Category: modest proposal

#heforshe · administration · equity · ideas for change · modest proposal · role models

What can I ask for? A modest proposal

aimeemorrison8 Comments

Academic women are often confounded when presented with the opportunity, obligation, or occasion to ask someone for something: money, teaching release, academic accommodation, etc. This confounding almost invariably results in women structurally under-asking and under-receiving, relative to male peers. And I know how to fix it.

What am I talking about?

Let’s say you are applying for a grant that requires matching funds. (Matching funds: some combination of you, your institution, partners or sponsor kicks in some money, and the granting agency matches it.) Let’s say you are asking your research office or some other funds-holding body on campus for these funds. My dearest spouse has been the receiver of such requests, for a variety of programs, for the last ten years, from hundreds of researchers. Here are the two far ends of the spectrum of requests, composites and only slightly exaggerated.

—

Professor A: “I need the research office to give me $50,000 in matching funds for this big important grant because I am big and important and if I get this grant the university will look bigger and more important.”

My spouse: “Well, no. We don’t even have $50,000 in that entire fund, and we must serve multiple researcher requests.”

Professor A, ten seconds later: “How much is in the fund?”

My spouse: “$10,000.”

Professor A, five seconds later: “That’s not very much! I need that $10,000 and who can I write to to ask for more? Is it the VP Research? What’s his email address?”

—

Professor B: “I’m so sorry, but I think I have to ask you for some matching funds for my grant? It’s a funder requirement. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”

My spouse: “Of course! How much do you want?”

Professor B, after delay of three days: “I don’t know, is maybe $1000 too much?”

My spouse: “Don’t you need more than that? How much do you need?”

Professor B, after a further delay of three days: “I don’t want to be a bother! I’m so sorry I’m doing this wrong! What can I ask for? Maybe I shouldn’t submit this grant, I obviously don’t know what I’m doing.”

—-

Guess who gets the most money here? These are composite cases, but the gist of it is incredibly common. Professor A asks for the moon, and when shut down proceeds in a completely unembarrassed way to find out what the maximum is, and then to ask for that. Professor B is cringingly embarrassed to have to ask for anything, tries to ask for the absolute minimum, and upon receiving a followup suggesting the ask be altered, assumes they themselves are incompetent and withdraws from competition.

I leave you to guess the gender distribution into A and B categories.

I leave you to guess who wins the most grants, get the most matching funds, gets better funding, thus puts themselves in line for accolades and further prestige. Guess.

Me, there are a bunch of opportunities I don’t pursue because I would have to ask for resources. My first year as grad chair, I missed out on some recruitment funds because I wasn’t sure if I was entitled to ask, if my asks were reasonable, who I was being compared against, what the priorities were, and how much money I could ask for and for what. There was a “cookie jar” of unallocated funds. All the grad chairs could ask for funds from it, as needed. Well, shit, I don’t perform well under those conditions. No rules, no criteria, no guidelines on what and how much and how often and when. I’m getting nervous just thinking about it. I also hate it when people ask me my fee for talks: shit, I don’t know. How much are you paying the other speakers? What’s your budget? What would be reasonable? Just the other week I was on the verge of a clinical breakdown and my plan was to complain on the internet instead of asking for help that would cost someone money–like a good girl I waited for it to be offered to me. I know people, by contrast, who legit fight to get their teaching all arranged on ONE day of the week so they never have to be on campus.

People who aggressively ask, get more stuff. Aptitude for such aggression is often gendered. Institutional acceptance of aggression is often also gendered: you know, “God, she’s so pushy and demanding, who does she think she is?” versus “He really has no tact, but what a genius!”

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A modest proposal 

In the spirit of He for She, I’m going to ask the mostly dudes who are in charge around here to do something pretty simple to make the soft-money and informal-arrangements a little fairer to the shy people as well as the bold. The team players as well as the out-for-themselfers.

Lay. Out. Some. Fucking. Parameters. Make them clear, specific, visible, and enforced.

For matching funds, why not have a page describing the process, something like this:

For X Award, researchers must secure matching funds from private and public sector partners, and from their institutions. Normally, the Office of Research can offer between $2500 and $7500 in matching funds in support of applications to this program. We are happy to work with you to determine your needs and to help you fulfill them. In some cases, extra funds may be deemed necessary, and such requests will be considered by the Important People Committee. 

Me, if I knew the parameters of the possible, I would feel WAY more comfortable making an ask. If I knew that the whole thing is negotiable and contingent, I would feel WAY more comfortable with a fuzzy rather than perfect ask.

I think the Powers that Be also need to note that many women are going to be more Professor B than Professor A. And even with clear parameters, are probably going to ask for less. I know it is tempting to let the shy and accommodating people just take less money, so you can get the aggressive and self-aggrandizing Professor B some more money so that he will leave you alone. But maybe that’s not, actually, fair. Maybe that’s not, actually, about whose proposal or whose research is actually better or more worthy, but about who is the squeaky wheel, and who is not. It’s resource allocation based on noise, not quality, frankly.

We can figure out new ways to be transparent about teaching allocation, and informal accommodations, and all the other “soft” requests that we always resist formalizing because of a desire to maintain “wiggle room.” I suggest to you, though, that some people are wiggling a lot harder than others, and tend to jostle the rest of us right off the bench and onto the floor. Wiggle room is often an excuse for the arbitrary distribution of resources, even if we like to frame it as room for empathetic discretion.
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A modest suggestion

Many Hook and Eye readers, I am sure, identify way more with Professor B than Professor A. And that’s fine. So do I. But it’s worth learning a little bit about how the other side lives. I have learned, for example, that it’s not necessary to be embarrassed by asking for too much or not enough. Someone will tell you “no,” but it’s not “NO BECAUSE YOU ARE A FLAMING IDIOT OMIGOD I CAN’T BELIEVE WE HIRED YOU.” It’s more, “no, can’t do it — reframe the request and I’ll consider it again.” Or sometimes it’s just, “no, sorry, ran out of money, oh well.” Seriously. I just learned that, like, this year.

It’s admirable to want to be a good team player. But not to the point of total effacement of your own needs and desires. I deal with enough Professor A types to never want to be that person. But I have been Professor B enough times to know that I’m never going to reach my potential that way either.

So if you are a B type, see if you can push yourself a tiny little bit out of your comfort zone. Maybe you have book deadline in a teaching term — maybe ask if you can do some repeat courses instead of new preps in that one term. Maybe you have taken on a big admin role — maybe you can ask to have your courses compressed into fewer days to buy yourself some breathing space. Maybe your one course consistently overenrolls way higher than other similar courses — maybe you can ask for TA or grader support. Just ask; maybe it will be no, and that’s ok. But maybe it will be yes.

#alt-ac · #post-ac · careers · grad school · ideas for change · modest proposal

Professionalization when "the profession" isn’t (only) what we’re aiming for

Lily Cho1 Comment

Like many, my graduate program has long had a mandatory professionalization workshop series–PWPs, as we call them–that all PhD candidates must complete before we’re allowed to graduate. Rachel Cayley wrote a useful blog post last week that distinguishes nicely between professionalization and professional development, and PWPs are very much about professionalization as Cayley defines it: they happen at the department level, are targeted at preparing grad students to work within, and eventually become tenured members of, our discipline, and are run by faculty. (My job at SickKids, in contrast, is about professional development as Cayley defines it, which happens at the institutional level, is generally aimed at less discipline-specific or narrowly academic professional skills, is often explicitly about non-academic career preparation, and is run by people like me). As professionalization, my department’s PWP series covers the usual stuff that one needs to succeed as a graduate student who is aiming to become a faculty member: conference papers and journal articles, job applications and interviews, teaching, writing the dissertation proposal, applying for scholarships, etc.

I somehow managed to miss out on one of our PWPs–“Professional Resources and Strategies,” run by our own Lily Cho, who also happens to be my supervisor–and squeaked it in on Tuesday, just in time to defend. Because I’ve been at York since 2008, I’ve been able to watch with interest the shifts in how it understands and addresses what it sees as the fundamental purpose of graduate education. I started out as a new PhD student in a graduate department that spoke of “the profession” as though there were actually just the one, in 2012 became a graduate assistant in the Faculty of Graduate Studies whose job it was to research professional and career development programs on campus and across the country, then in 2013 took a full-time job in administration and launched the Faculty’s university-wide graduate professional skills program. Back in 2008, the PWPs I attended didn’t acknowledge, never mind confront, the idea that we were training to become anything but tenured professors at R1 institutions. In her PWP, however, Lily spent quite a bit of time acknowledging that a workshop on strategies for professionalizing within academia occupied a fraught position given the awareness that only about 20% of us would ever enter that profession. It made for a useful and realistic but strange sort of workshop, and it made me wonder:

What does professionalization look like when “the profession” isn’t, or isn’t only, what we’re aiming for? And how do we balance the need to prepare all of the graduate students who are interested in that route for the academic job market and a future academic job in case they do end up in one, while recognizing that we’re professionalizing 80% of them for a profession they’ll never enter?

The other grad students who were in Lily’s PWP with me wondered this too, and they seemed to find her very considered attempt to do both things–acknowledge the realities of the job market while preparing people for that market–disorienting. A couple of them suggested dispensing with a discussion of those realities altogether, which certainly would simplify things. That’s essentially what we do at SickKids, in some very specific contexts. We do a lot of transferable-skills type professional development, but I also coordinate a thing called PI Prep School, which is a very comprehensive career development program designed to get people jobs as academic scientists (or principal investigators, i.e. PIs). It covers everything from preparing job documents to establishing your first lab, and includes a full day mock campus interview (awkward lunch with the hiring committee included). At the PI Prep School intro session, we talk very little about the job market for academic scientists, which is just about as bad as any other. Mostly, we just proceed as though everyone in the room who wants an academic job may very well get one, and work from that premise. It’s straightforward, and while it might be unrealistic, it does away with the uneasiness that the mismatch between purpose and reality seemed to create for some of the people who attended Lily’s PWP.

But PI Prep School is aimed at preparing people only for the very last part of being professionalized–the point at which you move into being a professional–and only those people who are interested in and committed to going that route participate. The people interested in learning how to do a good job talk either know what the job market is like and have decided that they don’t care, or don’t know and don’t care to know. A discussion of the realities of the job market they’re professionalizing toward could, and largely has been, dispensed with. But what about a mandatory workshop on publishing journal articles, or giving conference presentations, or teaching? To a certain extent, those workshops could be considered useful to all grad students because those activities are arguably a part of the graduate degree, although you could absolutely–if you had no intention of becoming an academic–never publish a journal article or give a conference presentation as a PhD candidate. But how do we–or do we need to–address the fact that these professional competencies, when framed in specifically academic terms, are attending to the professional futures of so few?

Some of the other participants in Tuesday’s PWP seemed to think that we don’t, but I’m not sure I agree. I was, like many people who began their PhDs alongside me, woefully unaware of the academic job market when I started, and only became aware as the market in my field–Canadian literature, never a very robust one to begin with–tanked very loudly after the economic downturn. My program made no effort (at least that I was aware of) to make its students aware of its academic placement rates, or of the other kinds of jobs its graduates were taking up after their degrees. PWPs talked about “the profession” without the scare quotes, as if there were only one, and contextualized the professionalization we were doing only as preparing us for that singular career path. I found the culture that approach promoted very damaging when it came time to figure out my own non-academic career path, and I’m certainly not alone in that. The old approach served very few, and my graduate program seems to have realized it. Lily’s workshop is evidence of that, and so too is the new #altac workshop the department is bringing me in to run as part of the PWP series starting in the fall.

I’d suggest that there’s a third way to approach this–not to professionalize as though entering academia is inevitable and the only option, or to get caught up in the seeming strangeness of professionalizing 100% of graduate students for a job 20% of them will have, but making professionalization a little more like professional development. One of the things that professional development for graduate students works to do is to make clear to PhDs the transferability of their skills to a fields and jobs in and out of the university environment. And while professionalization as Cayley defines it is about preparing people to be professors and academic scientists, what we teach in professionalization workshops and courses isn’t applicable to just that profession. Yes, the PWP on writing articles and giving conference presentations is aimed at helping us build our C.V.s, but it is also–and could, perhaps should, be explicitly framed as–preparing us to be effective writers and public speakers wherever we end up. Writing grants is a key part of being a faculty member in most fields, and a major topic in professionalization programs, but guess what? A major proportion of the non-professor PhDs I know work in research funding administration, writing, developing and administering grants (me included). Let’s talk about that in our PWPs. The same goes for Lily’s professional resources and strategies workshop: the same strategies that she suggested as useful for becoming an academic professional (making connections with people in your field, reading blogs by people who write about higher ed, keeping up on major trends, figuring out the dress code, going to the most useful conferences) are the very same ones that help you become a professional in whatever field you choose.

It isn’t a major change, and it doesn’t require much of professors–not much more than figuring out where else academic skills could be useful and then talking about it–but it might solve the problem of professionalization when “the profession” isn’t (only) what we’re aiming for.

administration · modest proposal · structural solutions

The TP Index

Lily Cho


Recently, when an intrepid undergraduate, Laura Woodward discovered, as a result of her investigative journalism, that Ryerson has an institutional double standard in terms of access to two-ply toilet paper (not surprisingly, students get single-ply whereas a range of administrative offices seem to be supplied with the cushy stuff), I made a joke on facebook about the TP index as a quick and dirty (sorry) way of measuring administrative bloat (I just can’t seem to help myself) in higher education.
But then I got to thinking about another TP index: the ratio of tuition to presidential salary.
I got to thinking about this because I showed this slide in my first-year course on business and literature (really, it’s not as bad as it sounds):
Sources: Parliament of Canada and York University Salary Disclosure Report 2014
(Note the particular elegance of the parliamentary formula for prime ministerial compensation where the PM’s salary is exactly double that of the average MP.)
We had been reading Thomas Piketty on income inequality (and the really interesting ways that he uses the literature of Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, and Henry James in order to illustrate the effects of income disparity) and the rise of what he identifies as an era “extreme meritocracy” where executive pay has climbed to new levels. As the 25 September 2015 Times Literary Supplementreports in its review of Piketty’s new book, The Economics of Income Inequality, “Over the past two decades, the ratio of CEO pay to the average pay of their workforce has widened in the USA from 20:1 to 231: 1 (with banks themselves leading the way with a ratio of 500:1).” The AFL-CIO measuresthe rate of CEO pay in Canada to be approximately 206: 1. In the university community in Canada, we have started to pay more attention to administrative compensation than ever. Perhaps most famously, there was the recent Chakmagateat Western where we find President Amit Chakma apologizing for his $924,000 compensation in 2014 and offering to return half of it. So, well, yes.
But to return to the scene of my undergraduate classroom, there was at first confusion about the guy on the on right. Understandably, we can’t all be expected to know who the president of York University might be or what he might look like and it seems okay that he is somewhat less recognizable than our current prime minister. But after we sorted out the who’s who, we did of course try to figure out craziness of these metrics. How is it that two public servants can be compensated in such a way where the guy who decides if we should go to war is paid much less than the guy who decides what tuition should be? My point here is not that the prime minister should paid more, or even that the president of York is paid too much. I did stress to my students that President Shoukri’s pay is completely in line with that of other university presidents in Ontario and around the country.
However, they were understandably still perplexed by the actual numbers. To be honest, I am too. I don’t really know why or how we have come to these salaries. I am especially confused by the fact that this compensation extends past their tenure as presidents. But this is not a discussion about how Canadian university presidents’ pay has skyrocketed. And I know that we are all confused about where the money goes.
I just want to talk about how my students processed all this information and what we can take from that.
My students immediately talked about way in which they experience university as a financial problem: tuition.
Although I will be the first to resist the narrative of students as consumers, I do think that considering tuition in relation to administrative compensation would offer a useful way to think about the connection between university administrations and students.
For example, high pay + low tuition would mean that this is one of the few times when a high ratio or a significant gap would be welcome.
Of course, the ideal would be low pay + low tuition.
At my university, full-time tuition for most non-professional programs, including compulsory supplemental fees is $7102.
That means that the TP index at York is about 65:1.
At the University of Alberta, the outgoing president, Indira Samarasekera took home $544,00 in salary and just over $1.1 million in total compensation last year. Full-time tuition and fees for most programs comes in at $7068. That means the TP index at the U of A is about: 156:1.
Of course, indexes are just numbers and they are not numbers that tell us the whole story about any story, especially one as complex as one this one where we need to take into account plummeting levels of public investment in higher education and a range of other pressures on the university system as a whole.
But they do help us get to some big picture questions. How can we understand university executive compensation in relation to the other numbers that we have to think about? At my department meeting today, I was told York’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (where the English department is housed) is looking at a deficit of $6.6 million in 2015-16. At Faculty Council, I was presented with similarly dire numbers where the bars and arrows on the graphs were all going in the wrong direction. But there were no graphs on executive compensation even though I think we all know which direction those bars and arrows would go.
I’m not that interested in the actual numbers as far as executive compensation goes. But I’m very interested in the relationship between numbers.
In talking about income disparity, the general trend is to talk about executive pay as a ratio of that of the average worker. However, in universities, the vast majority of people who take part in the institution are students, and not employees of the university. To think about their place as indexed to that of the compensation of leader of the institution is to ask us to think about other kinds of disparities.  Here, we can go beyond access to two-ply. We can talk about access to education first and foremost. We can talk about access to having the kind of space for breathing and dreaming that an undergraduate education should enable but which many of my undergraduates do not feel that they can afford because they are terrified of being jobless at the end of their degrees. Last week, in a casual conversation, an associate dean in my faculty mentioned that our students seemed to have a kind of “hope deficit.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot. My experience of  teaching undergraduate students has generally been one of overwhelming gratitude for the courage and perspectives they bring to my classroom. But I know what this associate dean meant when she talked about a hope deficit. Our students are also often desperately uncertain about their futures and this uncertainty leads to a lack of hope and thus a real fear that studying something that might bring them real joy and pleasure can only come at some kind of terrible unspecified future cost.
And yet, we are in a national moment where even unicorns might be real. Or, at least, where the long-form census, un-muzzled scientists and diplomats, and gender parity in government cabinets are suddenly quiet real.
So, maybe what I want from the TP index is not so much all the outrage about outrageous pay packages (don’t get me wrong, I still care about that!), but rather something that takes up a deficit I really care about: hope. And with that hope a genuine belief that a university education really does, as I believe, make life better.
I’m not asking for unicorns (although I too would like braid their glorious manes.) The TP index is just my way of saying that we need a more profound connection between the president of a university and the students who are at the core of the university’s mission. But I’ll take some unicorns too.
academic work · best laid plans · empowerment · ideas for change · modest proposal · organization · saving my sanity

Drop in, tune out

aimeemorrison2 Comments

Here’s an experiment I’m undertaking this term: I hold four hours of in-person office hours every week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-4, and I encourage any student that needs anything from me to come by during those hours. If they’re out of town, they can call. At the same time, I’m also telling them: please think twice before emailing me. I’m overwhelmed with tiny tasks ping-ping-ping and I think you can solve most of them on your own, if you just spend five minutes looking it up instead of 30 seconds emailing me so that I can look it up for you. If you want me to solve your tiny problems, I say, come to my office hours and I will totally solve whatever you bring to me. But you might have to wait in line.

Some people keep emailing. I redirect them to my office hours. People are now coming to my office hours.

My office hours are the biggest party in my hallway all week. Students are sometimes lined up four or five deep. Some of them, I can hear calculating: could I fix my own problem faster than standing in line? Or, Wow, Professor Morrison sure has to help a lot of people. Or once they come see me: OH! I feel so much better now / I understand what’s happening / I know what book to read / Thanks for your help.

So far, I’m calling the experiment a success. I’m getting less email now, AND, I’m solving more problems for students, more quickly. I’m trying to really devote some Grad Chair time to direct student concerns, but without having it take over my entire life, which it was threatening to do before. Now that time is intense, but it is limited. I’m also, I discover, not super awesome with email. I have trouble triaging what comes in and I forget about stuff that slips below the fold, as it were. When I did my year end review with my chair, and had to identify my own strengths and weaknesses, I brought up the email thing before he did: I often drop the ball and while I keep working on my game, I’m not really getting that much better at it.

In my defense, I often receive malformed or misdirected queries: students ask me ambiguously worded questions without indicating some key salient piece of information, like that they’re part time students, or that they are paying international fees of something. These details are fast and easy to sort out in person. And there’s nothing wrong in students learning that there are 135 of them that I’m helping and maybe it might not be instant: the open door and the lineups make visible the advising labour in ways that help keep everyone’s expectations in check.

I might still fiddle the parameters. I might have a few more drop in hours, but I like limiting them to a couple of days of the week, to give me some flexibility to schedule the other work that I need to do, and not be on campus 35 hours a week like last term: that was too much, and productivity suffered. I’ll probably survey the students at the end of the term to see how they liked it. But my sense is that everyone is getting what they need, and faster, and with smiles, and I love to see them and they’re even having fun together out in the hallways. It’s convivial.

And it helps hold back the ever growing email tide, at the same time as it models a sensible approach to overload. For me, at least.

A couple of my colleagues have expressed skepticism. They use email to track their work and their to-do. I know I used to be like this, too: “Send me an email to remind me!” I’d say. But then, honestly, I’d let the email slide off the first screen and forget anyway. This is how you get to inbox 2000.

For me, a good solution to a good chunk of my email overwhelm was to enforce a system whereby I still do the work the email required of me, but I don’t do it over email anymore. Because I have some tiny modicum of authority (this is why so many students need my help) I can shift the culture and the expectations by fiat. I hope it works out for all of us. Like I said, it’s an experiment.

In fact, I feel so freed by this loosening of the email noose that I’ve finally found the wherewithal to start up that drop in writing workshop for dissertating students. Sixteen of them showed up to our first  meeting, and we all wrote for an hour. And none of it was email.

balance · body · busy · grad school · modest proposal · parenting

In Praise of Sleep

janasmithelford4 Comments

It’s Reading Break! Phew….

Somehow I’ve managed to get halfway through my first semester of teaching, and coincidentally, half way through my first stack of papers. I’ve been grading leisurely this past week, with curling in the background (the Canadian Women’s Curling Championships ended a week ago), finally with space, it seems, to breathe.

This past weekend was one of the most relaxing I’ve had in quite some time. With no teaching pressures for the next week, I wasn’t trying to cram every spare moment with reading, writing lectures, or class prep of some sort or another. I took my daughter to an indoor playground, baked muffins, slept in, lazed around my house in my pajamas, and vacuumed my whole house for the first time in (gulp) over six months. It was really nice.

If I haven’t said so before, I’m going to say it now: teaching for the first time is intense and exhausting. Selecting books and writing the syllabus aside, the weekly lecture writing, assignment creation, and grading (my students do weekly reading responses), has made me, well…a bit frazzled. So far, I’ve been managing (with only a week of major slip-ups) to stick to my semester goal to keep my teaching prep to teaching days, write two days a week, and spend daily and weekend time with my family. But it has come at a cost: my sleep.

Sleep has been shown to be essential to all kinds of things: memory, focus, and concentration, safety, immune function, cardiovascular health…I could go on. But one of the things I’ve just started to piece together about myself and sleep is that when I don’t get enough of it, my stress levels go up exponentially. It doesn’t matter if all my work is done or if I’m fully on top of all my responsibilities, if I’m not getting enough sleep, I’m stressed. Period. And stress, apparently, does not do good things to your brain.

You’d think being several years into a PhD program would mean that I would have already figured out this crucial bit of information. But, believe it or not, PhD + Baby ≠ deep and intimate knowledge of the value of sleep. Although I’ve learned to deeply appreciate the moments when I have the “luxury” of sleep, I’ve failed to make it a priority.

This reading week, I’m determined change that, and I’m hoping my resolve will stick around for the semester. 

Do you prioritize sleep? Or is it often the first thing that falls to the wayside when you’re busy?

day in the life · kid stuff · modest proposal · parenting · righteous feminist anger

Snow Daze

aimeemorrison

This morning dawned bright and clear and dangerous: the coldest weather ever recorded in Waterloo. Environment Canada was telling people to stay indoors and leave their taps running. Daycares, all the schools, our dance studio, garbage collection, day programs for seniors, all cancelled. Exposed skin could freeze in 5 minutes. A blizzard or blinding squalls were also predicted.

The university? Remained open.

Now, this is Canada. It gets cold. Dudes, I’m from Kirkland Lake, Ontario–45 minutes away from where that guy filled the Super Soaker with boiling water and sprayed ice crystals. I see your Uggs and raise you my knee-high Sorels and an array of lined deer-stalker hats. However. This was extreme weather, full stop, and certainly extreme for Waterloo. Everything else in town was closed. Many students rely on unreliable public transit, and waiting for buses outside is dangerous today. Hell, parking in our assigned space 1km away from our offices exposes us to dangers in this weather. If you can get your car to start. And navigate the roads. Avoiding those drivers who haven’t cleared their windshields. We should have closed.

The university’s closure policy used to be to follow what the local school boards decided. This was a good policy not least because the school boards get the word out before 7am, while Monday on campus, for example, the university put out its closure decision (“We’re open!”) at 8:52, after we’d had a 6 inch snowfall overnight and all the school buses were canceled. Attendance … was sketchy.

No, the really great thing about tying the university’s closure decision to the school boards was that it made life a whole lot easier for parents. Most of us can’t arrange last minute child care. Some of us couldn’t afford it even if we could. Those of us who are contingent do not feel safe bringing children into the classroom and risking looking “unprofessional.” Those of us with tenure might still not be able to manage our kids and our students simultaneously, depending on age, temperament, and subject matter. Students with children are even less likely to feel able to bring them to class. And I know I’m not bringing my daughter to whatever meetings I still have to go to: she knows too much from dinner chatter and I live in terror of what she might blurt out. Ahem.

The university keeps proclaiming its interest in work/life balance, and in recruiting and retaining female faculty. (The university has a big new daycare! It was closed today, due to extreme weather …) It remains true that in most families, when the kids are suddenly off school, it’s Mom’s problem. At my house it’s my problem if Dad’s got meetings, and it’s Dad’s problem if I’ve got teaching or meetings. It’s very stressful, and today our daughter spent the morning playing the My Little Pony video game on her father’s iPad, in his office. I dropped them off right at the building door, before driving to the closest parking lot I could pay dearly for, and staggering in to my meeting.

I know this is a very specialized problem. I know that many businesses in the so-called “real world” don’t close in bad weather. But taking “sick days” to deal with child care on snow days is not really possible if you’re teaching or taking classes.

All I’m saying is, I guess, that the old system was more humane. It aided work life balance, and was attentive to the needs of women in particular. Sometimes we got a snow day that turned into soft rain and a bad call, maybe once out of every 10 snow days (so every 4 or 5 years). I think that’s a fair price to pay for making the lives of a community of more than 30,000 undergraduate students and 5100 grad students, 1100 (full-time permanent) faculty members and 2200 staff members. The university is the size of a big town, and has a lot of decision-making power, and it seems to keep choosing to grit its teeth in the face of real life, domestic and climatological. The rest of us are grinding them, stressed out and frozen and dragging seven year olds across the frozen steppes with us. Take the lead, UW: be better.

modest proposal · you're awesome

Don’t read the comments. Write them!

erinewunker4 Comments

It seems like all the signs point to “never read internet comments.” It’s true: the more you’re invested in a topic, the more broken-hearted you will be if you read the comments on the internet. The Atlantic has a piece on internet comments, and how they’re still pretty awful. There’s a twitter account dedicated to dissuading you from the very thought. It’s hilarious, and you should check it out. Everybody and her cousin will tell you not to read the internet comments. I’m here to propose something revolutionary: don’t read the comments, but write them instead! I exaggerate, of course, but while writing thoughtful, encouraging, or just plain decent comments won’t shift the axis of the Earth, it might shift the terms of discussion and make the internet a better place for women and for everyone else.

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There are several separate, but similar instances that have led me, an avowed long-time blog lurker, to think and act. While I haven’t transformed overnight into a prolific comment-writer, theses instances have made me rethink my role as avid internet user as a responsibility. It’s kinda like voting: if you can, but opt not to vote in an election, then what have you done to improve your political landscape? Here are the things that have occasioned my mental shift:

1. Under the heading “Sikh woman teaches Reddit a lesson in tolerance,” Balpreet Kaur’s story of bravely taking control of her own narrative unfolding derisively on Reddit became viral. What struck me was the pedagogy: Balpreet transformed a potentially traumatic event into a teaching moment for the internet. As a teacher, I thought I could do the same, and take the two minutes it lasts to write a comment. As an academic, on the other hand, I suffer from chronic perfectionism syndrome, which is part of the reason I’m such a reluctant commenter: “surely, it would take too much time I don’t have,” I would tell myself, “to put this thought into cogent prose that would represent my persona accurately.” But here’s the thing: the anonymous commenters who generally overpopulate the comments section [present company excluded, of course*] and transform it into a snake pit obviously discard their venom immediately, and without any packaging; also, the genre does not require polishing beyond what’s generally due to a tweet, a FB status update, or an SMS text. Bottom line: take the five minutes it takes to add your two cents, support an opinion you agree with, or demystify an idea in polite terms.

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2. Michelle Moravec and Heather Froelich performed a corpus analysis of the comments in an open thread on Postcolonial Digital Humanities website, and came up with startling results, especially for an academic discussion:

Of 38 individual commenters producing a total of 153 comments, we coded 26 commenters as male (68.5%) and 12 (31.5%) commenters as female. 72% of all the comments were written by men compared to 28% written by women.

Beyond comments:
3. The Wikipedia stats on women editors stand as the most eloquent example of why we need more feminine and feminist voices  online. As teachers, we know, probably best of all, that EVERYBODY reads Wikipedia; that it’s the first line of information, for teaching and for research. And yet, this example shows that far fewer women engage in editing Wikipedia articles than men. There are drastic consequences for this statistic: women writers are under-represented or brushed aside; if they exist at all, entries on women are underdeveloped. As one of my wonderful students put it, “women’s voices have been silenced long enough,” so why aren’t we taking this opportunity for redress? There are many reasons, and this blog response to the article from NYRB linked above lists nine of them.
4. Even if it’s impolite to quote oneself, Hook and Eye has many articles on why more women’s writing, reviewing, and commenting is vital. 

Finally, there are many circumstances impeding women’s participation: time, labour, emotional investment, fatigue, etc. We’ve discussed them here on H&E, and their disproportionate propensity to affect women. Yes, we need to draw a line between enough and too much labour. But do consider, every now and then, writing a comment, a Wikipedia entry, or a review. We have the expertise, the skills, the knowledge. Let’s get ourselves a voice!

* There are many good reasons to remain anonymous, especially given the environment I am describing, and what’s often at stake in revealing one’s identity. I am not referring here to people who feel this pressure, but to those who use anonymity to spew vitriol, as our commenting policy puts it.