Week 6/66: Conversations

I went to a "town hall" meeting held by the Republican senator from my state, and it was literally held in a town hall of a town that's got maybe 800 people.  The senator's "people" had communicated only (as they later said) with local(ish) people who had called or written the senator's office, and told only those people about the meeting.

So one of my friends was told, and spread the news.  But then someone else told her it was a different time.  So there was much confusion and denial from his staffers that 1) there was any meeting at all, 2) that they couldn't give any information, and 3) yes, there's a meeting, but it's an hour earlier than had been announced.

I called the local TV channel news office and they hadn't heard anything.

But my friend drove, and someone else came, too, and I went, and we drove for an hour.

We were all (as we talked about later) expecting this to be a meeting with lots of MAGA hats and much conservative cheering.  My friend had been told that Republican politicians holding town meetings weren't allowing anyone to record them, and their staffers were temporarily confiscating phones and such, so she had three devices to record, one of which you couldn't tell was recording because it looked like it's off.  Just in case.

She's also heard that Republican politicians were holding town halls that were mostly just talking points and pre-screened questions.

Anyway, we got there early, and sat in the second row.  And gradually, before the senator arrived, the room filled.  There were folks wearing dairy cooperative shirts, and one MAGA hat worn by a very young man, there was a Native American veteran, and some other men in veteran's gear (like hats saying "Navy Vet" or whatever).  And there were some folks wearing shirts with the name of a local Democratic politician.  And the Democratic politician himself.

Introductions happened, and the local town council folks were introduced, a couple politicians at different levels, and then the senator.  And if he thought this was going to be a really friendly crowd, he was wrong.  And since we thought that, so were we.

The questions started at the immigration problem (as in, children being incarcerated and people seeking asylum being treated badly), and went from there to Social Security, health care, the farm bill (with a heavy dose of "don't mess with people who need SNAP, just help dairy farmers make a living"), and to NRA funding (he pretended to be unaware that the NRA ever donated money to him, but also refused to refrain from accepting further NRA money.  It was interesting, and plenty of people called him out quite forcefully when he BSed (about how people come to be undocumented in the US, mostly NOT by crossing the border illegally as he asserted).

The senator answered questions for over an hour, and there was ONE that seemed sympathetic, and I was surprised at that one.  (The man who identified as a Native American veteran wanted to use gambling casino tax revenues to build the wall.)

My take aways: a lot of folks came from my small city.  And we had a lot in common with the folks who came from the dairy cooperative and who seemed to come from local small communities.  We're all concerned about Social Security.  We're all concerned about children being incarcerated when their parents seek asylum or try to enter the country without documentation (or overstay visas).  We all want farmers to be able to make a living.

No one recited any slogans, and everyone listened respectfully to each other.

I was impressed that the senator seemed smart and knowledgeable, though we're very opposed ideologically.

I read somewhere that most people really do think what they're doing is right and reasonable.  (The context was about spies.)  And that seemed pretty true of this crowd.  We disagreed on some fundamental solutions to problems, and on the sorts of things we see as problems, but I got the feeling that people were reasonably well informed (and some more than that, and most more than me) and really did want to solve the problems they think are important.

And yet, look at how my state votes.  It's hard to reconcile the two: what I saw at the meeting, and the way this state votes.

***

I had coffee and a long conversation with a new colleague.  I'm sorry to say, they seem very young and not very interesting.  (Those two don't necessarily go together, of course.)  I'm feeling a little "old guard" about them, I'm afraid.  I hope they end up being wonderful, though.

***

I did more biking this week and no hiking.  There was weather, and there was not feeling well, and there was keeping busy.

So much to do, and the time is rushing by!

#MeToo: Sherman Alexie

My social media feeds have pretty much exploded with posts and comments about Sherman Alexie, most in response to Debbie Reese's post in her American Indians in Children's Literature site.

There are a lot of women saying that Alexie's harassed them and hurt their careers and such.  I'm especially pissed off because I like his books, and I like teaching Reservation Blues.  In fact, it's on my Intro to Lit calendar in April.

I recently read a really smart argument that we shouldn't teach or buy books or art by artists who've abused their power.   (I can't find the article now, or I'd link it, so if this sounds familiar, please share it in the links.)  I'm convinced.  And while I can't change the calendar now (because students have already purchased their books), I won't be putting him on the next one.

One of the smart things this argument said was that there's a substantive difference between teaching works by dead folks, people who can't benefit from others purchasing their works, and living folks, people who benefit a lot from others purchasing their works.  So we can teach Chaucer and Picasso and such.

What are your thoughts?  Are you going to teach Alexie's works (if you do already)?  Will you show or attend movies by men who've been identified as harassers? 


(Please note, the numbers of women who've come forward to talk about Alexie's behavior is convincing; they were threatened, and now, with the threat potentially fading in power, they've come forward.  Others, such as Joy Harjo, have publicly said that they'd heard about problems for years.)

***

Edited to add: I just saw this statement from Sherman Alexie on effbee.

Edited: Corrected my typo of Joy Harjo as Joyce Harjo.

Hiring Faculty of Color and the "Five Things" Article

Today, this article came across my facebook page: :The five things no one will tell you about why colleges don’t hire more faculty of color" by Marybeth Gasman, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

In short, the article argues that institutions of higher education don't hire more faculty of color because "we don't want them.  We simply don't want them."

She then talks about the ways hiring works against faculty of color, starting with "quality," which she says is code for having gone to the right elite institution and worked with a prominent person in the field.

The second excuse she says hiring folks use is that there aren't enough people of color in the pipeline; she argues that schools using this excuse need to create their own pipelines, mentor people of color in their fields, and then, even if they don't hire their own graduates, cooperate with other elite institutions to hire from their pipelines.

Third, she says, is that faculty will bend rules to hire their preferred white candidates, and hold to rules to avoid hiring people of color.

Fourth, according to Gasman, is that faculty on search committees aren't trained in human resources areas, and too often look for "fit," which tends to mean that they hire candidates who feel comfortable, often because those candidates look like the members of the search committee, do similar work, and so forth.  Thus, a committee of white women would be more likely to hire another white woman than not.

And finally, Gasman says,

if majority colleges and universities are truly serious about increasing faculty diversity, why don’t they visit Minority Serving Institutions – institutions with great student and faculty diversity – and ask them how they recruit a diverse faculty. This isn’t hard. The answers are right in front of us. We need the will.

As I read this, I found myself nodding at times, and feeling irritated at times because she seems to be only thinking of elite institutions.

So, I want to ask, what about institutions such as my own? 

I've been on a lot of search committees, and I can't think of any time we've taken a candidate off a list because of where they got their degree or who they worked with.  I can, though, think of a time when one of the search committee members argued for a candidate based on a strong letter from a prominent scholar in the field.

I don't know what to make of the pipeline argument.  I've been on searches where we had a limited number of candidates apply (think of where I am), offered the job to the strongest candidate (on paper and in the interview process), who happened to be a person of color, but then had the candidate turn us down because they'd gotten a better offer.  To be honest, we often get turned down by our first two or even three top choices.

So I know we've made the pipeline complaint.

We don't have a graduate program turning out PhDs, so our only way of contributing to the pipeline is to work harder to attract and mentor students of color, and to send them up the pipeline, hoping they get into a strong PhD program.  We don't do nearly as much attracting and mentoring students of color as we should.  (I'm more ambivalent about anyone going on to a PhD in English these days, but I'd like to see real equity there.)  But the most elite PhD programs seem to mostly take students from their elite pals, leaving our students to get PhDs from strong state schools, which leaves them out of the elite candidate pools (but should make them great candidates for our own hiring, eventually).

I think the third and fourth reasons are closely related, and I think they're where our problems here come in.  From things I overhear, I know we hire for "fit" and that when we do, "fit" often means good old boys, or white folks, or people from the upper Midwest, especially more local, straight folks, and so on.

I'm intrigued by Gasman's fifth point, which seems more a suggestion than a reason why we fail to hire faculty of color: we should go visit institutions that do successfully hire faculty of color, institutions which are historically Minority Serving Institutions.  But even there, I'm a bit at a loss.

Say, I'm on a search committee right now.  And there are maybe 6 other search committees on campus right now, all separate, all in different fields.  Do we all independently send folks out to visit Minority Serving Institutions? 

And in this budget crunch, how do we do that?  And would a visit work?  There's got to be something here, but I think it might be sort of backwards.

What if we, as a campus, hired one or two deans from Minority Serving Institutions to come here and hold some workshops (say over two days, four workshops, afternoon, evening, morning, afternoon)?  And what if our administrators said that only departments whose chair and personnel committee chair both attended a workshop would be allowed to put in for a new hire in the following year?  And what if our administrators said that they'd look at requests for new hires more favorably from departments or programs who had a greater percentage of faculty attend workshops?

All our departments are pretty desperate for faculty (budget hell), and many faculty really do want to find ways to hire more colleagues of color.

We'd have a chance of making us more aware of our implicit biases, get ideas for increasing the diversity of our candidate pools, and have the potential to give a broad range of faculty some knowledge and tools to use in searches directly (as committee members) and indirectly (asking the right questions of search committees and such).

Could it work?  Would it work? 

(Of course, the next problem would be to retain our faculty of color, to help them feel welcome and comfortable here, to mentor them, and to not be jerks to them.)

Diversity Statements

Around the interwebs, I've been reading about colleges/universities requiring "diversity statements" along with teaching philosophies (and perhaps other statements).  My school, to my knowledge, doesn't require separate statements.  But my department always puts something about diversity, social justice as a qualification in our ads.  I can't speak across the campus as a whole, but in my department, we think it's important.  And we want new colleagues who think it's important.

I've seen some complaints about such ads or statement requirements as BS.  So I thought I'd say a few words about why I don't think it's BS, and why I think it's important.

Some years back, I was in some diversity training on campus and we were discussing putting diversity into the qualifications for academic ads, and one of our deanlings, who taught in Social Work, complained that if contributing to diversity were a requirement, he wouldn't get a job now.  And all I could say was, then you wouldn't get a job, and how could anyone even think they could qualify for ANY job in Social Work if they couldn't contribute in some way to diversity efforts on our campus?  HOW?

The implication of his complaint was that as a white man, he couldn't contribute to diversity on campus, and that such ads would discriminate against white men.  I think that's exactly wrong. 

I know grad students and adjuncts are incredibly busy, and if you're a chemistry student, thinking about diversity may seem alien.  It shouldn't.  (I'm using chemistry as a field where it may seem diversity is unimportant.)

White folks can contribute to diversity efforts.  We can take advantage of diversity training on our campuses, especially training for TAs and newer faculty (since those folks are mostly on the market).  We can contact offices on campus that support students with disabilities, students of color, first generation college students, students who are vets or non-trads, and we can make sure that our syllabi include information about these offices for students, make sure that our materials are accessible, make sure that we think about these students and teach for them, and not just white students who are well-prepared 18 year olds.  (I don't remember ever having a conversation with a person of color that revealed that that person had never thought about diversity.  We may not have gotten to diversity, if, say, we were standing in line at the grocery chatting about the cold weather, of course.)

The thing is, we should be making these efforts as a standard thing, and should be able to talk about why they're important to us.

For those with a bit more time, think about student groups on campus you can support with a small investment of time.  Maybe you can offer students in a discussion a small bit of extra credit for attending a Pow-Wow or talk on campus, or just take 5 minutes every week or two to tell your discussion students about some of the things happening on campus that they aren't already hearing about.  (No need to tell students that there's a football game, but do they know there's a drum group?  a chemistry speaker?)

If you have more time, then you can do some other activities, perhaps volunteer, whatever.

For those of us who care about diversity, we're looking for colleagues who demonstrate that they've worked to gain some awareness, made some basic efforts.  In an English department, we're likely to hear about teaching authors of color, teaching race issues in earlier lit, and so on.  But if you're applying in a chemistry department, you might really stand out if you've thought about how to mentor students of color or women in your courses, folks traditionally underrepresented in your area.  I can tell you that I have colleagues in chemistry here who think diversity is important, and who'd give that application additional attention because that's a qualification for teaching chemistry for our students, and for the students we want to come study here.  Take diversity and social justice seriously; it's not a throw away for many people reading your applications.

If you're a person of color, or a person with a disability, then you've probably already got ways to talk about your experiences and your commitment to diversity.  You've probably already put in the time to work towards social justice in a variety of ways.  But doesn't mean that someone reading your application will know about your experiences and work unless you tell them.  So tell us, please!

Program X

Our contract period started, and lots of friends have already started teaching.

My to-do list is a bit overwhelming.  Holy cow!

Meetings, endless meetings, scheduled for the next couple of weeks. 

There's a program here, let's call it Program X, which provides a degree, and is the only such degree for about 80 miles around, and far more in some directions.  The problem is that Program X requires a good amount of resources but has very few students.  And we don't have all the resources we should for Program X, though we like to pretend we do, so the few students we have don't really get a strong Program X degree.

Every few years, we have a meeting and someone has a big plan to "save" Program X.  Some of these solutions are about getting more students, others about cutting down resources.

Early on, Program X's director wanted to cut one of the required courses because students didn't like it, and most faculty didn't like it.  But it was one of those "how to research in this field" courses, so not having it made the program a bit weaker.  A part of the material was added to another required course.  (There were, when I started, three required courses, an intro, a research methods, and a theory course.)

One year Program X added a new sub-program which, we were assured, would bring in lots of students.  It brings in a few, but mostly, people who were in the old program switch over.  But the new sub-program takes resources from the old, so the old program was cut down, making it even weaker.

Then Program X's director said that with the new sub-program, we really couldn't ask students to do the theory course, and they didn't like it, and if they got rid of it, they could take more new sub-program courses.  So that change happened.  A little theory was going into the intro course, they promised.

More recently, Program X's director came up with the idea that students in another major could sort of do a double with Program X, and that would bring in lots of students.  Of course, in order to do this, the other major would be weakened.

Now, Program X has a new director, and unlike the other directors, this one very much wants to get into administration.  Since they've been here, they've been taking on or trying to take on increasingly administrative roles all over.  In some ways, they're good at this.  But holy cow, every time I'm in a meeting, this person has to talk, and my brain just shuts down on them.  This may be me being a jerk, or it may be a response to the administrivial jargon they tend to use for everything.

It sounds like the new director is making a big push for assessment (quite natural, given the climate), and re-asserting the other changes in hopes of attracting all those students to do the extra program.

(On one level, this person is pushed into administrative stuffs by those above, but they're "missing" one quality the upper administrators love, and so I think that's held them back.  I don't think they'd be a great administrator, but I don't think that's the quality that's holding them back, since other folks who are crap get pulled up into administration fairly often.  The quality this new director is "missing"?  Whiteness.  Yeah, that's a problem around here.  And so I both root for and dread the new Program X director's desire to get into administration.)

Grand Jury and Feguson

Ferguson. 

I watched the news announcement last night, and knew from the way the man in charge went through things that there'd be no indictment, and there wasn't.

What I didn't know, until friends started posting about such things, is that it's actually really rare for a grand jury in the US to return a "no true bill" finding.  (Here's a source: FiveThirtyEight: "It's Incredibly Rare for a Grand Jury to do What Ferguson's Just Did")  According to this article,

The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

The article goes on to note that you can't directly compare a Federal and State Grand Juries, but it still gives a sense that it's really rare for a Grand Jury not to indict someone when a prosecutor argues they should. 


The Nation has an article up about "Why It's Impossible to Indict a Cop."

And Think Progress has an article up where "Legal Experts Explain Why the Ferguson Grand Jury Was Set Up for Failure."


It's a busy day here, as always, but I'm feeling ignorant and subdued.  I really don't understand the Grand Jury process at all (though I've been learning a lot in the past few days).


I have a feeling that I'm witnessing, though from afar, one of those moments that's going to be very important in history.  Or maybe I just hope that this will be one of those moments where you point back and say, "a big change began as a result of this."