The life of the blind

November 9, 2010 By 3 Comments

out over the edge
Creative Commons License photo credit: HikingArtist.com

In the debate workshops I hold in support of management courses at Baruch, students practice articulating their positions on a wide variety of issues that generally revolve around the intersection of business and society.  A recent workshop focused on the merits of “Direct to Consumer” advertising of pharmaceutical products, a practice session that quickly spiraled into a much wider debate about the pharmaceutical industry in general.  Since I was playing devil’s advocate to the students representing Big Pharma, I essentially argued that, if money has infected all levels of medicine, from doctors to research scientists to the government that’s supposed to regulate them, then the consumer (or, “patient”) has literally no reliable source of medical information. American health care has been made into just another giant corporate industry.  If everyone in medicine has been bought, who can you trust?  I then reminded them of Dr. Jonas Salk, who, when asked if he owned the patent to the polio vaccine, famously replied “There is no patent.  Could you patent the sun?”

Later, on the train home, I realized that invoking Dr. Salk’s idealism most likely came off as incredibly corny to these business-minded Baruch students, who live in a world where the profit motive is applied to an ever-expanding number of things previously deemed too sacred to be corrupted by human greed.  The uncritical acceptance of this phenomenon is disturbing, to say the least. When I suggested that one of the team members could address ethical or moral issues, each team seemed to agree that morality was a side issue, something to be tacked onto the end of their presentations if they had time left over.  The students ended up covering a lot of ethical territory in their presentations anyway, but I still left the workshop with the sense that the next generation will happily go to work patenting the sun.

This semester, as I begin to more earnestly prepare myself to “go on the market,” I realize that my fears of a profit-driven health care system can be equally applied to another previously-sacred but increasingly-sold-out institution, higher education. A couple weeks ago, many of us had a cynical laugh at this viral video, which depicts an older professor giving a budding graduate student a brutal rundown of the horrors that await her in academia.  The student’s idealism is a subject of particular ridicule; her love of Dead Poets Society and desire to “live the life of the mind” come across as pathetic, clichéd attempts to sentimentalize an institutional experience that is more likely to constitute long hours of unrewarding labor, for a terrible salary.  The idealistic student should either drop their romantic illusions or get out of academia altogether.  In both scenarios, the idea of the “life of the mind” is left as a closed option, a laughable and childish delusion held by people that don’t understand the “realities” of higher education.

The conflict, for me, is that even though I laughed at the video, I really liked Dead Poets Society when I was young, and I’m betting that many of you did too.  I was the student who was entranced by the prospect of a “life of the mind.”  And though I’ve grown to accept the financial imperatives of living in twenty-first century America™, I still feel like those early idealistic motivations are primary in my inner life.  I’m as cynical as the next graduate student, believe me, but I also recognize that cynicism as a defense mechanism against the terrible feeling that graduate school is just a process by which I fashion myself into an educational product to be sold to the highest bidder (or any bidder, actually).

All of this makes me wonder, what is the point of our education?  We frequently lament that our undergraduate students view their educations as simply a means to an end, a way to “get a job.”  We fret that so few of them seem to want to “learn for learning’s sake,” instead concerning themselves with gaining “marketable skills.”  But isn’t this how so many of us have come to look at our graduate school educations, as little more than a path to the middle class?  I realize we all have loans to pay off, and I certainly enjoy my Blu-ray player, but I have the suspicion that, despite the mad rush of the market, most of us chose to pursue our degrees out of at least a small sliver of youthful idealism.  As that idealism, that feeling that the work we do actually matters and improves the world, is increasingly ridiculed and written out of our collective script, I can’t help feeling that the loss of the humanistic impulse in education is as scary and tragic as the “privatization” of human health care.  With those kinds of impulses and motivations fast disappearing, who is tending the light at the end of the tunnel?

Filed Under: Higher Education, Jobs, Politics

How to prepare and present a conference presentation

October 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

Two of my last three weekends were dedicated to that time-honored grad-student rite of passage, the academic conference. Reflecting on my own performances as well as those of my colleagues, I thought I’d compose a rough guide to the conference presentation. I hope that my fellow cacophoners might share and amend these guidelines I humbly offer. In the spirit of the efficiency celebrated by conference presentations themselves, I will organize these ideas in outlined bulleted form. I work within the social sciences, but I believe much of what I share here may be of use to you  budding humanists and natural scientists, too. Here goes:

Find a suitable conference

  • Sign up for email listservs for subfields and organizations you are interested in. Throughout the year you will get call-for-paper announcements (CFP) offering panel discussions to be a part of. Pay attention to the deadline and guidelines for CFPs. Read their panel description closely. Often they will have a certain rubric within which they are working, with a theoretical approach either tacitly or explicitly signalled.
  • There are many regional and graduate-student conferences organized for people still early in their careers. If you are at the dissertation proposal stage or still formulating your project, these kinds of events are a good idea. The grad student conference I attended in Boulder, Colorado, included very helpful workshop sessions on writing and theoretical approaches to the conference theme (“states of belonging”).
  • Many conferences also accept individual papers. You submit your abstract and they will place you with other “orphan” presenters. You run a greater risk of not getting your paper accepted or getting stuck in a hodpodge potpourri panel (like I was last weekend) if you opt for this approach.

Write a strong abstract

  • Most conferences want you to participate (and want your conference fees payment), but they do have limits and criteria for accepting papers. A compelling abstract is critical. Often this is an awkward exercise because  you have not written the paper for which you must make a synopsis.
  • You usually have 200-300 words to work with (the conference I attended last weekend confined me to only 100!), so you don’t have space to elaborate sophisticated concepts, nor to tell everything about your project. Use keywords that signal a certain literature that, after studying the CFP, you know the organizers will be attuned to.
  • Allude to a piece of research you have conducted or a fieldsite/event/documentary source that will serve as the material your paper examines.
  • HAVE A POINT your paper will advance. Even if you don’t yet know what that point is, make a concise and intelligible claim. Emphasize the innovative. The abstract doesn’t have to break new ground; it need only suggest your paper might do so.

Write the paper

  • The organizers will often want you to submit the paper for a discussant to read before the conference and prepare comments. Do NOT send a whole dissertation chapter draft or anything over 20 pages. At worst, the discussant will bear some contempt for this burden; at best, you are diluting her ability to give you concise feedback on your work. A presentation is typically limited to 15 minutes. It takes roughly 2 minutes to read a double-spaced page of text. So anything more than 7 or 8 pages is more than you can say in the presentation.
  • Write a ‘data-driven’ essay. If you are an anthropologist, load it up with ethnographic material. If you are a historian or literature scholar, delve into the primary texts. This will give your discussant a better chance at assessing your analytical points. If you saturate your argument in theoretical goop, it will be frustrating for an outsider with a different perspective. (There are moments when strategic obfuscation is advisable, of course.)
  • Most importantly, you only have time in a presentation to develop ONE maybe two points. In any case, no one will remember more than two points, so keep it tight. It is always more effective to go in depth into one particular aspect of your research than try to sketch together myriad pieces in one whirlwind showcase.
  • Signal early on what your intentions with the paper are. ‘Map out’ the argument so your audience can get a sense of what is to come.

Prepare the presentation

  • The text you submitted to the discussant and what you will say in the presentation should not be the same. There are different opinions on this, but I believe priority #1 is to keep people’s attention for the time you are talking. People generally stay more tuned in when they sense that someone is speaking to them, not reading to them. Some reduce their presentation to a series of points they talk through. This has the advantage of being “live,” but it also runs the risk of rambling. You might run out of time without a prepared text. One of my panel co-presenters last weekend ran well past his 15 minutes without ever coming to anything resembling a conclusion; he had to be unceremoniously cut off at 20 minutes with a curt “thank you” from the time-keeper. Ouch. Remember that by going overtime you are antagonizing your audience and colleagues on the panel. Be courteous.
  • If you are going to read your paper, go to the trouble of making it ‘sound’ better to listeners’ ears. Good general rule: Edit your text so that almost every sentence does not exceed one line in length. Cut down compound and complex sentences into simple declarative ones.
  • Remove all but the most essential references in the spoken version.
  • Practice reading your paper aloud for flow, emphasis, and timing. Replace unnecessary jargon or technical terms with more colloquial speech. You want to be familiar enough with the writing that you can pick your head up and speak to people.
  • Rules of PowerPoint: your PPT slides should absolutely NOT replace your paper; i.e. you should not simply read a bunch of bullet points and text excerpts off the screen to your audience. Yawn.
  • Your PPT show should complement your discourse. Show an image to illustrate a point you are making. Consider inserting a blank slide for portions of the presentation when you want the audience’s attention on you, not on the screen.

At the event

  • If you are using audio-visual equipment, get to the panel session room early to test it out.
  • Listen to your co-presenters’ talks and take notes.
  • Graciously thank the organizers and/or sponsors before you get into your paper.
  • Towards the end of your presentation, a time-keeper will usually hold up signs signaling your remaining time. Just acknowledge these with a nod and adjust your speech as needed. No need to interrupt your own talk with an exasperated “whoa! only 2 minutes left?”
  • If there is Q&A or discussion time, try to make an effort to identify connections between your paper and your colleagues’. If the discussant or an audience member says something misinformed about your research, keep a poker face or just politely nod.

There must be more to add to this, so all ye commenters please fire away…

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Higher Education, Jobs, Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Style

Rethinking academic labor

December 10, 2009 By 1 Comment

I don’t know how many of you are in the job market this year, but according to the report published in the November issue of MLA Newsletter , it looks grim in the field of English and foreign language departments. Catherine Porter, the president of the Modern Language Association, notes that job advertisements were down by 40% in English and by 52% in foreign languages, compared with October last year.

What is more alarming is that some scholars warn us that this recession, unlike others, can be not so much a silver lining for an upcoming bounce-back as the beginning of all-encompassing transformation of the postsecondary educational system. Time will tell us whether this is true or not. But in the ensuing paragraphs of her column, Porter suggests a number of ways to explore the impending issue of the productivity of academic labor in higher education. For example, she proposes that we should redefine productivity—in both teaching and research—in a broader context of globalization and the advent of the digital humanities. She also introduces various models for curriculum development and assessment created by universities and scholarly organizations including Carnegie Mellon’s hybrid model combining “on-line learning environment with instructor-led courses” (I would like to know more, but it was only briefly mentioned). Finally, the significance of graduate education and professionalization is emphasized with regard to collaboration among multiple disciplines and the role of graduate students as teachers.

I hear many different voices in response to Porter’s column including that of a CUNY professor. Despite the controversies surrounding the topic of academic labor, her column allows me to be more aware of what we do in the Institute—the development of Blogs@Baruch and the pilot project of Great Works assessment tool, for example—in a larger context of the ongoing transformation of university education.  Working for the Great Works assessment project, I have become more interested in kinds of models and platforms that we create and bring to the table. My initial idea of assessment was so naïve that I thought it would simply simulate the input-output corporate model to evaluate students’ achievement in a specific course. I now realize that the model is not given, but created by the collaboration among faculty, students, and university administrators. It also may not only seek an assessment of final outcome but also intervene every stage of learning process.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Jobs

Accent reduction….redux

November 4, 2009 By 4 Comments

In a recent Business Policy rehearsal, we were discussing anxieties about public speaking when one group member made the following statement:

“I’m concerned about my accent. The only way to get a good job in the U.S., is to not have an accent.”

I was stunned…. firstly, because this student did not have an accent that was impeding her ability to communicate effectively; and secondly, because I had never heard that this attribute would prevent someone from getting a “good” job.

The Baruch Campus is incredibly diverse, multilingual campus. Everyone has an accent of some sort, right? In this global economy, could this attribute truly prevent one from getting a job?

I bring this issue up again, link it to previous Cac.ophony thread discussions, the Baruch Teaching Blog, and Baruch resources…

A pertinent and persistent student issue!

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Jobs, Language, Oral Communication, Uncategorized

Let Us Now Propose Our Ideal University

June 8, 2009 By 2 Comments

Several weeks ago, an old friend of mine from my undergraduate days at Sarah Lawrence College (who, it should be noted, is about to enter a graduate program in Business Administration) sent me a link to a New York Times Op-Ed article. His comment was “this op ed is great. He’s basically saying that all universities should be like Sarah Lawrence.”

The editorial, “End the University as We Know It” by Mark C. Taylor, did not actually mention Sarah Lawrence College at all. The article does call for the end of the tenure system, of doctoral dissertations, and of the system of academic departments based on traditional disciplines such as Psychology, English, Philosophy, etcetera.

It is this last detail that must have reminded my friend of our alma mater.  That is, the curriculum at Sarah Lawrence is arranged around “problem-focused” topics (to borrow a phrase from Taylor’s editorial). Students can take courses such as “Surgically and Pharmacologically Shaping Selves” or “Contemporary American Politics: the 2008 Election in Context,” (two offerings from the 08/09 Course Catalogue) without being a Political-Science major or first taking introductory courses in medical anthropology. In addition, the way the professors are tenured — without rank — in disciplines rather than in departments allows for the fluid creation of new disciplines to adapt to changing fields of study. Disciplines such as Global Studies, Ethnic and Diasporic Studies, and Science, Technology and Society were created in all likelihood by interested faculty in extant disciplines. The college has no majors or minors. Every undergraduate takes a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree. Some students choose to prepare for entry into law school or medical school or to design a highly specialized program suiting their own passions. However, the net effect of this curriculum is that the college graduates class after class of knowledgeable generalists.

That is the extent of the similarity between Sarah Lawrence College and Mark C. Taylor’s idea of a “university for the twenty-first century.” Sarah Lawrence does not grant doctoral degrees so his suggestions about how to revise the dissertation hardly apply. Taylor’s suggestion of ending tenure certainly is not exemplified by Sarah Lawrence where all faculty, in theory anyway, are tenured or on the tenure-track.

The idea to end the tenure system, radically distracting as it is from his other ideas, seems to me the only proposal that Professor Taylor puts forth in the article that would actually address the set of problems he starts out with — the failing economy of graduate education. Prior to the recent meltdown in the global economy, the problem of a glut of Ph.D.s for a dearth of tenure-track positions seemed to me a bit of a bugbear.  Daunted by the job market as a doctoral candidate and no stranger to exploitation as an adjunct, I nonetheless had felt curiously optimistic that after several years of grueling applications I could land that sought-after tenure track position somewhere in the United States. This optimism had been based on the impending retirement of the baby-boomers, however, and it shrank along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the value of all those 401k accounts. Reading this Op-Ed after a season of cancelled jobs and announced hiring freezes, I found myself sympathetic to Taylor’s polemical claim that “graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning” and also found myself for the first time oddly receptive to a proposal to end the tenure system. Certainly, mandatory retirement age seems like a reasonable idea.

For many years, I have been pondering the economics higher education. With the skyrocketing numbers of young people enrolling in college and especially junior college in the United States, there must be another way to increase the access of all these students to higher learning than exploitive adjunct labor.

Professor Taylor’s proposals seem unlikely to implemented any time soon. But maybe his example should be followed. I propose we all go out on a limb and imagine our ideal universities. What ideas do you have? Perhaps the existence of one college that has managed to become an elite institution without playing by the rules (besides having no majors, did I mention — no grades!) should inspire us with the value of the improbable.

Filed Under: Administration, Higher Education, Jobs, Liberal Arts Tagged With: , , ,

Ability to Communicate Still the Most Desired Quality…

April 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I don’t know if everyone read the Sunday New York Times’ “Corner Office” interview?  Well, Richard Anderson the CEO of Delta Airlines talks about, among other things, the interview process and what he deems important when he is looking to fill an executive position.

And guess what? It is right up the “Communication Walkway” (my term).

He talks about communication as a number one element needed in today’s work world. He also talks about an individual’s personal life as a key factor to integrating them into the organizational culture. Therefore, it is very important to be able to articulate one’s background, ideas and opinions, not just work experience.

Here is an extract and the link:

‘He wants subjects, verbs and objects”

Q. And is there any change in the kind of qualities you’re looking for compared with 5, 10 years ago?

A. I think this communication point is getting more and more important. People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say written word, I don’t mean PowerPoints. I don’t think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don’t have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn’t have a subject, a verb and an object, so you aren’t expressing complete thoughts.

And here is another interesting tidbit:

You spend more of your waking time with your colleagues at the office than you do with your family and when you bring someone into that family — we have 50 senior leaders at our company and 70,000 employees — you need to make sure that they’re a fit to the culture. And that they’re going to be part of that group of people in a healthy functioning way.”

Thanks to Herb Brinberg for showing me and Mikhail this interview and to keeping us in the CEO Loop.

Filed Under: Jobs

The Schwartz Institute is Hiring

October 13, 2006 By Leave a Comment

That’s right, we’re hiring. In response to a whole lot of growth and thanks to lots and lots of generous support from various folks within Baruch and CUNY, the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College is able to add another full-time person — a Deputy Director — to help manage the myriad programs and projects we’ve got on our plate. Take a look at the job notice (after the jump) and please circulate it.

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Filed Under: Baruch College, Jobs