Weekend Reading: Butterflies in the Sky Edition

There’s not much of a theme to today’s reading list. Perhaps this is appropriate for a summer Friday. In any case, enjoy!

• First (and this could take your whole weekend, and that would be okay), there’s the #YesAllWomen hashtag, which began in the wake of the UCSB shootings. If you’ve not yet, spend some time with the tweets and with the many articles of essential reading to which they link.
• This week the MLA’s Task Force on Doctoral Study in Language and Literature released its report, which makes a range of recommendations for Ph.D. programs with an eye toward the current job market and changing goals for graduate study in literature and language fields. Make of its recommendations what you will, but the report is brutally honest in its assessment of the failures of our current system of graduate education (and, importantly, labor).

  In the light of persistent criticism from within the academy and from a larger public, the legitimacy of doctoral study needs reformulation if we expect to meet the challenges and opportunities of the moment. We are faced with an unsustainable reality: a median time to degree of around nine years for language and literature doctoral recipients and a long-term academic job market that provides tenure-track employment for only around sixty percent of doctorate recipients. We as members of the scholarly community must insist on maintaining excellence in our research and teaching by recognizing the wide range of intellectual paths through which we produce new knowledge. We must also validate the wide range of career possibilities that doctoral students can pursue.

• Along related lines, Kristine M. Bartanen recently published “Digital Scholarship and the Tenure and Promotion Process” for NITLE, which usefully packages some of the major threads of conversations around digital publication and tenure into a single article. This would be particularly useful as an introduction to these issues for institutions beginning new conversations along these lines.

  For some, digital scholarship is considered difficult to evaluate because it more often crosses customary boundaries of teaching, scholarship, and service than does traditional scholarship. This territory is a “mixed-use landscape” that liberal arts college faculty members often cross in their careers on teaching-intensive, residential campuses where multiple forms of scholarship are evident in evaluation portfolios, where mentoring of undergraduate research produces co-authored scholarship with students, and where community-based teaching and civic scholarship transcend or elide those same traditional boundaries.

• In lighter reading, I enjoyed Mark O’Connell’s piece in Slate about “quotation websites and the outsourcing of erudition.”

  But the real villain here, as far as I’m concerned, is this vast quote-aggregation industrial complex that doth bestride the narrow online world like a colossus, to paraphrase … I don’t know, but let’s go with Shia Labeouf. These sites—your quotefreak.coms, your thinkexist.coms—cater to a growing appetite for filleted wisdom, for deboned wit, for the mechanically separated meat of literature. I myself use these quote aggregators more often than is probably wise to admit. As a reader, I’m constantly underlining things in books—sentences, passages, whole paragraphs and pages—as though the decisive act of taking a pencil from behind my ear and drawing an emphatic line beneath a particularly fine phrase will somehow imprint that phrase in my memory. It doesn’t, of course. Within a week, I’ll have only the faintest recollection of the phrase. And so I’ll find myself googling “schopenhauer pendulum boredom” or whatever, and I’ll wind up on BrainyQuote trying to separate the pessimism from the Peanuts.

• Finally, Michael Bérubé's “For Hire: Dedicated Young Man with Down Syndrome” is a sensitive, touching, and honest reflection of a father helping his son through a major transition. Bérubé pride and anxiety are both on display, and contribute to a moving and provocative article.

  That was the hard part. What is Jamie capable of doing for a living? Our first checklist filled us with despair: factory work, nope; food service, nope (not fast enough); hotel maid service, nope; machine and auto repair, nope. (Though Jamie expressed interest in auto repair — not a moment of astonishing self-awareness.) With one agency, Jamie had two CBWAs followed by detailed five-page write-ups: one doing setup for conferences and meetings (tables, chairs, A/V), the other doing shelving at a supermarket. Neither went well. He had trouble stacking chairs, dealing with the duct tape for the A/V setup, and attaching skirts to tables. At the supermarket he had trouble with the U-boat, the device that carts dozens of boxes out into the aisles — and besides, they were only hiring graveyard shift.

Our movie this week? “Reading Rainbow"—enough said.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Joel Olives.]