When I started this blog nearly a decade ago I called it “Associations.” The term invoked the “what” and the “who” of the endeavor.

What: occasional musings about connections between writing and knowing, between writing and community, between writing and being.

Who: me as a writer trying to write, or at least the “me” that is an academic.

That’s my official title: “Associate Professor of English.” And as I return to this blog after some time and consider what’s next, I thought to consider the term and the title “associate.”

Faculty hired right from or soon after earning their Ph.D. programs are most likely to start off as  “Assistant professors.” An Associate professor is the promotion that usually comes after the professor has received tenure.  This happened for me seven years after my initial hire (which was, at that time, considered delayed; my  tenure “clock” stopped when my childcare clock rang).

It’s perfectly respectable to be an Associate professor. For the last decade plus (plus) I’ve quite enjoyed being just that. But it’s a “mid” level rank. ChatGPT actually used this term “mid” to define my position. (I love when A.I. and slang collide.)

“Mid” has a neither here not there status. You aren’t meant to  hang out too long in mid-land. You’re supposed to keep moving. Up.  To “Full.”

It takes considerable work to make it to this next, last level in the academic ladder. And there are good reasons to want to be Full. Full comes with a (modest) salary bump and (also modest) prestige.

Still, the term “full” lacks poetry.  A reward for moving up is to get stuffed? To have had enough? Of what? I’m moved by “associate” and motivated by professor. But “full” just doesn’t inspire.

And yet there are a lot of full professors out there.  They make up a small majority of the academic workforce.  26.4% of these highest-ranked professors teach in American colleges and universities while 22.7% of us are Associates. This surprised me.

There is more to say about the status of college labor force and the role of tenure and non tenure-track ranks in the academy.  For now though I’ll stay with the discovery that there are more Full professors than Associate.

I’m surprised by this because everyone I seem to know (well) in academe is either differently ranked–a lecturer, an adjunct (see above about labor)–or they’re like me, an Associate. These are the scholars I write with, the colleagues I committee alongside. What do we have in common? Well all of us are more likely to be mentors, directors of programs and projects, and…women, as this 2023 Inside Higher Education reports. My experience tells me another shared trait is that we’re all pretty “associative.”  We work independently on research and teaching but we also spend a good part of our energy trying to connect our scholarship to each other, to students, to communities not necessarily fully engaged with or embraced by higher education.  In my case, that means organizing around K-12 literacy access. In one of my colleague’s case, it means helping to set up urban gardens, something she knows about because of her studies in sustainability.

To be sure, many Full professors do this connective work too, even if they are at the satiation point of their academic career. Yet it must feel different. And as I prepare my application to become Full professor I wonder what might get lost if I am awarded this promotion and no longer officially engage in academic activities from the “mid” place: where we look ahead, behind, and also all around.

I read the The New Yorker to find out what to read. I take my direction from the magazine’s always on-point book reviews. But Louis Menand’s December 20th review essay, about the dire state of the humanities, prompted me to write to The New Yorker and to write about writing.  Here is my letter about the role of composition in revitalizing the humanities, published in the January 24,2022 issue.

It’s winter in The Bronx and we’ve had a bit of a gloomy start to the new year. So here’s to this New Yorker looking ahead to spring (or at least to the spring semester), and to the writing classes that may help us turn the page on the past, and even compose a new chapter for 2022.

I read in reverse. Here are two examples:

Ocean Vuong’s poetic On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous got me through the endless month of pandemic March. But inexplicably I turned its mystery into my mania. “Magical realism in the outskirts of Hartford, CT…hmm…that’s maybe too…different.”  I went back to the prosaic after that. From The Atlantic I devoured then became deflated by an essay by Benjamin Taylor, excerpted from his book about being friends with Philip Roth. It demanded answers. “Why is this my new required reading? Still I pay  homage to the canon of a childhood deconstructed long ago…”

A few days later, my reflection.  The snark, that suspicion: it was you reading, not me.  Never trust men making pretend they’re authentic, right? Right? Please react so you can come back.

This month I tackle revision of chapter five of my book, The Composition Commons.  The chapter presents research on the reflective letter–letters students write about a finished piece of writing.  Familiar to many composition instructors trained in “process pedagogy,” today reflection has become an important tool for promoting self-assessment. In 2016, reflection was described as “critical” to a writer’s development, one of the “threshold concepts” for writing studies.

Reflection does make judgments and encourage progress. But my research reveals that reflection does more for reading than writing. Reflective letters uncover what was not written, what was not said, and what we might say now if time were different. It archives mourning.

What does it mean to mourn collectively as a class, in real time? That’s chapter five.

Inspired by scholar of reflection, Pat Belanoff

For David.

I am a tryhard. A tryhard wants to fit in and stand out at the same time. They want to be noticed but not remembered. Being a tryhard can be exhausting and sometimes leads to serious regret. (See my class picture circa 1990, which I of course will not let you see. Please know that I have awoken to the brute truth that curly hair resists the bang.)

A tryhard does things slightly off-color enough…see my crazy-print tights!…but not too wild to stick–tattoo on my ankle…it’s washable!

I know I am a tryhard because my children told me so and then I worked hard at being good at that. When they told about my new identity, I laughed. “Yeeesss! So true” I nodded. Then I looked up tryhard. Now I am writing about being a tryhard (or am I analyzing why these half-formed minds think I am a tryhard?). Surely you’re convinced now.

Today, someone kind and smart, a fellow-educator with bang-appropriate hair, told me she read and shared one of my blogposts. At first, I tried hard not to look like I was trying hard not to be touched. But then I reread said post and figured something out: being a tryhard makes middle school and middle age exceptionally challenging. But it may make writing right.

Being a failure is in. We hear often–from self-help books to business manuals–that the secret to success is learning how to fail better. It’s not enough to accept mistake. We must embody it as a critical part of the process. No failure, no next find.

I am a writing teacher. So I’m all in with this new attention to error as inevitable, interesting, even generative.

But too much focus on potential benefits of failure can make us forget that the only way to get anywhere is being open to the process, to tryhard.

Writing isn’t really about mistake or mastery.  It’s about working to reach others, it’s about revision. We try hard to know if, and how, our words are working in other minds. And because we change and evolve, because we grow out our hair, we need to do this over and over again until we get it right.  For now.

March 15, 2019:

This is the brief talk I gave as part of a panel welcoming students accepted or wait-listed to The Graduate Center at CUNY.  Here I describe a class I’m teaching now, focused on the “academic novel” and that genre’s relationship to pedagogy, critical university studies, and, relevant to the audience of this crowd, making meaningful, transformative relationships at the university.

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Because soon you’ll all soon sign up for classes, and because attending and teaching class is something we all have in common, I thought I’d tackle our topic by describing a course I’m teaching right now at the GC.

The class is called When Composition and Literature Meet: Critical Pedagogy and the Campus Novel.  First, let’s get something out of the way: “When Composition and Literature Meet” is a terrible title. But I chose it because, perhaps like you, I feel a special urgency about the fate of the university and its role in making meaningful, maybe healing, alliances.

“Meeting” implies something of a happenstance relationship and that certainly describes the tie that binds my two fields, composition and literary studies. You might say the two have met up for a series of bad dates in the hallways of English departments for over a century. Fraught with power plays and disappointment, literature and rhetoric keep connected because every so often we sense that maybe, this time, we’ll get it right. In the late 19C for example, before there was such a thing called “literary studies,” the upstart field of “English literature” deferred to departments of Rhetoric. But then criticism took off, close reading became cool, and composition was contained by the newly hip mansplainers of meaning. Critical theory’s rise and the canon’s fall offered conditions for common ground and the two kept talking through the end of the 20 C. But relations remained strained.

You’d think that today’s attacks on the humanities might move these fields from polite conversation to collective action. But unity proves elusive.

So my class is an experiment in trying to make composition and literature meet up without the hang-ups of this disciplinary history. The conceit of the course was that they meet up in the space of a particular genre: the campus novel. But week three of the term and already the books called my bluff.  The campus novel, like the campus itself, proves a poor host for renewing or creating authentic relationships. Romance, friendship, and camaraderie yield perpetual pain and paralysis for characters in Michael Thomas’s Man Gone Down and John William’s Stoner and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty while isolation, competition and a war between creativity and conformity dominate plot points.

Still, we are loving these novels: we love wrestling free what’s good about the bad teaching moments depicted in them, love designing proposals for how we might do things differently from the conflicted characters of the classroom.  It’s an existential exercise, a meditation on the present, for us.  For we are only at the beginning of forming (or in my case, reforming) ourselves as scholars, students, and teachers and yet we show up, week after week, after a long day of teaching and otherwise working, to do this work of reconnecting broken characters and campuses.

So Composition and Literature are not meeting up. But we are. And that may be the best next thing.

This is the talk I gave at the Critical University Studies Friday Forum at The Graduate Center , CUNY on Friday October 20th.

I’ll open my talk with something participatory. If that’s upsetting to you (as it would be to me) I promise it will be over in 3 minutes. Going around are index cards where I’ll ask you to respond to a prompt I use to open every class I teach at Lehman.

Very briefly, describe the most recent thing you read or wrote—this could be the text you are sending right now, the Facebook post you are reading now, it doesn’t matter. What did that writing or that reading DO for you? Now please take one more minute to share this with someone sitting next to you.

Many of you do a version of this kind of active learning technique because you’re innovative teachers. Or perhaps you’re familiar with the pedagogies created out of the New York City Writing Project or Writing Across the Curriculum programs or critical teaching or digital humanities/digital rhetoric initiatives. I have learned almost everything about teaching from these interventions into university learning.

But let me start with full disclosure: the reason I do this sort of participatory, “flipped classroom” thing has embarrassingly little to do with a good pedagogy.

I do it to alleviate pain. I mean the radically, critically important moment of pain that comes from teaching—from that encounter with others. It’s the daily (or Tues, Thur, Fri for me) nervousness and energy that happen in the moments right before I step into the classroom, those moments of truth when I think “well, can I do it…again? Can I face them—will they face me?”

I’ve been having these moments of truth, these moments of pain and connection for nearly 20 years. If you’re just starting out as a teacher or about to become one, let me assure you:  it never gets easier.

But it does get more interesting. And more important. That is, if we believe, as I do, that “the great mistake” of our time is the privatization of higher learning. The “great mistake” is Chris Newfield’s phrase from his recent book The Great Mistake. Here he argues that the nation gave up its most essential resource—mass intelligence for a mass democracy—when it gave up on public higher education. He wants a return to investment in public higher education, with monies and with commitment. Here is one of his most eloquent and expansive definitions of the “great mistake” and his hope for public higher education to reclaim its place in the nation’s democratic ideals:

 We face many policy obstacles, but I found in my travels around the country that we face more fundamentally a loss of confidence and vision. I became most concerned about privatization as an ethos. To bend the term somewhat, I have been concerned about the weakened character of the collective practice of higher education that separates us emotionally and psychologically from the public vision of full participation in higher learning across all economic and racial groups.

Newfield’s book is forward looking. But the ideas buttressing it are as old as the humanities and certainly as old as the general education revolution of mid-twentieth century. He argues that “creativity” fueled the federal government’s financial commitment to mass higher education in the post World War II period and quotes from the famous 1945 Harvard report on general education, General Education in a Free Society, which ignited curricular reform across the country. The report saw universities as the beacon of democracy, in that they

reflect two characteristic facets of democracy: the one, its creativity, sprung from the self-trust of its members; the other, its exposure to discord and even to fundamental divergence of standards precisely because of this creativity, the source of its strength (my emphasis).

Creativity, discord, collectivity, and self-trust: these old, abstract humanistic values translated into real reform in the last century and can again. Indeed the general education curricular overhaul that Newfield celebrates served our department, English, quite well—increasing funding for scholarship in literary studies and encouraging unprecedented growth in research and majors.  It’s good to be reminded of this national interest in the humanities, in public higher education, and in English departments.

But today I want to remind us of another legacy of the mid-twentieth century general education curricular overhaul. The humanities’ boom was, often, composition’s bust. I don’t mean writing courses were cut. In fact, first year composition courses exploded in this period and required “basic writing” became nearly universal at the undergraduate level. I mean composition was cut off from this national vision of creativity—marginalized as preparatory courses for the real content that happens in theory or critique—anywhere but here. Literary studies and reading became synonymous with these “public good” values—creativity, collectivity, self-trust. And “basic” writing became the preparation for those values.

That too was a great mistake.

But we don’t have to repeat it. If Critical University Studies is going to embark on a new vision for higher education, if it’s going to be critical but also creative about public higher education, we at CUNY and, in particular, we writing scholars and teachers, might ask how our students could be part of the content of the new creative nation.

Which gets me back to the index cards that began this talk. I asked you to record semi-private moments of pain or uncertainty or simple acknowledgment of this moment, of our encounter. In my classes, these presentist, self-exposing moments happen every week, all semester until we’ve collected hundreds of them. For the final project students read through these cards, choose at least two from each student in the class, and then create a digital map, superimposing their reflections onto the official representations of the course—my syllabus, excerpts from the reading, passages from their writing.

This is just one step moving us from private pain to public good. I’m sure we can think of many others.

Thank you.