On November 10, 2015, I was the guest speaker for the Induction Ceremony of the Golden Key Honors Society at Lehman College, CUNY.  Here’s what I said:

Congratulations! Thank you so much or having me here and for giving me the opportunity to speak on behalf of my esteemed honorees.

I could go on forever about what a momentous occasion this is (some of my students are here and they’re like, “yeah that’s true, she can talk”). But we’re short on time so let’s begin with a brief writing assignment. Please take out a pen and paper or a laptop. If you’re without these things, it’s okay. In a minute I’ll pass out a blue book so you can answer questions about the meaning of today’s ceremony.

Just kidding. I really don’t have a writing assignment for you. But I bet if I did have a writing assignment, you could do it.

No, I know you could do it. Because you’ve already done this. Countless times in your college careers you’ve marked occasions by writing them into existence. When you wrote that History paper, or the lab report, or the short story, or the political argument you probably did not call these tasks “momentous occasions.” But that’s what they were: the occasion of deciding that you cared enough about your thinking to put yourself and your mind out there.

Of course we care in all kinds of ways.

But for the next three minutes I want to argue that one of the most profound ways to care about anything is to find a way to write about it using language—the common fabric of our humanity.

Now you might think that the only reason I’m celebrating writing is because I’m an English Professor. And because I’m an English professor I just love writing. I mean, what could be more pleasurable than spending Sunday nights alone at my desk, staring at a blank screen, waiting for sentences to come for an essay due weeks ago, while the rest of New York City settles in for a good, long evening of Netflix binge-watching? And what could be more gratifying than finally finding those sentences at 2am, then waking up at 6am to realize that these are, by far, the very worst sentences I’ve ever written and therefore I need to: make coffee, clean my closets, bicker with my children, and, finally, start the whole thing over again.

No. I don’t love writing. Like everyone else, I kind of hate it. And I hate it because it’s so hard. It’s mentally and physically exhausting and takes up too much time. And yet I continue to write. I always will. And I think you will do. All of us in higher education write. We need to write. Because putting observations and ideas and issues and problems and positions into words are ways to counter both epistemological and existential loneliness. We compose to recognize ourselves so that we can reach out to others.

Just for a second, let’s think about the steps you’d have to take if I actually did give out these blue books, and if you actually did have to do an on-the-spot essay.  The first thing you’d do is get pretty pissed off. Fair enough. But then you’d do something amazing: you would attempt to read my mind by getting out of yours. That is, you’d try and figure out what on earth I wanted from you. Then you’d start writing with that perspective in mind. Soon, you’d find yourself getting a little bit into this assignment. And once you did, you’d forget all about my question and my needs, and you’d start writing for someone or something else. And just like that, in under a minute, you’d be time traveling and shape shifting. This is writing: a superhuman, supernatural activity.

Because we live in an age of instant communication, we may forget just what a miracle the technology of writing is. But it is a miracle: of persistence and perseverance and caring and connecting.

When I teach writing, whether freshman composition or advanced literature courses, I always begin class with the essay “The Death of the Author” by the French philosopher Roland Barthes. Barthes argues that when we read we shouldn’t worry about an author’s intended meaning. Instead, we should connect to great works by writing back to them: by participating in the life of that work. In Barthes’s words, a text’s purpose “lies not in its origin but in its destination.”

He means that writing not only says, it does something.

But literary theorists and English professors aren’t the ones claiming that writing prepares us for surprising paths.  Just a few months ago, the President of the United States said much the same thing. Perhaps you’ve read the conversation between President Obama and the Pulitzer Prize novelist Marilynne Robinson published in The New York Review of Books. In this discussion, President Obama reflects that reading and writing were his greatest teachers. They teach us to “be comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found…that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you. “

It is gratifying to know that all of us here, and those who will be here next year and the years after, are different but connected, alone in our thoughts but together in thinking, and that our divergent destinations have found productive, caring ground at college, in this room, on this momentous occasion which will no doubt take you very far. Congratulations.

Assignment: Compose an analytical essay about your experiences in this first semester of college.  What might these courses help you do in your future?

Draft One-Nov 8, 2013

I am not taking any class this semester other than this English 111.  But I am teaching three, and learning something different from each one and, about the experience of teaching three classes and taking one.  The first thing I am learning is that there is never a day, when I am taking or teaching a class, that I don’t want the day to be over before it starts.

That is because teaching, for me, is about performing some kind of enthusiasm for a subject. And I am increasingly suspicious of my subject.  I constantly ask myself, as a scholar and reader, the question that propels this writing assignment: “What will this subject yield in the future?”I confess that I don’t know what students will do with “The Novel” or “Basic Writing” or “Cultural Studies” in the future, because the future feels foreign to me, in the way that it didn’t when I was a student.  It feels at once so new—robots, globalization, cyber-reality—and so sure of itself—we will know everything soon.  Insisting to students that they are learning something from the word of the mind, from literature and intellectual discourse is, well, challenging.  Insisting that they, or I, connect to (or confine to) a version of “success” is also problematic.  

 Perhaps that is what propelled me into this profession to begin with; I thought of knowledge, literature, and culture as ambiguous, what we used to call in the 1990s, a “construct” created by some hegemonic discursive power (I think that’s a direct crib from Foucault).  My “profession”—my subject—is, largely, the “professoriate”—academia, and more specifically, the study and teaching of language, literature, and rhetoric.  That definition, is itself emblematic of the way my subject matter resists the definitive.  Question: “What have you learned from taking this course in writing, in the novel, in literary theory?”  Answer: that we need to continuously re-evaluate what we are learning based on what we read, who we encounter, what history does to selves and societies.

 But ours is the age of the definitive.  The “Common Core” and CUNY’s “Pathways” and the “Race to the Top” culture demands defined success.  And I think it is more than my own mid-life crisis (did I mention I am taking a freshman composition course?) that makes me question what the study of literature and writing will mean as data and determined rubrics for skills take over the economy and education.

 And so, back to the beginning: I am enrolled in first-year composition because I am looking forward to figuring out what to do in this age of transition. And writing seems one way to find out.

Draft Two

Can the Future be an Outcome?

There used to be two versions of the college course syllabus.  There was the one the professor gave to the students and the one she kept in her head, or in her drawer, or in a file.  The students’ version, the “official” or public copy had all the usual information needed to navigate the class from week one to week fourteen: dates organized by weeks, readings due, assignments and their deadlines, and policies—the  “I won’t accept late papers” or “Midterm counts for 30% of the final grade” or “Office hours Tuesdays from 11:15-11:40”—type of policies.  I’ve received dozens of these syllabi over the course of four years in college and five as a graduate student; I’ve given out as many since becoming a professor of English in 2000.  The purpose for these documents was to map at the trajectory of the course; the purpose of the courses was presented as more of a promise: show up and fulfill the requirements of the syllabus and the meaning of the class for you, for your studies, indeed for your future would be revealed.[do1] 

But as the economic downturn, globalization, the ubiquity of digital media, the changing geopolitical power structures of nations becomes the norm, “the future” and what will count as meaningful and important for success in it, is increasingly unknown and complex.  At the height of uncertainty, scarcity of resources and technological and cultural complexity comes a new kind of syllabus: the outcomes statement syllabus[do2] .  This essay explores the relationship between the courses I teach—humanities seminars and beginning writing classes—and these new syllabi.  I find the relationship vexed and ambiguous[do3] .  Here I attempt to work through some of the thorny issues of that connection and to consider whether the new college syllabi—and, presumably, more outcomes-oriented college courses—can lead to a “successful future.”            

In the outcomes syllabus, a professor includes the learning goals for the course and how these goals will be measured, through assignments, feedback, and, ultimately, rubrics that offer a grade. The simplest and, to my mind most accurate, definition of “outcomes statements” comes from Christopher Gallagher, a professor of writing: “statements identifying what students will know or be able to do at the end of an activity, unit of instruction, course, or program of study” (44).[1]  Google “syllabus” in courses ranging from Physics to Philosophy and you’ll find these statements, especially from public colleges and universities, where they have been mandated with more oversight than the private, liberal arts institutions[2] [do4] Outcomes statements can be very rigorously specific or aspirational and vague vague, like my own.[3][do5] 

 In the early years of the 2000s, American colleges and universities began mandating these statements in college syllabi. A recent report[do6]  published by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education offers a brief history of the studies leading to this decision.  The dominating question of [do7] In an age when what counts as knowledge is shifting and since 2008 especially, when job loss and global economic crises change the funding for and priority in educational investment, outcomes have become one answer to the question “What is College For?” and more specifically, “What Will College Do for Me in the Future?”

In their widely cited polemic Academically Adrift Richard Arum and Josiah Roska join the ever-increasing chorus of naysayers who believe that colleges should be held accountable to better, higher, more accurate standards. Since the publication of that book in 2011and in concert with an ever-growing concern about government “entitlement” spending, assessment in general and outcome statements in particular has become a kind of panacea for a new education crisis. The last few years (2010-2013) have been particularly active for the Obama administration, which aims to explicitly link federal funding to measurable results of college-wide and course specific outcomes statements, as this recent Inside Higher Ed article explains.[do8] 

Traditional humanities courses, where students learn “critical thinking” and practice reading and writing in ever-increasing complex ways offer a challenge to the outcomes culture.  These courses, which marry skills acquisition (writing effectively) with idea-generation (reading critically), have many outcomes but not as many ways to measure them.  It’s not that you can’t measure whether or not a student has read particular books or can write cogently about them. You can. Professors and high-stakes testing and essay exams do all the time, with varying degrees of uniformity.  The challenge the humanities bring to outcomes involves something else.  Having satisfied all the learning goals of a course on, say, “The Novel” or “English Composition” or “Literary and Cultural Studies in the 1990s” (three courses I am teaching this semester) professors and students will still not be sure [do9] if those skills or “habits of mind” as we in the humanities like to say, will be obviously connected to “the future.”  That is, if the future means what the Obama administration is calling the “new” jobs of the “twenty-first century.”

In my own scholarly field, Composition and Rhetoric, there is an entire new sub-discipline emerging called that studies what one important article calls “The Question of Transfer.”[do10]  Scholars in this area of writing and rhetoric seek to find the cognitive and rhetorical links, the proven reciprocity, between beginning writing courses and advanced “discipline-specific” courses that happen later in college.  Some important data about writing and “reflection” and reading and advanced critical thinking have been made. But these findings won’t get to the question that drives this essay—the relationship between outcomes and obtaining “future success.”

Christopher Gallagher, the scholar whose definition I cited earlier, makes an important case for rethinking “outcomes.”  Outcomes can become useful, he argues, not as end-statements but if they focus more on the means of individual learning connected to larger programmatic goals.  Gallagher’s article “The Trouble with Outcomes: Pragmatic Inquiry and Educational Aims” uses philosophical Pragmatism as his way into this critique of outcomes statements. But his suggestion that we focus not on outcomes but on “articulation” between individual and larger goals, while enormously important, again doesn’t satisfy the quest for “future success.” That’s because (?) outcomes assume that a future filled with success is known, attainable, and desirable.  Now I don’t mean to suggest that humanities scholars are nihilists who seek [do11] apocalyptic tomorrows.  Rather I want to suggest that one of the most important purposes for college humanities courses is to question what I or you or “we” mean by “future.”

Some of us are having trouble (or, more accurately are troubled) by “outcomes statements” not because we don’t know what we are learning, or can’t measure it, or don’t believe in it.  It’s because we don’t know what the “future” should be, or mean, or do.  We never really have. Anyone who has ever tried to document reality in writing, or tried to come back to reality after being undone by fiction, or attempted to make connections between self and society, and between history and experience, and between the forces of political and social construction and the potential of collaboration and innovation understands that “future success” needs not only to be accessed but analyzed.  Courses in reading and writing question versions of, and syllabi for, success, future, past, and present. And that sounds pretty difficult to measure (accurately and in a way that is standardized across courses, not only at an institutional level, but at the level of American undergraduate education).

In the last year, recognition that the outcomes culture of my profession—the academy—and my chosen subject of study—the humanities—may be ad odds, or at least at a crossroads, propelled me back to the classroom.  Not to teach or to make statements or even to critique, but to experience.  That is, to experience what it’s like to encounter the requirements of a course in writing and reading while living in this age of outcomes.  And so I am in my second semester as a student of English 111, the first semester of freshman composition required at the college where I normally teach.  There is a syllabus for this course, with the mandated outcomes statements.  So far, just past the mid-point of the term, the professor and most of us students, are living up to those outcomes. And our collective ability to do so has quelled some of my anxiety.  But it has also introduced a different worry.  What happens when reading and writing can conform to a recognizable version of a future?  I suppose that is the subject for the next freshman composition assignment.

Ten months of almost weekly chronicling what was my sabbatical felt like the right thing to do.  It had purpose: writing was to keep me on track. Since I had no place to be—no classroom, no archives in Europe or writer’s colony in New England–I would mark time by filling this space.

Things have changed. 

That’s the second half of one of my favorite recent-ish Bob Dylan lines.  Here’s the whole verse from the 2000 tune:

 People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

On that note of acceptance and, in turn, an odd kind of optimism, I am updating this sabbatical blog.

Update: I am not on sabbatical. I am more than halfway through teaching three classes and, more notably, taking one.  So, it’s time to repurpose this writing project.

I will begin again by blogging about my adventures as a student of first-year comp. Most Fridays I can be found in Carman Hall 315 with the other twenty-one students in English 111, the first of two composition courses required at Lehman College. I sit in the far right row, closest to the door, third desk from the front. I take notes on my laptop in a space too tight for me and all my belongings—coffee cup, water bottle, purse, backpack, phone, jacket, sweater, gym bag. My things compete with my fellow students’ stuff: their books and ipads and phones and jackets and pens and arms and legs.  All of us sit at an angle, within sight but slightly out of range of the teacher’s gaze.

Scholarship–that is the reason I am subjecting myself to this strange experience of being a student at this time: mid-career, almost, probably, maybe mid-life. I want to write about what it’s like to  be a beginning writer in these complex times and I want to do that by researching composition classes.

Every week (or most weeks…I’ve been absent a few times) I engage in the practices required of beginning composition students—writing and reading tasks that are both infantalizing and, oddly optimistically, challenging.  Here are the two assignments I’ve completed so far:

–Descriptive Essay (of an influential teacher)

–Analytical Essay (of our experience as college students).

The first assignment inspired the article I am now finishing, “Freshman Composition and the Adjacent Possible.”  The second assignment had to be thesis-driven, an argument, about “anything to do with our experience in college.”  I decided to argue against the  “outcomes” culture of higher education (the move to make college courses adhere to unformed learning goals with assessable criteria). I explained how rubrics and outcomes are focused on what happens at the end of writing.  Most of the interesting thinking in a humanities course comes during the reading and writing and that, I argued “is hard to measure.”

The professor told me, rightly, that I didn’t “stick to that thesis.” I needed to really “figure out” where I stand on the issue.  Many of my classmates seemed to have that same problem–going in and out of conviction.  So I guess my revision will try to discover whether “I used to care but thing have changed” or “Things have changed. So it’s time to care.”

Stay tuned.

When August 1st arrives, it’s always a shock.  But this August 1st bring something more than shock. It brings recognition: back to reality. Today marks the first day of my last month before sabbatical ends and I return, after a year off, to teaching.  So this blog will be step 1 in my re-entry–a way to merge the semester that’s approaching and the summer that’s fading. My three courses for fall 2013 are:

1.  Introduction to Writing, for beginning composition students at Lehman College, CUNY

2. The Novel, for advanced English majors at Lehman College, CUNY

3. The 1990s: Complexity Science, Cultural Studies, Composition, and A New Humanities for Ph.D. students at The Graduate Center, CUNY

In the past, I’ve structured each class as an idea, often phrased as a question, like “What is Writing?” or “What Does the Novel Mean in an Age of Computers?” This year, I am trying to structure the three classes to work as one. This shift in perspective is thanks to a sabbatical reading about a host of changes that were brewing in the 1990s–in science, technology, ideology, culture.  I see these shifts coming to a head today.  And so I am thinking about my research on the 1990s and my teaching in 2013 as connected to a larger theme, something about the relationship between being at the beginning and being advanced, between introductory ideas and complex systems, between personal identity and social politics.

—

A complicated relationship between past and present, novelty and the already existing, art and the everyday, is currently on display in an art installation in the Bronx: the Gramsci Monument,  sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation.You don’t need to know much about the Italian political philosopher for whom the monument is built (Antonio Gramsci, who wrote the Prison Notebooks while in jail) to be moved by this project. The artist is Thomas Hirschhorn but construction of the monument was a collaborative affair, worked on in conjunction with the residents of the Forest Houses housing project.  The “piece” (or pieces) of this project,  make up a mini-neighborhood, with an area for an open-mike, for children to do art projects, for the radio station, the newspaper, the library and cafe.

By visiting, as my family did last week, you participate in its mission.  That mission is laid out by the artist, Thomas Hirschhorn, in four points:

 —Establish a new term of monument

 –Provoke encounters

 –Create an event

 –Think Gramsci today

The lessons of this space last well past the initial visit.  In viewing and participating, I became an expert and a beginner, a poseur and an intellectual, an artist and an accidental tourist all at once. The visit also helped me re-frame my return to teaching.  September is not a new beginning but a continuation of a construction project (art monument?) already in progress.

See you in class.