Wendy's new assignment

About five minutes ago, the IVC community received this email from Vice President of Instruction Craig Justice:

Colleagues:

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Wendy Gabriella, Professor of Anthropology and Academic Senate President, to Instructional Coordinator of Academic Programs, Office of Instruction, for the 2009-2010 academic year. Wendy will continue to co-chair the 2010 Accreditation Self-study Steering Committee. She will coordinate numerous operational projects for the Office of Instruction, including the Basic Skills Initiative grant program, Early College Program (Instructional Planning), some research projects conducted by the Office of Institutional Research, and will assist the Vice President of Instruction with enrollment management, program review, strategic planning, as well as other important projects.

According to the Academic Senate Bylaws, Professor Lisa Davis-Allen, Academic Chair of Visual Arts and Academic Senate Vice President, will become the President of the Academic Senate.

Please join me in extending our enthusiastic support for Wendy and Lisa as they serve in their new assignments.

It is my understanding that Wendy is receiving 100% reassigned time (i.e., reassignment from her regular teaching duties) to serve in this capacity and that she is not teaching any courses this semester.

It is no secret that VPI Justice, who has a reputation for intelligence and hard work, has been encumbered by startlingly numerous responsibilities since he came to IVC two or three years ago. (At IVC, deans, too, seem chronically overburdened.) That problem led to a proposal, last spring, to create a new IVC deanship—a Dean of Academic Programs, Student Learning, and Research. The proposal, however, was rejected by the SOCCCD board, perhaps owing in part to the need for frugality (or, anyway, its appearance) during this period of fiscal stress. (See April board meeting.)

A champion of openness and "process":

Wendy Gabriella has long been a faculty leader, but particularly starting in late 1996, with the emergence of a controversial conservative "Board Majority." (Arguably, the controversial "board majority" era continues to this day, though with somewhat different players.) In 1997, she and I twice sued the district board for its violations of the Open Meetings Law, when, repeatedly, the board met in closed session to make decisions that should have been made openly and with clear notice to the public.

(In those days, many objections to the board's conduct boiled down to the charge that the trustees and chancellor violated or circumvented established and legal "process"—something that nowadays is sometimes expressed in the demand for "transparency." It was during this period that the board violated its own policies and "best practices" (or so said the accrediting agency) in promoting the administrative career of Raghu P. Mathur over seemingly far more qualified candidates, especially in selecting him as chancellor of the district. Mathur continues to be chancellor of the district.)

Wendy also assisted in district students' repeated and successful challenges to the board's restrictions on student protests (initially with regard to administrative and board behavior that jeopardized the colleges' accreditation) and adoption of new "speech and advocacy" policies that violated student speech rights.

Most recently, Wendy led the effort to challenge the district over its disregard of a state statute giving faculty (i.e., the Academic Senates) the right to mutually develop (along with the district) a faculty hiring policy. That effort was successful and, by some accounts, constituted a landmark victory for faculty governance rights in the California community college system.

Epoch-shatteringly delightful!

Recently, I posted about a district almanac page that presents the distribution of grades given to students at our two colleges (during the Spring semester of 2006). The upshot: the faculty of our colleges—and especially Saddleback faculty—give lots more A’s than any other grade. (See What we have here is failure to evaluate.)

I’ve done a little research since then, and, as it turns out, this kind of grade information is fairly readily available, owing to such entities as the website Pick-A-Prof (PAP). According to Wikipedia,

Pick-A-Prof is a pay-to-use online website found at www.pickaprof.com that hosts professor reviews and other academic tools and services for university students and professors. …
…
The site posts grade histories of professors. The grade history graphs display the distribution of grades from A’s to F’s.

This feature displays the semester(s) a professor teaches a particular course and the average GPA each professor gives in that course. While searching for a course, the site shows the professors teaching the course, a 5-star rating system ..., the number of student reviews submitted for each professor and the percentage of students who dropped the class.
…
Many professors say the website portrays their courses unfairly and students will hesitate to take their classes if the grade distribution reported on Pick-A-Prof does not match their definition of earning an “easy A.” ….

I found a year-old article in UC Santa Barbara's Daily Nexus (New Web Site Evaluates Professors) that reports that

Pick-A-Prof won a lawsuit against University of California, Davis in 2006 that opened the gateway for the widespread publication of professors’ grades. The site sued the school claiming that professors’ grades were public record after the university had originally given out the grades but then refused to release them.

I’ve been told (but need to verify) that our own district has handed over grade distribution records per instructor to Pick-A-Prof.

So I visited PAP, and, sure enough, PAP has the data, at least for IVC. (One must register to access PAP's data, but there's no charge.)

I looked up Professor Roy Bauer and found that the fellow gives lots of A’s but many more B’s and his “G.P.A” (i.e., the average grade he gives) is slightly below 2.0 (C) for “Intro to Philosophy” and slightly above 2.0 for “Ethics.”

Bastard!

Naturally, I provided a review of this fine fellow. I gave him five stars (the maximum) and wrote that he is “epoch-shatteringly delightful.”

And it's all true.

For those youngsters who were mystified by my earlier allusion to Cool Hand Luke:



I think I'm beginning to like this Anderson Cooper fella:

Exit Tuffy

Tuffy the Titan gets pink slip from Cal State Fullerton (OC Reg)

Poll: Should O.C. colleges slash liberal arts to save money? (OC Reg)

One on One Interview with George McGovern (OC Reg)

McGovern gave a talk last night at the Nixon Library.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "that which we are, we are"

A lot of poetry invoked today by people who don't read enough. Sigh.


Here's the one that they are all looking for, the final stanza from Tennyson's poem, "Ulysses":

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

(photo by Ted Soqui)

The school of Fish: "sham" writing courses

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce
Special orders, don't upset us
All we ask is that you let us
Serve it your way

The New York Times’ Stanley Fish is at it again. (See What Should Colleges Teach?) Peevitudinal hectoring. You know.

He's worried about writing ability. Even grad students, he carps, can’t write “a clean English sentence.” What’s up with that?

According to Fish, it seems, the problem is that composition classes teach “everything under the sun,” but they don't teach composition.

Years ago, her writes, he secured the lesson plans of 104 composition classes and he found that

instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization.

Yep, that’s what they do. Is that a bad thing? Students have to write about something, don't they?

Fish, being Fish, adopted a bold and unpopular position and then commenced bulldozing: “unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”

“Nothing else,” eh? Is that even possible? Perhaps, our readers who teach composition can weigh in.

Oddly (or no?), Fish says he now has “support” from a right-wing organization:

Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni …, [f]ounded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995….

Yep, that Lynne Cheney, the wife of you-know-who and the author of the notorious novel Sisters. (Gosh, it’s got lesbian action. OK, but surely this is surprising coming from Cheney, that right-wing culture warrior.)

He’s only “slightly” uncomfortable?

Fish does criticize the ACTA’s willingness to “monitor academic work from the outside.” The “cure for the politicization of the classroom by some professors is not the counter-politicization urged by ACTA,” he says.

Still, he finds much in ACTA’s recent report (“What Will They Learn?”) to agree with:

With respect to science, composition, foreign language instruction and mathematics, ACTA is simply saying, Don’t slight the core of the discipline.

In essence, Fish adopts the mantra: “teach the subject matter and don’t adulterate it with substitutes.”

Got that, comp instructors?

Students are offered too many choices, too many options, says Fish (and Cheney, et al.). Instead, college instruction should focus on a coherent “core curriculum.” Fish quotes Cheney and Co.:

An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.”

Yeah, that’s been E.D. Hirsch’s big point. Communitarians sometimes harp on this. Makes sense to me. Up to a point.

From there, Fish does part ways with the restrictive right-wingers:

The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun….

OK, comp instructors. What do you think? Are your comp classes a “sham”?

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "everybody passes"

Here's a poem by Tony Hoagland for the first day of classes from your comrade and colleague, Rebel Girl - who is on sabbatical this fall, missing you all. Really.


Memory As a Hearing Aid

Somewhere, someone is asking a question,
and I stand squinting at the classroom
with one hand cupped behind my ear,
trying to figure out where that voice is coming from.

I might be already an old man,
attempting to recall the night
his hearing got misplaced,
front-row-center at a battle of the bands,

where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians,
amped up to dinosaur proportions,
test drove their equipment through our ears.
Each time the drummer threw a tantrum,

the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs,
as if they wished that they could knock us
quite literally dead.
We called that fun in 1970,

when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving.
I’m here to tell you that they were,
and many of us did, despite ourselves,
though the road from there to here

is paved with dead brain cells,
parents shocked to silence,
and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood
the quaking tint and texture of red jelly.

Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads
to show where we have been;
we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin
to show what we were thinking

when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn,
and Death kept blinking.
But here I stand, an average-looking man
staring at a room

where someone blond in braids
with a beautiful belief in answers
is still asking questions.

Through the silence in my dead ear,
I can almost hear the future whisper
to the past: it says that this is not a test
and everybody passes.

Fluffy ruminations about the Deity

Check out Nathan Schneider’s fluffy ruminations on the “ontological argument” for God’s existence (in yesterday’s New York Times). Included: this caricature of Anselm's famous a priori reasoning:


Thomas later rejected the argument, but then Descartes revived it. Immanuel Kant is often thought to have driven a stake through its abstract heart. It's dead, and yet it isn't. It is a zombie.