ComeBackZinc

It's a To the Lighthouse reference. Which is one of my all-time favorite novels. Such a great school. Such a gorgeous campus. Plus, Ghostbusters! Congratulations.

Yes. I'm considering re-reading Go Tell It On the Mountain by TripWillis.

There was a Harvard English acceptance listed on the board, a call from a POI, but it seems pretty fishy.

I agree 100% with what Dorinda just said. I myself have so much to learn. As my research interests have evolved, they've led me in a direction that is pretty far afield from the typical English and philosophy undergraduate education I got. I'm here to fill up with knowledge and skills. Sometimes I get frustrated with how slow it seems to take. What I mean about pretension is that I detect a certain self-undermining attitude from a lot of English grads. Sure, the language of postmodernism or discourse analysis or decon or whatever can be used in a way that's pretentious. But there's often a default stance of apology towards using them, from exactly the people who are saying that they want to use them for the rest of their career. And I just don't detect a similar attitude towards relevant subject matter in most other fields. When I talk to people in education, nobody apologizes in advance for talking about z-scores. They understand that sometimes you need to use specific methodologies and specific language. Since applying to grad school means that you're essentially asking a university to subsidize your learning, research, and teaching, you should feel confident about the value of your project even though we're all necessarily beginners. That's all I mean.

Monday, bloody Monday.

Again, I hate to be a broken record on this, but the consequence of fit being the most important element for an application is that it takes time and effort to get those pieces to actually fit together. This is a crude example, but if you know you want two modernists, you can't just send out four acceptances and hope that two take it and two don't. Oftentimes acceptances are spaced out over such a wide period because departments need to wait until they have commitments from people of specific specialties.

You've got to remember, these departments are assembling their graduate cohorts based on their own needs. The process is often drawn out because they need to assemble a cohort that contains a particular diversity in applicants, and doing so takes time. It depends on the individual department, of course, but oftentimes that's the reason. This is the flipside to the "it's all about fit" philosophy: when it's all about fit, it takes a lot of effort and care to get those fits to fit together.

In the summer before we started, the assistant director of our program set up an email chain for the new rhet/comp cohort. We all talked about ourselves and shared stories and such. Going back over it all months later, it's remarkable how little I see of the people themselves in the emails. How we represent ourselves....

It's a bit different for me, because my research interests are so different from most people here. I'll tell you, though: I reject entirely the idea that there's something more pretentious about talking about discourse or examinations than there is talking about standard deviations, or factor analyses, or control grouped studies. I work with people involved in that kind of research all the time, and there's nothing more legitimate about them, or more serious, or more scholarly. Also, this idea that we need to apologize for the research that we do, or the specialized language we use to speak about it-- that doesn't exist in most other fields. Nobody in education research is going "pardon me for being pretentious, but we should be using a Spearman rank order coefficient instead of the Pearson r." Part of ensuring that your field is taken seriously is taking it seriously yourself. If there's one thing that I've learned as a grad student, it's that imposter syndrome will just kill you. You can't apologize for valuing your own research, and you can't listen to the voice in your head that says you aren't smart enough or serious enough to be a real academic. The process is too draining and too long to survive that way. And really: if you don't value your own research, why should any university pay you to conduct it?

Sometimes I worry that there's some sociology grad student, searching for a dissertation topic, browsing this forum and just licking her chops...

Those disclaimers are pretty standard, and constantly violated, I'm afraid. I think they put them out there so they aren't getting bombarded by calls. One of the schools I applied to said the same thing, but I got a phone call all the same.

You do have people in your corner, lolopixie. It's crazy to me how hard I pull for strangers I've never met before, but I do.

The beauty of it is that nobody who cares about that kind of research or agrees with the ideas behind it has to do it. I would hate if people felt that pressure. I just think that the people who can and do work that way are performing a valuable service if they can help defend the broader discipline of English. (But then again, I would say that, wouldn't I?)

The university has always been complicit in the capitalist enterprise and it always will be. That doesn't mean that how you operate within that enterprise is unimportant. In any event, whatever anybody's orientation towards epistemology, the people who control the economic apparatus of the university want to see English (and its funding) justified in certain terms. And that goes for public and private alike. Obama has just proposed a major new assessment regime that is directly tied to federal aid, and there isn't a single college in the country that can afford to turn its back on federal funding. Not Harvard, not Yale, nobody. Moving forward, we can either refuse to use those terms, and find ourselves on the outside looking in, or we can speak to them in those terms while we maintain a skepticism and critical orientation towards that language. But not playing the game at all just isn't an option anymore. When the feds come to check the numbers, if we just refuse to engage, they'll hire people who will. And those people will have an ideological disposition that's got far worse things in it than belief in truth. The process has already begun at the state level, and now with this "college report card" it's coming to the federal level. I'm sorry if that's unpalatable, but it's just reality.

I'll PM you.

I took a class in assessment last semester. Assessment of teaching, assessment of learning, assessment of departments.... Very practical and capitalist in the sense you don't like. And the sense I don't like, either. Now, as you'd hope, in addition to reading a lot of theory on how to perform that assessment, we read critical theory that agitated against the very idea of assessment of writing and English. I found a lot of it very convincing. The problem is that the state legislatures that ultimately control public U's aren't likely to find those critiques convincing. They want to see numbers. If we don't produce them ourselves, the Kaplan corporation or similar will be happy to. Once the Kaplan people implement their tests, well, then you've got teaching to the test. Before you know it, the department is mandating a three week period dedicated to working on getting the test scores up, in order to keep our funding flowing. Then the test scores are worked into which adjuncts get rehired. Then they get worked into tenure review.... I happen to be good with those numbers and that kind of research. I would just much rather keep that kind of assessment in-house, under the theory that if we don't do it ourselves, it will be done for us. And none of us will like the consequences of that. Nobody at all. Maybe that's me becoming the thing I say I dislike, I don't know. But outside of the rarefied air of the best funded and most elite private schools, nobody can afford to ignore this stuff. Not anymore.* *says the grad student who is getting too big for his britches with this line of commentary.

I hate it too. Here's the problem: neither you nor I pay the bills.

Not to be that guy, but what happened to just studying what you're interested in is that the university writ large is subsidized by gatekeeping entities, and in the purview of those gatekeeping entities, the political economy of English and literature is threatened on an existential level. That threat means that most people don't get to follow their bliss anymore. I hate that it's true, and if I could wave a magic wand and change it I would. If it were up to me everybody would be able to study what they want, beyond purpose. But in reality, more and more external assessment measures are being imposed on departments and universities (both public and private), and young scholars have to be cognizant of the need to demonstrate the external value of their projects.

I'd like to get your thoughts PM'd, as well, if you don't mind and it's convenient.

I put the word out. Let me get back to you tomorrow morning.

Would you feel comfortable sharing a few reasons you didn't feel that Duke was a good fit?

My brother lived in Toyko for years and he said the thing he always missed the most was good pizza. He claims that too often, Japanese pizza has the same problem as a lot of American sushi: putting stuff in that doesn't belong. For example, he once went to get pizza in Tokyo and they were selling mayonnaise pizza.

How late was the call? Out of curiosity.

Those in the know go with New Haven..... http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/13/best-foods-in-the-world (Disappointing pizza: pizza in Italy. Although, of course, I'm dealing from a small sample size.)

Yes, yes, yes. I know it's easy for me to say, and I don't mean to be annoying. But go have fun. Live your life. You'll feel so much better.