaluation at the higher education level. Maybe I need to do some more research (as I've found, this is usually the case.)

As usual, I'm interested in qualitative analysis (which, though possibly more time-consuming, produces more fruitful and student-centered results in my opinion). Last year at my college there was some upset because of a report in Business Week that basically resulted from a few unhappy undergraduates filling out the BW survey. At the faculty meeting where it was discussed I thought that a mass ethnography project might be in order. I didn't suggest it because people might have looked at me like I belonged in a hippie commune, but I think some type of ethnography (or a combination of observational methods and focus groups with a set of surveys to follow) might be the key to understanding the student experience.

That's my two cents for the day. Now time for a nap. (I wish.)

A Theme?

Another plane crash dream last night. This time it was kind of like that plane that landed in the Hudson. For some reason I went into the plane afterwards and people seemed to be OK. Weird. If it were just the same plane crash again and again, I might get more used to it, but each time it is a different situation. Something is so terrifying about watching the free fall from air. Also, since is a huge fear of mine, I think it makes it that much worse. Not that anyone would really enjoy dreaming about plane crashes.

I had a great weekend, beautiful backyard Baltimore wedding, but no progress of any kind with the comp question. Some progress on the house though (not that I personally made it, that would be the DH) but I did clean, do laundry and go grocery shopping for the week.

Hopefully can get back to it this evening, although given my sleepless night, we'll see how it goes.

The impossibility of anonymity when using "thick description"

That very long title just a ploy to see if I can get twitter to post more than just the title. I fear that this twitterfeed feedburner openurl stuff is beyond my technological capabilities (ironic, considering I'm writing an article about technological capabilities).

No, seriously, I am on my way to the library to check out When They Read What We Write which deals with this ethical issues of anonymity and thick description. Hope I can also find that Clifford Geertz book. Hmm. Dunno which one that is.

OK, thanks to Wikipedia. It is in the book of selected essays, The Interpretation of Cultures. However, thanks library, they are all checked out or missing. Guess this one is up to Amazon.com because you know (or at least, I'm about to tell you) how obsessed I am with original sources and not using Wikipedia and then just saying I actually read the book.

Off to get When They Read What We Write. C U later.

the inevitable... 2nd day and no longer impressed with myself. Progress stalled, interview tomorrow...

(As a side note, I feel the need to make these titles really long because nothing I put in the body gets on twitter. End of side note.)

Well, I'm blogging and searching goodreads.com for something (anything, please Lord, anything but another article about the ethics of oral history and online publishing! Pleeease!) to read. What I am not doing is finishing up my comp question so that I can then tidy it up, turn it in, and move on to the proposal.

I think lingering in the distance is this fear of the proposal - that I'll be exposed as a fraud, that I have no idea what I'm doing, that I'll put forth all this effort and fail, that I'll never be able to make it as an academic (and a wife, and eventually, God willing, a mother). The other night I had a dream where I witnessed 3 plane crashes in a row, all at the same time, and then had to board a plane at the same gate where there was also lying inexplicably the wreck of one of the Continental planes that had crashed. The dream sort of veered off from there and somehow I ended up at National Stadium for a baseball game, but THAT IS BESIDE THE POINT. I am AFRAID OF CRASHING AND BURNING, people. I know rationally that my fear of being a fraud is merely impostor syndrome and that I have much quantitative and qualitative evidence to refute said notion. It doesn't mean that I don't have it, though, and I've had it all my life (always thought that school success was just "luck" and that one day it would run out, and then I got to grad school and felt it had when I got my first incomplete).

The best anecdote to imposter syndrome (see? I can't even spell impostor so how could I be one?) is to put your head down and just work through it. If I put together some proposal out of left field, then my committee will say, "That's out of left field. Do it again." And I will, and I will have learned, and it will be better. Failure just means you took a risk, and if you're not failing then you're not taking enough risks (thanks to JB for that one!).

Now I am going to suck it up and write about how one can use blogs, wikis, and real-time, push-button publishing and collaboration to make a successful oral history project. Yeah! Go team (of me myself and I)!

back and impressed with myself

I know, you're shocked at the title of this post. Me? Impressed with myself? Never.

I'm reading over my comp questions that I desperately need to finish (was hoping to do so before the wedding but since we moved 2 weeks before the wedding, that did not happen). However, I'm reading over what I have so far and it's pretty good. I may just get this PhD thing yet.

A snippet: (might have already posted this, but since I'm practically a different person now with a whole new name and all, I can do it twice)

Online databases of oral history allow oral historians to preserve participant testimony in the original format, and include the Virtual Oral Aural History Archive at California State University at Long Beach (currently not loading but check back and see if it does. The problem with including links in scholarly work is exactly this!). This website has topically organized interviews and allows visitors to listen to complete interviews on a variety of subjects. The archive also has a key-word index that refers to interviews containing specific words. A more popular although less scholarly project appears in the StoryCorps project, where a mobile recording booth travels the country and allows ordinary Americans to interview each other on a variety of topics. The project produces and airs the stories on National Public Radio on a regular basis.[1] These archives and projects point to new ways to disseminate and popularize oral history, and preserve the oral nature of the testimony collected. There are also numerous ways for individual oral historians to disseminate their work, and I will discuss these in the final section on practical implications of the digital era.